JUDGING PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, II

 

An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …

Comprehensiveness, the topic of the last posting, is only the first evaluative element one can apply to judging the worthiness of a construct; the second is power.[2]  Power refers to a construct’s validity and completeness.  From the descriptive and explanatory information this blog has shared concerning the construct, parochial/traditional federalism, one can cite a history that speaks to its power. 

That is, the nation took the ideas and ideals of parochial federalism and successfully built a republic under federalist mechanism and maintained it through the nation’s growth and ever-increasing diversity.  That story further refined the construct’s concepts and rearranged its priorities, but its basic spirit was maintained.  Some of this proved to be beneficial and some did not.

One example that can be cited is the process by which the nation measured the relative importance of the equality of people as opposed to the equality of states.  Unfortunately, that development in the early to mid-1800s “fine-tuned” the nation into the Civil War, but as a result, eliminated slavery.

As that process continued, it was still being observed in the arenas of various conflicts over various issues.  One example, and of intense virulency, is the issue over race relations.  As of the late 1940s, America’s ability to institute justice for all – and honoring a federalist commitment to individual integrity – had been making progress in this area of rectifying injustice, but one should keep in mind that this issue was not exclusively hindering the American nation.  Racial antagonism could be found around the world.

Given the history of the Civil Rights movement, one can argue that it was the values of parochial federalism that paved the way for that movement to begin gaining progress starting in the late 1950s and burgeoning in the 1960s.  One can also argue that given the espoused values of federalism, this progress was not nearly good enough. 

What the construct encourages is that one should hold onto an unambiguous commitment to equality within the citizenry but given the history of prejudicial and discriminatory policies across time and place, one is faced with certain realities acting against those values.  One can attribute whatever advancement one can cite in the US to the residual federalist values having their effect even in years when federalism lost its dominance among Americans.

Therefore, despite these debates – over race, gender, age, sexual preference, etc. – the overall endeavor to develop and maintain a federally defined equality among the US populous has survived and even strengthened.  That is promising if the nation does not stray too far from its founding principles – those being federal principles – even if that construct is not held as the dominant view in America today. 

The point here, though, is that it should be.  Why? To take advantage of the power it has in couching the issues a republic faces so as to assist in finding those ways that result in ever stronger states of being.  Parochial federalism has a track record that proved able to do so from the colonial period all the way through World War II.  That history resulted in the most dominant nation on earth.

And that leads to the third conclusion.  That is, insofar as the nation is true to the principles of this construct, the basic concepts are clear in meaning; that is, they are reasonably precise.  The temptation is, as the ideal of the founding generation believed, that while the nation achieved success and wealth and sought the luxuries that wealth could buy, its people would become soft and unwilling to abide by the federalist morality.[3]

For example, today – when the prevailing view is natural rights – instead of the nation worrying over many of the issues that this blog has reviewed such as crime, drugs, the break-up of the family, etc., authority over these issues – with its accompanying power – is handed to the national government. 

That government, with a professional bureaucracy, has been given the responsibility of handling many aspects of these problems.  Actually, in most cases, it is the national government, from its own initiative, that steps in due to a lack of action or even concern at the local or state levels.  People, it seems, are too taken up with their personal issues or desires – reflecting what is prevalent today, the natural rights view – to harbor much concern over the challenges that fellow Americans are facing.

Therefore, to meet these challenges, it takes, at a national level, for enough political assets, enough voters’ demand, and enough expertise to address the demands of the indigent or otherwise weakened portions of the electorate or populous.  A good example is those who have become victimized by the opioid crisis.[4]  To the degree the nation has allowed this form of inequality to prevail, the level of federalism has diminished, and federalist morality has been compromised. 

The construct’s basic concepts are clear and they, upon being applied in the study of American politics prior to the late 1940s, revealed a nation exhibiting high levels of willingness to incorporate its prescriptions.  Since that time, that trend has been reversed.  Consequently, its influence today has been at low levels for the past seventy years.

Moving on to the fourth conclusion – the one regarding the next judgmental element – reliability.  In terms of parochial federalism, one might judge its functionality by reviewing its loss of influence.  The changes the American polity has experienced since the late 1940s have become more difficult to understand and politics has become bizarre to the average American.  This, in large measure, can be due to losing the expectant role that parochial federalism provided in framing political discourse.

That is, that political discourse has lost its ability to explain and prescribe in recurring fashion for the current generations.  In the years since World War II, political discourse has been increasingly based on conceptual formats in which those challenges are discussed (with the accompanying assumptions) in political “speak” that does not speak to the American public or, at least, a large portion of it. 

More specifically, one can observe that a degradation of localism and community – with their guideposts in knowable signs or symbols of meaning – has helped make political battles not the affairs of oneself but instead, they have become the affairs of others.  This reflects the absence of reliability that parochial federalism provided the American public.

Reliability means messaging – be it descriptive, explanatory, exhortative – means the same thing time after time.  The prevalent language today misses the mark of reliability given the transitory political landscape (e.g., social change in all its forms seems to occur in an ever more rapid pace) and the centralist nature of the nation’s (or global) economic and political realities seems foreign and somehow irrelevant.  This blogger can attest to the challenge it has been to keep up with the lingo (what does “woke” mean?).

Yet the need for reliable remedies, given the cited above evidence relating to the social pathologies, demonstrates that ignoring them will become ever more dangerous to the health of the polity.  Parochial federalism leads to the discovery of truths in understandable form and what one discovers, within this construct, are consistently expressed over time.

For example, contemporary organizational theory has encouraged moral participatory principles by organizational membership in social organizations, public/governmental entities, or private businesses.  And these include schools, but one needs, in such efforts, to not merely impose some “shared decision-making” structural model, but actually go through the processes to build a federated sense among the membership in question.  That consists of communal (localized commitment), collaboration, and cooperation within those arrangements.

The literature that supports that claim stretches back to the last century and has been extended into this one.[5] These books and articles are highly influenced by the psychology of Abraham Maslow (especially utilizing his model, “hierarchy of needs”).  Their authors and/or editors are promoting principles that recognize the practical importance of allowing people to actively engage in organizational decision-making processes – usually close to them conceptually and physically – that can best be described politically as federal republicanism. 

That would be a sense of partnership among all levels of organizational life.  In grand fashion, that would pertain to a federated nation.  And with that conclusion, there are four down, and six to go.  The next posting will begin with the conclusion relating to the judgmental element, isomorphism.  That is, how well does the construct match – element by element – to the one it addresses and assists in its study. 

[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] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022).  The reader is reminded that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of parochial federalism might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.

[2] The other eight are precision, reliability, isomorphism, compatibility, predictability, control, level of abstraction, and motivation.

[3] To review evidence of such concern and reality, even before the Revolutionary War, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:  How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, NY:  The Oxford University Press, 2004).

[4] For an account of how ignored the onset and growth of the opioid crisis was without much concern among the American public, see Sam Quinones, Dreamland:  The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York, NY:  Bloomsbury, 2015).

[5] This blogger is partial to the edited book, The Planning of Change.  See Warren Bennis, Kenneth Dean Benne, and Robert Chin (editors), The Planning of Change (New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985).  Other sample sources include J. Stephen Ott, The Organizational Culture Perspective (Pacific Grove, CA:  Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1989) AND Thomas J. Sergiovanni, Moral Leadership:  Getting to the Heart of School Improvement (San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1992) AND Tahira M. Probst, “Countering the Negative Effects of Job Insecurity through Participative Decision-Making Lessons from the Demand-Control Model,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 10 (4) (2005), 320-329 AND John L. Cotton, David A. Vollrath, Kirk L. Froggatt, Mark L. Lengnick-Hall and Kenneth R. Jennings, “Employee Participation:  Diverse Forms and Different Outcomes,” The Academy of Management Review, 13, 1 (1988), 8-22 AND J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen, “Participation Decision-Making:  An Integration of Multiple Dimensions,” Human Relations, 50, 7 (1997), 859-878.