LOOKING INTO IT, PART I

 

The last posting of this blog left the reader with a self-imposed aim, i.e., this blog will now set out to analyze the current political stage and describe and explain the grand arena in which those who support natural rights values and beliefs counter those who uphold federalist values and beliefs.  To start, this posting will begin describing the method that that analysis will pursue.

          This inquiry is an investigation to support an argument proposing that Americans should readopt a federalist guiding construct for the study of governance and politics – through civics and American government classes at the secondary level.  The ultimate goal is to substitute the current prevailing construct, natural rights, with a construct that views this nation’s polity as an overarching partnership within its citizenry.

          Therefore, what is being set forth for this blog is a practical prescription.  In order to initiate this general inquiry, this blog chooses to present an analytical study based on G. W. F. Hegel’s model of inquiry.[1]That is, the present effort will be a breaking down of the respective opposing constructs and a critical review of their components in order to determine if a federalist perspective can and should provide a legitimate and viable theoretical construct for classroom use.

          Hegel’s model of analysis is chosen since it directly addresses dialectic struggle.

 

First, Hegel, following Kant, contrasted the reason, the source of dialectic thinking, with the understanding, the predialectical mode of thought.  The understanding, as Hegel saw it, is the type of thinking that prevails in common sense, in the natural sciences, and in mathematics and those types of philosophy that are argued in quasi-scientific or quasi-mathematical ways.  Fixed categories are uncritically adhered to, demonstrations are produced (only to be demolished), analyses are made, and distinctions are drawn.  Analyzing and distinguishing are necessary foundations of philosophical activity but only to prepare the way for the more sinuous and subtle method of the dialectic.  Once an analysis has been made, the elements of it are seen to conflict and collide as well as to cohere.  First, the understanding isolates, then comes Reason’s negative moment of criticism or conflict, and after that its speculative moment of synthesis.[2]

 

Or stated in more everyday language, analysis will map out the ins and outs of historical events in how they bring opposing forces into conflict and into resolution.

Each of three constructs – federalism, natural rights, and critical theory – will be compared as to its legitimacy and viability.  The basic logic of the analysis will be a dialectic analysis of first, federalism vs. natural rights, and second, natural rights vs. critical theory, with liberated federalism as a potential synthesis.

          The first analysis is historical – it took place in the years leading up to the post World War II period and its elements have been identified in the posting preceding this one.  The second analysis is what is currently taking place in which the dominant construct, natural rights, is being challenged by critical theory – albeit in very limited localities – mostly campuses of higher educational facilities.

 

The most common form [of dialectic reasoning] is to move from thesis, to antithesis, to synthesis.  This can be interpreted as starting with a position (thesis) about a problem and to argue its soundness, to then argue the opposite position as cogently as possible, and finally to arrive at a synthesis or position that contains the best dimensions of both thesis and antithesis.[3]

 

          This analysis will first present, in general terms, the dialectic development of the competing constructs:  federalism and natural rights.  The initial form of federalism, which was prevalent at the beginning of the nation, but zeroing in on the pre-World War II conditions, will be called parochial/traditional federalism or parochial federalism.  Within the context of the dialectic, parochial federalism will be the thesis.  As a dominant view of the national political culture, it held sway from the colonial period until the 1940s.

            The antithesis will be called Nixonian natural rights – although the term natural rights will be used to identify this construct.  At that point, though, the Nixonian version evolved into Reagan’s neoliberalism which heightened that construct’s beliefs in personal “sovereign” liberties.  It is the opinion of this blogger that that line of thinking and feelings further evolved into Trumpism which has, among Trump’s followers, become radicalized. 

Given the former president’s hold on the current Republican party, one cannot dismiss this more intense sense of natural rights thinking as exemplified by that faction’s response to COVID policies and the attack on the capitol building in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.  Current day politics will eventually determine the “stickiness” of this line of thinking and feeling.

While the natural rights view, as described in this blog, has to varying degrees challenged the dominance of federalism through most of the nation’s history, it, in the opinion of this blogger, began to seriously threaten that dominance during the Progressive Era of the early 20^th century.  During that time, it wasn’t Progressivism itself that posed the challenge so much as the industrialism and its accompanying laissez-faire economic approach that undermined the more communal, collaborative views that Americans held to that point. 

And the chief related reality was simply how national – through large corporations – the economy became.  Instead of viability relying on strong local engagement by citizens over what their communities were able to accomplish, the focus became national in orientation as businesses grew and workers and farmers reacted to varying forms of exploitation.  They took on national dimensions through national organized efforts – labor unions and the farmers’ alliance.

After this initial dialectic is introduced, this account will then present a more formal presentation of parochial federalism as a construct for the teaching of American government and civics (subsequently, jointly referred to as civics).  Guiding this analysis will be the subsidiary questions introduced earlier in this blog.  They are:

 

1.    How has the construct that guided the teaching of American government and civics evolved?

2.    What have been the salient consequences of that development?

3.    To what social arrangement, according to its tenets, should the development of a construct lead?

4.    How can that desirable social arrangement come about?

 

And these questions will be utilized as they relate to what Joseph Schwab identified as the commonplaces of curriculum development, i.e., subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu[4] (defined later in this account).

          Along with the commonplaces, the analysis will also incorporate Aristotle’s categories of causation as they relate to motivating political behavior or political socialization.  Categories of causation place a premium not on cause-and-effect relationships between or among distinct variables, but instead emphasize the processes found at the school site and within the lives of students.

          These include various concerns:  state of affairs, interactions, situational insight, and capacity to act morally (these will also be defined later in this account).  While Schwab designed these foci of interest to guide practical inquiry, they will be adapted in this account to aid the proposed dialectic analysis. 

The inquiry of the various constructs will proceed to the modes of expression currently in the present-day debate over educational policy.  It should be kept in mind that the promoted direction of this blog is not to reinstate parochial federalism but to introduce a newer version of federalism, liberated federalism.[5]

          There is more to convey in terms of methods, but here is a good place to stop for this posting.  The reader, with this posting, is given a good sense of where this blog is going.  Hopefully, the reader joins this blogger in tracing this analysis and by doing so, at least will be armed with arguments and insights that assist him or her in interacting with civics educators.

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[1] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Chicago, IL:  Encyclopedia Britanica-Great Books of the Western World, 1952) AND Harry B. Acton, “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York, NY:  The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, 1967).

[2] Acton, “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,” 447.

[3] William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986), 126.

[4] Ibid.

[5] In simple terms, liberated federalism differs from parochial federalism in that it sheds the exclusionary character of parochial federalism and instead actively includes all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, age, or natural challenges such as disabilities.

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.