POLS 241 Lecture Notes - Canadian Identity, Stamen, Identity Politics
27 Oct 2013
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Document Summary
Democracy= opposite of bureaucratic authoritarian regimes: liberal democracies are adversarial systems. Need to have a well organized opposition. Which needs: 1) active, well protected political class. Thus, anti-politics is an attitude of distrust and hatred of the political class. It"s the idea that you can"t trust politicians: this opens the door for other pathologies like populism, and identity politics. Nationalism: modern phenomenon, 200 years ago people had culture and cultural identity but it tended to be colloquial. Each village or region had their own separate cultural identities. Thus, the identities tended to be small scale. There was no machine present to impose and homogenize culture: this machine is the state. France: 200 years ago this changed with the french. Before this there were different regional cultures (250). But with the revolution there was an attempt to build a country out of 250 different neighbours: 1) napoleon created a large military.
