SHARED MORAL PRINCIPLES

 

One way to gauge how times have changed during the nation’s history is to compare how people have judged what is right or wrong, good or bad within different times.  Unfortunately, one cannot interview, for example, early American colonists.  But one can study the artifacts and written records they left behind.  On that score, one has the work of historians and even political scientists who have dedicated their professional efforts to look back.  As for current views, one need only look at what contemporary folks have to say or write.

          In this effort, one eminent scholar of the past is the late political scientist, Daniel Elazar.  As for establishing – as this blog has pointed out – what have been federalist views of morality, Elazar claims it was the central guide for judging right or wrong, good or bad not only politically, but in overall social environments.  He shares,

 

Covenantal foundings [sic] 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 covenants are essentially federal in character, in the original meaning of the term (from foedus, Latin for covenant) …[1]

 

Those colonists, by agreeing and signing such documents as the Mayflower Compact, purposely bound themselves to perpetual unions for specified reasons such as advancing mutual safety, expressing reciprocal respect for one another, and soliciting or having God as their witness. 

A more secular form (actually the more encompassing category) of this sort of agreement is a compact that consists of the same type of commitments without a reference to God as a witness.  Technically, the Mayflower Compact was a covenant.  Also of note is the relationship between the terms covenant and federal.  Federalism is derived from basic covenantal agreements.  They impose a certain moral view on social arrangements so initiated – in the case of this quote, the arrangement is a polity, but one can apply it to other less encompassing relationships such as a marriage or a business arrangement in which one has meaningful assets at stake.

The point is that such moral bindings presuppose that people are willing to take on a broadly based moral position.  To remind the reader, this sort of concern is being shared to explain a basic dialectic struggle with which Americans have been engaged in almost since their origin as a people.  That struggle would be federalism vs. natural rights views of governance and politics as experienced both within and without governmental interactions.

What of the natural rights view?  How does it see things in these realms of interaction and morality?  Again, one can look at what is being said or written by those who exemplify or act in accordance with this other view.  Probably no source further demonstrates or expresses the core elements of the natural rights view than the ideas of a current hedge fund manager who has experienced extraordinary success. 

Fitting that bill is Raymond Thomas Dalio, who is associated with the Bridgewater investment firm and has amassed a personal wealth of over one billion dollars.  Dalio has also written a sort of “how-to book.”  And he begins that work by reviewing how one should approach business, and by implication, life in general. 

He writes, “The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that helps me find out what’s true and what to do about it.”[2]  He goes on to state that principles are the foundations of how one should behave to get what one wants.  They function to guide courses of action not only in business but in life in general.  The aim is to satisfy one’s goals.

He encourages readers to give these principles a good deal of thought.  He analogizes them as recipes that can be applied to similar situations that call on decisions about how to behave.  He addresses the need for common or shared principles for social arrangements (families, communities, the nation) but refers only to their functionality and does not recommend one would adopt common principles per se.

Instead, he emphasizes that one is best served by having his/her own principles.  “If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clear-headed way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.”[3]  So, what is his first principle (and one can assume, the most important)? 

“Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 …”[4]  Sure, shared principles assuage group efforts, but that concern is not expounded upon in what he describes.  As a matter of fact, Dalio then doubles down on principles being one’s personal thing by claiming they can be anything one wants as long as they reflect how one is constituted. 

The ultimate “sin” is for one to be phony.  And to solidify one’s commitment, one should write down what one’s principles are – apparently, writing them adds not only to one’s ability to remember, but to also upgrade the essence of the commitment to some sort of permanence.  If the point being made here is missed, Dalio reflects natural rights thinking and one cannot help noting his contextualizing his thoughts in heroic terms.

Now compare that approach to the principled commitment expressed by the early colonists and founders of the states.  Their development was not just an arbitrary way of doing things but reflected a strongly entrenched cultural expression.  This overarching cultural value perspective that they expound can be verified by the fact that covenants reoccur throughout the colonies among groups with little or no communication among themselves.[5]

From these constitutional commitments, the resulting governmental development adopted a matrix structure in their arrangements, i.e., a grid type of structure in which there are many cells that assume high levels of coordination, cooperation, and collaboration – and, oh yes, common values.  That is, it depends on the citizenry to be federated in which each cell is a different element of power.  This arrangement not only distributes the levels of control, but also multiplies the access points by which citizens can seek political satisfaction. 

Described in this manner, federalism becomes a central feature of the nation’s constitutional makeup.  It encompasses – and as time has elapsed, in more sophisticated fashion – the other, often cited principles of the nation’s constitution:  popular sovereignty, separation of power, and checks and balances.  Its centrality, though, is not one of merely definitional neatness, but one that maintains the cultural and historical richness of the founding experience. 

This posting ends with another Elazar quote:

The old covenants followed a recurring format or model: … 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.[6]

 

One can easily see that those who entered such agreements, and so bound themselves, were not making a passive commitment, but a moral one of central importance.

---

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

[2] Ray Dalio, Principles:  Life and Work (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2017), loc. 60 (Kindle edition).

[3] Ibid., loc 78-88 (Kindle edition).

[4] Ibid., loc 88 (Kindle edition).  As a sub note, he adds:  “… and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.”  These latter qualities reflect a procedural concern for what is most utilitarian given human nature, not some concern for morality.

[5] See for example, Agreement between the Settlers at New Plymouth (Mayflower Compact), 1620, The Salem Covenant, 1629, The Watertown Covenant, 1630, Providence Agreement, 1637, Government of Pocasset, 1638, Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1639, Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, 1682, the Constitution of South Carolina, 1776, New York, 1777, and Massachusetts, 1780.  Each of these colonial and independent state documents follow the covenantal model of agreement.

[6] Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 244.

A ME OR US STORY

 

The nation has had many political views or perspectives expressed through its history.  Some, one might consider fairly safe and innocuous, but some right down scary.  The first type might include one with a disparaging moniker, the No Nothing movement, but it held to some very scary notions of nativism, perhaps a topic for some future posting.  Here, the point is that what these many ideas and ideals represented one can see revolving around two mostly opposing views, federalism and natural rights.

          That is, the nation has had two opposing and alternatively dominant perspectives of government as represented by these two views.  Federalism, as this blog has attempted to document, had the early dominant position.  That position was challenged by the natural rights perspective and during the years following World War II lost its dominance over the American political culture.[1]

          The two perspectives and their competitive stories have been and will continue to be described in some detail later.  But one approach to telling that story is by utilizing a dialectic analysis.  While other approaches could be used, this one allows one to get a good view of this central struggle as it manifested itself under different guises throughout American history.  Not only does such an approach address the politics of it all, but it also looks into the cultural backdrop under which such a drama unfolded.

          Federalism, the basic theoretical foundation of this blog, is a well-established body of political theory stretching back to the origins of this nation and before.  As has been documented in previous postings, federalism or a form of republican political theory relies, in part, on the ideas that have been described by Daniel J. Elazar,[2] Donald S. Lutz,[3] Michael Sandel,[4] and others.

This blogger defines federalism as follows:  A collective – or more descriptively, a communal – mental construct which views an ideal society as a product of a conscious initial agreement among either the founding members, which at times can be individuals or families, or groups, or a combination of individuals, families, and/or non-familial groups. 

The agreement is in the form of a covenant or a compact in which the founders agree, in perpetuity, or until its purposes are met, to the structural arrangements, the rights, and basic sanctions associated with the resulting government or governmental system.  In the case of the US national government, the resulting arrangement is comprised of the two-tier system of the federal government and the fifty states – it is a non-centralized system.

This view, as one of its basic elements, gives the members of the society a right to be treated in an equal manner with regard to governmental matters and a set of responsibilities to carry out the purposes of the union, i.e., all members, ideally, are active partners with rights and duties.  As such, fulfilling one’s duties and respecting the rights of others take on a moral claim.

Federalism and its communal attribute were far more central to the concerns of the nation’s founding fathers than was the natural rights’ central ideal, individualism.  While individual rights were important up to the time of the writing of the Constitution, they did not have nearly the prominence that many, such as Seymour Martin Lipset,[5] have ascribed to it.  Lutz shares,

 

The preamble of the U. S. Constitution secured the blessings of liberty to “ourselves and our posterity,” echoing the long-term communitarian commitment.  The Constitution set forth a decision-making process designed to produce, as Madison says in Federalist 10, “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”  There must be values, attitudes, and commitments – a mental stance, if you will – that lead people to frame their discourse, approach problems, and justify solutions in terms of the long-term community interests.[6]

 

More accurately, by emphasizing individualism in one's study of America’s past, it distracts one from the developmental forces that shaped the nation’s founding philosophy.[7]

          How does this dialectic struggle – federalism vs. natural rights, communal basis vs. individualistic basis – affect governmental policy?  Robert Putnam, in his analysis of the challenges that the nation’s youth currently face, provides a handy overview of how, during most of the twentieth century and into the present one, the American polity has handled one of this struggle’s main issues, i.e., equality.[8] 

He writes,

Graphically, the ups and downs of inequality in America during the twentieth century trace a gigantic U, beginning and ending in two Gilded Ages, but with a long period of relative equality around mid-century.  The economic historian Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz have described the pattern as “a tale of two half-centuries.”  As the century opened, economic inequality was high, but from about 1918 to 1970 the distribution of income gradually became more equal. … “[U]nder structural arrangements implemented during the New Deal, poverty rates steadily fell, median incomes consistently rose, and inequality progressively dropped, as a rising economic tide lifted all boats.” …

          In the early 1970s, however, that decades-long equalizing trend began to reverse, slowly at first but then with accelerating harshness. … [I]n the 1980s the top began to pull away from everyone else, and in the first decades of the twenty-first century the very top began to pull away even from the top.[9]

 

He goes on to share the statistics that support his claim.  For example, between 2009 and 2013, the real income of the top 1% rose 31 percent.  He comments, “post-Reagan public policy – though the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”[10]

          To be clear, the New Deal years reflect a more communal, federalist view at a national level, while what came to be known as the neoliberal economic regime – aka Reaganomics – reflects a more individualist, natural rights view.  Both views can be judged as a far-removed perspective from the initial compact-al view shared by the founding generation, but one can still note opposing positions in terms of the responsibility that the polity should shoulder in terms of sustaining equality.

          Historically, contextualizing this inherent struggle, one needs to get to a fairly basic level.  In that, Alexander Hamilton provides such a context by – in Federalist, No. 1 – the basic alternatives a prospective polity can consider:  “force,” “accident,” and “choice.”  This blog has reviewed these alternatives[11] and has relied on Daniel Elazar to explain the significance of this foundational issue. 

This posting will not revisit those distinctions but merely state:  as opposed to accident and force, choice indicates a conscious process by a group of people to deliberately establish a polity.  This nation’s foundation, starting with the first colonies, was accomplished by people who banded together and braved the unknown to establish societies.  Originally, heavily motivated by religious beliefs, these people understood the treachery of the bitter wilderness.  They also wanted to create what, in their eyes, were true Christian communities.

Borrowing from Old Testament examples of Judaic covenants, they organized themselves under this ancient form of societal bonding.  In that, there was a strong commitment to rely on an equality among the settlers and that equality, as testified by the signees to the Mayflower Compact, extended to all the settlers.  This story of the nation’s founding and bonding and how it evolved into a series of dialectic struggles will continue in the next posting.

---

[1] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

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

[3] For example, Donald S. Lutz (editor), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund, 1998).

[4] Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent.

[5] Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:  A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1996).

[6] Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 77.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis (New York, NY:  Simon & Schuster, 2015).

[9] Ibid., 34-35.

[10] Ibid., 36.

[11] See Robert Gutierrez, “Back to Basics, I,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (February 7, 2020), accessed December 6, 2021, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_02_02_archive.html .