Sabrina Karim critically reviews statements that Senators McCain and Obama provided for the latest issue of Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Karim’s critique is thoughtful and target, but it also seems worth noting that both national candidates chose to write for this venue and both addressed young people as active, contributing citizens. They wouldn’t have thought that way 5 or 10 years ago.
Author Archives: Peter Levine
Palin on commmunity organizing
This line from Sarah Palin’s convention speech has people in my world–the non-partisan world of civic engagement–furious: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
I wrote a letter to my new home-town newspaper, the Boston Globe, but they printed a better one instead. I submitted mine online and didn’t keep a copy, but the gist was this. It’s strange that a Republican candidate would imply that only people who work for the government and use tax dollars have “responsibilities.” Community organizers organize citizen volunteers in civil society, in the great tradition of the Committees of Correspondence, the abolitionists, the Civil Rights Movement, and the labor movement. There was a time when Republicans prided themselves on recognizing the power and responsibility of the private sector. But apparently they are so zealous to retain control of Washington power that they are willing to disparage active citizenship.
what would Kant say about Peggy Noonan?
Yesterday morning, the speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Sarah Palin was a great choice for vice president: potentially a “transformative political presence.” Later the same day, she was recorded saying that Palin was not the best qualified person and was chosen because of “political bullshit about narratives and youthfulness.”
What’s wrong with this? Perhaps it’s evidence of a lie. In the morning, Noonan published a proposition about her own feelings toward Palin. In the afternoon, she said a different proposition about her own feelings. If the two claims were contradictory, then she lied unless she changed her mind. But I’m not sure they’re flatly contradictory, since the original column was at least somewhat conflicted: Palin, she wrote, “is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books.” I think that’s compatible with saying that Palin was chosen for a foolish reason. Noonan could be hopeful about Palin, yet suspicious of the reasons she was chosen. In short, the case for a lie seems weak to me.
Instead of treating Noonan’s private remarks as evidence of mendacity, we could accuse her of violating Kant’s principle of publicity: “All actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity.” The idea is that one can test the rightness of an action by asking whether the actor’s private reason for so acting could be made public. If you cannot disclose the reason you have done P, you should not do P. Peggy Noonan’s private remarks suggest that she thought Palin was probably a bad choice. But she could not say that in the Wall Street Journal without hurting the Republican ticket and costing herself powerful friends. So she shouldn’t have written her Wall Street Journal column, according to at least one interpretation of Kant.
The publicity principle can seem over-demanding. Does it mean that one cannot mutter something to one’s spouse unless one would also announce it in an office meeting? The glare of publicity can expunge the safe shadows of a private or personal life. That thought gives me a little sympathy for public figures like Peggy Noonan who are caught on tape being frank with friends. (Jesse Jackson and many others have done the same.) But Kant offered his publicity principle in a book about politics (Perpetual Peace), and he qualified it by limiting it to “actions relating to the right of other human beings.” In other words, it applies to willing participants in the world of power, law, and politics–not to private individuals. By writing a column in the Wall Street Journal, Noonan committed herself to a public role. The implied promise to her readers was that she was acting transparently and sincerely in that public arena. If her private remarks show otherwise, then she violated Kant’s publicity principle.
half the kids are below average
Charles Murray, notorious for The Bell Curve and other provocations, has a new book entitled Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. I haven’t read the book, so I shouldn’t criticize it. But I have read the promotional materials and the op-ed version of Murray’s argument, which I can criticize as independent texts.
Murray emphasizes that “Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math.” It supposedly follows that “too many people are going to college,” and our schools are diverting too many resources to the impossible task of preparing everyone for higher education. “America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. An elite already runs the country, whether we like it or not. … It is time to start thinking about the kind of education needed by the young people who will run the country. The task is not to give them more advanced technical training, but to give them an education that will make them into wiser adults; not to pamper them, but to hold their feet to the fire.”
The op-ed version of this argument makes a very simple error. True, half the kids are below average, and it’s impossible to “Leave No Child Behind” if that means leaving no one below the median. But it is very possible to raise the actual skills and knowledge of the whole student population so that the median student in 2010 knows more than the median student knew in 1990. Certainly, the median student of today knows a whole bunch of things that nobody knew a century ago (even as he or she has lost some knowledge that used to be more common, such as some grasp of Latin). If the goal of education reform is to remove variation in student outcomes, it is–as Murray argues–doomed. But if the goal is to teach all students more, that can be achieved.
I do, by the way, agree that education is partly a positional good–there are always people who obtain more of it than others do, and they always have social and economic advantages. Thus raising the quantity and quality of an educational system will not necessarily reduce inequality. I also agree that some kind of elite is inevitable and that it’s important to teach them to connect their self-interest to the public interest. But neither of these doses of realism should discourage us from educating all kids better.
the role of charity
When Hurricane Gustav set its sights on New Orleans, the national political campaigns and parties instinctively started to raise money for NOLA charities. They were following the example set after Katrina, when the private sector contributed at least $6.5 billion (PDF). (And that doesn’t count the market value of volunteer time.) For comparison: the storm did an estimated $150 billion in damage; and the federal government has spent about $120.5 billion on relief (PDF). So the total value of Katrina philanthropy equals about 5% of federal funding.
Classic progressives might say that charity is too scanty, too episodic and unpredictable, and too unfairly distributed to matter much. Our attention should be focused on government aid. High-profile efforts to raise private money are distractions. Democrats should be especially reluctant to raise private money after a crisis, because their role is to put the government under scrutiny.
I only partly agree with this. Federal funding must and did dwarf private funding. But private money is useful for supporting experimental or adversarial activities that the government can’t touch. Also, individual contributors and volunteers create contacts and social networks. One local activist, Tim Williamson, said “Pre-Katrina New Orleans was an insular, closed community. …. Katrina has opened up the networks.” These human connections can be powerful. Finally, private money can support the kind of leadership and coordination that we normally expect of government. Foundations funded the Unified New Orleans Plan, a highly participatory and deliberative process. Compared to the structures created by local, state, and federal governments, the United New Orleans Plan was much better.
Overall, I would say that we need two things for any major public project (such as rebuilding a city): resources and structure. Resources can come from taxes or from private donors and volunteers. The danger of emphasizing private philanthropy is that it can let the government off the hook. But a balance of private and public funds is valuable.
Structure is at least as important as money and work, and we get structure from laws, regulations, and policies. But it is dangerous for official political leaders to set all the rules and priorities. Certainly, official institutions, from the New Orleans school system to the Army Corps of Engineers, made a hash of the job before Katrina. Governmental policies are generally better when citizens help to shape them more than they did in pre-Katrina NOLA. Besides, governmental policies are not sufficient because private institutions (from colleges and universities to churches) need to set policies and priorities, too. It’s important to coordinate across sectors.
The Katrina tragedy showed that government resources were woefully inadequate for the city of New Orleans. But the lack of money wasn’t as big a problem as the poor management of public institutions both before and after the storm. Katrina also proved that Americans are generous with their money and voluntary time. But the money and labor wasn’t spent as effectively as it should have been, because civil society wasn’t adequately organized and participatory.
Ideally, the parties would be debating these issues instead of just dialing for dollars.