George Packer is a seasoned and judicious political journalist and has offered in the Atlantic magazine this week a very pessimistic portrait of the American scene. He says that we are engaged in an extended civil war in that people have difficulty recognizing themselves as fellow Americans because of their ideologies, emotions and customs. The other side is the enemy. Hillary Clinton’s side thought she was right to think her opponents deplorable and irredeemable while those opponents thought that the coastal elites, as they considered them, condescending and remote from ordinary life, not willing to recognize that so many families of both stripes supported Little League and soccer practice. I observe the truth of this view when I see and hear people who are committed to law and order and think the looting that occurred last summer during the reaction to George Floyd was unconscionable while those who attacked the Capitol in January were people out on a lark and visa versa, the insurrectionists unpardonable and the looters understandable. Moreover, Packer thinks this situation is likely to remain of longstanding, each side more deeply sunk into its own silo of thought, fact and observation, whatever is the order of these three perceptions, and may lead to the disintegration of the American polity and something could set off a spark that not even the military should or could suppress.
I have long been of the opinion that indeed the United States as a nation has long been in a civil war that predated the American Civil War, back to the founding of the republic, and present in our current politics, divided as it has been between the old Confederacy as joined with some midwestern states, such as Kansas on the one hand and the coastal communities (other than the gulf, what with its cities, commerce and manufacturing and its ethnic diversity. My view is a bit more optimistic than Packer’s view in that demographics will come to the rescue. There will be within a generation a nation that is majority minority and that retired and college educated people and middle class women will far outvote that ever declining number of people who support white superiority, anti-vaxers, and creationists. That doesn’t mean that the republic is not within danger during the course of tht generation. People in reaction to the changing demographics may undercut the system of fair elections through letting legislators interfere in the election process and so could make democracy no longer legitimate. The danger is real but if it can be withstood the danger will pass and America will have absorbed the transition so that Black and Brown graduates of Harvard and Stanford will be senators and presidents without being noticed as markers of fresh inclusiveness.
There is another point that Packer contributes to his thoughtful presentation of how things are. He suggests that one antidote of the current national friction is to promote civic education. That way people will learn enough about the constitution and the fundamental ideas of the American union so that they will be vaccinated against its excesses. That is hardly a new idea. Durkheim thought that a nation could learn patriotism and so become willing to risk war to preserve the collective. Dewey thought that natural reasoning as a development of the reasoning anyone can develop from engaging in arts and crafts will result in an individual inspired by reasoning itself and therefore the fulfillment of the American creed which is, after all, to engage in the American Experiment: which is by trial and error and ingenuity to perfect the tool of democracy. Yet, of course, a reference to education as a solution always seems a weak reed whereby to sustain the edifice of a nation. It always lags behind, and character is too difficult to construct, and so is the last thing on the list of programmatic interventions for improving a social situation. But there is something to be said for Packer and let us consider why this aim is both difficult to accomplish but also quite promising.
The first hurdle would be to rearrange educational priorities. Since Sputnik, in 1957, educators have tried toengage students with the “hard” students off math and science, Admiral Hyman Rickover, the developer of the atomic submarine, as letting students get their sex education in the back seat of their cars. The current term is STEM: science, technology, engineering and medicine. There are just so many courses with which to fill a curriculum and so giving place to science means leaving out the humanities and the social studies. What Packer is suggesting is to make sure that students will be exposed to history and government, a major sea change in educational priorities.
Actually, that may be happening. The Borough of Manhattan Community College, which enrolls 25,000 students, has recently introduced a curriculum which requires courses in the liberal arts to take up the first of the two years spent in an Associate of Arts degree. (Their majors are in health related sciences rather than in refrigeration and so the institution is not just a trade school, however worthy it might be to provide solar panel and wind turbine engineering to provide well paying jobs.) Students take forty percent of their curriculum in common core courses including literature and history and some of those devoted to civics education, as would be a course on the three branches of the federal government. But this is not an easy redirection. Many of the courses available in the curriculum are courses on ethnic studies, whether of Black history or Puerto rican or Mexican history. This violates my general educational principle that students should learn things about which they are not familiar rather than things about which they are already comfortable and where they are likely to be exposed to the advocacy of the groups to which they already identify. Now it may be that the curriculum is designed as most are so that there is an easy path for weaker students. Some people will find paths to easy A’s. But there is the deeper question of how probing will be what is accepted as civics education.
If I were still involved in the business and the vocation of inventing new courses that might or might not be approved of by higher ups and so offered in the college curriculum, I would invent a course on civic education that might suit what Packer had in mind. It would not be a course on American Government or one on American History. I would have my students discuss in detail pivotal documents in America that showed the problems of dealing with American hopes and aspirations. I would include the Declaration of Independence which is the philosophical basis of American society and whether the students really believe that in some real way all people are created equal in either a religious or a secular sense. I would go over the Constitution as to whether it was indeed possible to create a balance of forces which would not be open to dictatorship or strongman rule or whether government instead really depended on the good sense and innate moral feelings of the populace to keep the country humane and whether that is itself a goal to which Americans should be inspired. I would add the Gettysburg Address, devoted as it is to an idea of American exceptionalism, and whether that too is an object to which Americans are inspired, given the fact that exceptionalism often seems to mean territorial expansionism. The idea would be that there are weighty concerns on many sides of what are controversial issues rather than documents that have been reduced to platitudes.
I would add another document in the American canon of words and ideas with which all Americans of all political stripes could engage in struggle so that they might better understand their own principles well enough, I would think, not to engage in flabby excess but with a finer appreciation of what is at stake in politics and so be less given over to heat without light. I would include Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, which was a brief document supposedly cobbled together so as to announce something to produce after Churchill and Roosevelt met off of Newfoundland in 1941 in preparation for more coordinated action against the Axis even before the United States entered into war. To the contrary, however, the principles enunciated are very sharply and distinctly defined and offer an American Creed that remains both sure and yet controversial as words to guide Americans, ideas with which students do and ought to struggle and about which they might remain uncertain, however much they have become part of the American Creed that some can legitimately argue should not be there.
The Four Freedoms are the freedom of speech; the freedom of religion; the freedom from want; and the freedom from fear. This seems a hodgepodge of very different levels of ideas, some coming from the Bill of Rights and one, the freedom from fear, occassioned only by the imagery of the nature of Naziism. More thoughtful consideration, however, shows them to be distinct and parallel or even essential principles for a democracy and far grander a hope for Americans than had previously been envisioned. The four of these, the fist two seeming to reaffirm what is already known and the second two specifying new claims of what the government can guarantee for its people, all revivify the American Creed.
The first freedom, that of speech, is properly illustrated by Norman Rockwell, who portrayed it as an urgent and serious citizen declaring what he said in what seems to be a local official meeting. This is not a ranter on a soap box exercising his right to say whatever he wants, however outrageous. Rather, it is the participation of people arranging the results of their elected communities, every citizen making a contribution to what might become the collective wisdom. Not every citizen will engage in that participation, but at least all citizens can participate in Rousseau’s idea of the social contract, which is that elections are occasions whereby people actually participate and ratify the government that presides over them. People, by voting, actually rather than by default or by inference agree to submit to the governmental system. That is very different from thinking. As Lipset thought, that elections were the functional equivalent and therefore alternative to revolution and mass unrest. That too, but the moral aspect of the issue is that the citizen, by voting, is not a subject to the government but its ultimate arbitrator and so makes the country free. Governments freely chosen in elections are, by definition, free, and precluding people from voting, except for special exceptions, such as ex-felons, for example, make the political system less than free.
Will my imagined students in my imagined first year seminar at a community college agree to this controversial principle? People might be leery of wanting really to include people who do not agree with you as being somehow defective and so not to be included in the electorate. Some people are so stupid or badly educated (which usually means less educated than themselves) to qualify as voters. Maybe there should be a test so that people qualify, or even a tax so that people of some standing as financially self-sufficient will engage in the luxury of voting, eliminating the riffraff and those who are marginal criminals. Those devices were used in the past and should perhaps be revived. And, in fact, there are many jurisdictions, such as Florida, Georgia and Texas, which are or are in the process of making voting more difficult , by restricting voting hours, or limiting lock boxes, or allowing state legislatures to overthrow elections. People should be willing to work hard to vote. That is the best way to cull from the herd those who should be eliminated as not worthy of Norman Rockwell's citizens. Lay it out for all sides rather than just dismiss the topic as just one way to give the advantage so that republicans or democrats will likely win the next election. See the issue as principled one.I think that many Democratic students would find they are not all that Democratic and that Republican students believe there ought to be free and fair votes even if the present alignments would chisel at the edges.
The second of the Four Freedoms is freedom of religion, which can be understood in its eighteenth century sense as not about dogma or experience or allegiance but as freedom of conscience, every person entitled to keep one’s privat heart about what they believe and understand as those may be very different from what fellow citizens may think and feel within the confines of their hearts even as they also remain courteous or “tolerant”. As the expression goes, to people who do not share or even know who their minds and spirits are. That makes the issue controversial rather than simply the idea that everyone is entitled to go to the church or synagogue or mosque so as to visibly show their adherence to a commonly held sense of being upright and respectable. Even atheists have their principles, in that view.
There are any number of issues that arise as to when to no longer accept forbearance of the private conscience of others in the name of an overall or collective conscience which will not abide such private belief becoming visible. There was a time sixty years ago when white barbers claimed they did not know how to cut black hair and so should be exempted from the Equal Accommodations Act. The barbers would have been more honest if they just said that it made them cringe to deal with the curly hair of smelly black customers, and so that private conscience should be respected because it went so deep. Nowadays, some bakers refuse to make a wedding cake for same sex couples because they also cringe at that and claim a right of religious exemption from same sex customers, although I don’t see it as in principle different from that of white barbers of a few generations ago, Both of those had religious objection, whether to Blacks or to gays. But put aside the constitutional argument and go to the experience of how to deal with a private conscience. How far would it let you go and really recognize the second freedom? Both gays and straights say that polygamy is a red herring, both committed to the idea that there is a loving relationship between two people that should be recognized as sanctified. But what if there were a significant minority that propounded the idea that people rich enough to support multiple wives (or husbands) would not be exploitive, which was one concern that led to the elimination of polygamy in Utah even though the main reason was probably the abomination of multiple wives on its own sake. Or having sex with animals, those also protected from the collateral issue that the animals would also be inevitably made to suffer. Consider non sexual matters which are so awful that people do not have a freedom of conscience. Reds were so disdained during the McCarthy Era that they were barely recognized as human and the same could be said today on MSNBC about Trumpists: they are either laughable or evil or both. Creationists are also laughable but there is a subculture of them to sustain one another. So maybe the freedom of conscience is not an absolute but only a recognition in one or another cultural period when some people or ideas are regarded as not within the ambit of respect. Cultures evolve from one unrespected position to another and follow its own rules of when it starts and when it ends, not respecting differing views as always being acceptable. Let my students discuss what is now or should be verboten for the imagination or the actions of people, hang conscience.
The last two freedoms are negative in that they are aspirational: matters not yet achieved. The freedom from want is illustrated by Norman Rockwell as a Thanksgiving feast, which seems to me very much off the mark however much the United States was thought of, particularly in the Fifties, as a nation set off from others by its affluence and abundance, the supermarkets filled with the prosperity available to the people. But think of want as meaning something much more general, something more than a war on poverty or a safety net. It means providing to people all the things that are needed so that people will not be driven by privation to have narrow and circumscribed lives, That means they have additional new rights to education and health care so that they can make their own destinies, every man or woman, not just warriors and rich people, or of a particular genius, to make the place in the world that feels comfortable and yet also satisfying. That is what Roosevelt meant by freedom from need. It is very idealistic and well beyond achievement in just a few generations.
And yet the freedom from want is very much today on the Biden agenda in that it will provide enough money for the families of the poor to relieve enough money from the government so as to allow children to thrive because their families can thrive. The solution to money is money, just as was the case when social security, by giving money to the elderly, removed the elderly from being among the poor. Good jobs and education for everyone is the American dream or at least for those who aren’t ingrates. Who is opposed to it even though it may be voted down? The opposition says it is too expensive but does not explain why these are bad things. Will it deprive people of their independence? Is it not right that people should struggle or even that there has to be a working or poverty class so that the rest of the social classes can prosper? Certainly slave owners thought so, but Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy will not say. They are disputatious without saying what is to be disputed, which strikes me to mean that the freedom from want has indeed become part of the American Creed.
The freedom from fear is indeed controversial rather than just opposed. It had in mind what was operating in European countries at the time, when stormtroopers could invade any residence and brutalize or kill them for their beliefs or their ethnicity. Everyone was subjugated to what Graham Greene called a ministry of fear and philosophers discussed how fear itself had become an emotion that came to dominate people. What a way to live. Treated as an emotion rather than as a set of constitutional issues of rights, such as the right to bear arms, it is possible to consider, within the United States, it means to have a spectrum of fear or a sufficient amount of fear so that we can consider the United States as a nation of fear. What breeds our fear? Conservatives will say that the government should be considered an agent of fear rather than just a mismanaged and misbegotten set of programs, as that is indicated by government intrusion into the right of the citizenry to arm themselves, people ever fearful that the feds will swoop down on citizens and take away their guns and overwhelm them with paperwork. People should not be afraid of a new tax statement or how to regulate your business. Liberals, for their part, are fearful of a society where the six shooter alone is the great equalizer because that means children shot down by random and gang related shootings or because the evil that lurks in the heart of men are prone to use guns to do their work. So the question is what kind of fear fills their imaginations and that is not easily resolved, certainly not by a Supreme Court decision. The heart, then, of the four freedoms is about emotions very deep, that plunge into the depths of human nature and the possibility of government, and so a fitting subject for students to ponder whether or not the discussions move forward to resolve our great current civil war.