I have been offline because I’ve been at the Frontiers of Democracy conference with about 120 scholars, activists, public officials, and students. There is a lively discussion of the conference themes on Twitter under the hashtag #demfront. Various subsets of conference participants have produced statements, and you can vote for which ones you like best or think are most important. (We’ll take the votes back to the conference tomorrow morning.)
Harvard Ed. School professor Meira Levinson visited the Summer Institute of Civic Studies yesterday and led us in a discussion of a case that raises two fundamental issues. Students were required to choose and implement a civic action project. An Orthodox Jewish 8th-grader chose as his project arguing against the Massachusetts gay marriage law on religious grounds, taking as a premise that homosexuality is immoral and citing scripture as evidence. The chief issues are: 1) the legitimacy of any religious arguments in public forums, such as deliberations in public school classrooms; and 2) the potential effects on any students who might be gay–in other words, the effects on inclusion and equity.
I am inclined to say the following. First, the school and its teacher should not be neutral about homosexuality. Gay students have a right to be included and fully respected in the classroom. The teacher should strongly communicate that anti-gay rhetoric is disallowed.
But there are several reasons to allow the religious student to argue against gay marriage on reasons of faith: 1) Gay marriage is actually a live debate in the legislature and the press, and students should learn to follow such debates. 2) Although a student does not have a constitutional right to say whatever he wants in class, it is good pedagogy to create free speech zones within social studies classrooms. 3) Other students will learn something about orthodox Jewish thought if he can speak candidly. 4) The student in question may learn from other students’ responses, and it is better that he bring his values into the classroom than to feel that he was censored there and continue to hold them privately.
I think that religiously-based arguments should be permitted in a classroom (or a legislature) and not rejected on the ground that they are religious. At the same time, I think anyone who brings religious arguments into the public domain can be required to defend them. If the religious student states, “God says homosexuality is sinful,” other people may reply that God does not say that, or that God does not exist, or that God’s word should not determine human laws. He cannot be permitted to close the debate by claiming that his identity generates his opinions, and therefore a critique of his opinions constitutes an unfair attack on his identity. He is entitled to have his identity as a Jew respected and to be fully included in the classroom, but he is not entitled to have his opinion about homosexuality respected by other people in the classroom. He should expect that it will be challenged.
I am proposing an asymmetry here. Being gay is an identity that must be accepted in a public school classroom; hence the teacher must be against homophobia and must favor inclusion and respect. Holding religiously-based, anti-gay opinions is not an identity but a position, and it can be challenged. (Yet being Jewish is an identity.) I recognize the problem: what counts as an “identity” and an “opinion” is contested and changes over time. But I’m sticking to my position. …
Today, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we discussed James Madison’s famous definition:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Also today, the New York Times’ conservative commentator, David Brooks, writes:
American conservatism now has a rich network of Washington interest groups adept at arousing elderly donors and attracting rich lobbying contracts. … [Grover] Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible. …
The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners. …
Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. They have created a climate in which purity is prized over practicality….
For many legislators, the purpose of being in Congress is not to pass laws. It’s to create clear contrasts you can take into the next election campaign. It’s not to take responsibility for the state of the country and make it better. It’s to pass responsibility onto the other party and force them to take as many difficult votes as possible. …
They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes.
Are the House Republicans and their movement allies a faction, in the Madisonian sense? The first issue is whether they are “united and actuated by some common impulse.” Their ability to enforce party-line votes and to use coordinated talking points are evidence that they are united, at least compared to any party 20 years ago.
Next, are they “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”? Brooks attributes bad motives to some of them, but if the test is subjective intent, they may not be factional. I suspect that many think they are putting their own reelection in jeopardy by supporting policies (such as deeply defunding the federal government) that promote the “permanent and aggregate interest of the community.”
But Madison’s definition does not require intent. A cause can be well-intentioned, or partly so, and yet “adversed” to the common interest–as long as we are able to say what the common interest is. I would say, and I believe polls show that Americans agree, that the common interest includes:
By this standard, the House Republicans may be acting as a faction, and a majority faction within government that has the potential to capture the other two branches in 2012. That is a dangerous for our constitutional design.
In Downsizing Democracy,* Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg suggest that 19th and 20th century nations needed mass support in order to field huge armies and float national debts. But postmodern nations need neither mass conscription in wartime nor huge numbers of their own citizens to buy bonds. Their governments really do not need mass support, and that is why turnout has fallen and the influence of wealthy donors has risen in countries like the United States. (One could also observe the apparent success of non-democratic countries like China.)
To buy this theory, you need not presume that “elites” are aware of any of the above and have deliberately orchestrated mass participation and then demobilization. A roughly Darwinian account–survival of the fittest–would explain the trends instead. (This is my conjecture, not directly out of Crenson and Ginsberg.)
Go back to 1600, and you will observe nation states in Europe and other parts of the world that are run by monarchs and aristocratic castes. A king must borrow money to hire professional soldiers to protect himself and conquer others. The ones who cannot borrow are at risk. King Philip II of Spain, for example–although he inherited the greatest empire of the age–went bankrupt in 1557, 1560, 1576, and 1596. It is not coincidental that both the Netherlands and England flourished at Spain’s expense during his reign.
The Dutch invented an alternative. They borrowed money from their own people to field a highly professional, permanent army and navy. Their people were willing to buy government bonds because their government was republican, hence accountable to the citizen-lenders. The Dutch economy, empire, and influence grew, only to be checked by England when it had adopted the same mechanisms–parliamentary government and a national debt. England became republican in the mid-1600s and then a constitutional monarchy in the 1700s not because its leaders saw that mass support would give them an edge in war, but for complex internal reasons. Regardless of the reasons, this change rendered them “fitter” than their competitors, and soon Britannia ruled the waves. The Glorious Revolution was like a random mutation that conferred evolutionary advantage on its organism.
The United States adopted the Anglo-Dutch model as we rose to global power. In 1900, 73 percent of American men voted (even though a significant number were effectively blocked by racial discrimination). The popular democracies had dangerous rivals in the form of dictatorships, which used a combination of authentic mass support and terror to mobilize their people. But the democracies prevailed in 1945 and 1989–voting seemed to work better than terror.
Since then, the world’s most powerful militaries have renounced conscription because they are deadlier using highly trained professionals and expensive technology. Governments no longer need large numbers of their own people to buy bonds, because they can borrow from institutions and millionaires around the world. Mass support no longer gives countries a Darwinian edge, and neither the European nor the North American democracies can really claim mass support any more.
That is a sobering thought if you favor popular democracy.
*Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized its Public (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Here is a passage from We make the Road by Walking, a dialogue between the American civil rights leader Myles Horton (who founded the Highlander Folk School) and the Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire. We talked about it today in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies as we discussed when power operates in a hidden way (by affecting people’s beliefs); when intervention is appropriate and helpful; what is “education” versus indoctrination or leadership; and related questions.
Myles [Horton]: We had to find ways to handle our own “weakness of culture.” One of the real problems in the South in the early days of Highlander was segregation, discrimination against people of color, legally and traditionally. One of our principles is that we believe in social equality for all people and no discrimination for any reason—religious, race, sex, or anything else. The social customs were to have segregation. Now how did we deal with that social custom? The way that was used by most people working in what then was called race relations was to talk about it and pray over it and wait for magic changes, I suppose. Some dealt with segregation by having segregated programs, and educating Blacks here and whites there, like it was traditional to do. We chose to deal with it directly, knowing that a discussion and analysis wouldn’t change their minds.
We decided to hold integrated workshops and say nothing about it. We found that if you didn’t talk about it, if you didn’t force people to admit that they were wrong—that’s what you do when you debate and argue with people—you can do it. People didn’t quite understand how it was happening. They just suddenly realized they were eating together and sleeping in the same rooms, and since they were used to doing what they were supposed to do in society, the status quo, they didn’t know how to react negatively to our status quo. We had another status quo at Highlander, so as long as we didn’t talk about it, it was very very little problem. Then later on, participants started talking about it from another point of view, a point of view of experience. They had experienced something new, so they had something positive to build on. When we started talking about it, it wasn’t to say: “Now, look you’ve changed. We were right and you were wrong.” We said: “Now you’ve had an experience here. When you get back you’ll be dealing with people in your unions who haven’t had this experience, and they’re going to know you’ve been to an integrated school. How are you going to explain it to them?” So they started, not ever talking about how they had changed or how they had faced this problem, but with how they could explain to other people. We just skipped the stage of discussion. Of course, it was going on inside all the time, but we didn’t want to put it in terms of an argument or a debate.
One aspect of the writing that fascinates me is the changing definition of “we.” First Horton, a white Southerner, chooses to describe racial segregation as a problem of the community to which he belongs–“our own weakness of culture.” But then the “we” becomes the Highlander Folk School: “our principle … is social equality for all people and no discrimination.” Later, “we” becomes the people who have experienced Highlander’s integrated meetings and will go back to their segregated communities. Even if you assume that “we” should not intervene to change “them,” who counts as “we” is usually open to change.
Another important theme is the avoidance of explicit argumentation. Horton thinks that to argue against segregation would be … what? Merely counter-productive in the particular situation? Poor pedagogy? Or unethical, because it would fail to respect the people who come to Highlander?