American Democracy Essay

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American Democracy is defined as a system of government governed by people or freely elected representatives. The key element to how the U.S. fought the Cold War was domestic civil rights. Domestic civil rights has being occurring all throughout history. Basically involving any violence against those who were fighting for civil rights. Including movements such as Women’s rights, ending segregation, and African American rights. The U.S. slowly but surely projecting its idea of what American democracy. Starting in Reconstruction period the language of freedom was transformed that was central to the American culture. American citizenship was linked to mainly to race before the Civil War. Reconstruction duplicated the ideas that whites were …show more content…

The United States was maturing into an industrial economy. Freedom, Equality, and Democracy where main goals for this period in time. The talk of “better classes,” “respectable classes,” and “dangerous classes” were the main concentration in public discussions. Traditional definitions of freedom were barred by poverty living along side the edge of growing class millionaires. The link now between freedom and equality was based on the skills and wealth and not by hard work. They started to devise plans on how to make men content with the inequality in distribution inevitable in society. “Liberal” reformers stood up with their belief’s of making everyone in society equal. Many Gilded Age reformers feared that lower class would use democracy to advance their own interests. Democracy was becoming a threat to the individual liberty and rights of property they have known. Which brought about the idea of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was the idea of natural superiority of some groups over other groups. If you were born wealthy you will always be known as wealthy and if you were born poor you don’t have a chance to come up. Social Darwinism also meant “survival of the fittest,” and that natural selection was natural in human nature and government must not

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