Civic Political Disengagement Summary

Toulmin’s System: Civic Political Disengagement

Claim: In the article, Civic and Political Disengagement, Wendell Berry claims that emerging adults are becoming less politically active as time progresses. On top of that, he claims that we have developed categories of “adult orientations to political life”.

Evidence: Wendell manually conducted an interview during the 2008 election and suggested that people were more politically engaged near election day. He termed this attitude as “media hype”, meaning people in reality are not politically engaged. Aside from this, he conducted a survey to determine the amount of people that classify themselves as being “political”. To his conclusions, he found out that the majority of people were “politically aware”; however, they obtained their information via the broadcast media. Hence, people are not necessarily developing their own opinions, rather they are following a cultural trend.

For example, apathetic individuals frequently replied with “naw” or “no” to political questions, indicating that they are not interested in politics.

Grounds: The key thing to understand is that American’s are becoming less politically active and are labeled, by Wendell, as apathetic, uninformed, distrustful and etc. Each respective label has their own set of characteristics; for example, the apathetic individuals are not affiliated with a political party and are completely unaware of what is happening in the political spectrum.

Warrant: The claim is suggesting that political awareness is indeed necessary. To elaborate, being politically active will reduce the influence of propaganda, meaning will be able to make independent yet educated