INITIATING THE POLITICAL PROCESS

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.

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[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.

[2] Thomas E. Patterson, We the People, (New York, NY:  McGraw-Hill, Incorporated, 1998).

[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).

THE ASSOCIATION

To continue, from the previous postings, describing the components of a liberated federalist model, the third component is the association.  To date, this blog has described the two other components:  the community and the entities.  Associations are a type of social arrangements.  Not all arrangements or collectives are associations.  Some are.

The term association, as used in this blog and as Philip Selznick[1] uses it, refers to those arrangements that are formal in that they are initiated by a compact or a covenant and operate significantly within the ideals contained within federation theory. 

Of course, the national, all embracing association is the federal union of the people and states of the United States of America as designated by the United States Constitution, its compact.  That association, as well as the associations that make up the state and local governments are, in the ideal, communal democracies as defined by Selznick.  Any collective, public or private, can be so judged if it meets to a significant degree federalist ideals as described and explained in this blog and alluded to below:

·        One, it is, as stated above, an organization formulated under the auspices of a compact or covenant that lays out its various provisions.  Ideally, that agreement should be in writing, but a verbal, binding agreement can meet this requirement.  That agreement sets out certain structural requirements:  a qualified majority rule, a strong provision for guaranteeing the rights of minorities and individuals, and a clear purpose or set of purposes for its existence that is publicly stated.

·        Two, it has a fraternal ethos that respects the dignity and integrity of each of the entities that comprise it and an emotionally felt commitment of inclusion for those entities.

·        Three, it has a covenant of reason upon which its moral standing rests.  The covenant of reason includes a deliberative process of decision-making, a provision of critical review of its decisions and actions, and a set of collective interests that reflects its purposes as well as its standing as an association.

·        And four, the association has an overarching responsibility to uphold the communal well-being of the community in which it resides.

To review these attributes, a short elaboration follows:

The compact or covenant refers to the formal agreement between the entities.  The agreement contains the characteristics identified by Daniel J. Elazar.  To review his characterization of a compact/covenant, here is a definitional account of a covenant and another quote that further describes the common structure of a covenant:

Covenantal foundings emphasize the deliberate coming together of humans as equals to establish politics in such a way that all reaffirm their fundamental equality and retain their basic rights ... Polities whose origins are covenantal reflect the exercise of constitutional choice and broad-based participation in constitutional design.  Polities founded by covenant are essentially federal in character, in the original meaning of the term (from foedus, Latin for covenant) ... [2]

And:

[The old covenants followed a recurring format or model which was] … an historical prologue indicating the parties involved, a preamble stating the general purposes of the covenant and the principles behind it, a body of conditions and operative clauses, a stipulation of the agreed-upon sanctions to be applied if the covenant were violated, and an oath to make the covenant morally binding.[3]

Donald S. Lutz points out that the distinction between a compact and a covenant is that a covenant calls upon God to be a witness to the agreement and a compact does not.[4]  In either case, the formulation of a compact or covenant calls for a bit of soul searching.  It demands that the entities involved seriously consider the consequences of such an act due to the nature of the commitment involved.

In addition, there should be at least some minimum level of emotional commitment among the entities for the agreement and each other since the union will most likely last for a significant amount of time.  Compacts and covenants should not be drawn up for frivolous reasons.  As Elazar describes these unions, the commitment is for the duration of the concern involved.  In terms of a national union and such institutional arrangements as marriage, the commitment is in perpetuity.

The purpose or set of purposes for the formation of the arrangement is spelled out in the compact or covenant.  To justify the sort of commitment called for under a compact arrangement, the purpose or purposes need to be of sufficient importance.  Importance can, at a minimum, be measured by the number of people affected by the activities of the association and the importance ascribed to that effect.  For example, a school staff with its responsibilities make it a suitable arrangement for such a commitment by those who work there, but seldom are.[5]

The qualified majority rule attribute holds that a raw majority rule arrangement in collective decision-making should be avoided.  One problem with raw majority rule involves a lack of concern for minorities.  Majority rule should be limited by constitutional (structural) parameters, as previously stated in this blog regarding equality.  Each minority and individual is entitled to protection from the majority and its potential abuses.  Basic rights, as identified by the Bill of Rights, serve as an appropriate starting point.  But on a more human level, this concern is emotionally felt among all entities of the association. 

On a more “practical” level, a member of the majority today can easily and eventually be part of the minority at some future time.  The reciprocal advantage, highlighted earlier in this blog, is actualized by a respect for the rights of entities, whether they are in the majority or the minority.  Since the situation in the future can easily be reversed, there is a practical and self-serving aspect to this reciprocity.

The attribute of fraternal ethos can best be seen as a “partnership” among the entities.  That is, fellow participants are genuinely held in high regard and a mutual concern for each other’s well-being and success is felt.  Under a partnership, a benefit for one, under the experiences of the union, is a benefit for all, at least in the long run.  Or, as Tocqueville points out:  “self-interest rightly understood.”

The final attribute of an association is a covenant of reason.  This attribute is the foundation for making possible the actualization of moral actions by the association.  This foundation is first anchored in the deliberative process by which decisions are made by the association.  The process is – and remember, this model is concerned with political activity and other political matters – identifiable. 

The steps of the process are as follows: 

·        challenges are perceived;

·        affected self-interest is identified;

·        (logically simultaneously) a review of ideals takes place;

·        relevant knowledge is reviewed;

·        a reflected moral mission is formulated;

·        an action strategy is selected;

·        an evaluation components (formative and summative) is selected;

·        a decision to act is made;

·        action is initiated;

·        and the actions (strategy) are evaluated against federalist values. 

This is how this construct views politics.  The process by which to study associational politics utilizes historical and social science literature (along with other sources such as poetic literature – novels, short stories, poems, etc. – and other artistic materials).  These activities are presented in a logical sequence, but they do not have to be carried out in that order except for the last three steps which would naturally be at the end of the process.

Another aspect of this attribute is that it operates, as much as possible, in a transparent fashion.  That presupposes an association that has collective interests and, whenever possible, is open and forthcoming with information regarding these elements.  Of course, this attribute can be restricted by competitive considerations as with proprietary information of a business or by concerns for national security facing the central government. 

Those, then, are the attributes of an association and with that the summation of the elements that makes up the liberated federalist model is completed.  What remains is certain event factors that theoretically puts the model in “action.”  That topic will be addressed in the next posting.

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

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State 33, Spring (1991):  233-234.

[3] Ibid., 244.

[4] Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

[5] As pointed out in a previous posting, staff relationships are defined by formal contracts, not a compact or covenant.