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.
