THE COMMUNAL PLANE

The last posting reviewed the very real concern a constitution has to address: the shortcomings of human nature. Yet much of this blog has been dedicated to promoting political and governing ideas and ideals that are based on the human potential for living in communal arrangements. What's it going to be? Are we doomed to being on constant guard against the devious aims of others or are we living among a sea of caring and collaborative partners in our efforts to further the welfare of this republic? This duality or, better stated, nuanced reality reminds me of childhood warnings and encouragements: generally, the outside world was presented to me as a place one should care for and one that was populated with good people worthy of my concern. Yet warnings were repeatedly issued: don't get into a stranger's car; don't go with a stranger who asks you to follow; don't take candy from a stranger. I never thought of questioning this inconsistency. I somehow understood that both messages were prudent. We are just living in that kind of world – get used to it.

How does this complication affect our constitutional thinking? How does federalism accommodate these opposing strains of human concern? Here's my take. I see our constitutional compact as a two-planed agreement. The two planes set the basic rules for several relational types: the relation between entities (persons and groups), the relation between an entity and the government, and the relation between our government and the governments of other nations. Transcending all of these relations is the aim of establishing binding partnerships. So one way to conceptualize all of this is to analogize it as efforts to establish and maintain partnerships between one entity and another. Sometimes, in terms of our relations with other citizens, we know them, but mostly we don't. So the best way to think of it is to ask what we need to do in order to formulate a partnership with someone we don't know and ask how to lighten up our protective provisions for those we do know and trust. If that is the case, what does the agreement need to include in order that a person might be able to sleep at night? One needs to first plan for the worst and then hope for the best. One needs to establish a fail safe foundation against the potential dangers others can pose and then allow for relations that can be close and rewarding.

My last posting addressed what it means to plan for the worst – how, for example, our founding fathers constructed the elements of our constitution with the strategic decision to pit interests against interests, power against power, and vice against vice. You are invited to read that posting. In this posting, I want to address the higher plane; that is, I want to describe how a federalist agreement promotes the communal bonds that reflect healthy partnerships.

While our constitution is quite clear in how it guards against the darker side of human nature, its approach in striving for the communal is primarily contained within its assumptions – most prominently, its belief that if people are allowed to be free, they will seek to attain the goals of the constitution. What goals?

[To] establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …¹

The compact that follows these initial words of our constitution – the provisions for the structural elements of our government and the powers granted it – were devised and implemented in the belief that such a resulting government can accomplish these goals. I believe that when one thinks of the implications of such an act of faith, one comes up with several relational principles. In terms of how entities relate with each other, these principles include what follows in this posting.

Beyond the concerns for human greed and antagonistic acts, the relation between the entities also has communal links tying them together. The links can include the elements of the agreement, emotional ties, shared resources, shared interests, and mutual respect. When a collective, be it a nation, a business association, or a marriage, is working, its entities – citizens, business partners, spouses – might become blasé over what is being taken for granted or to what participants feel they are entitled. The more prudent among us understand that none of these blessings are guaranteed and all need attention. All or any of these links would make the entities closer and more committed to accomplishing the purposes of the agreement, and participants are smart to be cognizant of them and how they function. Again, this relation has to do with what Philip Selznick calls reciprocal advantage.² This principle is based on the understanding that a communal sense between the members of an arrangement increases the chances of success; it is sensitive to the whimsical nature of fortune and fate, and it avoids the disruption that a lack of dignity and integrity can cause any collective effort.

Let's get a bit more specific. We need to respect those people with which we are partnered or federated. That means we need to strive for intellectual communal commitment and, if possible, strive for the emotional attachments that strengthen the bonds between the partners. Intellectually, one needs to know and understand basic social principles that point to enlightened dispositions toward our fellow citizens. Emotionally, the challenge is a bit more demanding. It is difficult to force ourselves to feel a certain way. We have to be committed with our heads and, hopefully, with our hearts. I dare say that the emotion has to be directed to at least the association as a whole – a heartfelt loyalty – and if we can direct such feelings toward our fellow citizens, so much the better.

This is not so straightforward. Emotional ties need to be of a certain type. We need to care for what the fates of others are, but we need to place such ties within the higher goals and aims of the agreement. Not only does this place a responsibility on the entity, but also on the association or union. For example, can there be the case that our ties to our nation might come in conflict with our ties to our family? A constitution needs to be sensitive to such potential conflicts and should be so constructed that such eventualities are avoided at almost all costs. Where the line lies between such loyalties depends on the situation in question and I don't pretend to know where that line is. But what I do know is that one needs to be careful when one enters compacts and when one offers one's commitments – be cognizant and forthright over what one is willing to sacrifice.

Citizenship is a special case. We don't choose where we are born. But a nation built on federalist principles should make the point as to what its demands are and be very clear as to the following admonition: to physically stay in a federated nation implies one agrees with those principles not because of an accident of birth, not because one's family hails from that land, but because the citizen makes a conscious choice – a buy-in to respect the union, to respect the institutions of the people who inhabit the union, and to respect its other citizens.

Summarily, respect is necessary on two levels: toward fellow entities and for the governmental framework. Let me continue this posting with some words about respecting other entities – I will address respecting the governmental framework in a future posting. There is progression involved when one considers respecting fellow entities. At the easiest level, one needs to respect others' idiosyncrasies. We are not only all different, but unique in the compilation of our individual characteristics – there is only one of each of us. The level of difference between us can be relatively small or large, but it is always significant. Accommodating these differences depends on how extensively we are called upon to interact within a given association. Citizenship under federal governance, if its formulating compact is designed prudently enough, will not be unreasonably demanding. Obligations and duties will not excessively interfere with a citizen pursuing legitimate private ambitions. Of course, the severity of those obligations and duties varies in accordance with the level of peace and stability a nation is enjoying as opposed to the level of crisis under which it is being challenged.

At all times, the obligations and duties that are before a federated people need to be respected and this includes how we treat, care for, and promote the interests of others. And this leads us to a more demanding level; that is, the level at which we respect diverse interests. We need to understand that in meaningful ways, the interests of our fellow citizens will be diverse and different from our own. While we need not support all interests, we do need to respect those interests and even be willing to defend the ability of those citizens to pursue them. And, of course, at an even more demanding level, federated citizens need to respect even those interests that are in opposition to their own. We are justified in promoting our own interests at the expense of those that oppose ours, but we need, one, to do that under the prevailing legitimate rules of the game, two, do it in peace – only government has the legitimate option of force – and, three, do it in such a way that when the determination of the competition occurs, the parties can walk away with a handshake and in good cheer.

At minimum, then, respect is characterized by civility. Civility is not just a nicety; it is an element of a healthy federated union. We do well to be concerned when the levels of civility are judged to be too low. We should understand that human ambitions and conflicts place perhaps unconquerable obstacles to maintaining ideal levels of civility, but we need to work at it. We surely can promote it in our schools, our churches, in our business interactions, and in our families. Etiquette has a role here. Even when our heart isn't in it, we can act like a nice guy or gal. Beyond that, we need to respect our fellow citizens in such a way that our sense of partnership is strengthened and not diminished.

1Preamble of the United States Constitution.

2Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

DEALING WITH HUMAN REALITIES

In this blog, I have presented the attributes of a federalist polity. I have emphasized the communal aspects of such an arrangement. Those include the commitment to a central fraternal ethos, a genuine concern for fellow citizens, and a shared responsibility toward building and enhancing social capital. This posting is dedicated to what a federalist polity is not. Specifically, it addresses the utopian notion that a federal union is one in which there is no competition or the potential for greed. In this posting, I want to leave you, the reader, with a clear understanding that to advocate for federalism does not mean one believes it is possible to set up a political entity that is devoid of greed and self- serving behavior. On the contrary, a lot of the structural arrangement that are derived from federalist principles is so structured to meet the very human tendencies which act contrary to the aims of federalism, but is very much a part of the human condition. Therefore, federalists recognize the presence of both the very human potential for citizens to have genuine concern for the fate of others, especially for those in whom they are federated, and of selfish motivations.

So where are we as Americans when it comes to these apparently opposite drives or proclivities? Some politicians like to banter about the notion that American politics is above having clashes between our economic classes. Attempts to advance policy geared toward enhancing equality are labeled by these partisans as acts of class warfare. And the question arises: if we are all federated under the Constitution of this republic, aren't we beyond pitting the interests of one income group against that of another? Of one region against that of another? Of one age group, religion, ethnicity against that of another? How does one go about addressing these concerns? Are there points of conflict between these groups that are just part of the human condition that need to be accommodated or regulated?

History is clear on this point: to date, ever since humans have hit upon the ability of civilizing themselves, there have been among them people of varying degrees of economic well-being. That while civilizing has permitted the overall ability to increase wealth, not all have shared in that bounty equally or anything near it. This posting is dedicated to addressing what this fact means to the makeup of a polity – even our own.

To begin with, varying levels of economic well-being reflect one form or another of competition. Considered indispensable in the creation of wealth, this competition is engaged between those who have a lot and those who don't have a lot. But it is also engaged between those who comprise the rich – rich versus the rich – and between those who comprise the not so rich – the not so rich versus the not so rich. The competition takes on the form defined by the ground rules that prevail in a given economy: there are capitalist rules, socialist rules, aristocratic rules, and so forth. There can be many different sources of competition in a society – some economic, some not. Probably most fundamental, though, in defining the nature of a society, is the competition over economic assets within a society. And several basic factors prevail in all economic systems: the need to motivate the producers of economic wealth, the need to compensate the workers, the need to distribute sufficient exchange resources in order to generate sufficient demand, the need to be efficient in the production processes, and so on.

Much of the study of economics analyzes these factors. But there is also a political angle to all of this. Because the competition over this distribution involves high stakes, the rules of the economic game are very important and those rules are established by the political institution of a society. That process of rule making begins with developing and implementing a constitution, the basic law of the land. And while it is not the only concern constitution developers address, it is one of their essential and central concerns. And once a basic constitution for a society is hammered out, in order to maintain its legitimacy, a polity is well served in preserving its workable formula with appropriate policy and in describing and explaining to its populace how and why the instrument addresses the essential factors in the fashion that it does. Of course, if the formula does not work or worked once but now ceases to do so, current politicians need to be about working out a new political arrangement – amending the old constitution or creating a new one.

We, the United States, have the oldest written constitution (not all constitutions are written). By and large, there is real support for it and we more or less abide by it. Actually, we abide by it quite faithfully. And so our civic instruction should be about describing and explaining to its populace, particularly its younger members, how and why we go about addressing the essential factors in the manner our constitution does. There is an array of ways to do that. One such way is to revisit the thinking of our founding fathers and see how they saw these universal factors and any other factors that swayed their thinking about the relation between the classes and other competing groups. Richard Hofstadter does just that in his book, The American Tradition.¹ Let me summarize what this historian sees were the assumptions and claims of the founding fathers:

• There is a human nature that humans do not grow out of or have the ability to give up.
• This human nature is both universal in any given time and across all times – that is, it is the same always and in all places.
• This human nature has, as a central attribute, an insatiable drive that manifests itself within each of us to further self-interests.
• Self-interest can be instrumental in encouraging individuals to join with others who share the same interests or nearly the same interests to form what James Madison called factions – what we might call interest groups.
• Depending on the governing system in place and other environmental factors, self-interest can motivate licit or illicit behavior, productive or destructive actions.
• Attempts to convince individuals or factions to abandon their self-interest are bound to fail because such attempts defy an unchangeable human nature.
• Any interest group or faction that gains unfettered control of the government or the economic system of an area will take advantage and exploit all other interests, individuals, or factions – that is, they will become oppressive.
• The only way to avoid such oppression is to devise and implement a system of governance that pits faction against faction, interest against interest, vice against vice, or more germane to our concern here, class against class. This arrangement checks the ability of any one faction from gaining an oppressive advantage.

These founders were federalist politicians; three of them described and explained these beliefs in a set of arguments that were compiled in a volume entitled The Federalist Papers. The purpose of those arguments was to sell the new federalist constitution of 1787 in order that it be ratified. The term that is used to describe the thrust of these beliefs is a “balanced constitution” that the founders believed summarized what their handiwork attempted to be. It is balanced in its aim not to allow any faction or class to have a level of power in which it can dictate policy which threatens unreasonably and destructively the interests of other groups. In short, the aim is to avoid oppression.

A polity that is so organized should issue policy that substantively protects the opposing aims of opposing factions within its jurisdiction. It should be on guard against those developments that upset the balance. For example, it should be wary of any one group or set of groups becoming so rich that they can parlay that wealth into unchecked political power. On the other hand, it should not issue policy so daunting to human effort that individuals of the various classes become convinced that effort and hard work are not sufficiently rewarded and, as a consequence, allow disincentives of not only hard work, but innovation. It should serve to encourage conservation of our resources of all types – psychological, environmental, social, artistic, and the like. These are but a few of the concerns policy makers have to keep in mind so as to keep in balance the competition that is so important in advancing societal welfare.

Calls for balanced constitutions date back to antiquity, but a federated formula in the US added a level of sophistication that premiered with the American experiment. The deed to check and counterbalance forces could not be successful by merely including all factions within the political arrangement of the nation; it had to be arranged in such a way in which all the above concerns could be satisfied. Hofstadter identifies several elements in our constitution that have been, to date, sufficiently successful in addressing these concerns. They are: one, our constitution has divided power with each class having control over one or another of the structural elements – we have a legislature, for example, with one house representing the wealthy (the Senate) and one the masses (the House of Representatives); two, the constitution provides for an officer who represents all the people, executes policy, and is further empowered with a veto – and even this latter power can be overridden by an overwhelming majority in the legislature; three, the maintenance of local jurisdictions, under the state authority, prevents national interests running roughshod over local interests; four, at the same time, the national jurisdiction is big enough to prohibit any one faction from dominating the nation; and five, there is an independent judiciary, without access to armed resources, that oversees the process by authoritatively judging whether all parties – both public and private – are operating within the rules and, in addition, determines what the rules mean. And let me add to Hofstadter's list of balancing forces: all of these provisions make it very difficult for the government to accomplish anything without significant demand from the citizenry. In terms of protecting against oppressive government, nothing protects more effectively than a government that finds it difficult to devise and implement policy.

Of course, before its implementation, all of this was an ideal – a theory that had been formulated to meet the realistic self-interest of human beings and allow for a people to go about and strive toward more communal ambitions. By accommodating those necessary functions that lead to societal welfare, it is a formula or model that permits and perhaps encourages a mode of governance that allows the citizenry to pursue lives worth living over the long haul.

But heaven was not created in 1787. Perfection was not attained. There is another side. The other side is what happens when, as a result of being so balanced and hampered, the government can't respond sufficiently, in either terms of substance or time, to the needs of a constituency? What happens when, despite all of these structural elements or because of them, some group or faction does gain control and is able to become oppressive? That has, some might say, happened or nearly happened. In the Gilded Age, large corporations had enormous power and were able to render all other factions nearly impotent. Yet a reform era – the Progressive Era – did come about and addressed the most egregious conditions of that time. This effort included several amendments to our constitution. Some suggest that we are again nearing those conditions. If so, how will we respond? If so, is the problem one of deficient policies or is it one of systemic shortcomings? If the latter, have the deficiencies come about because times have changed and our constitution no longer functions sufficiently well? These are the questions of our time. They are serious and highly consequential to the welfare of our people and of the world. Our students need to be aware of what we are facing and it helps immeasurably if they at least know and understand from where we came in terms of structure, aims, and theory.

1Hofstadter, R. (1948). The American political tradition. New York, NY: Vintage Books.