UNDERLYING THE CRAZINESS

Currently, the issue de jour of the Republican race for president is whether Republicans want a nominee who is willing to negotiate and compromise with the Democrats or one who is true to conservative principles and refuses to compromise.  Senator Ted Cruz said that if you want a candidate who is willing to compromise with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, then Trump is your nominee.  Donald Trump claims he is willing to negotiate with those Democratic leaders, but that he will get good deals for conservatives.  He says conservatives can believe him because he has made his fortune making good deals and even has written the second best book ever – second to the Bible (I wonder if he really believes that) – The Art of the Deal.  This concern reflects a basic constitutional principle, one that I described earlier in this blog.

It is a principle that relates to the whole question of how much power the central government should have.  Another way to voice this concern is to ask:  how little power will local governments – the governments closer to the people – have?  Republicanism is what the founding fathers wanted to maintain in the new constitution of 1787.  That is, the founders wanted the power to ultimately reside with the people, but that the actual decisions concerning governmental policy be made by representatives of the people.  Initially, this designation was made to distinguish republican governments from monarchies.  A philosopher who wrote about republican form of government was Charles de Montesquieu, who believed that for republics to work there needed to be a high degree of agreement among the citizens who lived under such a government.  This agreement reflects a communal familiarity among the citizens, a deep level of sympathy and commonality.  Without such agreement, policy disputes would not only arise, but also be bitter and rancorous.  The polity would lose the necessary levels of cohesion, resulting in the system splintering.  To assure this did not happen, republics needed to be relatively small states since “bigness” would mean more and more diverse interests or factions.  Such diversity would eat away at any sense of “we’re in this together.”   As such, policy would be next to impossible to formulate and therefore, needs would go unmet.  If the United States (with a capital “U”) were to succeed, the founders would have to find a way to solve this inherent problem of preserving a republican form of government in a large polity setting – as the one they were forming with the new constitution.

Of course, our structural federal arrangement was the answer, where local governmental entities would govern local concerns and the central government would be limited to handling the national concerns.  The problem, because of historical forces beyond anyone’s ability to halt or even modify very much, is that more and more concerns in the subsequent years became national.  And even the Constitution of 1787 (and how it has been amended since) contains basic principles that have nationalized many issues that one might consider local in nature. 

Take the regulation of marriage.  Marriage is an institution that serves to anchor one of our basic institutions, the family.  It is the marriage ceremony that contains the agreement on which a family is based.  By its nature, this sounds and is a local issue.  I would say, for the most part, marriage is still legally treated as a local issue.  But our national constitution states that there will be equal protection under the law and that includes state law (Fourteenth Amendment).  So, unless the state has a legitimate interest, it cannot discriminate in its laws.  For example, given that homosexuality is a natural occurrence and there is no deleterious aspect to state interests in anyone being homosexual, there is no legitimate state interest affected by gays or lesbians getting married in same sex arrangements.  This is what the Supreme Court just settled.  But this has angered many people who feel, for religious reasons, that same sex marriages are an affront to God.  Hence, a national policy is viewed by these people as overstepping the prerogatives of local governance.  Under such a situation, to many, the republican principle is breached and undermines the whole constitutional arrangement.

With this and other local-national disputes, Ted Cruz’s pledge to not engage, as president, in “deal making” and, thereby, compromise on principle, attracts many voters such as those who have been angered by the gay marriage decision of the Supreme Court.  The problem is that our system of government, as determined by our republican solution, depends on deal making, on compromising.  We have a federal system and that depends on more than just having state and national governments; it also demands that our representatives meet and hash out policy decisions by giving and taking in not a parliament, but in a congress.  It is a congress in which our representatives congregate and through majority vote determine what should be done.  They even have rules in Congress – that I don’t fully agree with – in which it takes more than a majority to agree on new laws (in effect now, it takes sixty, as opposed to fifty-one senators to agree before legislation passes that house of Congress).  Therefore, for a Cruz approach to work – where legislation would get done – you would need a parliamentary system in which the majority party or a majority coalition could secure passage of what it wants.  In our system, you not only have to get pending bills through two houses of Congress, but then have to get the president to agree and, at least, not veto it.  If the president vetoes pending legislation, proponents of the bill need to muster up super majorities (two-thirds vote) in each house to make it law.  Just so you know, a Cruz approach would guarantee that nothing will get done for another four years.  If this happens, given what we are now experiencing, this will increase levels of frustration and anger among the citizenry and promise that our future politics will be even more bizarre than they are now and perhaps more dangerous.

KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, AND IGNORANCE

I want to revisit a topic I addressed early in this blog.  As stated in the explanation shown just above this posting, this blog is, in part, dedicated to introducing a mental construct.  Early on, I described a construct as a perspective one has on some topic of concern.  I used the notion of a family to illustrate; that is, if I mention family, you have an entire array of knowledge, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and values you harbor about your family or families in general.  You might, to varying levels of specification, add a narrative about your family or families.  Such narratives can summarize the contents of the construct and serve to give one boundaries; that is, a sense of what belongs to the construct and what does not.  The media exploits this with standard story lines we see in films, plays, TV shows, novels, and the like.  All of this is entertaining because it relates to your construct concerning family. 

As with family, we carry around constructs about all those things with which we deal, such as our town, our schools, our work, our nation, etc.  This also pertains to the subjects we studied in school.  As a matter of fact, constructs are important parts of academic subjects.  In the sciences, constructs take on the term theories – or if the knowledge is less reliable, models.  I pointed out that for most people, I suspect the construct one holds in a particular subject is some form of the dominant construct that “rules” in a given field.  For example, in biology the construct or theory of evolution is dominant unless you happen to be a particular presidential candidate.  Whatever construct is dominating the field at a given time serves to provide an overall explanation for the subject; it provides potential answers to problems that can then be tested (hypotheses and hypothesis testing); and, as such, provides direction to the efforts of those engaged in furthering that field’s findings.  In the natural sciences, fields are by and large governed by one overarching construct.[1]  But in the fields of the social sciences, this is not the case.

When we consider the social sciences, since our ability to predict is so lacking, we have contending constructs.  One particular field that shares in this plight is the teaching of civics and government and this state of affairs spills over to all of social studies.  In this blog, I have dedicated a lot of space to reviewing three constructs concerning the study of civics.  They have been the natural rights construct, the critical theory construct, and the liberated federalism construct.  I have reviewed the debates concerning the relative merits of these perspectives and have made a case for the adoption of the liberated federalism construct.  But in all of this, a central concern has been the demands of truth telling.

In my earlier treatment of this topic, I cited Plato’s distinction among knowledge, belief, and ignorance.  Knowledge is what we reasonably hold as the truth beyond question; ignorance occurs when we don’t know something, and belief consists of all those things we hold to be true but about which we have some level of reservation.  I wrote back then that I knew I was currently typing the words that appeared in the posting, I didn’t know what I was going to be doing the next day at that time, and I believed there was going to be a next day (a belief that turned out to be true).  This is important to what I am addressing here because the notion of constructs is about truth telling, to the degree we can tell the truth.  Ultimately, all we hold to be true is our version of the truth, our construct of that truth.  There is a truth out there, but we have limited ability to discern what that truth is; we construct a version of it.  So it is with our views of government and politics, the subject matter of civics.  And what this blog has spent effort in conveying is that there are three constructed perspectives of what government and civics are and about what they should be.

Let me illustrate this with an example (as I did in the earlier posting).  As I describe the example, you might feel I am straying a bit.  Bear with me; I’ll get back to it eventually.  Since the terrorists attacked us on September 11, 2001, there has been in the media and among ourselves a certain level of anxiety.  It has to do with tolerating the non-Judeo-Christian tradition of Islam.  Let me admit to a bias.  I believe that we, as humans, are wired to distrust the other, the foreign, the “not us.”  If true, such a proclivity will affect how students view governance and politics in a pluralistic society and, therefore, have an effect on how they will see the content of civics classes.  This proclivity might have been useful in our ancient past when resources were scarce and boundaries between peoples were necessary for survival. 

Let me point out that I did not write I know this proclivity is at work; I wrote I believe that humans are so wired.  I use the word “believe” on the advice of Plato described above.  Remember, belief is somewhere between knowledge and ignorance.  I believe that we have a bias toward not trusting strangers or people not like ourselves.

The problem within this example, of course, is that in modern life, with its high degree of interdependence, such a fear, distrust, or downright dislike of Islam can be highly disruptive and counterproductive.  Yes, it is also unjust.  Therefore, good citizenship, in a civilized country, should include beliefs and actions that combat such disruptive biases.  This includes an appropriate civics education.  Good civics instruction should, by extension, encourage beliefs and actions reflecting functional levels of tolerance if not downright affection for varied modes of living.  Therefore, to the extent that we express or act upon our natural fears and related prejudices about the other, the foreign, the “not like us,” we are failing to provide good civics instruction.  A healthy view of Islam is that due to numerous factors, among the Islamic world there is a minority who wish us ill, but that minority should not lead us to blanket the whole of Islam and its adherents with discrimination.  Such a reaction will only make matters worse on both practical and moral grounds.

There is another element at work here.  History gives us ample examples of how people’s tolerance has been affected by how well their economy is doing.  Recently, we went through very trying economic times since the financial crisis of 2008.  But to quickly cite the most obvious historical example of how economic conditions can affect levels of tolerance, it would be post World War I Germany.  It is accepted historical thinking that those challenging conditions led to the rise of Nazism.  With the backdrop of worldwide depression and then galloping inflation, Adolf Hitler found eager ears for his message of hate and extreme nationalism.  What we can experience in such times – more recently the fear factors after the 2008 financial crisis – are social realities treading on potentially dangerous ground and social conditions, and their histories can eloquently demonstrate the importance of effective civics education.[2]  Civics should be that part of the curriculum that addresses any leanings among the populous that express hatred for minority groups, alien groups, and their corresponding beliefs, such as their religions.  I highlight this concern because it relates very closely to the overall argument I present in this blog – it adds a very relevant context.

To get back on topic, the very deficiency of not having a unified theory or construct in civics education can be exploited.  This lack can be an illustration of this very sense of how reality can be viewed by different perspectives.  It can illustrate how the diversity of views and beliefs – no matter how much they are held as knowledge – exist in a student’s social environment.  This applies to academic subjects, religions, cultural narratives, and the like.  Constructs are just that; they are constructed versions of the truth and unfortunately, the vast majority of our teaching does not highlight this factor enough.

I believe the above illustrates the importance of civics education.  Let me summarize.  How we view our government and political world is guided by the relevant constructs we hold concerning government and politics.  If that construct has a poor relationship with what is truly real – it is inordinately filled with poorly founded beliefs – and if those misconceptions are generally held, we can, under the “right” conditions, be led down a dangerous path.  While the US is not close to such drastic conditions, the Nazi example illustrates how serious this can be.  As it is, our current presidential race gives one pause.  Therefore, that part of our school offerings that addresses the relevant issues should be regarded as important – the health of our society depends on it.

---

[1] In the field of physics, there are two contending theories:  relativity to describe and explain the large cosmos and quantum mechanics to describe and explain, as best it can, the molecular and atomic world.  The quest is to devise a unified theory for all of physical existence.

[2]The Ed Show, MSNBC, shared a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that the number of extreme right wing militant groups spiking as of March, 2013.