NEIGHBORLINESS?? CAN IT SAVE DEMOCRACY?

Nancy L. Rosenblum, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors creates a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life--reciprocity, speaking out, and 'live and let live'--comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenbaum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant.").