A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, November 18, 2016

A DRIFT TOWARD WHAT?

The size of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote advantage in this last presidential election indicates that the nation isn’t particularly at odds with the party that has occupied the White House these past eight years.  What it more accurately indicates is that a significant segment of the usual coalition that has supported that party is disaffected with it.
In the last posting, that segment was identified and named as the white working class (WWC).  And this is not the first time in our more current history that that portion of the electorate has shown its disaffection.  To place context as to what just happened, a stroll down that history is useful.
          This current leadership of Democrats has mostly ignored the growing estrangement of the WWC.  Going into the 1960 election, the traditional coalition of voters that made up the Democratic Party was clear and understood by all.  It consisted of labor, leftists, urban interests represented by big city political machines, and those who found it difficult to meet the economic challenges of the day.
It was the party that grew out of the New Deal programs which FDR instituted to meet the devastations caused by the Great Depression.  Some of those included Social Security with its old age pension, unemployment provisions, and welfare, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
In addition, the Dems favored pro-union legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and minimum wage.  All of these provisions, with the exception of the right to work provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, seemed to have institutionalized a set of protections for the working class.  Those battles that created these protections, in the minds of many, were over.
          Of course, there was an opposing coalition.  This was made up of small business people, white collar workers and professionals (from bank tellers to local lawyers and doctors), pensioners, executives of minor to large corporations, and those who derived income from rural interests, such as farm owners.  They made up the bulk of the Republican Party.
Add to this mix an earlier version of alt-right, the members of the John Birch Society, and one has the mix of people who were represented at the Republican National Convention of 1960 in Chicago.  They had just witnessed a rewarding decade, the decade which expressed a continued sentiment: “we like Ike.”
          This reflected a clear division within the electorate, but then along came the Vietnam War that disrupted things.  And to understand that disruption, one needs to appreciate the challenges the Cold War had stirred up during the fifties.  Without getting into the details, that decade saw a conservative shift in the general tenor of the nation’s politics.
Because of China’s fall to Communism, during Harry Truman’s term, the Republicans had been able to tag Democrats as being soft on Communism, a growing menace which was equated with the rise of Nazism during the thirties.  The accepted belief was that Communism had to be stopped wherever it threatened to expand.
          One of the resulting hot spots where this menace was being observed was Vietnam.  Since 1954, that nation had been divided into two parts – North and South – one Communist, the North, and the other supported by the US.  Communist insurgents, the Viet Cong, were mounting an armed movement to depose the government of the South and reunite that nation.
The details are complicated, but slowly, during the sixties, that conflict escalated to a full-blown war.  Under the administration of Lyndon Johnson, the US became further entangled in the conflict.  By 1968, the US had a half a million troops in Vietnam with no end in sight.  That year, the Communists launched the Tet Offensive which indicated to many Americans that there was indeed no end.
The casualty rates were rising to alarming levels with over 300 Americans being killed per week (the rate of Vietnamese being killed was many times higher).  And all of that resulted in a growing anti-war movement that came to a head at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968.
That week demonstrated how anxious, frustrated, and angry many Americans were over the war.  Add to that the earlier assassination of the Democratic frontrunner, Robert Kennedy, along with race riots (the Martin Luther King assassination), high crime rates, and things were seemingly getting out of hand.
Richard Nixon, the Republican, won over Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate who had not won any primaries during the months leading up to their convention.  Humphrey, who coming into the election was the sitting vice president, had not committed himself to end the war.  Nixon, the Republican, promised a secret plan to end the war.  There did ensue, after the election, a de-escalation of the war and finally in the mid-seventies, the US cut its losses and pulled out.
But that left the Democratic Party in disarray and needing a reorganization.  A committee was set up and the result was a nominating process heavily reliant on primaries and a stripping away of power of the old machine structures that had controlled the party up to that time.
That newer system has since been tweaked, but it has mostly survived until the present day.  What it did do was shift the center of power away from labor unions and urban politicians.  The shift did not filter down to the working class, but to another set of elites.
What emerged was a more professionally oriented power structure that was led by a young group of politicians such as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton.  Collectively, they were labeled the neo-liberals.  They represented the interests of the professional classes – the middle class – and favored such policy that addressed educational opportunities, deregulation of finance, and the opening of international trade.  Bolstered with the advent of the computer and its promises of democratizing education, the neo-libs shifted the focus of the Dems away from the laboring class.
In terms of policy, the new focus left the working class off the radar screen.  Opening trade to cheaper labor markets here and abroad along with automation would, in the ensuing decades, devastate the manufacturing sector of the traditional manufacturing states of the northern mid-west.
With those changes, the long-held strongholds of Democratic support in states like Michigan, West Virginia, and Wisconsin weakened and was lost in this election.  This result was foreshadowed in the 1980 election when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
In those states, one sees these disaffected working class voters taking out their frustrations with the Democratic Party.  Along with the more traditional Republican states, like the solid South, Clinton didn’t have a chance despite her overall vote totals.
It is unfair to say that Clinton did not, in her platform, address the needs of the working class.  She did, but she did not sufficiently communicate that concern.  The disaffected, what George Packer calls the “unconnected,”[1] placed their trust in the rhetoric and ill-defined promises of Donald Trump.  Whether their trust is well placed, time will tell.  But as for the Democrats, there is some rearranging to be done.
Currrently, conversations are being conducted in trying to determine what exactly should the face of Democrats be and then presented to the nation.  Should the party stray away from the more professional class – the educational elitists – whom they have courted of late and return to their labor base?  Or should they attempt to meld the interest of the technologists, engineers, financial experts, global traders, and other professionals with that of the working class?
What is clear from this election – and that of 2000 – that it is not enough to win the most votes.  It is this context – the historical overview presented above – that a civics student needs to get a handle on in order to understand what is going on nationally with the current political arena.  Political observers need to hold on to their hats because this whirlwind is not over and the upcoming years promise to be different from anything the nation has seen before.



[1] George Packer, “The Unconnected,” The New Yorker 92, no. 35 (2016):  48-61.

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