DEALING WITH HUMAN REALITIES

In this blog, I have presented the attributes of a federalist polity. I have emphasized the communal aspects of such an arrangement. Those include the commitment to a central fraternal ethos, a genuine concern for fellow citizens, and a shared responsibility toward building and enhancing social capital. This posting is dedicated to what a federalist polity is not. Specifically, it addresses the utopian notion that a federal union is one in which there is no competition or the potential for greed. In this posting, I want to leave you, the reader, with a clear understanding that to advocate for federalism does not mean one believes it is possible to set up a political entity that is devoid of greed and self- serving behavior. On the contrary, a lot of the structural arrangement that are derived from federalist principles is so structured to meet the very human tendencies which act contrary to the aims of federalism, but is very much a part of the human condition. Therefore, federalists recognize the presence of both the very human potential for citizens to have genuine concern for the fate of others, especially for those in whom they are federated, and of selfish motivations.

So where are we as Americans when it comes to these apparently opposite drives or proclivities? Some politicians like to banter about the notion that American politics is above having clashes between our economic classes. Attempts to advance policy geared toward enhancing equality are labeled by these partisans as acts of class warfare. And the question arises: if we are all federated under the Constitution of this republic, aren't we beyond pitting the interests of one income group against that of another? Of one region against that of another? Of one age group, religion, ethnicity against that of another? How does one go about addressing these concerns? Are there points of conflict between these groups that are just part of the human condition that need to be accommodated or regulated?

History is clear on this point: to date, ever since humans have hit upon the ability of civilizing themselves, there have been among them people of varying degrees of economic well-being. That while civilizing has permitted the overall ability to increase wealth, not all have shared in that bounty equally or anything near it. This posting is dedicated to addressing what this fact means to the makeup of a polity – even our own.

To begin with, varying levels of economic well-being reflect one form or another of competition. Considered indispensable in the creation of wealth, this competition is engaged between those who have a lot and those who don't have a lot. But it is also engaged between those who comprise the rich – rich versus the rich – and between those who comprise the not so rich – the not so rich versus the not so rich. The competition takes on the form defined by the ground rules that prevail in a given economy: there are capitalist rules, socialist rules, aristocratic rules, and so forth. There can be many different sources of competition in a society – some economic, some not. Probably most fundamental, though, in defining the nature of a society, is the competition over economic assets within a society. And several basic factors prevail in all economic systems: the need to motivate the producers of economic wealth, the need to compensate the workers, the need to distribute sufficient exchange resources in order to generate sufficient demand, the need to be efficient in the production processes, and so on.

Much of the study of economics analyzes these factors. But there is also a political angle to all of this. Because the competition over this distribution involves high stakes, the rules of the economic game are very important and those rules are established by the political institution of a society. That process of rule making begins with developing and implementing a constitution, the basic law of the land. And while it is not the only concern constitution developers address, it is one of their essential and central concerns. And once a basic constitution for a society is hammered out, in order to maintain its legitimacy, a polity is well served in preserving its workable formula with appropriate policy and in describing and explaining to its populace how and why the instrument addresses the essential factors in the fashion that it does. Of course, if the formula does not work or worked once but now ceases to do so, current politicians need to be about working out a new political arrangement – amending the old constitution or creating a new one.

We, the United States, have the oldest written constitution (not all constitutions are written). By and large, there is real support for it and we more or less abide by it. Actually, we abide by it quite faithfully. And so our civic instruction should be about describing and explaining to its populace, particularly its younger members, how and why we go about addressing the essential factors in the manner our constitution does. There is an array of ways to do that. One such way is to revisit the thinking of our founding fathers and see how they saw these universal factors and any other factors that swayed their thinking about the relation between the classes and other competing groups. Richard Hofstadter does just that in his book, The American Tradition.¹ Let me summarize what this historian sees were the assumptions and claims of the founding fathers:

• There is a human nature that humans do not grow out of or have the ability to give up.
• This human nature is both universal in any given time and across all times – that is, it is the same always and in all places.
• This human nature has, as a central attribute, an insatiable drive that manifests itself within each of us to further self-interests.
• Self-interest can be instrumental in encouraging individuals to join with others who share the same interests or nearly the same interests to form what James Madison called factions – what we might call interest groups.
• Depending on the governing system in place and other environmental factors, self-interest can motivate licit or illicit behavior, productive or destructive actions.
• Attempts to convince individuals or factions to abandon their self-interest are bound to fail because such attempts defy an unchangeable human nature.
• Any interest group or faction that gains unfettered control of the government or the economic system of an area will take advantage and exploit all other interests, individuals, or factions – that is, they will become oppressive.
• The only way to avoid such oppression is to devise and implement a system of governance that pits faction against faction, interest against interest, vice against vice, or more germane to our concern here, class against class. This arrangement checks the ability of any one faction from gaining an oppressive advantage.

These founders were federalist politicians; three of them described and explained these beliefs in a set of arguments that were compiled in a volume entitled The Federalist Papers. The purpose of those arguments was to sell the new federalist constitution of 1787 in order that it be ratified. The term that is used to describe the thrust of these beliefs is a “balanced constitution” that the founders believed summarized what their handiwork attempted to be. It is balanced in its aim not to allow any faction or class to have a level of power in which it can dictate policy which threatens unreasonably and destructively the interests of other groups. In short, the aim is to avoid oppression.

A polity that is so organized should issue policy that substantively protects the opposing aims of opposing factions within its jurisdiction. It should be on guard against those developments that upset the balance. For example, it should be wary of any one group or set of groups becoming so rich that they can parlay that wealth into unchecked political power. On the other hand, it should not issue policy so daunting to human effort that individuals of the various classes become convinced that effort and hard work are not sufficiently rewarded and, as a consequence, allow disincentives of not only hard work, but innovation. It should serve to encourage conservation of our resources of all types – psychological, environmental, social, artistic, and the like. These are but a few of the concerns policy makers have to keep in mind so as to keep in balance the competition that is so important in advancing societal welfare.

Calls for balanced constitutions date back to antiquity, but a federated formula in the US added a level of sophistication that premiered with the American experiment. The deed to check and counterbalance forces could not be successful by merely including all factions within the political arrangement of the nation; it had to be arranged in such a way in which all the above concerns could be satisfied. Hofstadter identifies several elements in our constitution that have been, to date, sufficiently successful in addressing these concerns. They are: one, our constitution has divided power with each class having control over one or another of the structural elements – we have a legislature, for example, with one house representing the wealthy (the Senate) and one the masses (the House of Representatives); two, the constitution provides for an officer who represents all the people, executes policy, and is further empowered with a veto – and even this latter power can be overridden by an overwhelming majority in the legislature; three, the maintenance of local jurisdictions, under the state authority, prevents national interests running roughshod over local interests; four, at the same time, the national jurisdiction is big enough to prohibit any one faction from dominating the nation; and five, there is an independent judiciary, without access to armed resources, that oversees the process by authoritatively judging whether all parties – both public and private – are operating within the rules and, in addition, determines what the rules mean. And let me add to Hofstadter's list of balancing forces: all of these provisions make it very difficult for the government to accomplish anything without significant demand from the citizenry. In terms of protecting against oppressive government, nothing protects more effectively than a government that finds it difficult to devise and implement policy.

Of course, before its implementation, all of this was an ideal – a theory that had been formulated to meet the realistic self-interest of human beings and allow for a people to go about and strive toward more communal ambitions. By accommodating those necessary functions that lead to societal welfare, it is a formula or model that permits and perhaps encourages a mode of governance that allows the citizenry to pursue lives worth living over the long haul.

But heaven was not created in 1787. Perfection was not attained. There is another side. The other side is what happens when, as a result of being so balanced and hampered, the government can't respond sufficiently, in either terms of substance or time, to the needs of a constituency? What happens when, despite all of these structural elements or because of them, some group or faction does gain control and is able to become oppressive? That has, some might say, happened or nearly happened. In the Gilded Age, large corporations had enormous power and were able to render all other factions nearly impotent. Yet a reform era – the Progressive Era – did come about and addressed the most egregious conditions of that time. This effort included several amendments to our constitution. Some suggest that we are again nearing those conditions. If so, how will we respond? If so, is the problem one of deficient policies or is it one of systemic shortcomings? If the latter, have the deficiencies come about because times have changed and our constitution no longer functions sufficiently well? These are the questions of our time. They are serious and highly consequential to the welfare of our people and of the world. Our students need to be aware of what we are facing and it helps immeasurably if they at least know and understand from where we came in terms of structure, aims, and theory.

1Hofstadter, R. (1948). The American political tradition. New York, NY: Vintage Books.