Author Archives: Peter

should all institutions be democratic?

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Many of my friends and colleagues believe that the more democratic any institution is, the better. I take a more pluralist position: democratic values are worthy but they are inconsistent with other values, and what we want is a mix of institutional types.

You can’t enter this debate without having a definition of “democracy” in mind. I would reserve the word for any system that defines a group of people (the demos) and empowers them all to rule (the “-cracy” part, from kratein) with roughly equal influence or authority over the outcomes.

Voting is neither necessary nor sufficient for democracy. It isn’t necessary because other devices, such as lotteries, common property regimes, and consensus decisions, can also afford everyone equal influence. And it isn’t sufficient because a vote can’t achieve its purported purpose without various supports. These supports include at least freedom of speech and assembly and also (I would assert) universal education, an actual press that performs its role well, an independent judiciary, habits of deliberation, and enough social equality that no caste, class, race, or gender is able to dominate the discussion because of its perceived superiority. Social equality may, in turn, require at least a limited degree of economic equality. These conditions are highly debatable, but it’s pretty clear that at least some of them are necessary.

Democracy embodies at least two valid principles: 1) equal respect for the dignity of all people, and 2) a general presumption that decisions made by the demos will be wiser, or more just, or at least less corrupt and self-serving than decisions made in other ways. These two democratic principles are always worth considering, whether you are involved with a firm, a neighborhood, a church, a university, a family, or a scientific community.

But they are not the only valid principles. You should also consider: liberty, solidarity, excellence of various kinds, truth, diversity, peace, rule of law (which implies stability and predictability), psychological and material wellbeing, intimacy and privacy, efficiency, the interests of future generations and animals, and–if you are so oriented–God.

Alas, these various principles do not fit neatly together but often trade off. For instance, empowered groups can easily suppress individual liberty or ignore the rule of law. So how should we decide how to make the tradeoffs? A superficially appealing answer is: “Let’s decide democratically.” But democratic processes are biased in favor of the democratic principles over the other ones. Likewise, market processes are biased in favor of efficiency and liberty; scientific processes privilege truth and certain kinds of excellence; legal processes favor rule of law.

The cautious, pragmatic solution is pluralism. Let there be powerful democratic institutions and also intentionally undemocratic ones, where the latter category includes physics departments, for-profit startups, hierarchical churches, anarchistic commons, and many more. Assign decisions about certain broad questions of distributive justice to democratic institutions. But limit the scope of democratic decisions with a strongly liberal constitution that defends pluralism.

This is very far from an original or idiosyncratic position, but it may be useful as a dissent from the “strong democracy” thesis that is pervasive in some circles I move in. It also suggests a more capacious definition of “the civic” or “civic engagement.” I use these phrases to mean not democratic participation but rather creative love for the world. It is a secondary question whether the best way to improve the world (in a given situation) is democratic. Sometimes it is, but definitely not always.

If this statement seems lukewarm about democratic reform, it shouldn’t. The institutions that make decisions about broad questions of distributive justice are badly undemocratic, and changing that situation is a fundamental task of our time. I just wouldn’t interpret it to mean that all organizations must become democratic, because if they did, I would want to leave them.

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what defines an organization? the case of the global sangha

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(National Airport) What defines an “organization”? Normally, I would cite some kind of boundary around the people who belong to the group, plus some kind of system for making decisions that affect the whole. The boundaries can be temporary or permeable, and the decisions can be partial or occasional, but these seem to be definitive features.

It’s interesting to think about the global community of Buddhist monks, the sangha. According to the received story, The Buddha himself ordained the first monks and nuns and gave them the authority to ordain others. According to this account, today’s Buddhist monastics are descendants of a continuous series of ordinations that go back to the founding; this makes them the sangha. There are strict criteria for membership, and new monks and nuns take detailed vows. Even if the lineage of ordinations doesn’t really extend from each of today’s monastics all the way back to The Buddha, the lines extend a long way through history, and the story makes a plausible hypothetical.

The sangha is clearly a network, because the ties of ordination link everyone. Is it also an organization? It has a boundary (with monks/nuns on the inside and laypeople without). The ordination criteria and vows are tools for constraining the monastics’ behavior and influencing results. A monk can be expelled by his own abbot. Because there is no leader, steering committee, or electorate, it is hard to change the direction of the sangha as a whole (as opposed to the policies of any given monastery). But the practices of the whole sangha can evolve as a result of the members’ aggregate choices. Practices could shift quickly if a change that was compatible with the traditional vows spread fast. Is that enough to make the sangha an organization?

Incidentally, priests in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox churches all claim a lineage of ordinations all the way back to Jesus and St. Peter—the Apostolic Succession. So do some Lutherans, Methodists, and Moravians. If the global Buddhist sangha is an organization, then all of these churches also form one organization that just happens to be internally divided today. I think that is more or less the Anglican view of the situation, but not the Roman Catholic one; and the other denominations are mixed on the issue. This raises the question of whether someone can be a member of a given organization and yet deny it.

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what will Snapchat do to politics?

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Joanthan Mahler reports that “Snapchat, America’s fastest-growing smartphone app, [has] hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division.” Snapchat has more than 1oo million users, including many Americans between the ages of 18 and 31. Mahler quotes President Obama’s former senior strategist Dan Pfeiffer: “There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don’t engage with traditional news.” By entering the political news business, Pfeiffer thinks, “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.”

Snapchat’s potential to increase young adults’ involvement with politics is one reason that the news about Peter Hamby is interesting. The other reason is an apparent contradiction. Snapchat is famous for extreme brevity. A “Snap” lasts on your phone or other device for no longer than 10 seconds. Hamby, as Mahler notes, wrote a report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about–as it turns out–the damage that Twitter’s brevity and speed has done to American politics. I quote from the final section of the report:

No one is complaining about the revolutionary gateway to news and information that Twitter provides. But plenty of people in politics are anxious about the way the Twitter conversation thrives on incrementalism, self-involvement and snark.

“It made me think smaller when I should have been thinking bigger,” said Sam Youngman.

“Twitter just gives you an outlet for when you’re bored,” said another reporter who traveled on the Romney plane. “It’s just stupid shit you are not thinking about the ramifications of.”

John Dickerson [Slate writer and CBS Political Director], hardly a new media curmudgeon, called Twitter “a mess for campaign coverage.”

“It makes us small and it makes us pissed off and mean, because Twitter as a conversation is incredibly acerbic and cynical and we don’t need more of that in coverage of politics, we need less,” he said.

…

“I still don’t know how reporters sit and watch a speech, and live tweet a speech, and also have the bandwidth to listen to what candidates are saying, and actually think about it and absorb it so they can right a comprehensive story afterwards,” said Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press.

…

“I don’t think the Twitter culture helps anybody create great journalism,” said Garrett Haake. “If you’re trying to be the first person that put it out at 140 characters, you’re probably not thinking about the broader context in which you want to present something.”

… Dickerson’s take: “If I were running an actual news division, I would probably ban people from Twitter in some way.” That Dickerson, one of the more forward-thinking and tech-savvy reporters in the business, would even consider such an idea speaks to how frustrated many campaign veterans are with today’s shoot-first-and-update-later style of political journalism.

Hamby’s paper for the Shorenstein Center is the exact opposite of a tweet. It is leisurely, anecdotal, sprinkled with character sketches, and 95 pages long. It doesn’t start with a gripping thesis or end with a sharply defined message but gradually unfolds an argument for the value of long-form journalism through the quoted opinions of others. You could almost say it exemplifies “negative capability,” John Keats’ phrase for not letting one’s own views determine how one sees the world.

Snapchat doesn’t exactly seem built for negative capability. So it is fascinating to speculate how a gifted writer of long-form journalism who decries the trivialization of politics will use this tool to cover the 2016 election.

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notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service

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On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

  1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
  2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
  3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
  4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
  5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
  6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
  7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

  • Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
  • Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions

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community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale

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“I have yet to see something big that’s good.” So said a friend and esteemed colleague  at a conference that I have been attending for the past two days. The conference is on “Collaboration Research for Action and Equity in Education,” and most of the participants practice either community-engaged research or community organizing. They build or participate in rather small, participatory projects, but they also care about large forces and structures. So the problem that my friend posed is a fundamental one for them.

I actually don’t believe that the precise issue that matters is scale. In the 21st century, things that used to be limited to small scales (such as friendship networks and discussions) can now be very big. The difference that interests me is between relational politics and impersonal politics.

In relational politics, you know the other people you are affecting directly. You know their names and locations and something about what they want. There is at least a possibility that you can work together. In impersonal politics, you affect people you have never heard of or met. Impersonal politics includes such structures as votes, laws, rights, policies, large firms, and markets.

The two categories certainly come together. In fact, the street-level impact of impersonal politics is almost always relational. For instance, the edge of the policies that produce mass incarceration in the United States is the back of a police van in Baltimore. The police officers there knew Freddie Gray.

That example reminds us that relational politics isn’t preferable to impersonal politics. You can’t be truly cruel without being in a relationship with the victim. From office politics–or the activities of “street-level bureaucrats” (like police officers)–to torture, some of the most problematic human interactions are relational. And impersonal structures include such excellent creations as legal rights.

But we do need relational politics, because only in relationships can we learn from other people, build networks that are sources of power and capacity, and act with agency. It is only in relational politics that we can seriously ask the question “What should we do?” A difference between the conference I am attending and a more standard conference on urban America is not that this one has been more critical. There is a vast scholarly literature that documents and analyzes inequality and oppression. You can walk up and down the halls of a hotel during a sociology, public health, or education conference, and in every room they will be talking about oppression. But they are addressing the question “What should be done?”, not “What should we do?” Agency is lost when politics and research are impersonal rather than relational.

And yet practitioners of community-engaged research and community organizing are also deeply concerned about impersonal politics. One of the most frequently-used words at this conference was “neoliberalism,” understand as some kind of mass-scale and impersonal system. (But note that a social democracy would also be highly impersonal.)

So how can we make the relational improve the impersonal? I think the most common strategy is to create or support relational projects, connect them together in networks, recruit others to join the networks, and advocate for policies in institutions like universities that will directly support these projects. (For instance, we might advocate changes in the kinds of research that help scholars win tenure.) This strategy has been implicit in a lot of my own work. But I must admit that I don’t really believe in it, because I don’t believe that networks of relational projects will seriously trouble existing impersonal systems. Finding a better connection between the relational and the impersonal seems to me the most pressing issue of our time.

See also beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and civic relationships (what they are and why they matter).

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media literacy education article

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This is just out today: Levine, P. (2014). Media Literacy for the 21st Century. A Response to “The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education.” Democracy and Education, 23 (1), Article 15. It’s an invited response to Jeremy Stoddard’s fine piece “The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education.” My response is not a critique but just a complementary perspective. The abstract:

We cannot pretend to educate young people for citizenship and political participation without teaching them to understand and use the new media, which are essential means of expressing ideas, forming public opinions, and building institutions and movements. But the challenge of media literacy education is serious. Students need advanced and constantly changing skills to be effective online. They must understand the relationship between the new media and social and political institutions, a topic that is little understood by even the most advanced social theorists. And they must develop motivations to use digital media for civic purposes, when no major institutions have incentives to motivate them. Until we address those challenges, students will struggle to make sense of the new media environment, let alone take constructive action.

 

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CIRCLE’s release on today’s Civics results

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23% of 8th-Graders “Proficient” in Civics According to Nation’s Report Card Released Today
Today’s Release Shows Inequality in Civics Education, Serious Gaps by Racial and Economic Backgrounds Reflecting Unequal Education

Medford/Somerville, MA – Today, the Federal Government released the Nation’s Report Card: 2014 U.S. in Civics. Experts on civic education from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) based at Tufts University’s Tisch College – the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement – have been involved in both designing and analyzing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Civics Assessment and can provide informed commentary.

“The quality and equality of civic education is a reflection of our investment in a healthy democracy,” said Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE. “The National Assessment of Education Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, as it’s also known, is a difficult and complex test that successfully measures some key areas of civic learning and how well civics is taught. However, as the new Nation’s Report Card: 2014 shows, we are far from achieving an acceptable quality or equality of civics education.”

The 2014 NAEP Civics, released today, finds that 23% of America’s 8th graders are “proficient.” Although higher scores would certainly be desirable, many adults might be surprised by how difficult the NAEP Civics questions are. For instance, in 2014, 8th graders were asked to identify a power of the modern President not described in the Constitution and to understand that growth in the elderly population would affect Social Security spending.

NAEP assessments in all other subjects yield roughly comparable proficiency levels to those found in civics. For instance, on the 2013 Mathematics NAEP, 27% of 8th graders scored proficient and 9% scored advanced.

More significant than the overall proficiency levels are gaps by student groups. For instance, only 9% of African American students reached at least the “proficient” level in the 2014 NAEP Civics, compared to 40% of Asian/Pacific Islander students. Students from urban areas, students whose parents didn’t attend college, students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and students with disabilities all scored lower than average.

“The NAEP Civics measures education for citizenship, which is an essential purpose of schools,” said Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and a member of the NAEP Civics Committee. “In 2014, due to budget cuts, the NAEP Civics was fielded only at the 8th grade level. It is important for the NAEP Civics to be administered regularly and at the 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade levels so that we can assess our progress in educating America’s kids for citizenship.”

Previous research by CIRCLE has shown that what students know about civics is related to how much and how well they are taught civics. The gaps in NAEP scores reflect inequality in civic education.

Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg closely studied previous NAEP Civics results for a fact sheet entitled, “Do Discussion, Debate, and Simulations Boost NAEP Civics Performance?” In that work, Kawashima-Ginsberg explored the relationship between three promising teaching practices and NAEP scores for various demographic groups.

Dr. Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research at Tisch College, has written a fact sheet entitled, “What the NAEP Civics Assessment Measures and How Students Perform.” The fact sheet looks closely at what the NAEP Civics test measures, the skills and values that it doesn’t capture, and in general how to interpret the results. Levine was a member of the committee that helped design the 2014 civics test.

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the struggle to control images from Baltimore

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“10,000 Strong Peacefully Protest In Downtown Baltimore, Media Only Reports The Violence & Arrest of Dozens”

There is a struggle underway to influence how Baltimore is portrayed visually to America. My news feed is full of images like the one above–of peaceful protests or hardworking Baltimoreans cleaning up the streets. I doubt many of those photos are getting through to the mass TV audience that is watching hurled stones and burning police cars.

For my own part, I believe the property damage and physical conflicts with police were pretty much inevitable; but images of them don’t communicate two other crucial facts: that thousands have protested peacefully (which is difficult to organize and sustain, by the way), and that everyday life in cities like Baltimore is deeply oppressed.

The experience of the 1960s teaches us that it matters which images predominate.

In 1964, the summer’s urban riots/insurrections were seen to benefit Barry Goldwater’s campaign. Johnson’s aides called them “Goldwater rallies” because they played into the Republican presidential nominee’s narrative about America. LBJ nevertheless beat Goldwater soundly. But 1968 was different. As Clay Risen writes in the Guardian,

The [1968] riots thus provided an entrée for conservatives to finally, fully assert law and order as a national political issue. Something that had been brewing for decades at the local level, and which had played a role in the GOP victories of 1966, became after April 1968 the single most important domestic concern in the 1968 presidential race. Polls repeatedly put it at par with, and even above, the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon, who had largely avoided talking about riots and civil rights before April, now made law and order – and the revulsion of white suburbia against the violent images of rioters reacting to King’s death – a central theme in his campaign.

The riots also vaulted Nixon’s eventual running mate, the obscure Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, to national prominence. In the wake of the violence in Baltimore, Agnew had called local civil rights leaders to a meeting and then ambushed them with accusations that they had facilitated the racial militancy that he – and much of white America – believed to be the cause of the riots. Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan clipped a news story about the speech and handed it to his boss. And while Nixon toyed with other running mates, he ultimately chose Agnew based on his newfound fame as the standard-bearer of the “silent majority”.

To be clear: I don’t care whether Democratic or Republican politicians benefit or suffer from the images from Baltimore and other cities. But it is important which direction the nation takes. And (fairly or not) it’s people far from Baltimore, Ferguson, and Cleveland who will decide. That is why we should all be drawing attention to the alternative images from Baltimore.

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learning exchanges at Frontiers of Democracy

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There is still space for registrants at Frontiers of Democracy 2015, and we have just posted a preliminary list of the interactive concurrent sessions, or “learning exchanges.” More details here, but the headings are:

Additive/Replacement Engagement

Organized by Stephen Abbott, Great Schools Partnership, and the Glossary of Education Reform

Advancing Equity in Civic Deliberation

Organized by Chad Raphael, Santa Clara University

The Civic Media Project

Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College

Civic Potential of Modernity: Civic Studies as an Antidote to Civic Despair

Peter Levine, Tisch College, Tufts University
Joshua A. Miller, George Washington University
Karol Soltan, University of Maryland

Community—Police Relationships: The Critical Intersection of Race, Rights, and Respect

Bruce Mallory and Michele Holt-Shannon, New Hampshire Listens and the University of New Hampshire
Carolyn Abdullah and Val Ramos, Everyday Democracy

Continuum of Civic Action

Jason Haas, MIT Media Lab/Education Arcade
Cindy S. Vincent, Salem State University
Christy Sanderfer, University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service
Sarah Shugars, Tisch College at Tufts University

Creative Democratic Work at the Intersection of Faith and Community

John Dedrick, Kettering Foundation
Elizabeth Gish, Western Kentucky University
Robert Turner, Mathews Center for Public Life

Democracy through Text Messaging

Timothy J. Shaffer, Kansas State University

How does conflict resolution theory and practice contribute to the field of public deliberation?

Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Lisa-Marie Napoli, Indiana University, Political and Civic Engagement Program

Innovations in Civic Technology

Charlie Wisoff, Kettering Foundation
Nick Santillo, Conva

Is there a place for social justice in higher ed? Practitioners and academics share their experiences

Margaret Brower, Tisch College at Tufts University
Ande Diaz, Allegheny College
David Schoem, University of Michigan

Next Generation: Training Lawmakers for a Different Kind of Politics

Ted Celeste, NICD
Democratic and Republican legislators from Massachusetts

Schooling and Citizenship (P-20)

Lori D. Bougher
Phil Martin
Jim Scheibel
Rebecca Townsend

From Protest to Policy

Allison Fine

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the Clinton Foundation and the new gift economy

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The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer [that] has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs.” (For additional coverage, see Jonathan Chait, “The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency” or Graham, “A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash.”)

I don’t think the real issue here is potential bribery. According to the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S. Code § 201, “a public official” receives a bribe if she or he, “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act …”

So bribery would have been committed if the Clinton Foundation accepted money “in return for” some favorable treatment by Secretary Clinton. That is the kind of quid pro quo that the Justice Department alleges in the pending case of Senator Menendez. But it isn’t how things usually work in power politics, and it isn’t the heart of our systemic problems with money in politics.

A New York Times’  news story, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” suggests how things actually work. A financier gives the Clinton Foundation $31.5 million. At an event with Elton John and Shakira to celebrate the gift, Ms. Clinton lauds the donor’s “remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” … adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.” The same financier later on receives US State Department approval for a joint venture with a Russian uranium firm that affects control over this military/strategic commodity.

In a contract-based economy, parties agree to some kind of exchange before the goods, services, or money change hands. That has the advantage of efficiency and reliability. But when it comes to money and politics, such an agreement has the disadvantage of being a felony that can lead to imprisonment of no more than 15 years. There is an alternative, however–the older culture known as a gift economy. In a gift economy, goods circulate because A gives presents to B in the hopes that B will later give favors to A, but A studiously avoids any contract or explicit expectation.

The traditional reason is honor: it’s dishonorable in many societies to expect a return. In the current political environment, honor has the additional buttress of 18 U.S. Code § 201.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial, after raising “questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation,” hastens to acknowledge: “Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton.” However, the editorial warns, “accusations … will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public. [Hillary Clinton] needs to do a lot more, because this problem is not going away.”

I’m actually not sure what Ms. Clinton could do or say that would reduce criticism of the nexus between huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, favorable treatment of its donors by the US government, and personal benefits to the Clinton family. It’s a gift economy, and exhaustive investigation is unlikely to reveal a quid pro quo or lead to any legal action (or legal exoneration).

Donors to the Clinton Foundation don’t necessarily know what they want when they give; they may have a mix of motivations, including altruism. The Clintons don’t take specific actions for donors just because of the money. But they do accept their gifts at glitzy events with Shakira and express their love for the donors. As in Beowulf, “treasures will change hands and each side will treat /the other with gifts; across the gannet’s bath,/ over the broad sea, whorled prows will bring/ presents and tokens” (Heaney trans., lines 1859-63) The public can see what this amounts to, with or without additional disclosures. The question is whether voters should tolerate it.

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