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, February 15, 2022

THE TURN

 

[This blog is amid a series of postings that aims to share with the reader a history of the nation – albeit highly summary in nature – from the perspective of a dialectic struggle.  That is the struggle between a cultural perspective that emphasizes more communal and cooperative ideals of federalism and the individualistic perspective of the natural rights construct.

The general argument this blog has made is that federalism enjoyed the dominant cultural position in the US until World War II, and after a short transition, the natural rights view has been dominant.  Whether one perspective is dominant or the other; whichever it is, that fact has a profound impact on the teaching of civics in American classrooms.]

 

Can one attribute American political culture’s adoption of the natural rights view to pragmatism?  Of course not.  What that philosophy did do was to provide a line of thought and reasoning that undermined a more directed sense that Americans should be a federated population.  Instead, it casts, as ideal, a populous being able to put aside the binding obligations such a federation demands – that one cannot be simply justified in catering to one’s sense of what works with one’s beliefs, emotions, interests, and station in life.

          Instead, it upgrades one’s proclivities, biases, and tastes – what makes one feel good – to justify most chosen options or desired options one might pick or harbor.  Through the work of the pragmatists, such as William James, their ideas were first introduced to US culture in the late 1800s and took significant hold on many Americans.  And as the twentieth century began and progressed, those more individualistic notions helped make acceptable more laissez faire views in the economy. 

Under a capitalist regime, one can let go, without any guilt, of any responsibilities toward the fate of workers, consumers, or small level producers.  This indifference mirrors the main tenets of the natural rights view and, at the same time, served the interests of large corporations so they could conduct their businesses to maximize their profits.

          Now to apply these notions to the new economic world that the global corporations introduced, one can see how communal arrangements lost or had diminished their reliance on people fulfilling their federated duties and responsibilities.  And also, their dominance led to a path:  economic activity experienced fast economic growth, followed by a skewed mal distribution of income, and eventual collapse as the resulting imbalances resulted in global depression. 

Such a progression seemed, in hindsight, as simply an inevitable result given that actors just pragmatically furthered their individual interests.  It led to highly irresponsible activities that were unsustainable given economic realities.  These activities included exploiting workers, abusing consumers, and crushing competition wherever possible.  Included in such activities were reckless investment strategies that created unsustainable “bubbles” such as in the stock market, and most of that was repeated in the early years of the current century.

When that stock market bubble eventually burst in 1929 (and in 2008) and investors lost billions of dollars, the world faced catastrophic consequences as businesses went bankrupt and millions of jobs were lost.  Spurred by the crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was confronted with a decision.

Was he going to first steer federal policy to create industrial associations, communities of interests within each industry, as called for under the National Recovery Act?  Or was he going to empower governmental, central planners to set national economic policy?  This was not a policy position based on personal pragmaticism, a la James, but on a national mandated program that would rely on a hefty level of pragmaticism but at a national level. 

That decision was never made, for it was World War II that ended the depression before a comprehensive economic policy was established.  But, despite this injection of huge federal spending, creation of millions of jobs, and healthy levels of consumption – all to fight the enemy – the nation was left with a change of heart. 

And a good part of that newer perspective was an orientation to look to Washington, D.C. for solutions and more of an amoral view of governmental policies.  That newer view shed concerns for the partnering nature of citizenship and instead, in pragmatic style, sought for what “worked” in the immediate challenge the polity faced at any given time.  And that took shape, economically, with the default policy of liberal, Keynesian economics. 

This approach called for governmental actions which first manipulated fiscal policy and later monetary policy to promote economic growth (a compromise acceptable to all competing parties).  Such an approach relieved the government from making judgments about the aims of any competing interests.  Like a professional unattached mechanic – catering to some degree to pragmatic notions – the central government could raise and lower government spending, taxes, and money supply to get desired results. 

While how much raising and lowering was not immediately evident, experience could provide better answers as these tools were utilized and evaluated as time went by.  But that ability would place enormous power in the hands of the bureaucrats of the central government.[1] 

In that, local institutions became less powerful because they were not able to meet the demands of citizenry; they were less able to make authoritative decisions concerning the interests of average citizens.[2]  As a consequence, in this vacuum, there arose the anonymity of the individual and the general legitimacy of radical individualism.

 

Individual versus State is as false an antithesis today as it ever was.  The State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does so on what it takes from competing social relationships – family, labor union, profession, local community, and church.

          And the individual cannot but find a kink of vicarious strength in what is granted to the State.  For is he not himself a part of the State?  Is he not a fraction of the sovereign?  And is he not adding to his political status as a citizen what he subtracts from his economic, religious, and cultural statuses in society?

          He is; and in this fractional political majesty the individual finds not only compensation for the frustrations and insecurities to which he is heir in mass society but also the intoxicating sense of collective freedom.[3]

 

As Nisbet goes on to explain, the State becomes more in charge of the larger concerns at the expense of the influence of associations and local governments, and there remains no one involved in addressing smaller, day-to-day concerns.

          These latter concerns are numerous and in total are significant to Americans’ everyday lives.  They include the issues involved with civility or such matters as whether children are benefitting from well financed communal programs.

 

We have tended to miss the subtler but infinitely more potent threats bound up with diminution of authorities and allegiances in the smaller areas of association and with the centralization and standardization of power that takes place in the name of, and on behalf of, the people.[4]

 

The people, as a result, lose control of the major issues while feeling little to no restraints over their individual prerogatives in conducting their personal – person-to-person – lives.

This includes how they interact within their families and among their acquaintances.  With this newfound anonymity, the communal restraints of the past are dismissed and then forgotten.  Or, stated in other words, the drift toward obsessive individualism becomes pervasive and legitimates a sense of “do your thing” without any sense of obligation or duty to the federated union.



[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] Ibid. AND Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (San Francisco, CA:  Institute of Contemporary Studies, 1990).

[3] Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 228.

[4] Ibid., 229.

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