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, August 31, 2021

A SOFT FOUNDATION

 

After the last posting’s short lesson on politics – from an old civics teacher – this posting continues Michael F. Holt’s account of the final days of the Whig Party.[1]  Despite a record of bouncing back – albeit within a short history – as the 1850s fell upon the American landscape, the Whig Party was experiencing the consequences of a succession of election loses.  That was a meaningful level of defections which included its national chairman, Truman Smith. 

And then there was the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska proposal that finally led to the party’s final days, but not due to what one might suspect.  Many of the party’s woes had to do with its internal division between its northern and southern contingents.  And given that the Kansas-Nebraska issue had to do with the expansion of slavery, one would suspect it was the issue further dividing the remaining Whigs.  But it turns out that both segments of the party, at least initially, were antagonistic toward the proposed legislation. 

Its most consequential aspect was that it did away with the Missouri Compromise formula as to where slavery would be allowed to expand by introducing its feature of popular sovereignty.  That is, in the two new states that the bill was to create, the people of each were to determine whether slavery would be allowed to exist.

This was judged to be so egregious by anti-slavery advocates that it encouraged Southern Whigs to join with Northern Whigs in their opposition to the bill.  Perhaps due to this newfound unity, the remaining Whigs felt they could survive as a party until the 1856 election.  But interim elections, both at the state and national levels, would prove to be too detrimental.  That’s because newer parties garnered enough popularity or disenchanted Democratic voters took up various Whig positions to prevent the Whigs from gaining ground. 

These other parties included the Know-Nothings, the Free-Soilers, and the newly formed Republicans.  The end was finally obvious when in the next Whig national convention, in Baltimore, only 144 delegates showed up and half of them were from near-by New York.  Given the events that led to this state of affairs, one might question various aspects of the American political scene in those antebellum years.

For example, can a political party be too federalist for its own good?  In answering that question, one needs to be careful about how related terms are used.  Is it too federal to rely on the politics of localities when a party, in order to survive, needs to succeed at a national level when the polity in question is of ample size such as that of the United States? 

Holt writes,

 

State legislatures and state nominating conventions met while congressional Whigs struggled with [the outstanding national concerns and] … what happened in those legislatures and conventions decisively influenced Whigs' behavior in Congress, just as developments in Washington shaped how rival Whig factions opposed each other within the states.[2]

 

While one can see such goings-on as the fate of all political parties – as part of the funneling the last posting highlighted – with the Whigs one took this behavior to a dysfunctional level.  And in that, one learns that federal politics must sufficiently respect the various arenas – the various levels of governance – in which it chooses to participate.  In that, the party should recognize the augmentation of power and consequences – which increases as one advances to the national level – that each arena can entertain.

          What was telling, for example, was the poor showing of the Whigs in getting control of the US Senate.  In those days, state legislatures named the respective senators for each state.  So, localism held inordinate influence over who served in the upper house of the US Congress.  Poor vote getting at the local level, as the Whigs experienced, had its affect up the federalist chain and the Whigs found it more and more difficult to have a voice in that national body. 

The problems that party confronted were many and this concern over Senate representation was only one.  Another already mentioned in this blog was over patronage.  The Abraham Lincoln case is readily cited as an example.  He chose to not seek reelection to his House seat in 1849 in the hopes of securing a bureaucratic job, a Land Office appointment in Zachary Taylor’s administration and someone else was chosen.

Taylor, a Whig, did offer him the governorship of the Oregon Territory, but Lincoln declined it.  However, the case illustrates how the party found it difficult to reward local partisans who needed to be content in order to get out the vote on election day.  Those partisans worked, through a variety of strategies, to get fellow party members to vote.  Analysis of many of the Whig losses reveals that they were caused by a lack of Whig turn out in those elections.

Bottom line, the party did not handle patronage well enough to maintain the support of many around the country. The demise of the party is probably best understood through the review Holt gives his readers of the many varied stories, like that of Lincoln, emanating from more local developments in not only state capitals but town halls and other political centers.  That is, they are told through many stories that Holt tells in the pages of his book. 

But of importance here is to note how federal the system was during those years and how much the institutions of the system worked their way through the challenges that a federal approach offers those who work in its “trenches.”  Of these developments, Allen Guelzo gives his review of Holt’s work a flavor of those stories.  He shares,

 

And Holt clearly revels in the telling of them, in the local cut-and-thrust of politics, of the ill-timed public letter, of the public witticism that gets twisted by skilled opponents around a candidate's neck for life, of desertions, reconciliations, petty vindications, and even pettier vindictiveness.[3]

 

And in this, as polarization rose in the years leading up to the Civil War, one sees a diminishing loyalty to federalist commitments, at least at the national level.  It was still the dominant view of the way Americans saw governance and politics, but the immediate political needs of the time took primary focus among them and the centrifugal forces from local politics to that of Washington took hold.

The issues that incited this sense of animosity among Americans were several, but slavery, what was an incubating problem, began to burst in the consciousness of Americans of the 1850s.  It was demonstrated in the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and it served to give that polarization its shape and form.  With that stage, one is ready to consider the final nail in the coffin of the Whig Party – the banging will be described in the next posting.



[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[2] Ibid., 460.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:  Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 22, 2 (Summer 2004, 71-86)), accessed July, 23, 2021, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0022.206/--rise-and-fall-of-the-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics?rgn=main;view=fulltext . 

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