With the last posting,
this blog completed reviewing the elements of a liberated federalist model for
governance and politics. This is an
idealistic model and meant to guide the choice of content material for a civics
curriculum. The elements reviewed are
the community, the entities, and the association. What remains is a description of what spurs
the model into “operation.”
What
puts the model in “operation” occurs when an arrangement or, more ideally an association,
is confronted by a politically challenging condition. A politically challenging condition is one
that threatens to negatively affect or positively provide the opportunity to
advance the political interests of the arrangement/association. Political interests are defined, for the
purposes of the model, as events or situations that affect the societal welfare
of the polity.
That
is, the condition is efficacious in the association maintaining, increasing, or
creating social capital and civic humanism.
Social capital and civic humanism help define the trump value for
federalism within the tenets of federation theory. That value, as just indicated is societal
welfare.
This
blog has, over significant number of postings, described and explained the
mental construct, federation theory. The
reader who is new to this blog is invited to hit the archival feature of this
blog and begin with the posting for May 23 of this year for that account.[1]
As
for the activation of the model, it is the perception of a challenging condition
that stimulates the activities identified in the previous posting. As such, this model draws attention to both the
conflictual nature of politics and the consensus side as well. Thomas Patterson points out the dual nature
of politics, the one being conflictual, the other being the efforts to attain
consensus to devise a better way of life.[2]
Daniel
Elazar sees the study of politics as one of studying competitive behavior to
seeking public allocation of values and the other of seeking a just way by
which to arrange a polity’s public affairs.[3] The former lends itself to a more
quantitative approach to the study of politics, the latter allows and
encourages a more qualitative approach as it ventures into normative issues.
To
the extent that federalist ideals are met, the ideal association is successfully
able to issue a moral response. Morality
is defined as the resulting condition from a process that is true to federalist
values.[4] An alternative way to define morality is to
designate any behavior that abides by the values of societal welfare (advancing
social capital and civic humanism) as being moral. A short hand term that capture this concern
is: seeking the common good.
This
model, therefore, is concerned not only with the realities of distributing resources
and assets, but also with the moral or just processes and decisions that mark this
nation’s politics in both public and private arenas. In so doing, the utilization of the model in
developing instructional material in civics ensures a moral element in that
instruction; a turn that has been argued in this blog to be sorely missing in the
nation’s classrooms.[5]
There
are countless sources from which to choose political challenges. But perhaps the one source that seems to be
the fountainhead of more issues than any other is equality. As such, this synthesis between natural
rights and critical theory is this acknowledgement that at the center of most
political discourse is the intrinsic conflict among the various economic and
social classes and designations. But
unlike Marxian views, equality is defined differently.
Federation
treatment of equality is a compromise between how natural rights defines it –
summarily described as equal condition – and how critical theorists define it –
summarily described as equal results.
The next postings – perhaps three of them – will delve into this
compromise. It is that important.
[1] For a more complete account the reader can go further
back, but the May 23 posting begins a renewed description of liberated
federalism perspective which is a newer version of federalism.
[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of
(Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and
State 33, Spring (1991): 233-234.
[4] Phillip Selznick, The
Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and
the Promise of Community, (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1992).
[5] James D.
Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good and
Evil (New York, NY: Basic Books,
2000).
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