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.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

A FEDERATED COMMUNAL ENVIRONMENT

In the previous posting, there was an overview of a model.  That model depicts an ideal view of how a polity engages in political confrontations.  The purpose of describing this model is not to guide political science research, but to guide civics educators in the choice of content material for classroom use.  The model attempts to illustrate and implement a construct that represents a federalist view of governance and politics.  A more detailed explanation of the elements of the model follows starting with this posting which looks at the community.
  The community should ideally be characterized as a “functioning community” where a certain tolerance and inclusion exist.  On the one hand, to be able to enjoy a general level of legitimacy, there should exist among the members of the community a pervasive congruence in opinions, values, and goals.  Yes, there can be disagreements, they are even necessary, but there should at least be an agreement on and an emotional commitment for the ground rules and other mores under which those debates occur.
On the other hand, minorities should be respected and encouraged to participate in collective actions.  Of course, this includes legitimacy for the processes by which the minority can strive to be the majority.  In short, a community is established in which the feeling of “the people as a whole” prevails.
As such, there is an aversion to a raw majority rule being sufficient to reflect the will of the people.  More of a consensus, at least among those affected, should be sought and secured before collective action is initiated.  Here, it should be remembered that the model reflects an ideal.  Federation theory does not demand a consensus, only that establishing one should be the goal.
In real life, it is also not practical or desirable to allow a small minority to have veto power over collective action.  But those in the majority should design proposed policy with an eye toward accommodating as many entities as possible while maintaining the principles that motivate their political activities.  This process is what a lot of politics is made of.
The second condition is that there should be a “cultural commitment to federalist values in the community.”  It has already been pointed out that there are areas in the US that have inherited a federalist, moral perspective from the tradition established in the New England colonies.  In short, those areas tend to see politics as a moral expression and opportunity to advance the betterment of the commonweal and being a politician is a calling to serve the community and its interest.[1] 
Overall, federalist values do support and encourage an active citizenry not only from the perspective that one’s self interests are involved, but also from the view that there exists a set of duties and obligations that includes involvement in the political processes beyond those that directly affect the citizen.[2]  It should be noted:  the extent of these duties and obligations will become clear as the other elements of the model are reviewed.
The third condition is a “set of functioning and interacting institutions.”  This condition transcends governmental or formal political settings and extends to the social sector of a community.  This might include labor unions, trade associations, religious organizations, and the like. 
Robert Putnam writes of the viable political role that social associations in Italy played in the northern provinces of that nation in making a more civic minded communal environment.  This condition, in turn, played a vital role in allowing the regional governmental structures of those provinces to be significantly more successful than those of the southern ones.  Such social arrangements allow and promote the levels of trust and friendliness necessary to encourage social capital.[3] 
The fourth condition of a viable community is “community with a moral primacy.”  The inclusion of this condition refers to the reality that societies are made up of kinships, relationships, and historical patterns that define the nature of these communal elements.  Inherent in these conditions are moral attributes that transcend the public and private context that socially envelops the individual.  Laws which are enacted under the tenets of this moral condition are meant to perfect these realities; i.e., laws give it tangible life.
This morality is the basis by which a society is being able to claim that it is “civilized.”[4]  This moral primacy of a community, at times, enforces its position on the fates of individuals.  Conscription during war is such a case.  Most often, there is an ongoing tension, especially in environments where the natural rights perspective holds predominant sway, between the claims of rights by the individual and the community’s claim to moral primacy.
While the traditional federalist perspective gave theoretical respect to the claims of the individual, the history of the early republic is full of cases when the majority engaged in tyranny.  There was not a more compelling case than the mistreatment of African-Americans, but there were also ample examples of the mistreatment of Jews, Catholics, women, and other minorities being the victims of such tyranny.[5]
The federation theory model differs in that the balancing of individual rights and the concerns of the majority are given higher priority than was the case when traditional federalism was dominant.  It favors judicial review, although the history of court decisions has often missed an appropriate balance between the rights of the individual and the claimed authority of the majority.  If the reader is interested, see the example of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which was rectified by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).
The fulcrum for balancing these claims under federation theory would shift from the strong individual position, which is currently the case under the natural rights perspective, to a more communal center, but more protective of individual rights as compared to when traditional federalism was dominant.  Decisions would place the common good above all concerns, but with the understanding that an unreasonable restriction of individual rights would negatively affect the common good.  And, actually, the common good has little “tolerance” for such abuses. 
Under federation theory, the individual is not left to his or her own devices to engender the sophisticated levels of cognition necessary to formulate a moral system of thought.  Recent hesitancy in providing reasonable guidance, for example, through civics instruction, to assist individuals in dealing with moral questions has instead promoted an individualistic culture where an individual is apt to be bewildered by the moral questions of a given time. 
The liberated federalist perspective expects that the individual engage in the communal moral questions by an active participation in such issues, but not in an isolated fashion.  These types of more socially structured experiences provide the opportunities to develop morally.
Without appropriate opportunities and supports, the quest for moral well-being may be confused, frustrated, and aborted; the telos [what is sought] may be experienced as dim and incoherent rather than clear and compelling.  Therefore, the injunction to follow nature must be sustained by a worked-out theory of what the natural end-state is and why it is worthy of our striving.[6]
Due to the centrality within federation theory of developing a moral person, rights become paramount.  Morality, under this construct, is a quality only possible within a free person, one who chooses, through rational decision-making, to do moral things.[7]  A reasoned approach to such questions demands a respect for the individual and to diverse ethnic and racial groups.[8] 
These federally inspired arrangements allow heterogeneous populations to work out functional arrangements by allowing each group to maintain its cultural biases for the most part.  The arrangements, though, insist that, in terms of their purposes, their members acquiesce, through respect and appropriate behavior, to those values that legitimize the union and define the union’s basic procedures.[9] 
For example, immigrants who come to this nation from non-modern, traditional societies will most likely bring with them values that are antithetical to modern values, particularly those central in either an industrial or post-industrial economy:
One fact seems unmistakable; indeed it seems to come as close to being a law as anything to be observed in social science.  As individuals move up the scale of individual modernity, whether judged by objective status characteristics or by psychological attributes, they regularly become more informed, active, participant citizens.[10]
The author of these words, Alex Inkeles, goes on to point out that while an individual’s behavior in an industrial-bureaucratic system might be somewhat affected by a participatory environment (in the political realm), it does not necessarily have implications in other social realms.  The point is that under a federalist arrangement that heavily encourages individual participation in political processes, such a bias will not necessarily affect other dealings or arrangements such as ethnic affiliations and other ethnic based proclivities.
That concludes the review of the model’s element, the community.  The next posting will delve into the element, the entity.



[1] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism:  A View from the States, (New York, NY:  Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966).

[2] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1998).

[3] Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work:  Civic Tradition in Modern Italy, (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993).

[4] Phillip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth:  Social Theory and the Promise of Community, (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1992).

[5] Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule:  A Cultural History of American Democracy, (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 

[6] Phillip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth:  Social Theory and the Promise of Community, 151.

[7] Ibid.

[8] James MacGregor Burns, J. W. Peltason, Thomas E. Cronin, and David B. Magleby, Government by the People, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1993).

[9] Daniel J. Elazar, Constitutionalizing Globalization:  The Postmodern Revival of Confederal Arrangements, (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998) AND Robert Gutierrez, “A Case for Centered Pluralism,” Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue 5, no. 1 (2003):  71-82.

[10] Alex Inkeles, Exploring Individual Modernity. (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 1983), 21-22.

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