Spalding and Hudson both agree, and Spalding uses Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone to point out the decline in social capital. People aren 't participating like they used to and this can be caused by a multitude of reasons including people getting married later and the rate of divorces going up, economically these types of activities are not financially feasible and that our generations are very different. I would have to agree with both Spalding and Hudson, I don’t think people are as involved as they used to be and one of the easiest ways to see that is our voter participation rate. We have one of the lowest rates in the world yet we are supposed to be the best country in the world. There is no denying that not enough Americans vote, we
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Hudson discusses four key threats the national security state poses to American democracy, the first being secrecy, the second centralization, the third being repression and lastly distortion. We saw an increase in secrecy after 9/11 with the passage of the USA Patriot Act which many Americans were misled about until the whistleblower Edward Snowden came out and released all this information revealing that the NSA was collecting a lot more information than previously thought. We also saw it when the government tried to cover up the Iran-Contra problem under President Reagan. The second, centralization, is where we see the legislative branch give up their war powers to the president, we see a buildup of power in one branch that the founders probably would 've hated. The third, repression, can be seen again in the USA Patriot Act “ ...broadly expanded the definition of who might be defined as a terrorist, gave the Justice Department new authority to detain suspected terrorist without charging them with a crime, and expanded the FBI’s surveillance powers.” (Hudson, 2016, pg 330) This one bill allowed the government to not only deny you your constitutional rights but also could make you a terrorist based on what you thought. The last is distortion, Hudson believes we are spending too much money on our military and are funding things we don 't need. I would be willing to give a little more money to the military to ensure that they had the best weapons and they were all taken care of when they are in the force and when they leave. One of best solutions he gives is to make Congress take control again, they have given up power to the president but I doubt many of them would want that power because if something goes wrong, they are going to get the blame for it. Spalding doesn 't go into much detail on this topic but he discusses how the founding
Hudson discusses four key threats the national security state poses to American democracy, the first being secrecy, the second centralization, the third being repression and lastly distortion. We saw an increase in secrecy after 9/11 with the passage of the USA Patriot Act which many Americans were misled about until the whistleblower Edward Snowden came out and released all this information revealing that the NSA was collecting a lot more information than previously thought. We also saw it when the government tried to cover up the Iran-Contra problem under President Reagan. The second, centralization, is where we see the legislative branch give up their war powers to the president, we see a buildup of power in one branch that the founders probably would 've hated. The third, repression, can be seen again in the USA Patriot Act “ ...broadly expanded the definition of who might be defined as a terrorist, gave the Justice Department new authority to detain suspected terrorist without charging them with a crime, and expanded the FBI’s surveillance powers.” (Hudson, 2016, pg 330) This one bill allowed the government to not only deny you your constitutional rights but also could make you a terrorist based on what you thought. The last is distortion, Hudson believes we are spending too much money on our military and are funding things we don 't need. I would be willing to give a little more money to the military to ensure that they had the best weapons and they were all taken care of when they are in the force and when they leave. One of best solutions he gives is to make Congress take control again, they have given up power to the president but I doubt many of them would want that power because if something goes wrong, they are going to get the blame for it. Spalding doesn 't go into much detail on this topic but he discusses how the founding