An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …
With an understanding of how one can judge the value of federalism as a
construct, one is ready to undertake a critical view of it. An appropriate place to begin – given that the
present aim is to analyze the construct as it relates dialectically to natural
rights – is with its value of liberty. A
Whig (of Revolutionary vintage[2]), if
alive today, might view liberty, as expressed by the natural rights view, as an
expression of individualism and irresponsible behavior. And that expression can be judged to be of a dysfunctional
nature in today’s America.
That would include the nation’s schools where
there has been serious misinterpretation of the term, liberty, reflecting today’s
common usage. In the days of the Whigs,
liberty meant and was seen as arrangements set up to protect people from
despotism. It did not mean individuals
could do whatever they wished or even felt was the right thing to do as they
individually defined what was right or good.
That sort of individually defined liberty, when considered, was
dismissed as undermining social bonds.
Individuals, from rulers to common folk, could
abuse whatever powers they might have and pervert liberty by being licentious
and driving the polity toward anarchy.[3] “Americans early became socialized into a
kind of federalist individualism, that is to say, not the anarchic
individualism … but an individualism that recognized the subtle bonds of
partnership linking individuals even as they preserve their individual integrities.”[4]
Government and civics instruction should
address the natural drift toward anarchistic conditions which plague the “rule
of the many” polities.[5] The levels of incivility today – heightened
by the politically polarized landscape along with self-centered behaviors one
readily sees – indicate that abuses of liberty are at significantly high
levels.[6]
Liberty, as defined by the Whig tradition, has
an inherent quality that people are expected to exercise which entails duties
and obligations. This notion can be
traced to a tradition that one can ascribe to the term, federalism, and its
relation to covenants. It was not merely
a political concept, but could and did define, in ideal terms, what
individualism, human rights, and obligations should be. Elazar writes:
The
evidence is overwhelming that the covenant principle translated into the larger
political realm as part of the development of modern popular government
produced the idea of federalism. The
history and meaning of the term itself reveals [sic] this. The word federal is derived from the
Latin feodus which means covenant. …
All [colonial people] agreed on the importance of popular or republican
government, the necessity to diffuse power, and the importance of individual
rights and dignity as the foundation of any genuinely good political system. At the same time, all agreed that the
existence of alienable rights was not an excuse for anarchy just as the
existence of ineradicable human passions was not an excuse for tyranny. For them, the covenant provided a means for
free men to form political communities without sacrificing their essential
freedom and without making energetic government impossible.[7]
And how did this sentiment express itself when
early Americans strove to organize themselves?
Many of the founding generation (Patrick Henry being the most outspoken)
sided with the Greek model of antiquity in which the city-states united for
only common purposes, mostly defense.
Consequently, such thinking among Americans favored a strong localism,
and definitely, upon their independence from Britain, independent states.
But the founding fathers
accepted a model that was new. They
understood that local, small polities could be subject to unchecked passions of
factions or majorities which could lead them to act as tyrannical as despots
could act.
The
interdependence of the national and state governments was to ensure their
ability to check one another while still enabling them to cooperate and govern
energetically. In the words of Publius,
they advocated a republican remedy for republican diseases.[8]
The basic structural solution
was to be a non-central system; the assumption being that no central power
exists, but that there are several authorities, both national and
regional. In every case, these
authorities are granted their power directly by the people. Yes, a national authority might be granted
preeminence, but that position does not establish a single authority which can
take away from the other entities their basic power.
Elazar describes this
distribution as follows:
The
American people and their leaders were to extend this aspect of federalism,
which is partially described in common parlance as the “checks and balances”
system, into most other areas of their political life. Both the state governments and the national
government have powers which cannot be taken from one another, even when both
planes share in their exercise. The
principle was further applied to relations of the various branches of
government – executive, legislative, and judicial – within each plane even
before the invention of federalism. It
was subsequently applied to the structure and organization of the party system
… [9]
In fact, one can see the federal principle integrally embedded in the
nation’s civil society – its national culture.[10] This ideal is modified in that there is an
internal desire to meet political or social problems with local effort and
shift to regional or national responses only when practical concerns, such as mutual
defense or inability of local entities to meet common demands, have made it
necessary.
When a more regional or
national solution is sought, components of that solution will be left, as much
as possible, to local efforts (for example, in drafting an army, the US has
used local draft boards). While early
attempts to nationalize the nation’s political arena were made by the Federalist
Party, the Jeffersonians, with their election victory in 1800, made their
emphasis to grant a general primacy to the states “as custodians of the
nation’s political power, an emphasis that was to be dented from time to time …
but not altered until the 20th century.”[11]
Another restriction the
republican Whig tradition places on the structural arrangement that helped
establish early guarantees to secure liberty – as the Whigs defined it – was conditions
in which the representative bodies were situated. To begin, they were to meet often for short
periods of time so that the representatives of such bodies could come back to
live with their fellow citizens and experience the consequences of their own handiwork.
They also worked with complete legislative
independence from the executive agents, and this was seen as essential. In that way, legislators would not be “contaminated”
in their deliberations, and, in turn, they would not interfere with those
professionals of the executive as those agents went about implementing policy.
In terms of protecting liberty, it would be
protected by anchoring the legislative body to the people. Proportional representation, freer elections,
frequent legislative meetings, and healthy mistrust of any governing
institution were seen as desirable elements in a polity preserving liberty by
tying that government to the people.[12]
If correct in their calculations, liberty –
while always a subject to be abused by non Whiggish actors – promised to be
firmly established and protected from such abuse. The next concern, to be picked up in the next
posting, is a moral demeanor within a governmental arrangement that is
established on and enhanced by an equality standard.
[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022).
[2]
This view is distinguished from the political beliefs and positions of the Whig
Political Party of the early to mid-1800s.
[3]
Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968).
[4]
Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the
Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a
National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat
Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30, 10-11.
[5]
Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil)
Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33 (Spring, 1991), 231-254.
[6] A varied literature that this blog has repeatedly cited
supports this contention but for early contributions, see Robert D.
Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining
Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy
(January 1995) 65-78 AND Bowling Alone:
The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster, 2000). Putnam
defines social capital as a societal quality characterized by having an active,
public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social
environment of trust and cooperation.
[7] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federalism and Covenant,” in The
Covenant Connection: From Federal
Theology to Modern Federalism, edited by Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000),
245-255, 254-255. The term covenant has
a strong connection to religious beliefs.
The term, compact, essentially means the same thing but without a
religious tie.
[8]
Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the
Constitution? Thoroughly,”, 21.
[9] Ibid., 21-22.
[10]
Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the
Constitution? Thoroughly.”
[11] Ibid., 28.
[12] J. G. A. Pocock presents an interesting argument that
by vesting the power in the hands of the people, a polity is infinitely more
apt to depend on custom to devise its policies and laws. The advantage is that custom is the product
of past generations who, through their trial and error, have had sufficient
opportunity to keep what works and dismiss what doesn’t. On the other hand, a single or small body of
rulers depend on their individual judgements.
Obviously, the argument goes, the former is more prudent than the latter. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian
Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
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