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, November 11, 2016

WHY?

While this blog has been mostly dedicated to the scope – the content – of an ideal civics curriculum, the writer wants to begin a series of postings about this last election.  Through most of this campaign cycle, he has not bolstered the positions of one side over the other; he might have used perceived shortcomings of one candidate to exemplify a point, but he avoided suggesting for whom the reader should vote.
Now that this long and tiring campaign season is over, the reader might be left with the question:  why did the election turn out as it did?  In any event, the next series of postings will look at this question.  It will rely on an article published in the journal, The New Yorker,[1] for the facts on which these postings will be based.  So, on this Veterans Day, a look at what happened might be a good way to begin what some are anticipating as being “interesting times.”
Many are familiar with the Chinese (apocryphal) saying that it is a curse to live in interesting times.  The nation might be on the verge of finding out.  The pundits on TV have mentioned a host of factors stretching from bigotry to emails.  As with any event of consequence, chances are there are a multitude of reasons.  This is particularly true if the event in question is about an election in a nation of over 300 million people.
Some parameters should be stated up front:  Donald J. Trump was elected by a quarter of all eligible voters.  He received less than fifty percent of the vote, came in second in the popular vote, and there were significant third and fourth party candidates (taking about 5% of the votes cast).
          Another point should be made, one concerning why this blog is looking at this question.  The reasons for the results of this election are a rundown of those conditions that reflect two central claims this blog has made over the years:
·        One, the nation has, since World War I, adopted a natural rights construct as the prominent view of governance and politics.
·        Two, the problems that will be reviewed will illustrate how much the nation has turned away from the construct that was in place prior to World War II.
          For returning readers, the refrain that describes the older construct will sound very familiar, but for new readers, a quick word on the central concepts of the older construct would be helpful.  The older construct was labeled as traditional federalism and it holds that a polity of choice – one that is not the product of force or accident – is formulated by its participants coming together and forming the polity through the instrument of a covenant or compact.
The US is the product of a compact, the US Constitution.  Part of that compact is the belief that those who comprise the “citizenry” of the compact are equal and viable partners in the provisions of the compact.
In short, many of the reasons that will be described in the upcoming postings have undermined and are undermining the very quality of that equality.  It is the opinion of this writer that a review of these reasons can be the basis for a civics course, one based on federalist ideas and ideals.
He will write about these reasons in terms of how they affect the underlying qualities of a federalist union.  The claim is that such effects are placing the system in danger.  For example, the very fact that Trump did not receive most of the popular vote is placing, again, the very prudence of an Electoral College in question. 
The Electoral College is a product of our federalist foundation.  If the results of elections were to be determined from a purely popular vote basis, the resulting politics would tilt to an extremely urban bias, relegating the interests of the rural regions far behind.  This is counter to the congregational quality of a federal union.
That is, central to a federal system is the notion of an equality among its citizens and its states – those are who formulated the compact in the first place.  A resulting tilt, as just described, would be un-federalist in nature.  Perhaps our nation has grown beyond a federalist union; this writer does not agree.
And the construct that should be used in any civics course that looks at the current challenges would be better served with what this blog has offered: a revised version of federalism, liberated federalism.  The newer version places even more concern on these reported incidents of inequality.
A focused question, then, is:  why did Trump capture the vote of the downwardly mobile white voter?  He won both the male and female white vote despite all the controversy over his reported incidents of abusing women.  The writer of the cited article, Packer, asked the candidate Hillary Clinton about the support the Republican candidate was receiving weeks before the election.
Here is what she had to say:
It’s “Pox on both your houses,” … It was certainly a rejection of every other Republican running [for president].  So pick the guy who’s the outsider, pick the guy who’s giving you an explanation – in my view, a trumped-up one, not convincing – but, nevertheless, people are hungry for that … Donald Trump came up with a fairly simple, easily understood, and to some extent satisfying story.  And I think we Democrats have not provided as clear a message about how we see the economy as we need to.[2]
And yet, she emphasized, as her ads kept repeating, how untemperamental her opponent was to be president with little highlighting of how she was going to right the economic disparity of the last thirty of so years.  She might have had the policy proposals written out, but she did not communicate them to those who needed to know and feel them.  This election has rendered an interesting story; hopefully, the upcoming postings will capture its intrigue.



[1] George Packer, “The Unconnected,” The New Yorker 92, no. 35 (2016):  48-61.

[2] Ibid., 48.

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