how to teach 9/11

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Last year, I wrote a piece for CNN on how to teach 9/11 in public schools. That article will be part of a Twitter chat this evening at 9 pm eastern. The hashtag is #PTchat.

In brief summary, I argued that states should not require the teaching of 9/11, because states should generally refrain from requiring specific historical topics at all. If they go down that path, then everyone who thinks that X is important will demand that X be included in state standards to prove that the government cares. That’s why Illinois requires teachers to discuss Leif Erickson, the Irish Potato Famine, and the importance of trees and birds. Long lists prevent curricular depth and diversity among schools. For instance, in Boston, 8th graders will focus on Reconstruction for several months, in partnership with Facing History. That would be impossible if they had to race to cover 9/11 by way of many other specified topics.

However, 9/11 is an example of a good topic to cover. It has the advantage of being recent, and too often, history class stops at World War II or the 1960s (in part because the accumulated state requirements take too long to cover). Ending more than a generation ago conveys the message that history is over and students have no role in it.

If teachers do elect to discuss 9/11 in social studies class, it should be treated relatively dispassionately, in a scholarly way, and students should be encouraged to consider the related controversies (such as whether the US should have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq as a result). We don’t want to indoctrinate kids with any particular view, but we do want them to learn to deliberate and reason about complex and contentious issues.

One subtle question is what counts as a legitimately open question for discussion, as opposed to a question that should be considered settled in a social studies classroom. (Diana Hess is the expert on this topic.) For instance, slavery is a settled question, but same-sex marriage, even though I strongly favor it, ought to be presented as unresolved. The suggestion that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy should not be treated on a par with the idea that al-Qaeda attacked the US. A student who thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy should be held accountable for providing very rigorous evidence (which I believe will be impossible). Nevertheless, the attack can be understood in several broader political contexts, and students should be encouraged to explore the controversies with due respect for evidence and logic.

threats, negotiations, and deliberation: the case of the Syria crisis

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It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. — Hamilton, The Federalist #1 (first paragraph)

Here are three modes of interaction that apply to the Current Emergency:

1. Making credible threats to deter bad behavior. The Geneva Protocol to the Hague Convention bans the use of chemical weapons. President Obama called that a “red line.” There is a case for drawing red lines and credibly threatening to punish people who cross them. Mark Kleinman lays out an argument for Congressional authorization based on this idea of credible threats. Kleinman doesn’t consider his argument determinative, but Ross Douthat does. Douthat writes that a “no”vote in Congress would “basically finish off the current American president as a credible actor on the world stage” because he could no longer make credible threats.

[Footnote: I wish that no one would say “bombing Syria” or–in Kleinman’s phrase–“an attack on Syria,” because that is a euphemism for “killing human beings resident in Syria.” Syria is an abstraction that cannot die or suffer. As Hannah Arendt and George Orwell taught us, euphemisms are deadly in politics. Maybe we should kill people in Syria, but let’s call that what it is.]

2. Zero-sum political struggle between the President and Congress. That is the implicit model that people imagine when they think that by asking Congress to vote, Obama already weakened himself, and a “no” vote would be a humiliation that would embolden the Republicans to oppose him on all other fronts. “Negotiation” is an appropriate word for nonviolent zero-sum interactions. In this case, the president wants a yes. He and his people are busy negotiating with Members of Congress and will either succeed or fail.

3. An open-ended discussion about what to do. This is the model that people invoke when they say that the President prompted an important national conversation about military intervention by asking Congress to debate a resolution on Syria. If that model applies, the administration must honor the results of the vote, but any result could be called a victory for the process.

My origins are in deliberative democracy, but I try not to be naive about it. Deliberative moments are rare and fragile and depend on cultural norms and formal structures. You can’t deliberate with Assad (which doesn’t mean that you are required to bomb his army). You can’t necessarily deliberate with Congress if they are in a mood to wreck your administration or if the constitutional structure is dysfunctional. It is harder to deliberate if pundits are standing by with political scorecards, ready to call a “no” vote a humiliating defeat that ends your presidency.

On the other hand, the deliberative model has value. We ought to prize what Madison called “the mild voice of reason” whenever it has a chance. If Congress rejects the president’s proposal, that is not actually a defeat for him. We could commend his decision to go to Congress as a courageous and enlightened form of leadership. Certainly, in a family, a neighborhood, or a workplace, admirable leaders often delegate tough decisions to groups and agree to accept the results. We do not call that weakness; it can be wisdom. But it won’t be seen as wise unless someone says it is.

Politics cannot be pure deliberation. However, if we fail to recognize the deliberative moments, they have no chance at all. Regardless of the results, I am preemptively celebrating the president’s decision to go to Congress and I am preemptively denouncing all the reporters and talking heads who will score it as a win or a loss for the White House. Let’s pay attention to whether the bombing would be good for Syria and whether the debate is good for our democracy.

cover blurbs for We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

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“As America has wallowed through an unprecedented decline in civic engagement, Peter Levine has been a lighthouse warning of the dangers of civic alienation. Now, he makes the encouraging case that although we will live for a while with the consequences of past mistakes, the worst of the storm is over. Professor Levine concludes with ten common sense strategies that can energize the people and their governmental institutions while preparing a new generation of Americans with the values and competencies to sustain our reinvigorated democracy.”—Bob Graham, United States Senator (1986-2004)

“Peter Levine is a remarkable asset—a scholar whose research is rigorous and unflinching but whose passion for democracy brims with optimism and engagement. In We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, Levine catalogues all the ways our institutional systems discourage engagement among citizens. But he finds and lifts up a million people doing civic work for a better world, and asks us to join and harness that energy for real change. It’s clear-eyed and a clarion call—and a must read whether you’re a full time advocate or ‘just’ a citizen hoping to make a difference.” —Miles Rapoport, President, Demos

“We know what it means to get better leaders. But how are we supposed to produce better citizens? That’s the question Peter Levine brings into focus. If the examples he describes can spur the one million most active citizens into a movement for civic renewal, we will all benefit from communities that are more deliberative, more collaborative, and more engaged.”—Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

“In an America now rife with inequality, institutionalized corruption, a jobless recovery and more prisoners than any other country, many sense that we stand at a nadir of democracy. With inspiring erudition, Levine points to an unlikely solution: the people themselves. Drawing from experiences in schools from Washington, D.C. to neighborhoods in San Antonio, he develops a pragmatic approach to civic revitalization that builds upon developments in organizing, deliberation, civic education, and public service, but goes far beyond any of these to reach for an ambitious vision of participatory democracy. He asks us to join the emerging civic movement he describes, and we all should.”—Archon Fung, Ford Foundation Professor of Citizenship and Democracy, Harvard Kennedy School

are we seeing the fatal flaw of a presidential constitution?

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This is what dysfunction looks like: On one hand, the president can’t get anything through Congress, which can’t pass its own agenda either, let alone get it by the president’s veto. (See Mike Allen and Jim Vanderhei’s forecast of an ugly fall in the legislature.) On the other hand, as Gordon Silverstein argues, “the Obama administration has steadily, and significantly built up and exploited presidential power.”

The most disturbing diagnosis is that we are now seeing the breakdown that was written into the Constitution but that we had long avoided for contingent reasons. Republicans are acting badly (in my opinion), and the president is pushing some constitutional limits–but the disturbing argument is that both sides are acting just as one would predict given the constitutional structure.

Bruce Ackerman laid it out 13 years ago in “The New Separation of Powers,” Harvard Law Review, 113 (2000), pp. 645-7:

One of our foremost students of comparative government, [Juan] Linz argues that the separation of powers has been one of America’s most dangerous exports, especially south of the border. Generations of Latin liberals have taken Montesquieu’s dicta, together with America’s example, as an inspiration to create constitutional governments that divide lawmaking power between elected presidents and elected congresses — only to see their constitutions exploded by frustrated presidents as they disband intransigent congresses and install themselves as caudillos with the aid of the military and/or extraconstitutional plebiscites. From a comparative point of view, the results are quite stunning. There are about thirty countries, mostly in Latin America, that have adopted American-style systems. All of them, without exception, have succumbed to the Linzian nightmare at one time or another, often repeatedly. Of course, each breakdown comes associated with a million other variables, but as Giovanni Sartori puts it, this dismal record “prompts us to wonder whether their political problem might not be presidentialism itself.”

It is possible, of course, to avoid the Linzian nightmare without re-deeming the Madisonian hope. Rather than all out war, president and house may merely indulge a taste for endless backbiting, mutual recrimination, and partisan deadlock. Worse yet, the contending powers may use the constitutional tools at their disposal to make life miserable for each other: the house will harass the executive, and the president will engage in uni- lateral action whenever he can get away with it. I call this scenario the “crisis in governability.”

Once the crisis begins, it gives rise to a vicious cycle. Presidents break legislative impasses by “solving” pressing problems with unilateral decrees that often go well beyond their formal constitutional authority; rather than protesting, representatives are relieved that they can evade political responsibility for making hard decisions; subsequent presidents use these precedents to expand their decree power further; the emerging practice may even be codified by later constitutional amendments. Increasingly, the house is reduced to a forum for demagogic posturing, while the president makes the tough decisions unilaterally without considering the interests and ideologies represented by the leading political parties in congress. This dismal cycle is already visible in countries like Argentina and Brazil, which have only recently emerged from military dictatorships. A less pathological version is visible in the homeland of presidentialism, the United States.

The logic is straightforward. Sooner or later you end up with a different party in control of each branch. Members of the legislature are not held accountable for the overall state of the country, because voters are more likely to blame (or reward) the president or the legislature as a whole than their own representative. Thus legislators have every incentive to make things go badly for the president until their own party takes the executive branch back. Meanwhile, the president wants to succeed, and getting the support of a backstabbing opposition looks increasingly unattractive, so he acts on his own. The result is a “crisis in governability”–at best.

Why did we not have this crisis before? (After all, we have had a presidential system since 1789.) I think we have had moments of it, but one phenomenon traditionally made it rare. Our parties were ideologically incoherent, because race, economics, and region caused cross-cutting fractures. In particular, the Democrats long accommodated both the most liberal and the most illiberal politicians on questions related to race. The result was a set of minority blocs in Congress: liberal big-city Democrats, Prairie populists, segregationist Dixiecrats, liberal Republicans, libertarian Republicans, etc. A president had the advantage of a prime minister in a parliamentary system: he could build a majority by assembling blocs. For instance, Reagan governed with a coalition of Republicans plus Dixiecrats, sometimes compromising with Tip O’Neill but also driving his own agenda through a willing Congress.

That kind of coalition politics became impossible once the parties aligned neatly into right and left, as they have done for the first time in US history. One party now controls each house at any given moment, and if it is not the same as the president’s party, they will lock horns. Almost nothing has been accomplished in the last three administrations, for good or ill, except wars and bursts of legislation during the narrow windows when the president has had a working majority because of an election or a terror attack: 1993-4, 2001-2, and 2008-9.

Linz found that 30 countries had borrowed our constitutional model, and all 30 faced constitutional meltdown. Are we now joining the trend?

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

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Many people are contributing memories of “Famous Seamus.” I will not claim any great insight, and certainly no important interactions with the poet, although he, his wife, and I did wait on a freezing pitch-black Oxford winter morning for the bus to Heathrow, ca. 1990. This is the wife to whom he texted his very last words: “Noli timere” from the Gospel of Matthew:

And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.

But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. (Mathew 14:26-7)

I don’t think Heaney was identifying himself with Jesus. He was just recalling the Latin for “be not afraid” from his childhood of school and church. But he was an insightful reader of the New Testament, pointing out, for example, that it was Jesus’ bare act of writing that saved the “Woman Taken in Adultery.”

And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst (John 8:8-9)

Heaney said that poetry, like Jesus’ mysterious and quiet writing, “holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Poetry puts us in the “Republic of Conscience.”

People seem to like my discussion questions prompted by Heaney’s magnificent poem of that name. That post has had 1,300 unique visitors, including a burst of readers just lately. I first heard “The Republic of Conscience” in the soft Irish lilt of Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who read it at a conference. It belongs to Amnesty International because Heaney gave AI the copyright. Looking back over my blog, I also find that I’ve reviewed Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, quoted his commentary on terrorism from his Nobel Lecture, quoted him on the liberating power of poetry, and ruminated on what it would really mean to live in a republic of conscience. That is a fair amount to have written about one poet on a civics blog, so I am satisfied I have done my bit to memorialize this great man.