A COMPLICATED BALANCING ACT, PART I

 

Linda Yueh[1] points out a new economic development that seems to attempt to draw back to an earlier time.  This is being felt across western nations.  President Biden’s current call for the American government to have an infrastructure program represents America’s version of this newer effort.  This is the case since the president is calling for that program to rely on American produced products.

          This and the next posting address this shift in American policy.  This current posting gives a historical background that one should keep in mind when considering any new initiative regarding employment policy options.  The next will address the political-economic factors currently affecting governmental and business decision-making.

Such policy as promoting infrastructure expenditures to obtain domestic manufactured goods, as being experienced in different advanced countries, is meant to kickstart the manufacturing sector of those economies which has experienced a deemphasis in the last few decades.  Of late, many of the advanced nations have been deindustrializing and shifting their economies toward service industries.

          And this leads one to become conscious of what seems to be a historical progression which began eons ago.  To begin, humans were mostly nomadic.  They traveled and caught game as their paths followed changing conditions of the year.  Some finally hit on agriculture that allowed them to settle, build homes and communities, and began to establish social institutions that mark all human settlements.  For example, all established societies have the institutions of government, religion, economy, family, and education.

In various agricultural settlements, according to Arnold Toynbee, due to challenges – e.g., rising flooding tides of a nearby river or two – local populations potentially met those challenges with responses to placate the ensuing damages the challenges created.  That called on them to organize themselves to the degree that a civilization resulted.[2]  Of course, this entire development is complex and deserves its own analysis, but certain insights can be drawn for the purposes of this and the next posting.

Initially, this “civilization” result was the exception and only occurred after centuries of mostly agricultural dependence.  But once civilization broke out, the effects of civilized societies spread throughout much of the inhabited world.  For example, all of Europe became civilized even though that vast area was not affected by the original challenges that spurred Western Civilization.[3]

This civilizing effect, in turn, led to many developments in various human pursuits.  Roughly, in the nineteenth century, the academic and business sectors of the European civilization developed combustible engines and industrial economic activity took off.  Why?  Well, the obvious reason was the variety of goods that such activity produced.  But a more economic reason was that the productivity – the amount of output per unit of input – rose enormously.  Therefore, not only were people’s wants more readily satisfied, but profits surged upward.

          But that advancement was limited to certain societies, mostly western nations in Europe, North America, Australia, and eventually in non-western Japan.  In each country, an inherent battle ensued between the owners of production and labor.  Initially, industrialists were able to offer employment to workers, but at subsistence (in some cases, below subsistence) wages. 

Workers organized unions and during the late twentieth century began winning significant wage increases.  In the US, an autarky, and other countries, this led to inflation – higher prices for goods and services.  It also led in the US to lower quality products.  It seems that when an economy lacks competition, higher prices and lower quality of goods seem to ensue. 

The answer for industrialists, who seemed most conscious of the high wages, was to find low wage labor sources.  That existed in pre-industrialized countries such as China and India.  All this coincided with advances in computers that facilitated doing business with areas around the world.  Therefore, a lot of manufacturing found its way to China, India, Vietnam, and other preindustrial countries since the 1970s. 

Oversimplifying things, one can judge these changes as a formula for developing a global economy and heightened competition for US producers and workers.  The next posting will describe what all of this has meant for the current political-economic conditions of this country.  As a bit of prevue, the results are not limited to the US, but they also affect other Western countries. 

In the coming years, will the US, a la Toynbee, meet the ensuing challenges with effective responses – which according to the theory means advancement to an even more enriched future – or will it mean a failing future in which the fate of this democratic republic might truly be at stake?  Or stated another way:  What does January 6 really mean?

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[1] Linda Yueh, What Would the Great Economists Do?:  How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems (London, UK:  Penguin, 2019).

[2] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York, NY:  Dell Publishing Co., 1971/1946).

[3] In terms of Western Civilization, the following is offered by the New World Encyclopedia:

 Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made. If leaders of the civilization did not appease or shut down the internal proletariat or muster an effective military or diplomatic defense against potential invading outside forces, it would fall.

“Arnold J. Toynbee,” New World Encyclopedia (n.d.), accessed January 29, 2021, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Arnold_J._Toynbee .

ULTIMATE GOALS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

This posting continues a look at school reformers of the 1840s and beyond in the nineteenth century.  The purpose of this visit is to ask how parochial/traditional views over citizenship and education developed in America’s past.  The aim is to test the claim that that construct held dominance during the nation’s past from colonial years to the years just after World War II.  And if true, how did Americans experience that dominance?

          The last two postings gave the reader an introduction to the works of Horace Mann and Catherine Beecher.  Mann is noted for starting the nation’s first statewide educational system in Massachusetts and Beecher was a pioneer in promoting women in the teaching profession including her efforts in recruiting and training women to go out west and teach in frontier schools.  Both dealt with the strict tradition of Puritanical thought and its effect on how schooling was conducted.

          Generally, they worked toward bending the prevalent religious influence toward more secular leanings.  Specifically, they favored curricular content that emphasized communal deeds instead of instilling Protestant doctrine.  They

… tended to see schools as secular churches:  community centers where any child could be improved – even religiously “saved” – through education.  [They] believed it was more important to teach a child good deeds than good doctrine; to focus less on the details of literature or mathematics than to create faithful, decent, socially adept young men and women – people who could resist the mob rule of the French Revolution and the Ursuline convent arson.[1]

And women doing this work equated to missionary work of priest and monks and should be rewarded with social rewards over money or political power.

          But among the consequences of such a policy, a pedagogic calling suffered in that it began being viewed as a philanthropic pursuit instead of a professional career.  This led to issues in education.  They included:  as moral agents did this view of teachers interfere with the role of parents?  And, if based on Protestant views of morality, how were other religious traditions to be treated or respected?  This was particularly true concerning Catholics and Jews.

          A chief critic of these developments was a contemporary journalist, Orestes Brownson.  He complained of this religious bias toward WASP beliefs.  This converted Catholic also saw Mann’s deprioritizing of academic curricula to a more communal emphasis as impractical when it came to the interests of the working class.  They needed, in his eyes, vocational training and should be informed of labor rights.

          For good or ill, Mann and Beecher’s bias prevailed across the nation’s public schools.  That is, American education took on this more communal, faith-based education over academic rigor.  This writer, a product of 1950s-1960s Catholic parochial schools, can recall what he was led to believe:  that public schools just did not measure up academically to Catholic schools.

And he was exposed to the difference upon being moved from New York City to Miami, Florida back in 1958 and having to go to a public school for two and half months.  This was in the fourth grade and he found himself changing from being a failing student to being one of the brightest kids in the class.  His new classmates were being taught material that he had been exposed to years earlier especially in math.  He loved his new situation but was moved back to a Catholic school as the new school year started in the fall.  Oh well!

The question he asks today is, why this dichotomy?  Can one be taught and encouraged to be communal and academic at the same time?  Better still, can one use academics to advance communal learning?  Of course, this blog maintains that one can and one should see learning and education in these terms.

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[1] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 30.  The historical information in this posting is drawn from this source.  The arson reference is a fire Mann had to investigate earlier in his career.  The fire burnt down a Catholic convent.

HOW ACADEMIC SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE?

 

The last posting began this blog’s effort to relay a developmental description of how America, from its origins – its colonial past – to the years following World War II, held onto a version of federalism.  That version, this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism.  It held – more than any other perspective – on how Americans viewed governance and politics. 

As any theoretical approach, this version promoted a set of values and beliefs that were not at all times consistent or even pristinely logical.  And, during its years of dominance, people varied in how exactly each interpreted its tenets.  Generally, the view upheld the values of cooperation, collaboration, and community.

          It is these values, among others, that one can detect underlying the principles of the US Constitution as the founding generation came together and formed the nation’s government.  In a public relations coup, the faction that proposed and argued for the ratification of the Constitution took on the name, the Federalists, even though the term today is associated with local or state governments.  This cast their opponents as the Anti-Federalists who argued for maintaining the bulk of power at the state level. 

But at its heart, the term federalist fit the national effort because what the new agreement was calling for was a federated relationship among the states and the people of the United States.  And to be federated means that those entities were committed to work toward cooperation, collaboration, and community.  But a problem remained:  who constituted “the people”?  Since the original settlers in the eastern seaboard first arrived, there were already a slew of “Others” who had arrived by 1800. 

Mostly, this consisted of voluntary immigrants, but some were forced.  By the time of the Constitution, many immigrants from a variety of European nations had made the trip over the Atlantic and the pure Anglo makeup of the American population already had become significantly mixed.  Of course, the forced element consisted of African slaves who began to be brought over in 1619 and by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the slave population was at 500,000, a significant number since the population of the nation was roughly 3.9 million.[1]

Americans – its original Anglo contingency – were more or less forced to accept the other European nationals and by the late 1700s, when several generations of this mixing had transpired, they defined the white population of the US.  But this was their extent of inclusion.  Even those who opposed slavery, by and large, saw the acceptance of blacks as an inclusionary step too far.  For them, one can detect a bigoted view of Africans which was extended against indigenous peoples and the Asians that began making their way here in the 1800s. 

Racism, under parochial/traditional federalist view was alive and well.  And one can to a degree see this racism being detrimental to the survival of this view.  With the New Deal in the 1930s and its limited efforts to deracialize federal policy, then with the contributions of blacks during World War II, and desegregation of the armed forces under Truman’s administration, the undermining of legal segregation began. 

And these democratizing developments debased the legitimacy of the parochial/traditional federalist view and bolstered the popularization of the natural rights view.  But the challenges to this earlier version of federalism did not begin in the 1930s.  One subplot of the American story, according to this writer, is this building criticism of federalism, some of it reflected in public policy, some of it in the form of social developments. 

The effort here is to take note of the major events and the development of ideas that led to this shift.  And this blog has chosen a telling story concerning American public schools to initiate this effort.  The choice is not because this story happened first, although this writer has shared a Tocqueville account of 1830s America,[2] this story reflects America in the 1840s.  These accounts provide evidence of what is generally being claimed in this blog:  that federalism held strong till the years after World War II.

The last posting began that history with an introduction to Horace Mann and his work in Massachusetts to establish its public school system.  That posting related that under Mann’s leadership, that system encouraged and advanced defining the profession of teaching as one that should be “manned” by women.  At its base, the reasoning seems to have been motivated by funding considerations – simply stated, one could hire women at a cheaper rate than men.

Beyond funding, the policy also reflected Mann’s sexist beliefs that were described in that posting.  What should be mentioned, was that he was not alone in these beliefs, they were generally accepted to varying degrees among Americans, including women.  One of his main advisors was a woman by the name Catherine Beecher.  She promoted women’s role in education and, in time, was instrumental in getting women to go out west and fill teaching positions across the rough western communities in what is now considered the Midwest.

She supported Mann’s initiative to shift the occupation of teaching as being defined mostly as a female profession.  They fought against certain prejudices that held that if teaching was feminized it would lead to weaken academic standards and debasing school discipline especially among male students.  Mann defended his policy by various arguments, but somewhat central, beyond the $11,000 (worth $329, 334.94 today) female teacher corps saved Massachusetts’ taxpayers in an 1800s’ budget, by writing:

As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue![3]

          As an ideal one can detect some biases and presumptions about teaching.  And these views reflect religious leanings.  To remind the reader, from the last posting, the connection was made between federalist thinking and Puritanical/Calvinistic beliefs.  In all of this, while congregational thinking of this tradition affected constitutional thinking in all American states, it was strongest in the New England states.  And in this, there is an irony.

          Initially, Mann rebelled against Puritanical, religious thinking and adopted phrenology (a belief that physical features affect behavior).  By diminishing predestination, Mann saw phrenology as beliefs that led to proactive education to meet the shortcomings of young people.  But in this, which was ironic in of itself, he downgraded the importance of academic goals in educating the masses.

          His view of public education emphasized the social – congregational – qualities that led to a cooperative, collaborative, and communal population with a religious bent.  The overall purpose of public schooling should promote students’ “affection outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”[4]  This stood in counter distinction to European public schooling.

          For example, Prussian schools – of which Mann saw through admiring eyes – upped teacher salaries to hold on to their male teachers and French schools promoted high academic standards with secular content (the French were prone to critique German school curricula as being too religious). 

          Next posting will look at what Mann’s contributions meant to the religious, parochial foundations of American federalism as it was considered in the early 1800s.  This writer hopes he is expressing that a culturally based idea with its associated ideals of governance and politics is not a well thought out ideology. 

It is instead a mixture of beliefs and emotions that are expressed in a more or less logically congruent argument about how and why a polity exists.  But that level of coherence is enough to project a clear sense of what is considered politically legitimate.  And in the 1800s it was securely considered legitimate for schools to promote a view of morality.

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[1] “How Things Have Changed in Philadelphia Since the 1787 Convention,” Constitution Daily (May 25,2016), accessed January 21, 2021, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,were%20being%20held%20as%20slaves.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  See pages 78-79.

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 27.  The historical information concerning Mann in this posting is drawn from this source.

[4] Ibid., 28.

A STEP FROM CALVINISM

 

This blog will now turn to an effort this writer will revisit in the future.  He fears he might have misled the reader of this blog a bit and this effort is meant to clear any misconceptions.  He has repeatedly claimed that the US had as a dominant view of governance and politics what he calls the parochial/traditional federalism view or construct.  He described that view in more or less positive language although he has pointed out that it encouraged or justified Americans holding racist and other xenophobic beliefs, attitudes, and values. 

He didn’t underestimate those negative qualities, but he did want to make sure the reader appreciates its positive qualities.  The positive qualities have to do with the construct’s set of espoused values of community, partnership, and collaboration.  But at the same time, people who held on to its espoused values made no excuses for the exclusionary policies its adherents proposed and maintained.  Those policies included slavery, discriminatory practices, and other exclusionary behaviors Americans commonly put into effect.

Probably the most direct and unambiguous pronouncement of this exclusion can be found in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott Case.  Chief Justice Taney clearly states that African Americans – be they enslaved or not – were not part of the partnership the Constitution established.   Here is a portion of that decision:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the declaration of independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in the memorable instrument … [1]

Taney here is not shy of what he interpreted the founding compact to be in terms of African Americans.

And a lot of this exclusion falls in line with certain religious biases generally held but originating with the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts colony and, in general, in the New England.  It was the Puritans who introduced the covenanted approach to the establishment of governments. 

Puritanism was based on Calvinism that, in turn, believed in strict moral precepts, predestination, and a rebellion against adorned trappings and the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.  Through these beliefs, that tradition promoted an equality within its congregations and as interpreted in governance, this sense of partnership was strongly encouraged but as indicated years later by Taney’s opinion, was limited to those considered part of the “tribe.”

Such scholars as Donald Lutz[2] have traced how these precepts, especially those based on congregational ideals, worked their ways into the various founding documents.  These documents were drawn in the localities within the original thirteen colonies.  One can also detect them guiding the development of the states as the nation initially established its governments and expanded westward across North America.

This posting begins this writer’s effort to take a closer look at that historical record.  The postings that will further this effort will not be immediately follow each other (although the next posting, at least, will continue this posting’s message).  Instead, this topic will be revisited here and there but with more frequency in the upcoming year or so. 

This first installment looks at the effect of this tradition on the development of the nation’s public schools.  And the first topic has to do with the hiring of teachers.  By the 1820s, school officials were finding it difficult to fill teaching slots in what had been a male dominated “profession.”  The problem was a reluctance to raise either taxes or church contributions to pay men sufficiently. 

The option was to hire women to those positions.  In terms of timing, this coincided with the efforts to establish independent public schools especially in Massachusetts and through the work of Horace Mann.  His story is telling in terms of how parochial/traditional federalism influenced the development of the nation’s initial efforts to provide public education.

And it is with him that this blog begins its look at this development.  Relevant to this story, Mann was elected to the lower house of the Massachusetts’ legislature in 1827.  His political leanings encouraged him to join up with the initial political organizing that led to the establishment of Whig Party.  This was a movement that brought together socially liberal advocates with northeastern business interests.

They were liberal in that they pushed for the establishment of insane asylums and for public funding of schools for the deaf and blind.  He himself argued for an end to the death penalty and doing away with lotteries as being unchristian.  He attained a level of notoriety when he was assigned to investigate the burning of a Catholic convent in the town of Charleston.  This led to his political advancement that resulted in his election to the state senate.

An ironic aspect of his story was his belief in phrenology – the belief in and analysis of people’s physical attributes as causal factors in their behaviors.  He, unlike others who looked at such characteristics, used the derived analyses as a way to discover potential shortcomings in people that could be addressed by education. 

That is, “[d]uring the nineteenth century, phrenology was considered a progressive ideology.  Its proponents believed that each individual’s deficiencies could be identified, then ameliorated through schooling; … [and therefore] would eradicate poverty and crime in just a few generations.”[3]  Interestingly, he saw the utilization of phrenology as a substitute for the prevailing reliance on religion to guide such judgements.  Further, through that guidance one could lead challenged individuals – even arsonists – to productive lives.

This bent in his public acts did not go unnoticed by local religious personage and elicited a fire-and-brimstone sermon reaction from the local Calvinist preacher.  But the experience led Mann to take up education as an issue that would lead him to establish his place in American history.  School reform became his life’s work.  And in this he bucked the thrust of Whigs who favored laissez faire policies in the economy and other social areas of concern. 

By the late 1830s he was leading Whigs to establish a state board of education to oversee Massachusetts’ local schools and to institute compulsory education.  By that time, as a state senator, he left the legislature to become the first state’s secretary of education.  He took it upon himself to become versed in educational theories and looked to reputable systems particularly Prussian schools.  That European system in the nineteenth century instituted various policies to upgrade the teaching profession including higher pay and prohibition of teachers holding other jobs.

From the Prussian example, Mann instituted the policy for the Massachusetts’ school system that every school have a library and that the state established “normal schools” for the purpose of training teachers.  Again, normal schools were originally only open to women applicants – the reasoning being women could be paid less than men.  Later in the twentieth century, these schools were converted into regional state colleges (having lower admission standards than state universities).

Unfortunately, much of Mann’s reasoning for these sexist policies had to do with his sexist beliefs.  While he saw teaching as a woman’s profession, albeit economic reasoning was offered, he also believed women were not appropriate for certain occupations such as politics, military, and journalistic professions – they were not suitable due to their “black and sulfurous” environments.

All these elements of the Mann’s story were instrumental in defining how Calvinist traditions and biases affected the development of American education.  The aim is to give the reader some of the detail of how this influence was felt and give a hint, at least, as to why it finally gave way to the natural rights view.  There were various social and political forces that pushed toward the eventuality of that transformation.

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[1] “Dred Scott v. Stanford, (19 HOWARD 393 (1857)),” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 463-470, 465.

[2] Donald S. Lutz (ed.), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund,1998).

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 23.  The historical information in this posting is drawn from this source.

THE REPUTATIONAL FACTOR

 

For those new to this blog, its overall goal is to describe, explain, and promote federation theory.  That theory can be utilized to guide the development and implementation of a civics curriculum.  While this aim sounds modest, it is demanding.  The main reason for the difficulty is what is in place.  To begin with, every society has a prominent view of governance and politics in place.  The US is no exception.  It has a view this blog and others call that natural rights view and that view, in various ways, is both alluring and detrimental to a just and civil society.

          The allure stems from its basic tenet, i.e., people have the right to form their own values and attitudes and to act in ways to achieve or further those choices up to the point they do not deny anyone else the same rights.  Of course, this is a form of liberty and liberty is central to Americanism.  But as is often the case, language plays a part in all of this.

          In the history of political development there have been various definitions of liberty.  This particular one has been given a name – natural liberty.  It is probably the most permissive form of liberty.  It is named “natural” because it resembles what one attributes to animals out in the wild.  They simply do what they want to do assuming they are not constrained. 

Of course, each animal’s freedom can and does run into conflict with that of other animals.  A smaller animal’s right to live can be shorten by a larger animal’s right to eat.  And the solution to this “conflict” is settled by violence to the cost usually of the smaller animal.  To avoid the likelihood of that happening to humans, humans have qualified rights by the proviso that each needs to honor the rights of others with a general commitment to the rules and laws that govern human interactions.

The concern for governance and politics has a lot to do with what those rules and laws are and how they are enforced.  Since people do not all have the same interests in relation to those rules and laws, each – according to the natural rights view – competes with others to secure the set of provisions that benefit his/her interests.  In practical terms, for example, business owners and workers, in many ways, have opposing interests.  Which interests prevail relies to a great degree on the rules and laws pertaining to that competition.

This, in turn, leads to a view of society as a compilation of competing entities with a vague – although often strongly felt – sense of loyalty to the very system in which they compete.  One knows this view is favored by the fact that one is not surprised or that much insulted if one hears of this or that individual breaking those rules or laws to gain advantage in this system of competition.  As a matter of fact, certain rule or lawbreakers are romanticized by those who are taken by this spirit of liberty.  These examples of criminals are hoisted by a strange allegiance to a notion of “I can do what I want.”

And with this context, this posting can get at its main topic:  how do natural rights advocates promote themselves in the various competitive situations they confront?  Robert Greene wrote a book full of advice.[1]  In general, he portrays a social reality as being one of competition and the ultimate currency of that competition is power. 

Power comes in various forms.  Citing another source,[2] there are five basic forms of power:  coercive power, reward power, expert power, legitimate power, and referent power.  Money is simply a tool that can assist one or other of these different forms – e.g., it can be traded to attain a reward, or it can be withheld to administer a punishment.  And to be clear, power occurs when one gets someone else to do what he/she would not do otherwise.[3]  Obviously, this view reflects market thinking writ large.

And this leads one to an aspect of market relations that enhances one’s competitive advantage.  Instead of viewing one’s approach to how one engages others in these markets, one is apt to be more concerned with image than substance.  One competitor has an advantage if he/she convinces others of the merit of his/her product and/or of the detriment of alternative products and/or of doing without.  And here one gets a sense of where this sort of thinking leads.  It turns out, according to Greene, that reputation is more important than substance.

And a “good” reputation is not necessarily better than some sort of unsavory reputation.  Greene gives a set of examples in which military leaders, such as Rommel, were able to secure victories merely based on their reputations and not on their strength.  That is, in various situations they projected deceiving images or information that convinced an enemy that discretion would be the better part of valor.  They lied in order to win in those situations.

According to Greene, one should take those examples and apply them to the competitive arenas one confronts not only in business, but in any political confrontation in which one might engage.  That’s just prudent and a product of a natural rights’ political world.  But does one need to see politics in this way?  And beyond that, should they see politics in this way?

This is not the way federation theory suggests people see politics.  Yes, politics entails competition – that’s not controversial.  But here’s a progression that might suggest a different perspective.  It’s from reciprocity to sentiment to self-fulfillment.  Reciprocity suggests that if one does someone else a good turn, that other person is likely to return the favor.  And enough of that most likely elicits positive feelings, people liking each other and even leading to love in some cases.  And finally, enough positive experiences feelings teach people that happiness and even joy are dependent on positive social relationships.

Greene’s view doesn’t see interactions this way.  But one can say that he is writing about competition, not socializing.  But that’s part of the point.  Greene’s view promotes a social landscape in which interactions boil down to competition and one’s reputation is built not just by competitive interactions but by all interactions.  People form their judgements of others by how those others act in any interaction they might be perceived doing.  Afterall, one cannot look into someone else’s mind, but only observe his/her behavior.

Perhaps sharing a snippet of what he has to say might make his message clear.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power.  Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides.  Make your reputation unassailable.   Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen.  Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations.  Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.[4]

What this writer finds interesting is that Greene relies heavily on military examples where confrontations are singular battles, and one does not waste time with consequences other than winning or losing.  Regular life is more continuous and human relationships evolve via day-by-day interactions.  But even in a political atmosphere, one needs alliances, and, in turn, they do not last when pending punishment hangs over those involved.  Doubt it?  Just look at the current president’s situation.

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[1] Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power  (New York, NY:  Penguin Books, 1998).

[2] John R. P. French, Jr. and Bertram Raven, “The Bases of Power,” in Current Perspectives in Social Psychology, ed. Edwin P. Hollander and Raymond G. Hunt (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1967), 504-512.

[3] Andre Munro, “Robert A. Dahl:  American Political Scientist and Educator,” Encyclopaedia  Britannica, February 1, 2020, accessed February 12, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-A-Dahl .

[4] Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, 37.

BUILT-IN POLARIZING FACTORS

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 

The last posting pointed out that currently and effectively since World War II an imbalance has evolved concerning the nation’s elections.  Surely, the origins of this imbalance can be found in the arrangement the Constitution establishes by setting up winner-take-all, single representative districts for the US House of Representative and, at the state level, the respective state constitutions do likewise for their legislatures. 

This feature can be found in British derived systems such as in the US and in Canada.[1]  That posting explains how such designations hurt left of center advocates – urban, Democratic voters – and enhances right of center advocates – rural, Republican voters.  Therefore, along with right of center voters feeling threatened by demographic factors one can add how the left feels underrepresented.

          Ezra Klein points out[2] that by the year 2040, just twenty years from now, 70% of the nation will live in the 15 largest states – and this projection captures the basic problem in that, consequently in the US Senate, those people will be represented by 30 senators and the rest, 30% of the population, will be represented by 70 senators.  Add to that the effects of gerrymandering and ignoring the wishes of voters whose candidates lose in winner-take-all elections one can ascertain how frustrating politics can be for urbanites and even suburbanites. 

These factors, in effect, disenfranchise significant portions of the electorate, if not, as has often been the case, the majority of voters.  In the case of the Senate, its ability to stifle legislation, with its filibuster provision, is particularly egregious.  Rural sentiments can unduly block what the majority of Americans wish to be enacted at the national level.

To illustrate, the reader could consider polling results that indicate strong majorities wishing for various policies.  This includes such policies as paid maternity leave, government funding for childcare, boosting minimum wage, tuition free state college education, and Medicare for all.   It is telling that one can readily categorize these proposed legislation items as liberal or progressive policies.

Federation theory, which this blog supports, promotes a qualified majority rule.  It concedes that purely democratic systems – where majority rule has unrestrained power – can lead to policies that trample individual and/or minority rights.  The nation’s history can attest to that possibility; occurrences of such policies led to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.  But the opposite can also be true.

          That is, the minority – read conservative advocates – can block legitimate majority wishes.  And under current conditions, the victims of such a feature are the urban, liberal states or, as within state arrangements, cities and their suburban areas.  These more congested areas can be shortchanged by what the respective legislative bodies decide policy will be. 

This reality or potential was exposed recently when rural states objected to providing urban areas, particularly in the Northeast, of assistance during the initial months of the COVID pandemic.  Red states didn’t see it useful to assist blue states (a strategy that subsequently seems to have been shortsighted).

          As for fixes, there have been various proposals.  One considered by experts of such matters, has been to abandon the winner-take-all model.  Instead, representation can adopt the European model in which representative districts are larger than those in the US and provide multi-seat allocations in which more than one representative is chosen in an election.  This enfranchises voters who did not vote for the top vote getter in that district.  It also results in legislative bodies that more accurately reflect how districts are politically constituted.

          So as things stand, the right feels threatened by the demographic changes that the country is experiencing – the shift in the population toward urban areas not to mention the increased numbers of nonwhite and non-European descendants – and the left by being disenfranchised, one can understand the polarization of the national political arena. 

These are situations that civics teachers need to address if they are to explain contemporary political realities.  Given the events that transpired in Washington this past Wednesday, a citizen needs to appreciate this background to make sense of what happened.  And unfortunately, without hyping the situation, the very existence of the republic – if we “can keep it” – seems to be at stake and demands ordinary citizens to know and substantively understand what’s happening and why it is happening.

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[1] Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose:  The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2019).

[2] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).