FRAMEWORK

As I write these words, it's Father's Day. While my son is a soccer fan and watched the World Cup, I watched the final round of the US Open Golf Championship, even though it was relatively boring. Martin Kaymer took a fairly safe lead and held on to it all afternoon. He is our new national champion. As I was watching, I remembered my own personal rule of thumb: if a player has a lead of more shots than the number of holes remaining, it's over. Does this rule hold up in every occasion? No, but often enough – as it did this afternoon – and so I felt fairly sure that my rule would hold true as I watched – out of loyalty – till the bitter end.

This rule is a heuristic. We hold heuristically derived beliefs as a way to handle complex realities around us. They are useful and even necessary when we are called upon to make quick decisions and we don't have the time to figure out how every factor affects that decision. They are usually formed from experience and, given the quality of those experiences, they tend to be reliably effective. When it comes to politics, heuristically derived principles go a long way in organizing how we think about politics.

Most people don't give politics a lot of thought, much less a lot of analysis and reflection. When presented with a political stimulus, it is our heuristically formed beliefs, more times than not, that determine how we will react to that stimulus. In terms of politics, it's not a matter of time restraints, but a lack of interest that engages our heuristic thinking. Most Americans find politics and governance bewildering and lacking in any entertaining qualities. Of course, there is a minority of folks who finds politics as a source of a lot of entertainment. I hope civics teachers fall into that category. But for most, politics is one of those periphery subjects that people organize in their minds according to mental shortcuts; that is, heuristic thinking. What do these shortcuts look like and how do they become consciously engaged?

In Paul Goren's new book, On Voter Competence, three heuristically derived general principles are identified: limited government, traditional morality, and defense/military. Martha Kropf would add a fourth: race/identity.¹ Goren applies these principles to the mental operations that citizens perform in choosing a president. But the basic mental process can be applied to any politically motivated thinking and I think that the specific principles identified by Goren and Kropf pertain to many of our policy issues involving the federal government. Let me cite how Goren describes these principles: “policy principles lie in that sweet spot of mass beliefs systems; neither too abstract, such as liberal-conservative worldviews, nor too concrete, such as particular issues, to elude all but the most-diligent citizens.”² This level of sophistication does not allow for serious reflection over involved political matters, such as what the government should do about the civil war in Syria, but it does give a basis for interpreting political messaging. The danger is it can expose the citizen to vulnerabilities of being swayed by certain language choices used by politicians and other political operators. Given this state of affairs, educators who are responsible to impart those beliefs, knowledge, and skills necessary for good citizenship should make the student aware of how citizens think or, stated more directly, how they will probably think about public policies in the future.

Chances are that those students will take up those thought processes as they leave school and go about leading their adult lives. After all, for most people, having a job, raising a family, and the other demands of adulthood are varied and taxing, leaving little inclination to contemplate political topics and little energy for the kind of effort many political and governmental issues entail. While the ideal is – an ideal a civics course should promote – that every citizen should dedicate meaningful time in meeting civic responsibilities, the reality is that such time and effort will not be forthcoming. One of the aims a civics course should have is to identify those principles that prevail among the populous and function as frameworks in which political messages are organized. By so doing, in effect, the educator warns the student that in the upcoming years, he or she will be subjected to accounts of what is happening politically that will exploit these heuristics and try to persuade him/her to particular policy choices. To engage the heuristics of the voter, these operatives will hit on one or more of those principles and contrive narratives that present the facts of relevant situations in ways that are persuasive of whatever policy choices operatives want to advance. So, in the Syrian situation, the offending practices of one of the belligerents – let's say, the Syrian government – offend our traditional moral sensitivities. The heuristic takes over, short circuits any perceived need to analyze further, and the citizen is more apt to agree with a particular message that reflects the targeted principle.

Another principle related to Syria and, now, Iraq is our defense/military principle. Apparently, according to the messaging of this last week, the recent events in Iraq pose a direct threat to our security. For example: “U.S. lawmakers said the Obama administration and other nations must move quickly to contain the resurgence of extremist violence in Iraq and prevent that country's government from falling, saying the situation is sowing the seeds for the next 9-11-type terrorist attack.”³ Of course, this messaging is being promoted by politicians who are advocating a more active military role for the US in preventing the overthrow of the Iraqi government. The purpose of an educator who analyzes such messaging is not to dissuade a student of a policy choice, but to make that student aware of how messaging can color the facts and make certain choices more acceptable if not preferred.

If students leave school with at least a guard against such politicized messaging – geared not at rational reflection and discussion but toward triggering unconscious reactive responses – then schools will be providing a useful service. For students who gain such a critical perspective, it will take more than timely slogans or truncated messaging aimed at their heuristic thinking before they accept advocated pleas. Perhaps more of such reluctance would have saved us from what most consider ghastly mistakes of the past such as our involvement in Vietnam and the second Iraq War.

1Kropf, M. (2013-14). On voter competence by Paul Goren. Political Science Quarterly, Winter-Spring, Book Review section, pp. 777-778.

2Ibid., p. 778.

3Nissenbaum, K. (2014). U. S. lawmakers urge rapid containment of extremist violence in Iraq. The Wall Street Journal, June 15, see http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-lawmakers-urge-rapid-containment-of-extremist-violence-in-iraq-1402849650 .