ROCKY ROAD

 

[This blog is amid a series of postings that aims to share with the reader a history of the nation – albeit highly summary in nature – from the perspective of a dialectic struggle.  That is the struggle between a cultural perspective that emphasizes more communal and cooperative ideals of federalism and the individualistic perspective of the natural rights construct.

The general argument this blog has made is that federalism enjoyed the dominant cultural position in the US until World War II, and after a short transition, the natural rights view has been dominant.  Whether one perspective is dominant or the other; whichever it is, that fact has a profound impact on the teaching of civics in American classrooms.]

 

The truncated national history that this blog has traced over the last series of postings has reached to the present day.  That history shared with the reader the highlights of the struggle between federalist values and ideals with that of the natural rights view.  And the state of that struggle today is still in the wake of the New Deal programs and the ways that program changed American politics since the 1930s.

That is, the central government’s set of policies and programs that the Franklin Roosevelt administration introduced has set the social / political / economic stage in which that dialectic struggle transpires.  In effect, the New Deal did much to redefine the meaning of federalism as the organizing construct for how the US government was structured and how it has functioned.

Until that time, a more localized based federalism defined the relationship between the central and state governments and consequently how Americans approached and interacted with governments.  The New Deal placed the central government as the dominant power, and state and local governments seemed to take on parttime roles as to how people were governed.

This posting will summarize the effect of this transition and suggest a way of not only studying governance and politics in civics classrooms, but also American history.  Both subjects, out of necessity, are conceptualized under a guiding construct to give direction, issues to consider, concepts to visualize the subject matter, and questions to ask.  Prevalent today in both subjects, that construct is the natural rights view. 

That view renders the study of these subjects as a running account of how Americans have and are engaging in transactional politics as opposed to partnered politics.  In terms of American history, that transactional view limits its purview to analyzing segmented episodes in which the people of a time engage in the trade-offs through the politicking of their national leaders – especially their presidents. 

The episodes are arranged in chronological order and are organized around the dominant transactional issues of a given time – e.g., the Civil War period or the Reconstruction period.  Each organizing issue usually takes a week or two to cover and correspond to a chapter or two in the textbook that a course utilizes.

What the previous postings leading up to this one suggest is that a dialectic process (a continuing struggle) among Americans’ commitments to different views of liberty and equality offers one a way to approach those succeeding periods and their respective issues.  That is, the struggle suggests a series of questions and concerns that one can apply to each period other than exclusively counting on transactional processes. 

For example, instead of an emphasis on the personal interests the various parties of a time are trying to advance, the focus can be more targeted to how the parties – which can be individuals or groups – defined their liberty and sense of equality in relation to the other highlighted parties.  Such an approach would leave behind the general narrative of a time and rely more on biographical information about the parties most engaged in the given conflictual situations.

While one still needs to know what generally happened, the emphasis would be on motivations, temperaments, environmental factors, etc.  These contextual elements take on more nuance than simply listing who and how one won some political challenge.  The aim would be to see how historical characters were tugged in different directions when viewing their governmental and political realities and assumptions.   And such accounts would be framed by how moral their actions were.  In turn, that morality would be questioned in regard to federal values.

One general type of direction – what currently exists – relates to a view that each citizen has the rights of a sovereign individual (the natural rights view with its attending values) as opposed to a view that places each citizen within a partnership with duties and obligations (a federated view with its attending values).  As such, lessons, under this newer approach, would be characterized as having the opportunity to debate the inherited moral dilemmas that American history has considered through the years.

Does this blog offer this approach to the study of American history as the only legitimate way to analyze the nation’s past?  Of course, not.  What it does claim is that it is a legitimate way and one that has two advantages:  one, it harkens back to the nation’s past espoused values in that it held federalism as its dominant view until the late 1940s – i.e., it has an established tradition in the nation’s thinking. 

Two, it addresses the concerns of justice and civility that have faced American society through the various issues over which debates about liberty and equality have transpired.  This is done not by imposing a set of values, but by struggling through a set of value questions in which the two moral traditions are highlighted.

Why challenge the natural rights view in the study of civics and history?  Since its adoption as the dominant view of the nation, it has correlated with increased levels of anti-social behaviors and incivility.  As Robert Putnam points out, the nation’s levels of social capital are presently at very low levels.[1]  This, by any level of concern, should make social studies educators – from the classroom to district offices to state and federal offices of education – consider the application of serious reform in how its subjects are taught. 

Yet, little seems to change and part of the problem – according to this blogger – is the misdirection that various attempts at change have taken.  First, the general understanding of how American governance and politics has changed in the last century has been underappreciated.  Here is a summary of the effects the New Deal had in how Americans have been governed since the 1930s.

 

The New Deal altered the pattern of dual federalism irrevocably. This was evident, first of all, in the changing fiscal relationships of the 1930s. An enormous increase in the size and number of federal grants-in-aid resulted from the New Deal.  Equally significant, the qualitative nature of federalism changed as well. The federal government became involved in more traditional state and local functions (welfare, social services, local public works), and it created essentially new areas of governmental responsibility (social security, employment programs).

Federal leadership in the development of new policies became the norm rather than the exception, and new patterns of cooperative administrative relationships became predominant. A new concept of federalism was required to describe these new developments. This new concept was labeled "cooperative federalism," characterized by the intergovernmental sharing of functions and the breakdown of sharply delineated patterns of authority and responsibility inherent in dual federalism.[2]

 

What one has is a profound degree of increased centralization – as compared to what existed before – that the nation has experienced since those depression days nearly one hundred years ago.

          Second, a targeted concern should be that this diminution of a localized governance has encouraged a less engaged citizenry, and this has been more tangible in the nation’s bigger cities, although the suburbs have also been significantly affected (and to a lesser degree, rural areas are also less communal than they once were).  The natural rights view is well ensconced across the board and what that means is that it has become normal to be so detached from the fate or welfare of others.

          How did the nation get to this point?  Well, the postings leading up to this one attempted to give the reader an inkling about how that happened.  Below, in outline form, is that history.

 

Phases:

     I.         Sectarian federalism (Puritanical covenantal foundation) vs. Commercial upheaval (c. 1740s to Revolutionary War)[3] + Transcendentalism

   II.         Regional federalism vs. Anarchistic / “Cowboy-ism”

 III.         Reform/Progressive Federalism vs. Corporate “Laissez-faire-ism”

IV.         Ike/Nixonian-ism[4] vs. New Dealism (Cooperative federalism / Keynes-ism economics)

   V.         Neoliberal economics (Reagan-ism) / Natural Rights vs. Critical Theory[5] or Something else

 

It is the last “Something else” which this blog promotes as being filled with liberated federalism.  And what follows, in subsequent postings, is a more ironed out description and explanation of what that is.

 

[Reminder:  The reader is reminded that he/she can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, he/she can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit or click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings by this blogger by merely clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then look up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).  And while this work has some years on it, the basic argument is still on target.  As a matter of fact, with the advent of polarized politics, they are more vibrant.  Putnam characterizes social capital as having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation. 

[2] The Federal Role in the Federal System:  The Dynamics of Growth / The Condition of Contemporary Federalism:  Conflicting Theories and Collapsing Constraints (Washington, DC:  Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1981), subsection “Cooperative Federalism,” accessed February 28, 2022, https://library.unt.edu/gpo/acir/Reports/policy/a-78.pdf , 3-5.  The term “dual federalism” refers to a federal union in which each level of governance operates fairly independent from each other; cooperative federalism is conducted with significant levels of overlapping governance among or between the levels.

[3] T. H. Breen offers a telling account of how colonial Americans became active consumers of British imports.  While this encouraged a mercantile view, Breen makes the point that the involved transactions demanded and assumed a high level of moral behavior from the merchants.  This is described as being part and parcel of how Americans interacted.  T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:  How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, NY:  The Oxford University Press, 2004).

[4] Note the natural rights option is listed first for the first time.

[5] Critical theory thrives on college campuses and is a Marxist guided construct that has been encouraging a line of research that mostly documents and explains the exploitive conditions that victimized penurious segments of the population experience.