The
following list of titles and accompanying dates refers to past
postings on the blog, Gravitas: A Voice for Civics Education, that
have been deleted. After each title and date, the entries below
include the first paragraph of each respective posting. If you
care to receive a copy of a particular posting, send your request via
email to gravitascivics@gmail.com . One posting per request.
181
CHEESY
(June
1, 2012)
Have
you been aware of what is happening in Wisconsin lately? Coming
soon, they are going to have a recall election in which the governor
and certain members of their legislature might lose their positions
of authority. This is very unusual. The last recall election I
remember was the one in California when the incumbent governor, Grey
Davis, was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. Rare? There
have been only two governors removed from office in this way. All
this Wisconsin hullabaloo seems to have been initially started over
current governor Scott Walker's plan to strip public employee unions
(PEUs) of their collective bargaining rights. This has situated
Wisconsin politics in the metaphoric arena category which I wrote
about in my last posting of this blog. That is, the politics over
deciding the status and level of constitutional integrity PEUs will
enjoy has pitted powerful interests in that state in a
non-compromising mode.
182
“CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?”
(June
4, 2012)
Imagine
walking down a busy sidewalk in Manhattan. If you have never
experienced such a stroll first hand, you surely have seen it
depicted in a movie or two – the popular movie Tootsie has
such a scene. To a visitor, the mass of strangers one encounters can
seem to be a formidable obstacle course. How should a good citizen
view these people? Do they represent potential threats or
opportunities? Or are they the source of indifference? While these
might seem to be important questions – or should be – to a civics
educator, there seems to be little if any attention paid to this
aspect of citizenship. That is, to my knowledge, the concern over
how Americans should view their fellow citizens has not gotten much
academic or popular interest. I think the question – what would be
the most beneficial or most moral view of other citizens? – should
garner a very practical priority as we consider the content of a
civics curriculum.
183
MINI STIMULI EFFORTS
(June
8, 2012)
Since
I commented on the recall election in Wisconsin two postings ago and
since the results are in, I thought I would share my thoughts on the
strategy employed by Governor Walker's campaign.
184
AGREEING TO ASSOCIATE
(June
11, 2012)
For
those of you who follow this blog, you may have detected a liberal
bias. Or you may have determined that I am a Democrat who wants to
push a Democratic agenda. That has not been my purpose. What I have
been writing about are issues, such as the recent recall vote in
Wisconsin, where I see certain political activities that challenge or
otherwise threaten our federalist character. As I have tried to
trace the political development of this nation, I have made the
argument that we as a polity started and maintained a federal
perspective in order to justify and make sense of our collective
experience as a governed and governing people. That perspective
dominated until the 1950s. Since then, a natural rights perspective
has taken dominance, but that does not mean we have relinquished all
allegiance to the prior guiding construct. I have argued that we
should return, albeit under a revised form, to our earlier allegiance
to federalism. Therefore, if that be the overall goal, a renewed
introduction to federalism is in order.
185
E. U. ARE,
NOT IS
(June
15, 2012)
For
those of you who follow this blog, you know that I have been
describing and explaining federation theory. I am doing this in
order to make the claim that this theory should become the dominant
mental construct guiding our efforts in the subject fields of civics
and government. Within this effort, I have progressed to outlining a
federalist model by which one can holistically look at the construct
and to give it a sort of “picture” quality – a picture that is
sufficiently concise and easy to remember. To date, I have presented
several elements of the model: the environment, the entity, the
relationship between entities, and the relationship between the
entity and the association. Each of these terms has been defined.
The last element is the association. I began to describe the
association in the last posting. I shared a main aspect of the
association – its sense of partnership or fraternal ethos.
186
CHALLENGES OF
BEING ASSOCIATED
(June
18, 2012)
I
have made the point in this blog that not all organized groups are
associations. As I am using the term, a group needs to exhibit
certain attributes in order to be considered an association. I have
used the term, arrangements, to signify all groups. Only some are
associations and while I am not aware of any study indicating what
percentage of arrangements are associations (and adopting the word in
an arrangement's name does not suffice in making it an association),
my personal experience indicates that the percentage is not high.
187
THE FREE RIDER
PROBLEM
(June
22, 2012)
In
the last series of postings, I have described and explained an ideal
model for federalist governance and politics. The main elements of
the model are related to a federalist union which I call an
association and the model consists of the environment, the entity,
the relationships between entities, and the association itself. I
chose an ideal perspective in order to establish a standard by which
to judge real groups or arrangements of people. Surely, by focusing
on associations or arrangements, I am emphasizing collectives as
opposed to individuals. Why? Because governing and politicking are
collective activities; they are the exercise of power relations
between and among people. While the ideal should not relegate the
profound importance of the individual to these mechanization of
influence and distributions of values to insignificance, the process
in question is one of collectives.
188
HATE SPEECH CHALLENGE TO FEDERALISTS
(June
25, 2012)
One
of the concerns by people who advocate for a more communal approach
to governance and politics or for a more moral perspective is that
such a view will be deemed as naive or over idealistic. After all,
it was Machiavelli, the father of modern political thought, who
proclaimed politics as amoral. In my last posting, I wrote that most
of the concerns and arguments that take such a “realistic” view
seem to boil down to stating that there is a communitarian
underestimation for the free rider problem – people with the
freedom to act will rationally choose to take benefits out of a
system for which they do not pay, wholly or in part. In reality,
such “short changing” opportunities arise all the time and
citizens, either knowingly or not, take advantage. Hence, critics
argue, the best we can do is to set up a market system and allow that
system to operate mostly unhindered. The market will objectively
reward those who produce and punish those who don't. Okay, not
always, but most of the time and more so than any other approach.
The problem with relying solely on the market is that it depends on
individual motivation and denies that there is a reliability with or
even the existence of group motivations. And yet, “[h]appiness
comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships
between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and
something larger than yourself.” [Haidt,
J. (2012). The
righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.
New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Citation on p. 244.] I have
also argued that governance and politics are collective activities
amenable to this “larger than yourself” orientation.
189
THE SCOPE OF LIBERATED FEDERALISM
(June
29, 2012)
As
I have presented and evaluated the two competing constructs which are
vying for the allegiance of civics educators, the natural rights
construct and the critical theory construct, I have used the ideas of
Eugene Meehan. He developed criteria by which to judge the worth of
social science models and theories. [Meehan,
E. J. (1969). Explanations
in social science: A system paradigm.
Homewood, IL: The
Dorsey Press.] Using this very criteria, how well does the
liberated federalism construct fare? As a reminder, this blog has
been dedicated, in part, to describing, explaining, and promoting the
liberated federalism construct. In terms of describing and
explaining, that effort has been basically done; I want to now begin
evaluating it, particularly in terms of how useful it is as a guide
for our civics curriculum in secondary classrooms.
190
A BURNING ISSUE
(July
2, 2012)
A
blog dedicated to civics education needs to express a reaction to the
Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Health Care Act
(Obamacare). The instructional benefit of all this news reporting on
a Supreme Court decision has, I believe, an enormous educational
value. We see with ample coverage the role of the Supreme Court in
our governmental system. But before commenting directly on the
decision, I will couch my comments on the other big news of the week
– the Colorado fires.
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