FROM PAROCIAL FEDERALISM TO NATURAL RIGHTS

 

This blog, with the last posting, completed its outline of the parochial federalist view of governance and politics.  It did so from the perspective of an advocate for that construct.  In doing so, it showed the merits of incorporating it as the central construct for the teaching of American government and civics at the secondary level.

          The emphasis has been to both explain the construct as a republican theory that reflects the commitments of the founding generation of Americans around the time of the American Revolution, and as a structural foundation, in which compacts have brought layers of governmental arrangements together in a non-centralized structure which respects the integrity of each level.

          Combined, the construct is not only interested in the factual elements of the nation’s governmental system, but also in the normative questions or responsibilities and duties that citizens are expected to accord that system.  As such, the construct is seen as directly addressing the perceived levels of disaffection and dis-attachment characterizing many of today’s youth in how they meet those responsibilities and duties.

          In addition, the blog provided a critique of that construct by this blogger that emphasizes the narrowness of its view when it comes to identity factors.  The construct, through its influence on the American public and demonstrated through the years of its dominance, contributed to dysfunctional racism and xenophobic attitudes that undermined its claims of support for equality and liberty.  Such influence proved to be very costly in terms of human life (including a heavy death toll in a civil war), property loss, and in its effects to dash human ambitions.

          This blog now transitions from the thesis of an overall dialectic argument to the antithesis – which is currently situated in a thesis position.  That would be the natural rights construct.  It will be described and explained as a current dominant view.  As with the parochial federalist view, it will be presented by a sympathetic eye – as if this reviewer is an advocate.  He will do the best he can in that endeavor.

            Its full title is natural rights/liberalism perspective and the following approach, as just indicated, will be presented as if it should be the foundational construct for the teaching of American government and civics at the secondary level.  In general terms, the reasons for this argument will be that this perspective legitimately and viably promotes the interests of good citizenship and natural liberty.  That argument employs the language of freedom often voiced by many of its advocates as a gift from God.

That is, liberty is being defined as the freedom to do what one wants to do while respecting others to have the same and being amenable or supportive of a prevailing sense of transactional interactions with others.  Within these broad parameters, schools’ curricular treatment of government and politics will promote an approach to government that leaves such determinations over duties and responsibilities to individuals.  All reasonable and legal options from which to decide will be considered legitimate and in the purview of the individual. 

Therefore, this basic curricular choice avoids any attempt, either directly or by suggestion, of any preference for political values, ideals, ideas, other than for liberty, to the individual student.  For it is up to individuals to determine the type of citizens they will seek to be, only restrained by legal boundaries.

As with the parochial federalist review, this presentation of the natural rights perspective will attempt to answer the same research questions.  Overall, the concern is:  does the natural rights view provide a legitimate and viable way to study government and politics at the secondary school level, i.e., in middle schools and in high schools?  There, the targeted courses would be civics and American government, respectively.

              This overall question leads to subsidiary questions.  They are concerned with those issues associated with the comparison between the natural rights perspective, dominant today, and the federalist perspective, which is promoted in this blog.  These views, in many ways, are at odds not only concerning how governments should be described and explained, and how politics should be conducted, but about how people should behave in accordance with that governance and in their – especially political – interactions with each other. 

With that, therefore, the following subsidiary questions are offered:

 

1.    How has the construct guided/evolved in the teaching of American government and civics?

2.    What have been the salient consequences of that development?

3.    To what social arrangements should the development of this construct lead?

4.    How can desirable social arrangements – a la the precepts of the construct – come about?

 

In addition, they steer one’s attention to how Americans should proceed into the future – the espoused aims for those upcoming years. 

Through a description of the historical development of the effects of the two opposing perspectives, a clear comparison will be attempted.  This analysis will be guided by the above subsidiary questions as they relate to the commonplaces of curriculum.

The commonplaces of curriculum were developed by William Schubert[1] and include the subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu.[2]  Each of these commonplaces will serve as the divisional categories of the following postings in much the same way they organized this blog’s review of the parochial/federalism construct.

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[1] William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[2] They can be defined as follows: 

·       The subject matter refers to the academic content presented in the curriculum. 

·       The teacher is the professional instructor authorized to present and supervise curricular activities within the classroom setting. 

·       Learners are defined as those individuals attending school for the purpose of acquiring the education entailed with a particular curriculum. 

·       Milieu refers to the general cultural setting and ambiance within the varied social settings found at the school site. 

 

CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, V

 

This blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation,[1] argues for an instructional approach he calls historical dialogue to action (HD-to-A).  Basically, that approach calls upon students to investigate historical documents and other historical sources (including the work of historians) to gather information relevant to some contemporary problem area.  While grounded in historical material, it is not exclusively so.

These problem areas are so designated because they, to some degree, offend federalist values.  And the aim is for students to develop their individual positions regarding these issues and be prepared to defend their positions in discussions, arguments, and debates.  Teachers are to employ a process that has students develop the knowledge and skills by which they can perform these various steps including taking some action at a local site in which the problem is being manifested.

While this whole process is very much dependent on historical material, this blogger finds the application of the parochial/traditional construct as an approach too reliant on historical materials to the exclusion of other sources.  This bias goes contrary to a great deal of both psychological and pedagogic theory that advocates diversity of instructional methods for different types of learners and for different types of substantive materials.

Here is what a current academic group has to contribute:

 

Teaching methods are the broader techniques used to help students achieve learning outcomes, while activities are the different ways of implementing these methods.  Teaching methods help students:

·      master the content of the course [and]

·      learn how to apply the content in particular contexts

Instructors should identify which teaching methods will properly support a particular learning outcome.  Its effectiveness depends on this alignment.  To make the most appropriate choice, an instructor should consider learning outcomes, student needs and the learning environment.

Consider the following example:

·      Learning outcome:  Solve a complex math equation.

·      Learning environment:  An in person, upper-level math course with 20 students.

·      Teaching method:  Guided instruction.  First, the instructor facilitates learning by modeling and scaffolding.[2]  Students take time to ask questions and receive clarifications.  Next, students practice applying these skills together and then independently.  The instructor uses formative assessment to check for understanding.

This example demonstrates alignment of what the instructor wants students to do, and how they are supported in these tasks.  If the instructor chooses a different teaching method, such as a traditional lecture, students would need to process the lecture’s content and apply principles simultaneously.  This is very difficult to do and would lead to less successful outcomes.

Choosing the appropriate teaching method brings instruction to life while encouraging students to actively engage with content and develop their knowledge and skills.[3]

 

HD-to-A was thought of with these sorts of concerns in mind.  It calls for, where appropriate, employing social scientific processes and findings, natural science processes and findings, journalistic sources, literature and other artistic sources, and any other reputable source that is relevant to the issue under study.

          This approach – a diverse and interactive one – to educational challenges has a rich history and includes the work of such scholars as Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy,[4] Robert Slavin,[5] and Robert Solso.[6]  And when one considers what the above cite advocates, it verges on the obvious in that it respects the notion, “different strokes for different folks.” 

In addition, when social studies curriculum employs a more current, problem-solving, and relevant approach, it would be useful in encouraging lower achievers to interrelate with the substance of the material and bring it more to life.  In addition, relying on both experimental designs and then narrative based material can avoid falling into a routinized experience for students.

Parochial federalism is too committed to analyzing those historical materials, i.e., historical documents.  Yes, they contain, for example, the values and beliefs of the founding generation – useful information – but in adopting a strategy that reflects the above citation, analysis of these documents to the exclusion of other sources and modes of investigation is short-sighted.  Instead, and this would be promoted by some other construct, there should be a give-and-take between and among various sources and/or activities.

And with that call for diverse methods, this critique is set to address its final point of contention.  That would be how parochial federalism defines community.  That view, being a product of the nation’s early history with its limited technology, thought of community only in geographic terms.  Today, given online technologies (hence this blog) and transportation advancements, community can transcend physical localities. 

These broader capacities call for a broader view and that view should be incorporated into a definition of community.  Parochial/traditional federalism – as its name suggests – has an excessively local view of social/political concerns.  Yet to meet what ails the nation, any view of governance and politics needs to be proactively ensconced in what is currently the relevant setting, that being a global reality.

And with that, this blog comes to its end of how it substantively presents and critiques the parochial/traditional construct – a construct by which Americans mostly saw governance and politics from colonial days to the end of World War II.  In those years, it took on various versions of itself – the first being a covenantal view, one believed to be witnessed by God.

Through such developments as the Enlightenment, Western expansion, industrialization, the Hollywood effect, and the New Deal, that construct was not a stagnant view but evolved with the major events of the nation and with the various forms of its main challenge, the natural rights view.  But with the experiences of World War II and how profound they were, that form of federalism gave way.  This blog, with the next posting, will begin reviewing its replacement, the natural rights view.

The next posting will be short and will summarize what this blog has offered in terms of the parochial federalism construct.  It will offer some introductory commentary on what constitutes the natural rights construct and that will be in the form of an overview in the context of how it was historically situated in the late 1940s.

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[1] Available through Amazon.  The book dedicates three chapters to the development of three units of study a teacher can employ in a civics or American government, secondary course.

[2] Scaffolding is merely an instructional strategy of breaking up what is to be learned into manageable segments and either giving students the tools by which to handle the segments or giving them various structures of the materials that possibly render them in a more manageable and/or understandable form.

[3] “Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation/Teaching Methods,” University of Buffalo (n.d.), accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/develop/design/teaching-methods.html .

[4] Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy, Educational Psychology:  A Realistic Approach (New York, NY:  Longman, 1990).

[5] Robert Slavin, Educational Psychology:  Theory and Practice (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 1994).

[6] Robert Solso, Cognitive Psychology (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 1995).

CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, IV

 

The last posting ended with the following,

 

By addressing these concerns [lack of viable local governance] … one gets at a very fundamental aspect of a parochial view of federalism as that term suggests one should have.  That would be a parochialism based on local partnerships across the nation in which a partner comes face-to-face with other partners.

 

This is not so much a call for the central, federal government not to address national concerns, but to encourage local citizens to make their local governance and governments proactive entities ready, willing, and able to address the array of challenges citizens face.  That goes from truly local concerns to such global worries as climate change.  Each level of government has not only a relevant role, but a vital one as well.

          And before leaving this local concern, one related problem should be mentioned.  Local communities are evermore becoming single-political units of advocacy.  That is, like minded people are to greater levels living near each other.  Liberals live in liberal neighborhoods or sections of towns, and conservatives also live close to like minded people.  This has political consequences. 

For example, when it comes to districting – or redistricting – Congressional or legislative districts, gerrymandered map-drawings (maps that show how the districts are designated) insure that one party dominates in each of the districts.  This makes general elections near meaningless as the choosing of representatives shifts over to primary contests.[1] 

Add to that the fact that primary elections draw the attention of only the more partisan voters and one can see that many elections do not fulfill their intended purpose.  Ideally, elections should be the time when regular citizens meaningfully involve themselves with others to determine who should represent them in developing governmental policy, yet that is, to ever increasing frequency, not happening.  By this development becoming common, it discards how democracy in a republic is supposed to work.

At the heart of this concern is how unfederated these monocultural arrangements – which they usually turn out to be – are.  Not only that, but these states of affairs are further institutionalized by the practice of gerrymandering those representative districts.  Here’s an idea:  what if a constitutional amendment was proposed and ratified in which it stated the following:

·      One, since monopolistically determined representative districts undermine the federation of a citizenry, and,

·      Two, the US Constitution is a federalist arrangement,

·      Therefore, redistricting shall honor, as much as possible, the principle of diversity as expressed by the allocation of voters within representative districts as closely as possible to the diversity of the state’s electorate as expressed in the last election.  For example, if the state’s election returns indicate 51% voted for Party X and 49% for Party Y, and then based on information garnered from voter registration distribution, each district will reflect this distribution as closely as possible.  Independent registered voters would be considered neutral in this allocation and randomly assigned according to residential addresses.

·      Claims that this mandate is not being met shall be subject to civil suits in which the courts will determine if a proposed districting plan shall be enforced.

·      This provision should not be considered an obstacle to any third-entity solutions, such as generated by commissions to set up to design districting maps, but instead serve as a standard such solutions need to meet.

 

As is probably obvious, this blogger is not a constitutional lawyer or scholar, but he feels his intent is communicated by the above bulleted list.

          In many states, given the popularity of one party over another, this “reform” would have no practical effect, but in those areas or states in which there is sufficient diversity, it could have an enormous effect.  Here is what Eilperin reported earlier in this century:

 

Political scientists and good government advocates have fretted for years about House incumbents’ reelection advantage.  Redistricting has only exacerbated an already disturbing trend.  In [recent] … congressional elections, only thirteen seats switched party control, and seven incumbents lost in the general election …  As University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Nathaniel Persily wrote, “current rates of House turnover may equal historic rates of turnover in the Politburo [the policy making body of the old Soviet Union].[2]

 

The above listed provisions – or some such constitutional change – would encourage people of different ethnic and political standing to start talking to each other, start depending on each other, and perhaps begin interacting more often with each other. 

There is evidence that, in general, this is not so popular,[3] but it is a central attribute of federalist thought that citizens should strive to become federated with each other.  To achieve the necessary relationships so that they do so, people need to interact, especially politically.  With the above amendment or some such provision, the belief here is that a stage would be set for such interactions.

So much for that concern; now back to critiquing the parochial/traditional federalist view.  And what follows is the next element of this critique.  This element, it turns out, is somewhat related to what has just been stated.  That is, another shortcoming in the use of traditional federalism, particularly given the heterogeneity of modern societies and especially in the US, is that it takes no account of ethnic diversity; at best, it tolerates it. 

While this nation has a history of diverse European populations, with the addition of mostly the African slave population in its early days, most communities were segregated, and in the ensuing years this included whole states being established by religious/national groupings.[4]  But as time went by, communities began to intersperse, and that trend has grown extensively to the present day, particularly in urban centers.

The nation’s larger urban areas, especially, are cauldrons of diversity.  There, one finds zones of intermingling peoples.  Here is how a recent review of diversity states the situation:

 

Nearly all of the nation’s largest cities have at least one neighborhood that meets our definition as being both racially and ethnically diverse and mixed income.  Three large cities – New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco [–] account for nearly half such neighborhoods, but some smaller cities also rank high in the fraction of their population living in these diverse, mixed income neighborhoods.[5]

 

This runs counter to what this posting reports above – the prevalence of segregated areas.  That means these cities run counter to what seems to be occurring in the rest of the country.

          And in these “unusual” areas – the urban areas – there are schools with high levels of diversity.  The concern here is to merely state that such a distinguishing and influential factor should be accounted for when districting and other policies are being considered.  Surely a construct that would set the priorities of what governmental elements should be studied – as parochial/traditional federalism potentially sets out to do – and what issues will be analyzed should have a component that addresses diversity within the population. 

Not only does parochial/federalism tend to ignore these factors, but it also tends to minimize diversity, and, by its sense of priority, somehow attributes an insufficient degree of legitimacy to it and fails to entertain the sort of solutions that this posting offers – be they amateurish. So, as with the state of the nation’s politics running in two opposing directions – known as polarization – one gets a sense of how that has come about. 

On the one hand, there is segregated, representative districting and on the other hand, the higher levels of desegregated urban centers.  Parochial federalism provides Americans with little to no guidance about how they should address this current day political landscape other than claim that they should federate with each other.  Unfortunately, the times call for more guidance.

          This critique, it turns out, needs at least one more posting before it is completed.  Two more issues should be addressed.  They are related to the use of historical documents and a definitional issue – that being the definition of community.  And last, a summary statement should be added.  The next posting, hopefully, will touch all of these bases.[6]

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[1] Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics:  How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).  While a bit dated, nothing in ensuing reports in the news seems to suggest this situation has been rectified; as a matter of fact, things have gotten worse.

[2] Ibid., 112,

[3] Ibid.  This lack of popularity seemingly due to people, as conditions now stand, finding this form of interaction unattractive – it strikes many as having to deal with “them” – the other.

[4] See, for example, Tom Gjelten, “White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity.” NPR (July 1, 2020), accessed July 17, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity AND Mark Carnes and John A. Garraty, The American Nation:  A History of the United States (Boston, MA:  Pearson, 2015).

[5] Joe Cortright, “America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods,” City Reports (June 18, 2018), accessed July 17, 2022, https://cityobservatory.org/admin/ .

[6] Afterall, tonight is MLB’s All-Star Game.

CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, III

 

Despite Daniel Elazar’s assurances that the US is thoroughly federalist,[1] the intrusions of the central government into all aspects of life and the resulting undermining of communal institutions[2] have become prevailing aspects of the nation’s political system.  And that reality undermines the nation’s federalist character which places a premium on localism.

That will be the issue this posting addresses – a lack of local government viability – as the next element of this blog’s critique of the parochial federalist construct.  This account draws the conclusion that the parochial/traditional federalist theory did not adequately address the potential – even perhaps the likelihood – of the centralization of power in the federal government.  It should be recalled that federalism is a non-centralized system of governance, yet many would view the federal government as the central element of this nation’s system.

Then again, some might think this claim is a bit unfair in that the founding fathers could not have been expected to foresee the conditions that led to the dominance of the federal government, i.e., the global depression of the 1930s or the danger to the nation’s security posed by potential enemies with nuclear weapons.

          Both historical developments occurred with a backdrop of the increasing dominance of national corporations as they increasingly exerted their financial power over the nation’s economy and through that advantage, the nation’s politics.  A truly localized governance, given these contextual realities, has been very difficult to sustain.  The parochial federalist perspective was basically overwhelmed by any attempt to re-establish this purer version of a federalist view.

          This blogger believes that one key cause of this deficiency is that the initial perspective assumed that the conditions of the compact drawn up by the founding generation would be basically accepted by succeeding generations regardless of how the nation was to evolve.  If true, that, one must say, was a lack of imagination, but this blogger should not be too critical; his entire life has transpired in a time of enormous change.

Except for the provision for an amendment process, which is basically expected to accommodate marginal changes and is very cumbersome to employ, there is no provision for a generational affirmation of the republican principles entailed in the nation’s constitution. 

Just to demonstrate – and what follows is only a demonstration – how resistant to change the original document was/is, the nation was to encounter a civil war before a meaningful change was considered and implemented.  That would be the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment that this blogger has heard a constitutional scholar characterize as a fundamental, transformational change to the original constitution.[3]

This prevailing hereditary approach (or problem) needs to be changed to one in which each generation makes a renewed commitment to the nation’s constitutional principles with the ability to make the marginal or significant changes for which the passing of time demands.  That is, there must be the opportunity to make constitutional changes more readily than now exists.

But even with that, this blogger has some reservations.  If such a provision were added to the national constitution, what would happen to common law that is so reliant on precedent?  For example, a major critique of overturning Roe v. Wade was how, by doing so, it undermined the principle of precedent and with it the ability of law to be predictable.  Yet states have a much easier process by which to change their constitutions and they seem to accommodate those changes.

 

Every state but Delaware requires voters to ratify proposed state constitutional amendments – changes to a state’s constitution.  From 2006 through 2020, a total of 1,016 constitutional amendments were proposed and put before voters.  Of this total, voters approved 733 proposed changes to state constitutions.[4]

 

And yet with this pace of change, state governments function and do not change their basic, foundational elements of their governments or how those governments govern their respective populations.

Such opportunity to change as the states accommodate – perhaps to a much lesser frequency – needs to be made at the federal level so that, while basic commitments to republican principles are protected against the whims of popular opinion, structural, procedural, substantive, and definitional elements can be altered.  The original plan underestimates how fundamentally the passage of time creates demands that often call for corresponding changes in the basic rules of the game.

For example, given the shifts in population to urban areas and the ability of the rural population to secure representation in Congress and state legislatures beyond their numbers – a condition allowed to occur from gerrymandering and single-representative districts[5] – the system is becoming less and less democratic. 

This promises to be a condition that will prove to be disruptive to a serious degree as this underrepresentation of urban citizens becomes more and more obvious.  As it is, this blogger believes that this undemocratic trait is a prime cause for the polarized politics this nation is presently experiencing.

          But the immediate problem this posting addresses is that the system has become too centralized in all aspects of governance.  Yet, due to the inflexibility of the system to change its constitutional provisions, on which levels of effective localism depend, the system seems helpless to protect the efficaciousness of local governing units. To what extent does the system need to be more flexible in its ability to make changes?  To the extent, in part, that the governmental system at the state and federal levels can meet the demands of the day without undermining the nation’s commitment to localism. 

Ironically, that commitment to localism has to be defined in such a way as to maintain an effective sensitivity to global conditions and challenges.  Why?  Because the modern world is now global, and viable local governance not only has to address local problems, statewide problems, national problems, but global ones as well.

Back in 1991, Robert Bellah, et al. wrote,

 

It is equally remarkable that this strong new awareness of the non-utilitarian context of life mostly operates at two quite disconnected levels.  There is very local, even personal “Green behavior” – such as recycling trash, using only certain products, and driving less.  And there is a second, planetary level of concern, as in campaigns to protect endangered species, tropical rain forests, or the ozone layer.  The mediating relationships that link the individual household with the planetary ecosystem are left out – the bounds of human institutions and culture.  There is a void in awareness, a gap in our thinking at the crucial point, the middle range between the local and the global level.  Planetary environmental degradation is rarely understood as connected with human poverty and hunger.  Why is it that it is easier to think about the whole planetary ecosphere than to understand the social effects of our everyday relationships within household, economy, and polity?  Environmentalists sometimes forget that human culture is itself, as Cicero put it, a “second nature,” whose true aim is not to exploit the rest of nature but to cultivate it, raising the potentials emergent in humanity toward harmonious completion.[6]

 

In short, viable citizenship, given the interdependence of nations and the global consequences of economic activity, demands public virtue that is sensitive to world-wide issues that not only address environmental issues but also global labor exploitation, international crime syndicates, global health issues, etc. that cannot be neglected. 

That is, such concerns among the citizenry cannot be effectively promoted solely by a national governance, but by local activity and engagements that politicize common people into getting involved not only with local problems, but also global ones.  Parochial federalism lacks a sufficient voice in dealing with global issues.  It is simply not modern enough to meet the world that Americans are confronting today.

            Of course, this is a complex situation, and this posting does not provide a solution in which one can have much trust – the aim here is to draw attention to these conditions.  But it – the situation in which localism is lost – should garner more interest than it now seems to have.  A national discussion in which the conversation goes beyond some newer form of “states’ rights” being expressed, needs to occur.[7]

          The next posting will address the shortcomings these counter federalist biases have had in maintaining a federation among a citizenry and yet not fully addressed by parochial federalism.  By addressing these concerns, as described above, one gets at a very fundamental aspect of a parochial view of federalism as that term suggests one should have.  That would be a parochialism based on local partnerships across the nation in which a partner comes face-to-face with other partners.

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[1] 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.

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

[3] The reasoning supporting this claim is based on the provisions of the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.  With them, the federal government introduced the potential policing of states in how they treated all of their citizens.  That said, it took over forty years before the courts began honoring these provisions by initially protecting property rights of business interests (that case being Lochner v. New York, 1905).

[4] “Amending State Constitutions,” Ballotpedia (n.d.), accessed July 14, 2022, https://ballotpedia.org/Amending_state_constitutions.

[5] Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose:  The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2019).  This blogger’s recently published book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics (available through Amazon), provides an overview of Rodden’s study in which this “single-representative” districts provision is identified and described.

[6] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 14-15.

[7] States’ rights debates are generally conducted for racist and xenophobic attitudes and beliefs – but a discussion of localism needs to keep its focus on enhancing ways to encourage a more engaged citizenry in policy formation by all levels of government.  It is only at the local level that average citizens have a reasonable chance at affecting the process.