American Government: An Introduction to Government

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You'll never guess what I got as a birthday present when I turned 14. It came from one of my best friend's parents who had known me all my life and knew just what I would love. It was a perfect gift--a gas mask. A gas mask! Why in the world did they give me a gas mask? It was because I was involved in protests against the war in Vietnam. In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was lots of protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. These protests would sometimes grow rowdy and police and soldiers would fire tear gas at demonstrators. I hope you've never been tear-gassed, because if you have, you know how much tear gas hurts. That gas mask came in very handy.
I'm telling you this because growing up in the 1960's made questions about politics and American government very real to me. Our government was involved in a massive war in a country thousands of miles away. This wasn't the boring stuff of high school civics textbooks. It was current and very relevant to me. I also came to realize that government was about more than war. It was about laws and the police. Under what conditions could I be arrested, stopped and searched. What rights did I have if I was accused of a crime? It also became obvious that government was about schools and family, jobs and opportunity. Government could support discrimination based on race or gender or ethnicity or religion, or it could fight to end it. It was about sex and the most intimate details of my life.
When I was a teenager it was illegal for unmarried people your age to have sex. You could be suspended or expelled from school if you were caught. Unfortunately, this didn't crimp my lifestyle very much, but it made me very aware of government. It was illegal for people of the same sex to have sexual relations, and that remains the law in many states today. On a more mundane level, I came to realize that the price of everything, from gasoline to milk, could be affected by government.
The Thinkwell lectures you will be watching are about all of this. They're about trying to understand what government does, how it does it, and how it matters to you. I find it intellectually fascinating. You can excuse me for that; I'm a professor. These lectures are about learning, but more importantly they're about asking questions. Questions about how democratic government in the U.S. ought to act, how it ought to respond to problems. In many of the lectures you will watch, questions will be posed that will be not fully answered. This is because there is more than one possible answer to almost every question, and you have to decide for yourself what you think. To put this point another way, politics is an interpretative art, not an exact science. Yes, it involves questions of facts, but it also involves questions of morality and justice.
Obviously, people disagree on these sorts of questions. That leads me to a warning. As you may have noted, I have strong feelings, and you need to be very careful not to confuse them with the truth. However, honesty compels me to tell you that over the years I've been struck by the striking resemblance between them. In light of the contested nature of American politics, Thinkwell has widely recruited three distinguished lecturers with three different perspectives on American government.
Mark Rhome of Georgetown University will give some lectures. Mark specializes in public policy. Matt Dickinson of Middlebury College will also give some lectures, and he's a specialist on the U.S. Presidency. You can tell the three of us apart by our shirts. Mark and Matt are wearing green ones, and I'm the scruffy looking guy in the purple shirt. So if there are three of us, why did I get to do the introductory lecture? It's because I've got a special shirt. In addition to being the purple guy with the beard, I teach at the University of Chicago, and I specialize in the judicial system. As you watch these lectures Mark and Matt and I will ask you lots of questions. Sometimes they're rhetorical, but often they are designed to encourage you to think about how they might best be answered. Thinking about them is not just an intellectual exercise; it's also about engaging you in the political debates of our time. Participating in those debates will hopefully help you to understand more about what matters to you.
Constitutional Principles
Foundations of Government
Introduction to Government Page [1 of 1]