The nation has had many political views or perspectives expressed
through its history. Some, one might consider
fairly safe and innocuous, but some right down scary. The first type might include one with a
disparaging moniker, the No Nothing movement, but it held to some very scary
notions of nativism, perhaps a topic for some future posting. Here, the point is that what these many ideas
and ideals represented one can see revolving around two mostly opposing
views, federalism and natural rights.
That is, the nation has
had two opposing and alternatively dominant perspectives of government as
represented by these two views.
Federalism, as this blog has attempted to document, had the early
dominant position. That position was
challenged by the natural rights perspective and during the years following
World War II lost its dominance over the American political culture.[1]
The two perspectives and
their competitive stories have been and will continue to be described in some
detail later. But one approach to telling
that story is by utilizing a dialectic analysis. While other approaches could be used, this
one allows one to get a good view of this central struggle as it manifested
itself under different guises throughout American history. Not only does such an approach address the
politics of it all, but it also looks into the cultural backdrop under which such
a drama unfolded.
Federalism, the basic
theoretical foundation of this blog, is a well-established body of political
theory stretching back to the origins of this nation and before. As has been documented in previous postings,
federalism or a form of republican political theory relies, in part, on the
ideas that have been described by Daniel J. Elazar,[2] Donald
S. Lutz,[3] Michael
Sandel,[4]
and others.
This blogger defines federalism as
follows: A collective – or more
descriptively, a communal – mental construct which views an ideal society as a
product of a conscious initial agreement among either the founding members,
which at times can be individuals or families, or groups, or a combination of individuals,
families, and/or non-familial groups.
The agreement is in the form of a covenant or a
compact in which the founders agree, in perpetuity, or until its purposes are
met, to the structural arrangements, the rights, and basic sanctions associated
with the resulting government or governmental system. In the case of the US national government,
the resulting arrangement is comprised of the two-tier system of the federal
government and the fifty states – it is a non-centralized system.
This view, as one of its basic elements, gives
the members of the society a right to be treated in an equal manner with regard
to governmental matters and a set of responsibilities to carry out the purposes
of the union, i.e., all members, ideally, are active partners with rights and duties. As such, fulfilling one’s duties and
respecting the rights of others take on a moral claim.
Federalism and its communal attribute were far
more central to the concerns of the nation’s founding fathers than was the
natural rights’ central ideal, individualism.
While individual rights were important up to the time of the writing of
the Constitution, they did not have nearly the prominence that many,
such as Seymour Martin Lipset,[5]
have ascribed to it. Lutz shares,
The
preamble of the U. S. Constitution secured the blessings of liberty to
“ourselves and our posterity,” echoing the long-term communitarian
commitment. The Constitution set forth a
decision-making process designed to produce, as Madison says in Federalist 10,
“the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” There must be values, attitudes, and
commitments – a mental stance, if you will – that lead people to frame their discourse,
approach problems, and justify solutions in terms of the long-term community
interests.[6]
More accurately, by emphasizing individualism
in one's study of America’s past, it distracts one from the developmental
forces that shaped the nation’s founding philosophy.[7]
How
does this dialectic struggle – federalism vs. natural rights, communal basis vs.
individualistic basis – affect governmental policy? Robert Putnam, in his analysis of the
challenges that the nation’s youth currently face, provides a handy overview of
how, during most of the twentieth century and into the present one, the
American polity has handled one of this struggle’s main issues, i.e., equality.[8]
He writes,
Graphically,
the ups and downs of inequality in America during the twentieth century trace a
gigantic U, beginning and ending in two Gilded Ages, but with a long period of
relative equality around mid-century.
The economic historian Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz have described
the pattern as “a tale of two half-centuries.”
As the century opened, economic inequality was high, but from about 1918
to 1970 the distribution of income gradually became more equal. … “[U]nder
structural arrangements implemented during the New Deal, poverty rates steadily
fell, median incomes consistently rose, and inequality progressively dropped,
as a rising economic tide lifted all boats.” …
In the early 1970s, however, that
decades-long equalizing trend began to reverse, slowly at first but then with
accelerating harshness. … [I]n the 1980s the top began to pull away from
everyone else, and in the first decades of the twenty-first century the very
top began to pull away even from the top.[9]
He goes on to share the statistics that support
his claim. For example, between 2009 and
2013, the real income of the top 1% rose 31 percent. He comments, “post-Reagan public policy – though
the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic
administrations.”[10]
To
be clear, the New Deal years reflect a more communal, federalist view at a
national level, while what came to be known as the neoliberal economic regime –
aka Reaganomics – reflects a more individualist, natural rights view. Both views can be judged as a far-removed
perspective from the initial compact-al view shared by the founding generation,
but one can still note opposing positions in terms of the responsibility that the
polity should shoulder in terms of sustaining equality.
Historically,
contextualizing this inherent struggle, one needs to get to a fairly basic
level. In that, Alexander Hamilton
provides such a context by – in Federalist, No. 1 – the basic
alternatives a prospective polity can consider:
“force,” “accident,” and “choice.”
This blog has reviewed these alternatives[11]
and has relied on Daniel Elazar to explain the significance of this
foundational issue.
This posting will not revisit those
distinctions but merely state: as
opposed to accident and force, choice indicates a conscious process by a group
of people to deliberately establish a polity.
This nation’s foundation, starting with the first colonies, was
accomplished by people who banded together and braved the unknown to establish
societies. Originally, heavily motivated
by religious beliefs, these people understood the treachery of the bitter
wilderness. They also wanted to create
what, in their eyes, were true Christian communities.
Borrowing from Old Testament examples of Judaic
covenants, they organized themselves under this ancient form of societal
bonding. In that, there was a strong
commitment to rely on an equality among the settlers and that equality, as
testified by the signees to the Mayflower Compact, extended to all the
settlers. This story of the nation’s
founding and bonding and how it evolved into a series of dialectic struggles will
continue in the next posting.
[1]
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s
Discontent: America in Search of a
Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).
[2] For example, Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1966).
[3] For example, Donald S. Lutz (editor), Colonial
Origins of the American Constitution: A
Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 1998).
[4] Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent.
[5]
Seymour Martin Lipset, American
Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company,
1996).
[6] Donald Lutz, The
Origins of American Constitutionalism, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 1988), 77.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York,
NY: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
[9] Ibid., 34-35.
[10]
Ibid., 36.
[11] See Robert Gutierrez, “Back to Basics, I,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics (February 7, 2020), accessed
December 6, 2021, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_02_02_archive.html .
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