I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

Please don't take the title of this posting as being somehow threatening. Some postings ago, I suggested that a useful exercise for high school government students to engage in is to identify those individuals in their community who hold power. I mentioned a few ways to do that, but basically the idea was to see which residents hold leadership positions in several economic areas such as industry, professional services, financial services, and the like. After the areas are identified, a student can find which entities within the different economic areas reported the largest budgets. The leaders of those entities, one can safely assume, wield relatively more power than their fellow community members. In order to further confirm their power position, one can, as a further step in this inquiry, check out the physical attributes, such as where their offices are, the physical appearances and physical amenities of these offices, the leaders' residential areas, their commuting patterns – what they see going to and from work – and their areas of socializing. This need not be too intrusive – we don't want kids being accused of stalking – but a general view and understanding of the physical environments these leaders experience can give one a sense of the exposures these leaders of the community confront as they go about their mostly work related activities.

One hypothesis they can test is: “[i]t can only be said that location tends to isolate the men of power from the mass of citizens less powerful than themselves and from community problems.”¹ That is a conclusion that Floyd Hunter arrived at in his respected study on community power holders. He reached this conclusion from inspecting and visiting many of the areas where the identified leaders lived and where they worked. And the finding seemed more true for those leaders who represented organizations with more financial resources than those that had less. Of course, these more cloistered leaders could afford lifestyles that protected them from exposure to the more seamy and distasteful realities such as slum neighborhoods and crime ridden areas. But the question remains: how sensitive can these leaders be to the problems of their community if they are constantly shielded from them?

And this says nothing of the influence they enjoy over governmental decision-makers. So it is not just that they are potentially ill-equipped to address problems but, through their influence, they will proactively prevent those more exposed to the problems to implement the policies that might be helpful; to address those problems will probably call on diverting resources from those projects and maintenance programs they might understand as being in their interests to pursue and support. At least that might be an off-shoot of the physical conditions surrounding the lives of the powerful.

Of course, direct exposure is not necessarily needed in order to get a sense of what is “out there.” One can read and see media that reports on conditions. We know of philanthropic efforts by the wealthy across the nation. Each metropolitan area can boast of a community of charity givers and organizers that do much needed work to relieve – not solve – the level of deprivation in their communities. But it is only government that can really put a dent in the level of deprivation that confronts those needier members of the community. And, of course, this whole area of concern, from a federalist perspective, is one of equality – in terms of meeting essential needs and providing meaningful opportunity. So if those most influential are partial against such government action, the chances of local political will being sufficiently present to address the needs of the poor, even to the degree federalist thought would lead one to favor, would be small indeed. Our students should become cognizant of these relevant conditions within their community – not necessarily a simple aim to accomplish. Here is how Hunter describes the level of transparency involved:

They [the powerful] are able to enforce their decisions by persuasion, intimidation, coercion, and, if necessary, force. Because of these elements of compulsion, power-wielding is often a hidden process. The men involved do not wish to become identified with the negative aspects which the process implies, and their anonymity will be respected.²

But once informed, whether students then choose to become concerned or even involved with these political dynamics is a value choice they should be free to make. 

 

1Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Quotation on p. 22; emphasis in the original.

2Ibid., p. 24.

ILLUSIVE SEPARATION?

Most of us are familiar with the political discourse that deals with the issue of whether government does enough for us or whether it does too much. Liberals (or what we call liberals in terms of this discussion) call for governmental programs that address a wide assortment of concerns such as poverty, health care, education, the environment, race issues, immigration, and the like. Conservatives, at almost every turn, call for a scaling back, if not eliminating or not funding government programs in these areas. There are some areas in which conservatives call for more extensive governmental action, as in abortion, but the general view is that conservatives are against government involvement in our private affairs. Much of this debate is based on an assumption: there is a private sector distinguishable from a public sector and each acts according to its own dictates and constitutes its own locus of power. That, in one realm of our society, lie those organizations – mostly businesses – that are apart from government and exist to provide goods and services for compensation. That while this realm is probably regulated by government to some degree, they exist as separate entities from government and their level of independence should be guarded and protected from the clutches of government to the extent possible. They should be able, for the most part, to act as they see fit and, by so doing, exercise their, mostly property, rights. On the other side, is a government populated by professional politicians and career government workers who operate in their own spheres with minimal involvement from outside actors. I would postulate that our civics and government instruction in schools across the nation teaches that these two sectors exist and that there exists a customary and legal separation between the two realms – the separation is part and parcel of our democracy or constitutional order.

There is a group of political scientists who question this assumption. According to Amitai Etzioni, the list of scholars who are doing (or did) the questioning include Grant McConnell, E. E. Schattschneider, C. Wright Mills, Theodore Lowi, and Mancur Olson. While these scholars might vary in their views of the extent of overlap between the two sectors and how the two act in coordination or in unison, each brings into question the view that the sectors are separate and mostly act independently of each other. They would argue, to some extent, that the sectors or realms act too much in tandem to be so independent as the assumption would have one believe.

Whether or not the sectors are independent or not or, if not, to what degree they are separate is a question that not only is important in understanding our system of governance, but dictates the types of questions that instruction should ask about our governance. A few postings ago, I reported on the use of Social Security numbers by private entities for a wide range of purposes. Etzioni reported on how the numbers are used to identify customers or clients or to categorize information about a whole slew of personal items such as medical, financial, or legal information. He used this case to illustrate how a line between the private and the public realms became blurred by the practice of utilizing Social Security numbers for private purposes or public purposes outside the Social Security program. In future postings, I will give other examples Etzioni provides. In this posting, the aim is to merely point out this scholarly area of interest that places in doubt a wide array of assumptions civics and government instruction holds – basic assumptions – of how our system is arranged and works. For if the private and public realms are not so independent from each other, many other assumptions come into question such as the essence of representation in Congress or the particularity of the policies of a specific Presidential administration. Our whole popular view of the democratic quality of our system can potentially come into question. Are these two realms answering to a third realm: corporate America, popular culture, or the political class? The point is that one cannot assume, as is the case of the Social Security numbers, that either the governmental/public sector or the business/private sector acts of its own volition – at least not entirely – and that such a possibility is not necessarily anti-democratic although it very well might be. What we can surely say is that such a reality is consequential.

The claim Etzioni is proposing is

… the deep divide between the public and the private realm (which plays a cardinal role in public discourse and is drawn upon in several segments of social science) is not nearly as deep as is often assumed, and that the two realms are intertwined and tend to change in tandem. Moreover, we often face the same forces on both sides of the divide; that is, they have a private face and a public face, but are actually often one and the same actor. Finally, the blurring of the realms has increased since the advent of cyberspace, although … it was in place long before the 1980s.¹

All of this, if true, belies the claims of the Tea Party and conservative politicians such as Paul Ryan. They push for policies or oppose policies – usually inhibiting the government from addressing pressing national problems such as unemployment – that assume the divide, that very likely, is not there.

1Etzioni, A. (2013). The bankruptcy of liberalism and conservatism. Political Science Quarterly, 128 (1), pp. 39-65. Quotation on p. 61.