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    Why Education Is Democracy’s Best Bet

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    Joyce Appleby, a renowned historian of the Founding Fathers and Republican ideology, wrote in her 2001 book “Inheriting the Revolution” that the first generation of Americans (1790-1830) believed a good education was a requirement for every responsible citizen. The majority of men, and notably a wide cross-section of women, in the early days of the republic viewed education as a “critical bridge to responsible citizenship,” according to Appleby. They admired the intellect of our Founding Fathers and felt a patriotic duty to elevate their knowledge so they could better understand the leaders and politics of the day, and thus become better citizens.

    In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville captured his enthusiasm for America and its enlightened citizens in his famous book, “Democracy in America,” proclaiming that in the future, “all the world will be America.” How times have changed.

    Soul-Searching for America’s Broken Ethics

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    Following Boris Yeltsin appointment of Vladimir Putin as his successor to the Russian presidency in 1999, after the death of China’s Deng Xiaoping in 1997 and, finally, at the end of the Arab Spring in 2012, the world has seen a reversal of democratic government and the rise of authoritarianism. More than a few Americans would say that had President Donald Trump been reelected to a second term, it is likely that many of our institutions and norms built to protect democracy would have suffered a similar fate. Many were already under assault in his first term, like the politicized Department of Justice.

    For the first time in our history, we are witnessing something other than a peaceful, orderly transition of presidential power that was enshrined in our American memory beginning with Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796. We have never seen anything like Trump’s assault on the facts, the electoral process and the sacred nature of a free and fair vote for all Americans. How in the world can more than half of Republicans believe the election was rigged?

    Disinformation and Lies

    The answer — a campaign of relentless disinformation and lies, spread by social media and irresponsible cable TV and talk radio journalists, believed to be true by a large swath of the population, who apparently received little or no instruction in civics and US history. If this debacle teaches us anything it is that civics and history deserve a much bigger role in our primary and secondary education curricula, even at the expense of a reduced STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) curricula that has been over-emphasized for too long.

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    Look at the voting process. Several recent surveys of Republican voters indicate that anywhere from 50% to 80% of them believe the 2020 presidential election was not free and fair. This despite the fact that Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure and Security Agency and a former Microsoft cybersecurity expert, stated that the recent election was “the most secure in US history.” Every state and every Republican and Democratic governor has certified their results with only negligible, immaterial changes in vote counts. 

    Yet we are witnessing a horrific display of threats against state officials — of both parties — who have certified the election results by those who do not trust the voting process. Why? Because they do not understand the voting process and how it is protected. Many do not understand the Electoral College either. This unacceptable in America. We are looking a lot more like a banana republic than the beacon of democracy to the rest of the world. Clearly America’s reputation has suffered terribly around the globe. 

    The vitriol and emotion, amplified and reinforced on cable TV and social media, builds continuously until it drowns out rational thought. These conditions — extreme ideologies, absence of compromise and bipartisanship and the threat of domestic terrorism created as a result — are a major threat to our republic. Left unchecked, the situation will worsen and could destroy us if we don’t act immediately. Let’s hope and pray that nobody gets hurt as a result of these mindless protests dangerously getting close to becoming violent.

    There are some short-term political and economic solutions to mitigate our divisions. Not the focus of this essay, but initiatives like publicly-financed campaigns to take “dark money” out of politics will go a long way to bringing the parties together. Economic policies to rebuild the middle class and reverse the growth of inequality will foster a shared prosperity to reduce fear and anxiety amongst a large portion of our population. 

    However, these political and economic solutions will not take hold unless we begin to restore the health of our underlying culture and start to remember who we were as Americans, and who we need to be going forward. It starts and ends with an informed electorate. In times of crisis, we look to history — and those who made it into history books for all the right reasons — to instruct us in a time of need.

    A Time of Need

    The 19th-century thinker Horace Mann often called the founding father of public education in America called out the importance of an educated public to the health of a democratic government: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Even before Mann, Thomas Jefferson offered similar wisdom: “Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other, [but if the new nation could] enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of the day.”

    Regarding the importance of a strong civics curriculum in our schools, we have George Washington stating, on the one bookend of US history: “A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”

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    Echoing similar opinions some 244 years later as the world’s longest-enduring democratic, self-governing republic, is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “But in the ensuing years [following the ratification of the Constitution], we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

    This is quite a commentary on the importance of education generally, and civics specifically, to the health and continued survival of “American exceptionalism.” Beyond the voting process and the Electoral College, how well does the public understand how government is structured, how it works? The Annenberg Public Policy Center reported the results of a broad survey of Americans and found that only one in four Americans could name all three branches of the federal government. This an astounding discovery. The same survey found that fewer than 15% of the same cohort could name more than one First Amendment right, with only 37% of respondents able to name a single First Amendment right — their response, by and large, was freedom of speech.

    How beneficial would it be to society if everyone knew that our federal government does not sanction any religion, nor prevent anyone from practicing their own beliefs, or not? Freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government round out all the First Amendment rights.

    How are we doing in terms of education outcomes in this age of information overload, hyper-partisanship and emotion crowding out reason and thoughtful reflection? Not so great. According to DoSomething.org — a youth nonprofit whose corporate sponsors include 3M, Ford Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Google and General Motors among many others — in 1985, the quantity and quality of high school graduates in the US as a group was ranked number one in the world. But by 2015, our high school population was ranked 36 in the world. 

    Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School has been conducting expansive and thorough surveys since 2011 of more than 2,000 senior-level business leaders, across a wide spectrum of industries in the US, regarding the competitiveness of the US economy. The conclusions of the study team strongly align with the findings of DoSomething.org noted above. Porter has concluded that shared prosperity is a key component of an economy’s competitiveness and that the US economy is failing to deliver shared prosperity to an ever-shrinking middle class.

    More importantly, Porter has tied this economic failure to political and cultural failures. To find solutions to our political failures — climate change, inequality, health care and immigration — we must focus on revising election and campaign financing laws. To find answers to our cultural failures — systemic racism, increased polarization, domestic terrorism and crime — we must improve outcomes in K-12 public education as the most critical solution.

    Restoring Trust

    There is nothing more important to the long-term survival of our democracy than a large investment in education as well as in our defense and military capability. Turns out, that as a nation, we invest about the same amount annually in each, which is surprising to most people. The 2020 defense budget is projected to be about $750 billion, and total spending on public education — elementary plus secondary — in 2015 across the country, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, was $706 billion. The problem is that education is funded and administered locally and, as a result, there is a wide variation in the quality of its delivery as the DoSomething.org and the Harvard studies both demonstrate.

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    The current noise and disinformation around election fraud — a president asking state legislators to overturn a popular vote in choosing electors to the Electoral College and how presidents can lose the popular vote of the nation and still be elected — threaten our democracy. How? In short, even more people begin to lose trust in our government to be fair, and “for the People.” Trust in Congress is already at an historical low point according to Pew Research.

    How do we restore this trust? A strong civics education is a good start. Why is this so important? Here’s the deal: The 2016 presidential election came down to fewer than 80,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Even though Trump lost the popular vote among over 125 million total voters, his narrow wins in these three battleground states gave him an Electoral College majority of 306 over Hillary Clinton’s 232.

    This means that just 0.06% of all the voters in America determined the outcome of the 2016 election. In the 2000 presidential election, it came down to 537 votes in Florida. It is frightening to consider that so few voters could make such a difference, and how easily it might be to corrupt such a small number of voters. If that doesn’t argue for a strong civics curriculum in our schools, what does?

    Education is the single most important component of the common good for maintaining the long-term health of our democracy. Why? Because we will not meaningfully transform our political and economic models until we begin to transform our culture. And you do not transform culture by screaming at people. You transform culture by educating people and celebrating rational discourse among all citizens.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Searching for the Soul of America

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      The soul of America is a highly sought-after commodity these days. In their victory speeches, both President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris mentioned that they fought for the soul of America in the tightly-contested elections. Some 75 million people agreed, giving the Biden-Harris ticket the reigns for the next four years to repair and restore the soul of the nation.

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      The losing incumbent, Donald Trump, has been a singularly divisive figure in American politics over the past several years. He is a racist and a white supremacist, a xenophobe and an Islamophobe, a misogynist and a narcissist, a liar and a petulant loser. Trump repeatedly denied scientific evidence when dealing with environmental issues and the coronavirus pandemic. The COVID-19 death toll in the US is nearing 250,000 from over 10 million cases, primarily due to the mishandling of the pandemic by the Trump administration. And yet, 8 million more people than the 62 million who voted him into office in 2016 find Trump’s actions and behavior as acceptable. A staggering 70 million Americans still feel that there is nothing wrong with the soul of the nation and chose to cast their vote for Trump.

      If we are forced to draw conclusions about that intangible entity referred to as the soul of America just from the votes people cast in the presidential contest, we can only surmise that it is split almost evenly between what Joe Biden and Donald Trump stand for. Refusing to accept that verdict, I investigated down-ballot races across the country with the hope of unearthing other clues that could shed a light in my quest to understand where and what America stands for today.

      Should Non-Citizens Be Able to Vote?

      Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have in their constitution language to the effect that the right to vote is available only to citizens of the country. Notwithstanding that, Alabama, Florida and Colorado passed constitutional amendments to make the citizenship requirement for voting more explicit. What is interesting is not that these measures passed with an overwhelming majority, but the fact that 23% of voters in Alabama, 20% in Florida and 33% in Colorado cast their ballots against the measure.

      The 3.5 million Americans who subscribe to the idea that non-citizens should be able to vote belong to an interesting segment of the nation’s population. Perhaps they echo my thought process that it is appropriate for non-citizens to get to vote on specific issues. As non-citizens, it makes sense that they do not get to participate in the representational democratic aspects such as electing the president, governor or members of Congress. However, in keeping with the philosophy of taxation with representation, it also makes sense for them to vote in specific propositions, measures and initiatives local to their place of residence.

      Criminal Justice Reforms

      Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota legalized recreational marijuana, increasing the list of states that have decriminalized the schedule 1 drug to 31, including Washington, DC. Only in seven states — Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming — is the possession of marijuana fully illegal, even for medicinal purposes, although in North Carolina, it is not considered a criminal offense.

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      Oregon became a trailblazer, the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs. Today, America’s prisons have a population of 2.3 million, where one in five behind bars is there on account of a drug offense. With the decriminalization of marijuana, America’s war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, may finally be coming to an end.

      A harsh reality of committing a felony offense is the loss of the right to vote. In the infamous presidential election of 2000, Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in the state of Florida by a razor-thin margin of 537 votes. Florida, along with Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, has some of the harshest possible voting laws for people who have committed a felony offense. According to the Sentencing Project, 5.2 million people were ineligible to vote in the 2020 elections. Nearly 22%, or 1.13 million of them, are in the state of Florida. History may have been very different, and Bush may never have won the 2000 election had Florida’s laws allowed former felons who have paid their dues to the justice system and turned their lives around to vote.

      This November, California made a shift to take a more liberal view on the voting rights of those with felony convictions. Californians restored the right to vote for people on parole, removing an important obstacle in allowing former felons to become full-fledged members of society. They also rejected a proposal that sought stricter parole rules and harsher sentencing.

      Eliminating Symbols of Slavery

      Earlier in June, Mississippi retired the state flag that had incorporated a version of the Confederate battle banner in it. The people of Mississippi voted to approve a new flag with the symbol of magnolia and the words “In God We Trust,” removing one of the last vestiges of Confederacy in a state flag.

      Rhode Island voters passed a measure to strip the racially insensitive phrase “Providence Plantations” from its official name, after having failed to do so in 2010. By an overwhelming majority of 80% and an impressive majority of 68%, respectively, voters in Utah and Nebraska passed an initiative that removes references to slavery from their constitutions and suspends the permission of involuntary servitude as criminal punishment.

       And the Verdict Is

      Toning down the populist and ill-conceived war-on-drugs rhetoric and easing the reintegration of former felons into society by restoring their voting rights are small steps toward meaningful criminal justice reform. Eliminating signifiers that celebrate the Confederacy and slavery from state names and flags is more than symbolic. They open up a path to healing, rejecting the hatred that lurks in the veneration of the icons of white supremacy.

      The disappointments came from my home state of California. Here, Proposition 22 posed the question of whether app-based gig-economy workers such Uber and Lyft drivers should be treated as contractors or as employees with proper benefits. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates pumped nearly $200 million dollars to avoid the responsibility of giving gig-workers employee status. Their marketing blitzkrieg recruited Mothers Against Drunk Driving to portray a dismal scenario of increased drunk-driving deaths should this proposition fail. In the end, capitalism won where people opted to have their cheap Uber and Lyft rides, even if it meant denying their drivers their fair share of benefits.

      More poignantly, California missed its chance to reinstate affirmative action, which it ended in 1996 without giving adequate time for that initiative to have a meaningful impact. Sadly, more than 56% of voters failed to appreciate that compensating for centuries of advantages enjoyed by whites and other privileged classes would not only require counterinitiatives like affirmative action, but that they need to be given time so that African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities have a true shot at social equity.

      Counterbalancing my disappointments stemming from the 70 million who are still willing to embrace Donald Trump and Californians rejecting affirmative action, I found many down-ballot measures, from Mississippi to Utah, from Arizona to New Jersey, pointing to a subtle shift in the right direction. That gives me a glimmer of hope that the soul of America may not be so dark as to be beyond redemption. And as they say, hope springs eternal.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

      by

      Nearly every commentator knew that the one certain thing about this presidential election was that everything that followed the date of voting would be uncertain. Inspired by polls that had consistently given Joe Biden a significant lead over the past two or three months, some predicted a Democratic landslide. But in that eventuality, the same commentators felt uncertain about how the transition would play out and, more seriously, how the nation might be governed. Some pundits even wondered whether it could be governed.

      On Monday, The New York Times published an article with the title “Undeterred by Pandemic, Americans Prepare to Deliver Verdict on Trump.” The author, Shane Goldmacher, summed up the atmosphere of the final phase of the campaign in these terms: “As Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. raced across the most important battleground states in a frenzied final push for votes, the 2020 election was unfolding in a country with urgent problems: an uncontrolled public health crisis, a battered economy, deep ideological divisions, a national reckoning on race and uncertainty about whether the outcome of the vote will be disputed.”

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      The Times’ columnist Lisa Lerer, who had consistently manifested her preference for Biden throughout the campaign, published an article on election eve with the title: “Win or Lose, Trump and Biden’s Parties Will Plunge Into Uncertainty.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Uncertainty:

      The permanent state of democracy in the United States since the beginning of the 21st century, likely to continue for decades to come.

      Contextual Note

      On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump predictably claimed victory, well before all the votes had been counted. More realistically, Business Insider summed up the continuing uncertainty. Publishing their live results, Grace Panetta and Madison Hall concluded — with what Democrats will see as a ray of hope — that “it remains unclear how the race will go, and there are more scenarios in which Biden ultimately wins than Trump.” 

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      The one thing most Americans were not hoping for in this age of ever-deepening uncertainty was “more scenarios.” In a nation that has become accustomed over the past four years to living through a screenplay scripted by a former reality TV host, polls leading up to the election appeared to reflect a desire for some sort of stability. Citing pre-election polling, Emily Badger in another Times article noted that “voters on the left and right say they’re concerned about the stability of American democracy.” She quotes a Biden supporter in Ohio, a state Trump appears now to have won, who expressed her fears in these terms: “We’re just teetering, and it’s scary as all get-out.”

      During a bitter and confused primary campaign, the Democratic Party claimed to have identified the personality who best represented stability and electability: Joe Biden. Whether the former vice president eventually makes it past the Electoral College by the December deadline remains to be seen. If he wins, the Democrats will tout his victory as a triumph for stability, but the nation may not agree. As the Democrats congratulate themselves on their good judgment, the rest of the country, and especially its youth, may instead see the future as “scary as all get-out.”

      Goldmacher’s article in The Times paints a grim picture of the immediate future. “Much of the country felt on edge,” he writes, before quoting a construction worker in Los Angeles whom he describes as busily boarding up a storefront in anticipation of serious civil unrest: “Everyone is starting to panic,” the worker explains.

      Even after we know the initial result sometime in the coming days, there is no way we can anticipate the aftermath. Will there be lawsuits, protests, recounts, further manipulations, proposals for constitutional amendments or outright civil war? Will the millions of lethal weapons people have been stocking in preparation for conflict be put to use?

      In contrast, David Dayan makes the astonishing claim that “Donald Trump Has Been Good for Democracy.” The basis of his claim is that millions of Americans formerly indifferent have become politically engaged, and not just in voting, though on that score the statistics do tell the story of record voter turnout. Most commentators thought high turnout would be an advantage for Biden. It appears not to have been the case.

      Historical Note

      On the eve of the election, in an article on the fragility of the American nation, Fair Observer’s founder Atul Singh riffed on a pair of metaphors for the current state not just of US politics, but of the country as a whole. The first was the idea of a nation held together with string. The second was the slogan Joe Biden repeatedly used as a drumbeat since the beginning of his campaign, his oft-repeated claim that the election was a “fight for the soul of the nation.” Upon close examination, these two metaphors appear to be antinomic to the point of tragic contradiction. Their antinomy sums up the existential quandary that this election has revealed.

      In the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition of philosophy, the idea of the soul was synonymous with essence. It designated the metaphysical principle that accounted for the identity of any entity, animate or inanimate. The essence or soul defined and united all of an entity’s diverse constituents. An essence thus signifies the presence of an active force — the soul — that ensures the integrity of a thing or a person.

      Even a chair or a shoe, or any other human artifact, can have a soul or essence, though in contrast with living things, their integrity is imposed and ensured from the outside — from the mind of the designer or manufacturer — rather than materialized by the action of dynamic organic principles within the object itself. The DNA of a chair, or a nation for that matter, lies in the mind of those who gave its identity and who are committed to maintaining it.

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      If we describe something that needs to be held together with string — a chair for example — it indicates that its essence is no longer present, at least as a sufficient active force to maintain its integrity and fulfill its purpose. At some point, we can decide to dismantle the chair and use it as firewood. At best the string may prolong its useful life span, but that in itself is an admission of the absence of its “soul.”

      Joe Biden clearly would not agree with Atul Singh’s description of a nation being held together with string. Were he interested in framing his opposition in philosophical terms, he might appeal to a form of Cartesian dualism and claim that an essence that has fled may return or perhaps may be reinjected because the soul and the body are distinct and autonomous. But the source of Biden’s rhetoric is more likely the popular moral dualism children learn in Catechism of angels and devils fighting for the control of everyman’s (or every child’s) soul.

      As a politician, Biden quite logically sees every issue as one of deciding who is in control. If he is effectively declared president by the Electoral College — and if that election is not overturned by Donald Trump’s Supreme Court — the problem he will face when he takes office will be how to control an omnipresent entity that politicians like Biden prefer to deny: uncertainty. Emily Badger concluded her article with a quote from Yale historian Beverly Gage: “If people have actually lost faith in the idea that you can fix things and make them better, then that’s not a great political moment to be in.” Especially when the thing you most want to fix is “the soul of the nation.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer. Editor’s Note: At the time of publication, the US election is still too close to call.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More