Author Archives: Peter

on the relationship between ethics and politics

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The basic ethical question is “What should I do?” Three prevalent ways of addressing that question are: 1) to universalize, asking what you’d want anyone to do who was similarly situated, 2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most good for the most people, given your resources and options, or 3) to exhibit and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness. Philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers, but in a vast range of ordinary circumstances, they concur.

The basic political question is “What should we do?” The verb is plural because politics exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-states. To be sure, the ethical question never vanishes, because you can ask whether you should belong to a given group and what you personally should do in relation to it. But the plural question raises a new set of issues that are not directly addressed in individual ethics.

For one thing, we decide what we should do together—not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decision. But that is the wrong choice if the group is misguided, and you retain the options of resistance or exit.

This means that issues of complicity arise in politics that are not salient in individual ethics. A group to which I belong acts in my name. Am I therefore complicit in the harm that it does? On the other hand, how do I know that what I would have decided alone is really better than what the group has decided by discussing?

The group has potential value. It can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal behavior in order to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually unequal. So the question “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” and to act together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain, but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.

Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can be applied in politics, but with important modulations.

First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical norms, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-ideal behavior in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from the logic of hypotheticals.

Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group that maximizes net benefits for the world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price to pay.

Christopher Winship acknowledges that justice demands raising the quality of the schooling available to the least advantaged American students. However, he argues, “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all.* This is an example of how preserving the group (in this case, a Nordic democracy) can do more good than maximizing the benefits of the group’s actions at any given moment.

Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—virtues understood, in an Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions. In other words, virtues are habits that can be deliberately shaped. Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. Developing and maintaining virtues requires different strategies when a group instead of an individual is the thing that is virtuous or vicious.

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That scheme must be complicated in two fundamental ways.

On one hand, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. Anyone who asks of her nation “What should we do?” probably developed her opinions under the influence of that already-existing nation. These are examples of the ontological dependence of individuals on groups.

On the other hand, groups are rather like individuals in their interactions with one another. Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom co-edited a book that explored the close parallels between collective-action problems in small communities and among states. In both contexts, there is typically no single enforcer who can determine the behavior of the parties. There is plenty of room for disaster, yet sometimes the parties work out solutions, from rules for pasturing goats on common land to international arms treaties.

Furthermore, governments do not merely work “within their jurisdictions by imposing authoritative rules on their subjects” (p. 11) Even dictatorships cannot do that, because they cannot police and control their populations without a great deal of voluntary cooperation. A government is not a single actor that stands apart from society and directs it, but rather as a whole set of human actors (politicians, civil servants, front-line workers) who constantly interact with each other and with people outside the government. Not much is accomplished unless they are able to motivate voluntary compliance with agreements.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their Bloomington School see governance as “polycentric.” At the local level, we are constantly interacting in game-like situations with other people who may either cooperate or not. There are islands of command-and-control in which some individuals tell others what to do, but their capacity to control usually depends on norms of willing compliance. Nation-states exist in a global anarchy, without any power above them, but they have managed to work out some arrangements for cooperation. And between nation-states and local communities are complex webs of arrangements involving intermediary organizations such as municipalities and regional governments, parties, interest groups, and media organizations. Cooperation, competition, and mutual destruction are all possible in all of these contexts.

I think that the categories of the ethical and the political constantly recur at all scales, and which one is most salient depends mainly on the perspective that seems most appropriate in the situation, that of an “I” or a “we.”

That said, scale matters, because it influences how we should think about agency and responsibility. We shoulder the most responsibility at the smallest scales, especially when we act alone. Agency is also most tangible at that scale: we can see what we accomplish by ourselves. However, we cannot accomplish much. At very large scales, agency is hard to detect because millions or billions of others are also at work, and it is unreasonable to expect the whole population to shift at anyone’s will. In the middle range (which I think is under-theorized), we can take part in effective action. That is politics. Politics is an ethical matter, in the broadest sense–there is a difference between right and wrong–but the ethical principles appropriate for individual action no longer suffice. A new set of considerations becomes important when we move from I to we.

*Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8.

See also: against methodological individualism; is social science too anthropocentric? and two basic categories of problems.

on the relationship between ethics and politics

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The basic ethical question is “What should I do?” Three prevalent ways of addressing that question are: 1) to universalize, asking what you’d want anyone to do who was similarly situated, 2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most good for the most people, given your resources and options, or 3) to exhibit and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness. Philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers, but in a vast range of ordinary circumstances, they concur.

The basic political question is “What should we do?” The verb is plural because politics exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-states. To be sure, the ethical question never vanishes, because you can ask whether you should belong to a given group and what you personally should do in relation to it. But the plural question raises a new set of issues that are not directly addressed in individual ethics.

For one thing, we decide what we should do together—not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decision. But that is the wrong choice if the group is misguided, and you retain the options of resistance or exit.

This means that issues of complicity arise in politics that are not salient in individual ethics. A group to which I belong acts in my name. Am I therefore complicit in the harm that it does? On the other hand, how do I know that what I would have decided alone is really better than what the group has decided by discussing?

The group has potential value. It can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal behavior in order to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually unequal. So the question “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” and to act together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain, but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.

Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can be applied in politics, but with important modulations.

First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical norms, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-ideal behavior in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from the logic of hypotheticals.

Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group that maximizes net benefits for the world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price to pay.

Christopher Winship acknowledges that justice demands raising the quality of the schooling available to the least advantaged American students. However, he argues, “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all.* This is an example of how preserving the group (in this case, a Nordic democracy) can do more good than maximizing the benefits of the group’s actions at any given moment.

Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—virtues understood, in an Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions. In other words, virtues are habits that can be deliberately shaped. Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. Developing and maintaining virtues requires different strategies when a group instead of an individual is the thing that is virtuous or vicious.

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That scheme must be complicated in two fundamental ways.

On one hand, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. Anyone who asks of her nation “What should we do?” probably developed her opinions under the influence of that already-existing nation. These are examples of the ontological dependence of individuals on groups.

On the other hand, groups are rather like individuals in their interactions with one another. Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom co-edited a book that explored the close parallels between collective-action problems in small communities and among states. In both contexts, there is typically no single enforcer who can determine the behavior of the parties. There is plenty of room for disaster, yet sometimes the parties work out solutions, from rules for pasturing goats on common land to international arms treaties.

Furthermore, governments do not merely work “within their jurisdictions by imposing authoritative rules on their subjects” (p. 11) Even dictatorships cannot do that, because they cannot police and control their populations without a great deal of voluntary cooperation. A government is not a single actor that stands apart from society and directs it, but rather as a whole set of human actors (politicians, civil servants, front-line workers) who constantly interact with each other and with people outside the government. Not much is accomplished unless they are able to motivate voluntary compliance with agreements.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their Bloomington School see governance as “polycentric.” At the local level, we are constantly interacting in game-like situations with other people who may either cooperate or not. There are islands of command-and-control in which some individuals tell others what to do, but their capacity to control usually depends on norms of willing compliance. Nation-states exist in a global anarchy, without any power above them, but they have managed to work out some arrangements for cooperation. And between nation-states and local communities are complex webs of arrangements involving intermediary organizations such as municipalities and regional governments, parties, interest groups, and media organizations. Cooperation, competition, and mutual destruction are all possible in all of these contexts.

I think that the categories of the ethical and the political constantly recur at all scales, and which one is most salient depends mainly on the perspective that seems most appropriate in the situation, that of an “I” or a “we.”

That said, scale matters, because it influences how we should think about agency and responsibility. We shoulder the most responsibility at the smallest scales, especially when we act alone. Agency is also most tangible at that scale: we can see what we accomplish by ourselves. However, we cannot accomplish much. At very large scales, agency is hard to detect because millions or billions of others are also at work, and it is unreasonable to expect the whole population to shift at anyone’s will. In the middle range (which I think is under-theorized), we can take part in effective action. That is politics. Politics is an ethical matter, in the broadest sense–there is a difference between right and wrong–but the ethical principles appropriate for individual action no longer suffice. A new set of considerations becomes important when we move from I to we.

*Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8.

See also: against methodological individualism; is social science too anthropocentric? and two basic categories of problems.

Apply for the Ninth Annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies

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The ninth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will take place from June 12 to June 22, 2017 at Tufts University. It will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar that brings together faculty, advanced graduate students, and practitioners from many countries and diverse fields of study.

Organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Tisch College and Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland, the Summer Institute will engage participants in challenging discussions of such topics as:

  • What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
  • What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
  • What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
  • What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

This is the syllabus for the eighth annual seminar (in 2016). The 2017 syllabus will be modified but will largely follow this outline.

You can read more about the motivation for the Institute in the “Framing Statement” by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania:

Practicalities

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

To apply: please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 17, 2017. You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply.

The seminar will be followed (from June 22, evening, until June 24) by a public conference–”Frontiers of Democracy 2017″–in downtown Boston. Participants in the institute are expected to stay for the public conference. See information on the conference here. That page also explains how you can propose a concurrent session for the 2017 conference, whether or not you wish to apply for the Summer Institute.

the prophetic mode in the Civil Rights Movement and in everyday politics

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On Martin Luther King Day, Kenyatta R. Gilbert published an explanatory article in The Conversation about King’s “prophetic vision.” Gilbert traced King’s rhetorical mode to three “particularly inventive” Black preachers active during the Great Migration: “Baptist pastor Adam C. Powell Sr., the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) pastor Florence S. Randolph and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop Reverdy C. Ransom.” All three were political reformers and community leaders who echoed the Hebrew prophets (as well as the Gospels) in their sermons.

If you’ve made a careful study of King’s own writing and speaking, you will recognize constant evocations of the Biblical prophets. Just for instance, in the “I Have a Dream Speech,” King quotes Amos 5:24 (“But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”) and Isaiah 40:4 (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”).

In fact, it can be a bit of cliché to call King and other Civil Rights Leaders “prophetic.” That combination of words yields 649,000 hits on Google right now. So it’s worth looking a bit closer at the texts of the nineteen biblical books traditionally called Nevi’im, prophecies, to see what we mean when we associate them with the great Civil Rights leaders.

These are heterogeneous texts, containing biographical information, autobiographical passages, dramatic narratives (like Jonah in the whale), reports of the Lord’s words, dialogues between the prophet and the Lord, dreams, acts of these wise men and women, sermons, predictions, and much poetry.

Although this whole body of text enriched King’s speech and thought, I think that we have something more specific in mind when we use the word “prophetic” for his words.

A prophesy, in the narrower sense, often begins with a moral condemnation of the present, often directed explicitly at the most powerful people: the kings, priests, and rich men:

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. (Amos 5:11-12)

The prophesy may forecast the punishment and fall of these wicked men. “Woe unto you,” says the Lord, through Amos, six verses later. A classic prophesy then predicts a better time, a time of justice. This prediction is not empirical, based on continuing the current trends into the future. Rather, it is moral and hortatory. If the people begin to act righteously, then God will help them make the world better. “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15).

A Hebrew prophet derives his authority from God’s interactions with him–or her, since Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Hannah, Avigail, Huldah, and Esther are traditionally named prophets along with the bearded men. In contrast, a modern political prophet should be cautious about claiming direct divine inspiration. Instead, a modern prophet invites the audience to consider a moral description of the present. If they agree, and they behave as recommended, then the prophesy may become true as a result of their coordinated action.

So understood, prophesies can be rather humdrum. You are using the prophetic mode if you stand up at a PTA meeting and say, “The playground is a mess. If we all get together and clean it up this Saturday, the kids will be safer and happier next week.” The divine intervention and high flown language of the King James Version are missing, but you are still submitting a moral condemnation of the present, an exhortation to action, and a vision of the better world that will result.

The problem is that some prophesies are good, and some are bad. The bad ones either describe a morally worse world or demand unproductive actions. A certain President-Elect, for example, promises to make America great again in ways that I consider both unlikely and undesirable. We need methods for distinguishing good prophesies from bad ones. And two dominant modes of thought are unhelpful.

The scientific (and social-scientific) mode is unhelpful because it tries to separate empirical descriptions from moral judgments. Moral judgment is presented as mere opinion, and anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. This mode is also unhelpful because it predicts the future based on data from the past. We can make the future different from the past, but only if we refuse to assume that observed patterns must hold.

The professional mode used in bureaucracies (whether governmental or corporate) is also unhelpful because it is limited to means/ends reasoning. It says: If you want this to happen, you may (or should) do that. But what should you want to happen?

The scientific mode fits neatly together with the professional/bureaucratic mode when institutions use social science to find efficient means to their fixed ends.

The prophetic mode challenges these ways of thinking. A prophetic voice claims that some things really are bad (not merely in the prophet’s opinion), that a better future is possible, and that we can and must create that future by changing how we act. Prophesies are not hypotheses that are either true or false. They are exhortations that we can make true by how we react to them. They should be rooted in the experience of the speaker, the experiences of the audience, and a deeper tradition that preserves many others’ experiences, such as the Biblical background on which King drew so regularly.

King and his fellow African American Christian Civil Rights leaders exemplified prophetic thought. Their texts–together with the ways they were received and used–are models of a form of reasoning that is essential to citizenship in all times and places. Theirs is a gift that we must preserve and pass on.

See also: “an exercise for Martin Luther King Day,” “a different Shakespeare from the one I love” (with a excursus on the King James Version in Black political rhetoric),”the Nehemiah story,” and “homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School” (on “natality” as human freedom from the past).

the hollowing out of US democracy

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How could a celebrity with no governing experience and no grassroots infrastructure alienate and offend an outright majority of Americans, adopt positions far from the mainstream, and yet become our president?* I argue that the underlying reason is a hollowed-out democracy in which many citizens no longer expect to be represented by accountable organizations and are no longer invited to share in governing. A celebrity who offers symbolic politics has the number of followers and the level of attention that professional politicians strive to buy with their cash. In an environment of isolated citizens, he wins.

We still have plenty of voluntary associations and networks concerned with politics. But politics is a minority taste, so these groups draw a small proportion of the population. And because most of them attract members by offering a political message or agenda, they produce ideologically homogeneous groups.

We also still have very large numbers of professional advocacy organizations, but many of them are accountable to donors rather than members, and their capacity and vision come from their highly-skilled professional staff, not from citizens.

We also have some large movements that look accountable but aren’t. The Koch Brothers network, for example, employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide, more than the Republican Party. The Koch Brothers own it.

What we lack now are the kinds of organizations that I believe have been core to US civil society since the era of de Tocqueville. They offer benefits other than politics to attract members. They draw a range of people–not representative samples of the US population, but diverse groups. They give their members reasons to think politically and aggregate their political power. They create pathways to political leadership for those who become most interested. And they depend on their members’ support for survival.

In short, they offer what I’d call SPUD–Scale, Pluralism, Unity, Depth–which is the magic recipe for civic engagement.

Four traditional types of organizations that offered SPUD were unions, political parties dependent on local voluntary labor, religious congregations, and metropolitan daily newspapers. All four were imperfect, but each was much better than nothing. And they are all in bad shape today.

I’ve previously shown that newspapers have lost readership precipitously and parties have become loose networks of entrepreneurial politicians and donors instead of actual organizations. Unions and religious congregations have also shrunk. To illustrate those two trends, here is a new graph that shows the rates of union membership and weekly religious attendance. The top line is the proportion of adult Americans who either attend weekly services or belong to a union, or both. That proportion has dropped by twenty points, from a majority of 54.6 percent in 1970 to a minority of 34.3 percent in 2012. (By the way, I am skeptical that union membership really rose in 2012; I suspect that’s random noise.) I would look no further than this 20-point drop for the underlying conditions that yielded The Donald.

*The echo of Hamilton was inadvertent but seemed apt once I noticed it.

Facts/Values/Strategies: a mini-conference at Tufts’ University’s Tisch College of Civic Life

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Current global crises of democracy raise fundamental questions about how citizens can be responsible and effective actors, whether they are combating racism in the United States, protecting human rights in the Middle East, or addressing climate change. If “citizens” are people who strive to leave their communities greater and more beautiful (as in the Athenian citizen’s oath), then their thinking must combine facts, values, and strategies, because all three must influence any wise decision. Mainstream scholarship distinguishes facts, values, and strategies, assigning them to different branches of the academy. Many critics have noted the philosophical shortcomings of the fact/value distinction, but citizens need accounts of how facts, values, and strategies can be recombined, both in theory and in practice. John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Mahatma Gandhi, Jürgen Habermas, Amartya Sen—and many other theorists of citizenship—have offered such accounts.

Actual civic movements also combine facts, values, and strategies in distinctive ways. For instance, the American Civil Rights Movement used the language of prophesy, and Second Wave Feminism strategically advocated new ways of knowing.

These papers propose theoretical, methodological, historical, and empirical responses and case-studies related to the question: how should citizens put facts, values, and strategies together?

Papers

  • “Public Entrepreneurship, Civic Competence, and Voluntary Association: Self-Governance Through the Ostroms’ Political Economy Lenses” — Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University
  • “Giving Birth in the Public Square: Dialogue as a Maieutic Practice” — Lauren Swayne Barthold, University of Connecticut
  • “William James’s Psychology of Philosophizing: Selective Attention, Intellectual Diversity, and the Sentiments in Our Rationalities” — Paul Croce, Stetson University
  • “The Praxis of Amartya Sen and the Promotion of Democratic Capability” — Anthony DeCesare, St. Louis University
  • “Social Media, Dismantling Racism and Mystical Knowing: What White Catholics are Learning from #BlackLivesMatter” — Mary E. Hess, University of Toronto
  • “Institutions, Capabilities, Citizens” — James Johnson, University of Rochester, and Susan Orr, SUNY College at Brockport
  • “Forgiveness After Charleston: The Ethics of an Unlikely Act” — Larry M. Jorgensen, Skidmore College
  • “Facts, Values, and Democracy Worth Wanting: Public Deliberation in the Era of Trump” — David Eric Meens, University of Colorado Boulder
  • “When Democracy Had Roots and Airwaves: Putting Facts, Values, and Strategies Together in Rural America” — Timothy J. Shaffer, Kansas State University
  • “A Civic Account of Justice” — Karol Edward So?tan, University of Maryland

Paper titles are preliminary

Conference chair: Peter Levine, Tisch College, Tufts University.
Good Society editor: Trygve Throntveit, University of Minnesota

review article: Public-Spirited Citizenship: Leadership and Good Government in the United States by Ralph Ketcham

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[From Political Science Quarterly, vol. 131, no. 4, winter 2016-17, pp. 896-7. Text as submitted. The definitive version is available at www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/polq. ]

Ralph Ketcham is a distinguished American political historian and biographer, a renowned educator, and an avid student of political thought from classical to current times. In Public-Spirited Citizenship, the most recent of more than a dozen books, he offers a sweeping narrative about both political science and American politics from the founding era to the present, with a valuable excursion into 20th century East Asia.

His story begins with the civic republican tradition that defined the public good as the purpose of politics, civic virtue as the foundation both of a good society and a worthy life, statecraft as leadership and institutional design to encourage civic virtue and promote the public good, and education as the development of good character along with the skills and knowledge needed for civic life. Ketcham emphasizes that the founders of the American republic were steeped in this tradition.

Civic republicanism never vanished, according to Ketcham’s account, but it suffered a series of blows in the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea of a public good began to seem unscientific and naïve as theories of human nature emerged that emphasized self-interest and irrationality. Education was increasingly defined as the imparting of information and scientific insights about the way things really worked, not moral development or reflection on the public good. Public institutions, too, shifted from deliberative forums to sites of negotiation among organized interests.

The American Political Science Association played a role in that story. Starting in the early 1900s, leading American political scientists decried education that took the form of “sermonizing and patriotic expostulation” (p. 105). The only alternative they recognized was a rigorous, detached, disenchanted study of politics as it was. In keeping with that goal, they advocated specialization and expertise. Political science meant training for professors and technocrats in basically the current system.

Good citizens, Ketcham argues, will not be “’experts’ in the details of government; rather, they must have a disinterested perspective and must ask the proper public question, ‘What is good for the polity as a whole?’ and not [a] corrupt private one” (pp. 33-34). That stance is best cultivated, Ketcham argues, by a broad liberal education that is “profound,” “integrated,” and “radical.” But all those ideals seem naïve to positivist social scientists, who doubt there is anything good for the polity (apart from the aggregation of private interests) and who favor education that is specialized empirical training for the status quo.

The broad outlines of this narrative are not unique to Ketcham, but he has a sharp eye for overlooked aphorisms, incidents, and characters. This book is a treasury of quotations from proponents of civic republicanism and positivism alike. It is also a pageant of character sketches—from Benjamin Franklin in dialogue with Mohawk King Hendricks about good government in 1754, to Fukuzawa Yukichi reflecting on how republican norms might merge with Confucian ideals in Meiji Japan, to Ketcham’s own colleagues at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who are giving renewed attention to the ideal of “citizenship” that is in their institution’s name.

I concur with the whole story, but I would add that an 18th century account of the public good and civic virtue can’t directly apply today, not only because we must draw from more diverse sources, but also because we have learned hard truths from history, the natural and social sciences, the terrible experiences of the past century—in a word, from modernity. The decline of civic education and civic culture reflects not only a loss of moral commitment but also a profound intellectual challenge that confronts public-spirited citizens today.

responding to the deep story of Trump voters

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(Washington, DC) This is Arlie Russell Hochschild’s now-famous “deep story” of Louisiana Tea Party supporters, their “account of life as it feels to them.” It’s become famous because it’s also the “deep story” of at least some Trump voters:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

One response to anyone who holds this story is basically: Drop it. The people you believe have moved ahead of you on line are actually still behind, in the sense that they still face unfair disadvantages. For example, an applicant with an identical resume is much less likely to receive a job interview if his name sounds African American rather than White. (My own team is replicating this finding now, as part of a larger study to be released later.) To the extent that some people are moving forward on line, it’s because the most blatant inequalities are being to some extent remedied.

This is true, but I don’t believe it will work politically. I can’t think of any group in history that, upon being informed of its unfair advantages, has responded by yielding them willingly.* The standard response to being told you are privileged is to realize that you have something to defend. And I think that’s an especially likely response if you actually face hardships and disadvantages–which is true of White working-class rural Louisianans.

Waiting in line is a perfect example of a zero-sum situation. Literally, to move one space forward in a queue is to move everyone else one space back. As long as people see themselves in zero-sum relations with others, politics will be ugly. Of course, people don’t have to see the competition in racial terms. If, for instance, White rural Louisianans saw themselves as part of the same group as African-American rural Louisianans, they wouldn’t count successful Black people as winning against them. As Jamelle Bouie wrote yesterday, “many white Americans hold (and have held) a zero-sum view of politics, where gains and benefits for nonwhites are necessarily an imposition on their status.” He adds that how to “fix this white voter problem … is a separate and difficult question.” Telling the people whom Hochschild interviewed that they are racists does not seem to me a likely solution (nor does Bouie suggest it).

A different approach is to attack the zero-sum framing of the situation. People should be asking why anyone must wait so long for the American Dream. White Americans have voted for progressive policies when they have come to think that maybe everyone could achieve a good, secure, prosperous life. The underlying rules could be changed so that everyone wins.

The immediate barrier to that kind of solution is distrust in government. If you don’t believe that government can be trusted to improve the social contract, then the existing contract may seem inevitable. Then your struggle with other people is zero-sum.

And people no longer trust the government much …

Perhaps the most common way to change this trend is to try to “sell” people on the government again– to persuade them that it offers solutions by outlining the policies that it can achieve and by using more effective rhetoric to defend it as an institution.

I dissent in part. People should not trust governments. As Jean Cohen writes, “One can only trust people, because only people can fulfill obligations.” Trust in the US government, as displayed by the American public ca. 1958, was naive. It often involved viewing presidents and other national leaders as friendly personalities, which reflected poor judgment. When it comes to governments and other large institutions, we ought to use one of these substitutes for trust:

  1. A sober assessment that the incentives are aligned to make the people who run the government also look out for our interests. I don’t think rural White Louisianans have much reason to make that assessment, even though, in my view, they would have been much better off with Clinton than with Trump.
  2. Personal connections to people who work in or closely with government. Because politics and government service are now the preserves of white-collar professionals, working-class people have few such connections. Consider, for example, the almost total absence of actual, current working-class people at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
  3. Intermediary organizations that tangibly answer to us and (in turn) influence governments. Unions [and grassroots-based political parties] were prime examples, but they are shattered.

I’d support anything that makes White Americans less likely to see zero-sum situations in racial terms. But I believe it’s most promising to reduce the zero-sum situation more generally. Improving the social contract requires large institutions. Governments are strong candidates, although unions, co-ops, and other nongovernmental structures can be effective as well. Any large institution must, in turn, have direct, human connections to the people whose support it seeks. That means that even if the government is our main tool for social change, we need more than the state by itself; it must come with a panoply of social movements and organizations that link people to it. The hollowing out of these movements and organizations is thus at the root of our problems.

See also why the white working class must organize; to beat Trump, invest in organizing; building grassroots power in and beyond the election.

*Partial exception: the French nobility voted on August 4, 1789 to abolish the privileges of feudalism, spending all night eliminating one major privilege at a time by majority vote. It was a heady spectacle, but many of them lost their actual heads in 1793-4. Besides, they were voting for a new regime that promised all kinds of glories, not just moving themselves down the social hierarchy.

the Democrats and religious Americans

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In The Atlantic just before the New Year, Michael Wear–an evangelical who helped Barack Obama with “faith outreach”–offered a critical assessment of the Democrats’ relationships with Evangelicals, 81% of whom supported Trump in 2016. Wear argued that it is a civic obligation to strive to engage all sectors of the society, and it’s a political necessity to engage religious Christians, given their large numbers. Wear wouldn’t expect Democrats to compromise on the substance of abortion, but he suggested that they could acknowledge the moral motivations of abortion’s opponents and look for common ground where it exists. He also decried a certain tone-deafness or ignorance about religious values and traditions, which sometimes verges implicitly on contempt. For instance:

[Wear] once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”

Wear’s remarks are a bit anecdotal and could give a misleading overall impression. However, in The New Republic, Sarah Jones responded in a way that I thought vindicated Wear’s point. She argued that the Democrats should “frame abortion access as a moral good”; women suffer from any wavering on that topic. (Note that an outright majority of women have been against abortion in several recent years.) She added, “The country is becoming increasingly secular and increasingly liberal on issues like marriage equality. The Democratic party won’t win by catering to social conservatives, and it shouldn’t try.”

Leaving aside Wear’s point that national leaders should always try to engage any significant group, Jones is also wrong empirically. It’s true that the proportion of Americans who do not believe in God has risen–to 10% in 2016. Still, 89% say they believe in God, 64% believe in Hell, 54% believe that “religion can answer all or most of today’s problems,” 53% say that religion is very important in their own lives, and 55% claim to belong to a church or synagogue. The secularization trend is subtle and modest. I also fail to see a trend in the pro-choice direction:

Ed Kilgore offers a more interesting response to the Wear interview. He notes that whenever Democrats become concerned about losing “religious” voters, the conversation turns to White Evangelicals (see the Wear interview) or to “cultural conservatives” (as in Jones’ reply), with sometimes a passing reference to Jews. The discussion overlooks Catholics of all backgrounds, Protestants of color, Mainline Protestants (who number 36 million, mostly Whites), Muslims, Hindus, and other religious minorities.

Many of these constituencies see politics through religious lenses, at least in part. They are prone to be alienated by an aggressive secularist agenda, and they are likely to see issues like abortion as morally complicated, wherever they land. Often enough they vote for reasons other than religious ones. For instance, a majority of Mainline Protestants supported Trump, which I would attribute mainly to their race and class rather than their faith. Still, there are powerful faith-based reasons that they might oppose not only Trump but also Paul Ryan’s economics. Meanwhile, religious congregations remain sources of social capital and bottom-up political power that progressives ignore at their peril.

See also the political advantages of organized religion.

why the global turn to authoritarian ethnonationalism?

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It seems impossible to explain why Donald Trump won the 2016 election. For one thing, he lost the popular vote. Besides, a single election is an “n” of one with numerous contingent circumstances, in this case including the FBI’s last-minute intervention, Hillary Clinton’s gender, and the behavior of cable news. We often think of a cause as something that would yield a different result if it were changed. In this case, changing any of a dozen or more factors might have put Clinton in the White House.

More valuable is to consider why authoritarian, illiberal nationalists either dominate or (like Trump) have narrowly missed winning majorities in many countries: at least in Austria, China, Hungary, India, Israel, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States–with England and France also looking at risk. Across the 34 OECD countries, true right-wing parties still capture only about 8 percent of total popular support, but that’s steadily up from five percent in the 1970s. This graph from Funke, Moritz & Schularick shows the recent shift in nine major European nations.

Vote Share for the Far Right Since 2004

At the global level, the “n” is much greater than one, and we can rule out certain explanations for the trends. For instance, in other counties, an authoritarian leader hasn’t replaced a person of color or defeated a female opponent.

I cannot estimate the relative impact of the following factors, but they seem plausible to me across the whole range of cases:

Oligarchy: Many of the authoritarian leaders are billionaires or closely associated with billionaires. Their supporters are personally wealthy individuals rather than multinational public companies, which are more comfortable with predictable centrists like Hillary Clinton. A billionaire can know political leaders personally, can trade wealth for influence, and can profit from disruptions in the larger economy. Several of the key billionaires are media personalities. I think some of them develop authoritarian expectations by being the barons of large private enterprises, within which their word is law. Billionaires have almost tripled their share of global GDP since 1996, and their inflation-adjusted total assets have risen by 7.5% annually over those two decades. They represent a global force that was absent in 1996.

A gap in the ideological landscape: For this purpose, let’s categorize ideologies along two dimensions. They are either pro-state or anti-state/pro-market. And they either favor a narrowly defined ethnocultural group or they support diversity and globalism. I’ll call the latter spectrum closed versus open.

Since the 1950s, the dominant parties and movements in the wealthy democracies were all fairly open, at least in principle; the debate was about how much the state should intervene. We often thought of the US ideological spectrum as one-dimensional, from pro-state to pro-market, with everyone giving lip-service to openness. Some conservatives claimed to be pro-market and nationalist, but it’s not clear that that was a coherent position. The whole structure ignored the possibility of a pro-state, explicitly closed position. Like entrepreneurs who have discovered a market niche, authoritarian nationalists have filled the corner previously occupied by fascism. To be sure, Trump may govern like a market libertarian if he turns things over to Paul Ryan and contents himself with symbolic nationalism, but that’s not what he promised to do.

You would think that nationalist authoritarians wouldn’t cooperate much across international borders, because they are xenophobic. But there was a short-lived Fascist International in the 1930s, and we definitely see some coordination today.

Al Qaeda/ISIS: Before explaining why I think these terrorist organizations share causal responsibility for the global turn to authoritarianism, I want to stipulate that we are morally responsible for how we have responded to them. We did not have to invade Iraq, pass the Patriot Act, or turn Guantanamo into a prison. Those stupid and harmful acts are our responsibility as American citizens. Still, it seems both naive and misleading to omit the intentional acts of Al Qaeda and ISIS from our causal theory. They sought to provoke antidemocratic reactions, and they succeeded. An admired friend of mine recently summarized her qualitative research with Muslim teenagers in suburban New Jersey over the past decade, explaining that they have moved from a comfortable feeling of being Americans to a sense of vulnerability and alienation. This is an injustice that is up to remedy. But it struck me as a mistake not even to mention Al Qaeda as a major cause of the change. Osama bin Laden got what he wanted when he sent those planes into the Trade Towers. Although the US leadership of 2001 (including H. Clinton) proved monumentally stupid, Al Qaeda found a vulnerability that would have been hard to defend.

The 2007-8 financial crisis: Funke, Moritz & Schularick show pretty compellingly that voters shift to the far right after financial crises. This has been a pattern across many nations for at least a century. The 2007-8 collapse was an especially terrible one. It hit the advanced economies particularly hard, thus giving their voters a sense that they were losing comparative advantage as well as absolute wealth. It was followed by fiscal austerity that punished ordinary people, while no elites were held accountable for the trillions of dollars of waste and disruption. My sense is that Barack Obama got a pass from a majority of Americans because he wasn’t responsible at the time of the crisis, and he has been seen as laboring to repair the damage. But Hillary Clinton was part of the governing elite that was on duty when the fateful decisions were made.

Cultural backlash: Pippa Norris proposes that cultural liberalization (marriage equality, improving sexual equality, growing racial diversity, etc.). have produced a backlash rooted in the White working class of OECD countries. She clearly favors the trend of cultural liberalization and abhors the backlash, but a different take is Nancy Fraser‘s: people are rightly rejecting a form of “progressive neoliberalism” that unites “new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights)” with the cultural agendas of “high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood).” That is the coalition that delivers diversity in schools and workplaces along with “the weakening of unions, the decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the two–earner family in place of the defunct family wage.”

A hollowing out of democracy: People have died or placed themselves in terrible danger in the name of democracy and liberal values, whether on Omaha Beach or the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But an inspiring vision of democracy means more than the right to choose among professional politicians every few years. Even a call for equality isn’t inspiring enough, because how much should each of us care whether our share of power is as great as everyone else’s? Democracy must mean working together to create a better world.

Instead, the US rightwing has abandoned the sometimes inspiring pro-democratic rhetoric of Ronald Reagan to claim that we are not a democracy at all, but a republic. Similar rhetorical shifts away from democracy are evident in other countries as well. Meanwhile, the technocratic center presents democracy as a system of regular elections along with transparent information. Even defenders of the EU admit that it demonstrates a severe “democracy deficit.” Democratically governed associations, such as unions and congregationalist churches, are in decline. And several strands of the left are reflexively critical of any pro-democratic project that emerges in the US or elsewhere in the wealthy global North. People seem increasingly sophisticated about democracy’s drawbacks (misinformation, majority tyranny, cultural bias, etc.) and decreasingly inspired by its promise. That leaves the field open for explicitly illiberal and antidemocratic movements.