HAIR'S BREADTH

Being able to buy public policy affects a polity in many ways. It tends to make policy reflect the short term interests of those who can make the purchase at the expense of others. It affects trust levels since even if the policy is aimed at the common good, the citizenry will suspect the motives behind the decisions that generate any policy. Once the belief that policy choices are up for bidding, then the job of governance by those in positions of power will be that more difficult, and reliance on coercive means will tend to become more the mode of ruling. So, with this in mind: What constitutes bribery? And is bribery different from political donations? Some claim the difference is miniscule – a hair's breadth of difference. I want to address this difference in upcoming postings. I want to describe how such a small difference has allowed people of means to have what some describe as undue influence over those who determine public policy. And while there is influence directed by those with money over those with political authority, those who have political authority also engage in practices that at times can exert undue influence over those who make political donations. Here, in this posting, I want to more or less introduce this topic.

Let me begin by stating what to many has become obvious: money, always the lubricant of politics, has become even more of an issue as the gap between the rich and the not so rich has grown over the last several decades or so. Dave Meslin, in a Ted Talks production,¹ addresses the belief that citizens of prosperous democracies tend to become selfish, stupid, and lazy. He rejects this belief and points out that the reason many citizens choose to be uninvolved in the political processes of the nation or even of the locality in which they live is because prevailing practices by governments or other political entities set up obstacles to such involvement. He lists seven obstacles and explains them. I want to focus on the second one he mentions and labels “public space.” Here, the point is that in order to be able to engage in meaningful political speech, speech that can compete with speech of those who can purchase large quantities of public space, in the form, for example, of advertising space, one needs a significant number of financial resources. In addition, this obstacle takes the form of having direct access to political decision-makers, in the form of lobbying efforts, which also call for enormous amounts of money. This, in effect, results in regular folks, as they attempt to compete against monied interests, having almost insurmountable disadvantages systemically placed against them.

So, due to this imbalance, a system has evolved in our nation, not by necessarily evil people, but by engaged people who have definite political goals and who also have the use of big bankrolls to pursue those goals. This system entails a definite process, not one of “bribing” public officials, per se, but of well-heeled political participants making political donations to those politicians or political parties that “see” things as they do.

Again, none of this is new. Probably the most famous effort to overcome this obstacle occurred during the Progressive period. During the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the enormous wealth of industrial corporations, public policy developed not to advance the interests of the people, but to almost solely advance that of the monied class – the industrialists. The citizenry became so disgusted that it began electing into office, from local to national, politicians that became known as Progressives. Probably the most famous was the Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, although the Progressives came from both major parties – Democrat Woodrow Wilson was also a Progressive – and from a variety of interest groups. “Yet,” as Lawrence Lessig writes of that time, “one common thread that united these different strands of reform was the recognition that democratic government in America had been captured.”² Today, as if on cue with the conditions of almost exactly a century ago, we again face the challenge of tackling a form of widespread corruption – a corruption born of a mutual, reciprocating relationship between those with money or access to money and policymakers.

There are differences today. To begin with, the nature of the public space has changed. That change has been the product of technology, as in the case of mass media and social media. As a result, monied interests have far reaching means to get their speech out there. They have the resources to make sure their speech is professionally produced and, as a result, more convincing and effective. And, in addition, we have a degree of banality on two levels: one, a certain enabling by the citizenry that has allowed an economy of dependency between the monied and the politicians to form – perhaps as a result of the changes during the last century – and, two, the nature of the goals many of the monied players seek. That is, they seek to have policy that gives them increased income they cannot attain under market conditions – for example, as in the case of special tax loopholes or subsidies. We call these attempts “seeking rents.”

This corruption – and it is a form of corruption – is mostly legal.³ There is no, for the most part, concrete quid pro quo: something, money, for something else, favorable votes in a legislature, for example. Instead, the system at work operates from understandings between the givers and the receivers. These understandings take the form of, to various degrees, vague expectations and tend to be created, nurtured, and maintained over time. It is a gift economy that has evolved. It is made up of no specific demands, but a relational understanding that is dependent on continued support by policy decisions that are favorable to those who furnish the resources.

All this is usually quite legal. Yes, it is a hair's breadth of difference between this practice and out and out bribery, but it is a difference nonetheless – of significant importance.

1See the Internet site: http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html .

2Lessig, L. (2011). Republic lost: How money corrupts Congress – and a plan to stop it. New York, NY: Twelve, Hatchette Book Group. Quotation on p. 5. Many of the ideas in this posting originate with Lessig's work.

3Sometimes it is illegal as some participants have crossed the line. People have gone to prison.

CONVOLUTED DIVISION

As I reviewed the state of civics education and of social studies education earlier in this blog, I mentioned the internal debate within this professional area. That is, there has been a debate in which some practitioners have promoted a curricular position known as critical theory and another one promoting the curricular position I have called natural rights construct. In addition, there are other views. In some states, for instance, there has been a renewed interest in what educators call social reproduction. This third position has been ostensibly incorporated by the natural rights proponents, but really is more of a traditional position. This latter curricular construct champions a social studies' role that encourages patriotism and loyalty toward our political system. Following this curricular thought, social studies content would include celebratory material of our political history. It emphasizes those stories that reflect the glorious events in which Americans, both the leaders and exceptional citizens, have demonstrated heroic efforts to advance a democratic agenda. The aim is to instill those aspects of our cultural heritage that are seen as worthy of being incorporated by our young students and necessary in order to maintain or even increase levels of patriotism among our citizens. The goal is to encourage the development of good citizenship through some form of admiration, if not worship, of the sacrifices and other heroic actions of those who have come before us. In general, the reproductive approach, in its more extreme form, is akin to nationalism – a belief that can be summed up by the cry, “My country, right or wrong, my country.”¹

I write that this perspective has been somewhat accepted by natural rights advocates but, let me add, I believe that that acceptance is more out of convenience. In theory, natural rights advocates should be antagonistic to this more traditional view because those who want to instill an unquestioning devotion for the American system, as the traditionalists favor, are arguing for instilling values. As such, natural rights advocates should see such efforts as trying to deny or circumvent the process by which students would develop their own value orientation. In the extreme, traditional approach would deny students their liberty to choose their beliefs by having them be subject to a type of indoctrination. If this is true, why would natural rights advocates be amenable to accepting this approach? They are because, at a time when reform is in the air, the alternative source for reform would be those promoted by critical theorists. Quite frankly, reforms offered by traditionalists are a far better option to prevailing, in-field educators than those offered by educators who are, to varying degrees, influenced by Marxist ideals. And, due to the language that is used by traditionalists, it is easier for the natural rights advocates to manipulate the efforts of the traditionalists than it would be of the critical theorists. Let me give you an example.

Early in my teaching career in Florida, I was mandated to teach, by state law, a course called “Americanism vs. Communism.” This course was conceived in the mode of traditional thought. To quote the 1961 law: “The course shall lay particular emphasis upon the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.” The law went on to state that instruction should emphasize “the free enterprise – competitive economy of the United States of America as the one which produces higher wages, higher standards of living, greater personal freedom and liberty than any other system of the economies on earth.” And yet, because of the way the course was taught, it fell far short of the aims held by the authors of the law. In my school, we used a text produced by Time-Life corporation which gave a fairly honest and well-balanced explanation of Marxism. This ideology was not presented as some sinister theory that aimed at depriving freedom from people, but as a view that reacted to conditions that existed in industrial economies in the late 1800s before the more tempering public policies, such as programs like the New Deal, had taken effect. Students, by and large, were encouraged to view socialism as perhaps an extreme answer to very real problems and that the true enemies of liberty and democracies were the totalitarian policies of such leaders as Stalin and the other leaders in the Kremlin. The material gave ample legitimate, historical evidence to back up its claims. I am not saying that the material promoted socialism, far from it, but it did encourage a more balanced view than the indoctrinating effort I believe the law envisioned when it was written.

Basically, the educators who were called on to put this law into effect were influenced by natural rights beliefs. The reason natural rights educators could pull off this switch is because the language that traditionalists used had been somewhat vague. Face it: while the law is fairly straightforward as to its aim, it has to use the language of democracy. After all, the danger the law claimed to address was the threat communism posed to democratic governance. So that language opens the door to an approach in which one can claim democratic approaches call for entertaining all points of view and that includes the views of the extreme left. So, a course that in effect puts the language of the law into operation can very easily follow a strategy that has students investigate, from a more open process, the tenets of Marxism, the history of its development, its turn toward totalitarianism, and the course of the Cold War. In such an approach, the course of study can be far from an indoctrination and actually be a course that is interesting and fun to teach and to take.

On the other hand, critical theorists push for a curriculum that is open-ended to begin with, but they push their aims not by spelling out a set of content, as in the case described above. Instead, they concentrate on questions that would guide what they want students to consider and investigate. These questions are aimed at having students look into those aspects of our polity, society, and economy that “exploit” the lower classes. I write the word, exploit, in quotes because exploitation is defined by them in Marxian terms; that is, exploitation occurs when economic results have the wealth and income of upper classes grow faster than those of other classes. Those who are on the short end of such a comparison, according to this view, are being exploited. Critical theorists, who see class conditions in this way, are fairly clear in their bias and they easily see that the questions that should be addressed are those that almost exclusively identify, investigate, and explain those incidences of exploitation.

Where do teachers fall in this divide? Let me refine what constitutes the divide. The divide, when seen as that between traditionalists, those who favor social reproduction and cultural heritage, and critical theorists, those who favor social reconstruction, have teachers expressing a definite view. They express overwhelmingly consistent antagonism for the critical position. Kathleen Hall Jamieson reports the following:

Evidence from a 2010 survey of social studies teachers … a random sample of 866 public high school teachers and an oversample of 245 Catholic and private high school instructors, 83 percent viewed the United States “as a unique country that stands for something special in the world”; 82 percent thought pupils should be taught to “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings”; and only 1 percent wanted students to learn “that the U.S. is a fundamentally flawed country”.²

They overwhelmingly see the US as basically a good place but are not shy in having students question the extent of that goodness. They entertain such events and conditions that demonstrate the flaws the nations should address. And they see that fundamentally, as opposed to Marxist, the nation is not a flawed country. I believe these findings are a justification for a claim I made early on in this blog. That is, teachers by and large are advocates of the natural rights position. This is not for many of them a reflected choice, but one in which they adopt the biases of the prevailing political culture of the US and of the institutional culture of most schools. It is this background or context that make manipulation of traditional language possible and likely to continue. Also, there is no “danger” of critical theorists having much influence over what is taught in our schools.

1Perhaps this is an overstatement, but there those believers in nationalism who would advance a curricular position that I am describing as traditionalist.

2Jamieson, K. H. (2013). The challenges facing civic education. Daedalus: Journal of the American academy of arts and sciences, 142 (2), Spring, p.70. Emphasis added. The research referred to in the quote was published in 2010 and conducted by Hess,Schmidt, Miller, and Schuette in a publication published by American Enterprise Institute.