A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, January 2, 2015

POSSIBLE: A COMMUNITY OF TOLERANCE

Let me wish all a happy new year.  May 2015 bring peace and prosperity to all, but may it have enough discord so that all bloggers like myself have something to write about.  You do need to keep us off the streets.

You might have noticed this space has not been active since last July.  I begged whoever reads it to allow me a respite.  And a respite I have taken and enjoyed.  A lot has happened since I have posted and I must comment that our president went through a string of misfortunes leading up to the mid-term elections.  Since then, his luck has changed.  The economy is doing well, a development that began before the election but upon which Democrats could not seem to capitalize.  As we know, the Republicans have taken over both houses of Congress and the next years will see little cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of our central government.  The Republicans also did well at the state level.  What that means, among many effects, is that austere forces will prevail in terms of government spending.  In turn, that will be a dampening influence on our overall economic comeback.  Yet other forces might overcome this soft spot – hopefully so.

On this first posting back, I want to comment on an argument that might be seen as countering much of what this blog has promoted.  Richard Dagger[1] expresses the notion that community, while a positive thing, can more or less be excessive and that is not so good.  He also believes that too strong a sense of community has a stunting effect.  How?  As the shared sense of community grows, a population might easily develop and feed into exclusivity.  That is, a recurring problem is in social arrangements in which the people tie themselves individually as members of a community which in turn fosters among themselves an “us versus them” concept or construct.  This, in turn, marries the individual to the norms of that community to the point that its members discard other views and discourage or, might even seek, to abolish any tolerance for any diverse view or way of life.  Intolerance might even take on an authoritative posture as the group might legislate against any symbolic or behavioral expressions of different ways.  The most obvious occurrence of such a policy was the Jim Crow laws of the South in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1960s.  We still suffer from the remnants of those intolerant policies.  How many of our current problems between the police and African American males, for example, are a product of this tension?  But even to a lesser degree, everyday disdain for the unusual or foreign can function – or dysfunction – in such a way as to cause narrowness and bigotry.  Further, it can stunt the individual from realizing potential within himself or herself as would any other limitation.  By its very nature, intolerance is just another example of putting blinders on to the realities of life, to the opportunities life offers.  In Dagger’s words:
Membership is usually defined not only inclusively – that is, in terms of who the members are – but also exclusively, by ruling some people out.  Thus one may appeal to membership in an effort to exclude as well as to include people.  A self can be so situated, so imbued with a sense of membership in a community, that he or she will fail to acknowledge the claims to membership made by those he or she considers to be outsiders.[2]
But is this necessarily so?

I have chosen this topic for my first posting as a way to ease into the main theme of this blog:  the nation could benefit from a more heightened sense of community and that a means to that end is to establish in our secondary schools a civics curriculum that enables and even encourages a more communal approach to the study of governance and politics.  In addition, that approach should be pervasive throughout the curriculum – both in the explicit and the implicit elements of the curriculum.  To do this, one needs a well-thought out mental construct to guide the choices one makes when choosing the content of such a curriculum.  I am proposing, through this blog, a federation theory construct and much of what this blog has stated are descriptions and explanations of what that choice entails.  The issue Dagger poses in his book is a legitimate one:  can you have too much of a good thing – so much that it becomes a bad thing with serious consequences?  Yes, you can, but that is why I am introducing a version of federalism that addresses this very problem and one that is addressed by contemporary communitarian writers such as Michael Sandel and Amitai Etzioni.  They have described their positions as being sensitive to the problem of intolerance and Dagger’s representation of their efforts is, in my estimation, too critical of their efforts.  That aside, under the auspices of federation theory, the individual is given the latitude to be a self-defining participant in the grand partnership we call citizenship.  As a matter of fact, he or she is obligated to be as open and as much a seeker of truth and beauty as he or she can be.  This is not only for his or her own well-being, but for the well-being of the community.  There is no either/or here, at least not necessarily.  Both the interest of the community and those of the individual are mutually served when the individual is disposed to question and criticize common or conventional wisdom.  A citizenry so populated is more open to innovation and improvement.



[1] Dagger, R.  (1997).  Civic virtue:  Rights, citizenship, and republican liberalism.  New York, NY:  Oxford.

[2] Ibid., p. 52.

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