Announcement–and Invitation

Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that I’m more or less obsessed by what Americans–ordinary citizens and elected officials alike–don’t know about our nation’s history, founding documents and legal system.

To reiterate my thesis: In a country where, increasingly, people read different books and newspapers, visit different blogs, watch different television programs, attend different churches and even speak different languages—where the information and beliefs we all share are diminishing and our variety and diversity are growing—it is more important than ever that Americans understand their history and their governing philosophy.

Our constitutional values are a covenant; they are ultimately all that Americans have in common.

All governments are human enterprises, and like all human enterprises, they will have their ups and downs. In the United States, however, the consequences of the “down” periods are potentially more serious than in more homogeneous nations, precisely because this is a country based upon covenant, upon what I have elsewhere called the American Idea. Americans do not share a single ethnicity, religion or race. Culture warriors to the contrary, we never have. We don’t share a comprehensive worldview. What we do share is a set of values, and when we don’t know what those values are or where they came from, we lose a critical part of what it is that makes us Americans.

At the end of the day, our public policies must be aligned with and supportive of our most fundamental values; the people we elect must demonstrate that they understand, respect and live up to those values; and the electorate has to be sufficiently knowledgeable about those values to hold public officials accountable.

To put it another way, our ability to trust one another and work together ultimately depends upon our ability to keep our governing structures true to our fundamental values, and we can’t do that if we don’t know what those values are or where they came from.

In a country that celebrates individual rights and respects individual liberty, there will always be dissent, differences of opinion, and struggles for power. But there are different kinds of discord, and they aren’t all equal. When we argue from within the constitutional culture—when we argue about the proper application of the American Idea to new situations or to previously marginalized populations—we strengthen our bonds and learn how to bridge our differences. When our divisions and debates pit powerful forces trying to rewrite our history and most basic rules against citizens who lack the wherewithal to enforce those rules, we undermine the American Idea and erode social trust.

That brings me to an announcement and a request—or maybe I should call it an invitation.

Scholars and educators have expressed concern over inadequacies in civic literacy and citizenship education for a very long time. Periodically, there have been efforts to increase requirements for civic and constitutional educational content, generally in government or “social studies” classes. Most recently, in 2003, the Alliance for Representative Democracy launched the Congressional Conference on Civic Education, and evidence indicates it did have a modest effect.  However, it followed the typical trajectory of these efforts, which has been an initial burst of enthusiasm followed by limited implementation.  The vast majority of new initiatives have had a very limited impact; worse, some states are now reducing social studies and civics requirements in order to focus on subjects tested under the No Child Left Behind Act.

I am currently working with several of my colleagues on a new project: the establishment of a Center on Civic Literacy at IUPUI.  We just received funding for our first three years, so this is a brand-new initiative. My colleagues and I represent different disciplines—law, business, social work, religious studies, bioethics and education—because we are painfully aware that all of our disciplines are adversely affected by low civic literacy. The Center will offer a clearinghouse for research, and will publish a peer-reviewed journal; we also intend to conduct original research on a large number of questions: we want to identify programs and curricula that have demonstrated effectiveness in producing civically-literate students; we want to know why previous efforts at reform have lacked staying power.  We want to investigate the theorized consequences of civic ignorance. And we want to develop a set of recommendations for basic civic education that can be both implemented and sustained.

One of our first projects is something we are calling “The Civic Challenge.” Indiana will celebrate the bicentennial of the state constitution in 2016. What better way to mark the occasion than with a two-year Civic Challenge, in which the entire community engages in a conversation about the U.S. and Indiana Constitutions?  The idea is that every organization we can enlist will use their program years 2015 and 2016 to focus on the Constitution and issues of Constitutional literacy. I see it as sort of a “One community, one book” project on steroids.

Even though we have barely begun, a number of organizations are already on board: the Indianapolis-Marion County Library system, the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana Humanities Council, Phoenix Theater and the IRT, the League of Women Voters, the Bar Foundation…and many others. We want to make this a high-profile, community-wide, fun project. (It has even been suggested that we enlist sports bars willing to focus their trivia contests on Constitutional rather than sports trivia.) We plan a web site, a Facebook page…well, you get the idea. The hope is to engage the whole community—left, right and center, religious and secular, immigrant and native born, minority and majority–everybody we can corral.

We plan to administer a survey to Indianapolis citizens before we begin the Civic Challenge, and again when it concludes, to see if we have managed to “raise the bar.” If we have, we will challenge other cities to do the same.

We are in the very early planning stages. If this first project is to be successful, we need good ideas for organizations, programs, contests..in short, we need people willing to be involved with the effort. That’s my invitation. If you are interested in knowing more, you can contact me directly at [email protected] or follow our progress on this blog.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if I think the Establishment Clause requires a certain result and you think it requires a different one. What matters is that we both know what the Establishment Clause is, and what value it was meant to protect. It doesn’t matter whether I think Freedom of the Press extends to bloggers and you disagree. It matters a lot that we both know what Freedom of the Press means, and why it was considered essential to trustworthy government.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. If I think this is a table and you think it’s a chair, we aren’t going to have a productive discussion about its use. We don’t need citizens who all agree about the implications of our founding decisions, or who even agree with the decisions themselves. But we desperately need citizens who share an understanding of what those decisions were.

I hope you’ll agree—and participate in the civic challenge!

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Constitutional Oblivion

I know I’m a broken record when it comes to the appallingly low level of civic literacy in this country, but bear with me for one more installment of “Is it really possible to be that ignorant?” 

Valarie Hodges is an actual, nonfictional member of the Louisiana legislature, which means Louisiana citizens elected her to that body. She enthusiastically supported Governor Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program; however, it turns out that her support rested on the premise that school vouchers could only be used for Christian schools.  As she explained her position,  “I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools. I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school.”

Where to start?

There’s the bad history, of course. While the nation’s founders were all nominally Christian–Protestant, to be more specific–their actual beliefs varied. Some were traditional believers. Many were Deists. Jefferson famously re-wrote the bible to eliminate all the metaphysics (pardon me, Valerie–that means ‘the God stuff’), leaving only the moral instruction. Adams opined that the attribution of divinity to Jesus was a great heresy. Franklin was openly skeptical–and, unlike Valerie–famously tolerant.

Then there’s the Constitution. People we elect to public office take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Is it too much to expect that they have some minimal acquaintance with that document?

Read together, the religion clauses of the First Amendment are a prescription for government neutrality in matters of conscience. Government is prohibited from favoring one religion over another, or religion over non-religion. That’s what we mean by separation of church and state–government, even in Louisiana, has to keep its grubby hands out of our souls. From the tenor of her remarks, its safe to assume that Valerie had never encountered references to or explanations of the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause, and would be surprised to learn that they prohibit teaching Christianity in public schools, let alone authorizing vouchers to be used only in Christian schools.

But finally, there’s reality. Are there no non-Christians in Louisiana? I can understand why there might not be a Buddhist Temple or Hindu shrine close by, but really, are there no synagogues or mosques? Has Valerie ever met an atheist? A Unitarian? Does she watch television or read news on the Internet? It is incredible that she seems never to entertained the possibility of neighbors who do not share her particular beliefs.

I hope–I believe–that Valerie is an outlier, that her incredible ignorance of the law and history and composition of her own country is unrepresentative. But we have a lot of anecdotal and survey data that suggests she isn’t as much of an anomaly as we might hope.

I’m not sure what we do about people like Valerie, or about the people who educate and elect the Valeries of our nation, but several of us at IUPUI intend to find out.

Tomorrow, I’ll explain how.

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Are We Really Talking About Taxes?

I’m beginning to suspect that all the anger/righteous indignation/resentment directed at the subject of taxes isn’t really about taxes at all.

If Americans were really discussing the tax system, surely they would know more about it. And I’m not just referring to the ludicrous arguments being made by the televised talking heads in the wake of the healthcare decision. (Hint: the Supreme Court ruled that the imposition of a penalty for noncompliance was an appropriate exercise of Congress’s taxing power–they didn’t rule that the penalty was a tax.) I’m talking about far more basic information.

A recent poll of Tea Party folks found that 90% of them believed taxes had either gone up or remained flat under Obama; only 2% answered (correctly) that taxes had gone down, which they have for 95% of American taxpayers. Bill Maher noted the irony: members of an organization formed to oppose taxes and named after a historical group known for its anti-tax activism don’t know whether taxes have gone up or down.

Nor is this an anomaly. Discussion of taxes rarely include definition of the term. So people will assert, with a straight face, that “the bottom half” of Americans “don’t pay taxes.” This is hogwash–they pay lots of taxes. Poor people may not make enough money to owe federal income taxes, but they pay federal payroll taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, property taxes (even renters pay property taxes, which are part of the rent)…In fact, the percentage of their income that the poor pay in state and local taxes is far higher than the percentage paid by the wealthy.

So–we have people who don’t know whether taxes have increased or decreased, and pundits whose calculations of the tax burden conveniently or mistakenly leave numerous taxes out of the equation. But my biggest pet peeve is the folks who discuss tax rates without distinguishing between the marginal rate and the effective rate.

Right now, we are arguing about the wisdom of returning to the marginal rates under Clinton–approximately 39%. Listen to the bloviators on your favorite talk show and you are likely to get the impression that such a rate translates to taking 39% of the taxpayer’s income in taxes. Of course, it means no such thing. It means that once an individual has made enough to be in the highest income bracket, each dollar in that bracket will be taxed at that rate. The effective rate is the actual percentage of overall income paid, after averaging out the rates applied to each income bracket. That–plus lots of loopholes aka “incentives”–is why Mitt Romney’s effective rate was in the neighborhood of 13%, and why corporations that are theoretically subject to 30%+ tax rates actually paid 12.6% in 2008.

My point here is not to advocate for any particular tax policy–we can all agree or disagree about what an optimum tax system would look like. My concern is more basic. It seems to me that if we were really arguing about taxes, we would know much more about them. And if we aren’t really arguing about taxes–if taxes are just a useful surrogate for whatever it is that actually has our collective panties in a bunch–what is that sore spot?

What’s the real source of our sour national disposition?

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The Golden Mean

I’ve been on IUPUI’s faculty for nearly 15 years, and for the very first time, faculty offices are scheduled for repainting and (gasp!) new furniture. Since the desk I’ve used since I arrived has seen nearly as many birthdays as I have, I welcome the change.

The downside is that we all have to box up our books, files, pictures and the like so the movers can do their thing, and it is amazing–and daunting–to realize just how much…stuff…(aka crap) one can accumulate in 15 years. It’s particularly sobering to realize how seldom that crap gets consulted.

I did come across some interesting reading as I was weeding out my files of “background information.” Case in point, an essay by Benjamin Barber titled “A Failure of Democracy, Not Capitalism,” remarking on the passage of an anti-corporate-corruption measure in 2002. As Barber pointed out,

“..business malfeasance is the consequence neither of systemic capitalist contradictions nor private sin, which are endemic to capitalism and, indeed, to humanity. It arises from a failure of the instruments of democracy, which have been weakened by three decades of market fundamentalism, privatization ideology and resentment of government.”

Bingo.

Fundamentalism is problematic in all areas of national life, not just the economic sphere. As attractive as either-or formulations and beliefs may be–and let’s face it, possession of THE truth, THE answer, is undeniably seductive–such hard and fast, one-size-fits-all approaches just don’t work in the real world.  Unfortunately for market fundamentalists, capitalism requires regulation to ensure an even playing field; unfortunately for proponents of central government control, those regulations need to be carefully calibrated–too much is as bad as too little.

There are areas of our common life that require “socialism”–the communal provision of services like police and fire protection, sanitary sewers and roads, to give a few examples. There are other areas where government needs to tread lightly–retail sales, manufacturing, and other entreprenuerial activities requiring relatively minor rules protecting public health and safety. The level of government activity should depend upon the nature of the activity rather than rigid ideology.

The regulatory failures of the past decades have–predictably–spawned a movement intent upon “replacing capitalism.” Americans tend to lurch from one fundamentalism to another, and we don’t seem to recognize that such pendulum swings are unhelpful. Barber’s insight remains an important one; we don’t need to give up capitalism, which has served us well overall. We just need social and legal structures that channel its energies and control its corrupting tendencies.

The Greeks had it right when they advocated for the golden mean.

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My Country ‘Tis of Thee….

If you are looking for an uplifting, “ain’t we great” post appropriate to the 4th of July, you probably need to stop reading now.

I began my reading this morning with Kurt Anderson’s Op Ed in the New York Times, on the downside of liberty. Anderson revisited the historic American tension between individualism and community, and concluded–in concert with many other contemporary observers–that Americans have confused a robust defense of individual rights with a wholesale abandonment of our civic obligations to the wider community. He argues that we have lost the ability to distinguish between individual rights and self-interested greed.

Anderson points to a cultural phenomenon. Thanks to the recent weather, I have been pondering a structural one.

As anyone who isn’t spending time in the arctic knows, we’ve been having an unprecedented heat wave. Much of the nation has also been battered by ferocious storms, and television news has been featuring visible evidence of the damage–especially shots of the downed power lines responsible for a massive loss of electricity. As of last night’s newscast, more than a million homes remained without power. Elderly people and children, especially, are at risk without air conditioning.

My question is simple: why don’t we bury our power lines? My answer is equally simple: because we have a political/economic structure that privileges short-term savings over long-term quality–a structure that rewards those who are penny-wise and pound foolish.

It costs more up front to bury our utilities. It’s cheaper–initially– to string lines. But not only does burying those lines improve the appearance of our cities and towns, it is much cheaper in the long run. It doesn’t take extraordinary storms to down the lines; more predictable weather also takes a toll. Over a period of years, utilities will more than save the extra dollars spent to bury the lines and consumers will enjoy more dependable service.

This same “penny wise, pound foolish” mind-set permeates our public services. Go to Europe (yes, I know, it is heresy to suggest that other countries might do some things better than we do) and walk on granite pavements that have lasted longer than most of our cities. Expensive to build, much less expensive to maintain and replace. Look at the current rush to sell off public assets–Toll Roads, parking meters, even the City-County Building–rather than spend what is necessary to maintain those assets for future generations.

In business, the triumph of the shareholder and manager over the entrepreneur-owner has meant that the next quarter’s bottom line is privileged over the long-term best interests of the enterprise. It’s more important to return an extra twenty cents per share now than to invest in improvements that will benefit the business ten years hence. In politics, it has always been the case that “long term” means “until the next election.” So we have the ridiculous spectacle of the State of Indiana returning $100 to each taxpayer rather than applying those funds to necessary improvements in education or infrastructure that won’t yield such immediate gratification.

Maybe it’s fitting that we have fireworks on the 4th of July. Children love fireworks, and we seem to have become a nation of children.

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