DC Confidential. David Schoenbrod
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Название: DC Confidential
Автор: David Schoenbrod
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика
isbn: 9781594039126
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There was open debate on the Civil Rights Act. Members of Congress made clear the burdens as well the benefits. They not only promised the right not to be discriminated against in employment, schools, hotels, restaurants, and other public accommodations but also imposed the corresponding duties—duties not to discriminate—on employers, schools, and businesses that provide public accommodations. Businesses and governments that failed to do their duty would have to lay out large sums of money to comply with court orders and pay damages. By taking responsibility for the burdens as well as the benefits, the legislators produced an act of Congress rather than just a hope of Congress. They took real personal responsibility for important legislation.
I emphasize the role of Midwestern Republicans in the passage of the civil rights legislation because, today, some on the left view those on the right as devoid of the capacity to be fair, and some on the right return the favor. My point is that although the parties are different today, most citizens on both the left and the right have the capacity, somewhere down deep, to be fair. The trickery is one of the things that gets in the way. Based upon an exhaustive analysis of thousands of questions asked in polls over fifty years, political science professors Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro reported that “people of all sorts, in all walks of life, tend to form their policy preferences not only on the basis of narrow self-interest but in terms of group interests and—especially—the public good, or perceived national interest.”22
Trickery gets in the way of fairness because it masks the responsibility of elected officials and thereby lets them avoid the open debate that, as discussed throughout the chapter, educates citizens on how proposed acts of Congress will affect other people. The sense of fairness thus awakened can get people to moderate their positions. Human nature being what it is, there will always be many fights in Congress, but when Congress resolves the disagreements in the open, taking responsibility for the burdens as well as the benefits, voters can accept the overall system as fair and therefore accept the results. Win some, lose some. The Economist approvingly summarized the viewpoint of Nobel Prize–winning political economist and professor of economics James M. Buchanan as follows: “A democratic system can maintain legitimacy despite rancorous politics if broad agreement exists on the fairness of the underlying rules [of decision].”23
The circle of repeated demand, feedback, and decisions resulting from open debate promotes virtue. This virtuous circle could, as previously noted, put the goodness in peoples’ hearts into the heart of government.
With open debate, Congress’s function becomes like that of an orchestra conductor. By beating time and setting the mood, the conductor provides a context in which the ensemble can make music together even as its members express themselves individually. Analogously, Congress is supposed to provide a context in which society can prosper even as its members pursue their individual aims.24 To do so, Congress must make clear what benefits and burdens it is enacting and thereby set realistic expectations of what people can expect from one another and their government. A Congress that does this job well helps people respect rather than hate one another.
In contrast, when a system seems unfair, as when people butt in line or Congress uses tricks to evade blame for the unpopular consequences of its decisions, fairness to our fellows goes out the window and harmony becomes acrimony. That is why the drafters of the Constitution were smart in putting stock in members of Congress taking responsibility and openly debating the consequences of its critical choices.25
Open debate has produced decisions on behalf of the American electorate. As one visitor from overseas, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in 1835, because “the people participate in the drafting of the laws by the choice of the legislators, in their application, by the election of the agents of the executive power; one can say that they govern themselves.”26
Such government was a source of good will and pride. At Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln celebrated this government with his ringing conclusion that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”27
Perhaps because this passage is so familiar, perhaps because we hear it in an era of tricky government, some are prone to dismiss “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as a Fourth of July pie-in-the-sky aspiration. For Lincoln, however, this people’s government was a present accomplishment rather than a distant aspiration. Otherwise, he could not have resolved that it “shall not perish.” It was a people’s government because voters could hold their representatives accountable at the polls and the voters included folk of modest means. In contrast, in Britain at the time, a property-ownership requirement kept the overwhelming majority of adult male citizens from voting. On this side of the Atlantic, almost every state had abolished the property qualification for voting. Thus, it was quite ordinary folks, We the People, who supervised high officials. In Lincoln’s view, what was missing from the people’s government was the inclusion of people of all races. Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address framed the Civil War as a struggle to pair the liberty that comes from accountable government with equality.28
Lincoln’s celebration of the people’s government reached poor people as well as rich ones. Consider, for example, the teachings of Jane Addams, who established Hull House in Chicago to help poor immigrant families. Addams taught the aspirations and personal responsibility needed for people to move from the back streets to Main Street. In particular, she told poor immigrants that they had no less capacity for leadership than their supposed betters. In her view, ordinary people are entitled to the dignity of their own values and high officials should be accountable to them no less than to the elites. For this reason, she particularly revered Abraham Lincoln, whom she described as having taught that “democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.”29 Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
One of Addams’s early pupils was my mother’s father, Louis Marschak. My grandfather was six years old when Hull House opened in 1889. He, his six brothers, and his one sister frequented it. It was Hull House, I suspect, that taught my grandfather to revere the Gettysburg Address about one score and seven years after President Lincoln delivered it. Its message of equality and democracy must have had special meaning to my young forebear whose poor Jewish family had recently faced oppression in Europe. For him, “All men are created equal” and “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” were not just pretty figures of political speech. When I was a tot and my own father was at war in Europe, my grandfather taught me to recite the Gettysburg Address by heart. I didn’t understand the words but knew they were sacred.
If you think “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” presumes that voters have more rationality than they actually do, consider this finding of professors Page and Shapiro: “Despite the evidence that most individual Americans have only a limited knowledge of politics (especially of proper names and numbers and acronyms), [the data] reveal that collectively responses make sense; that they draw fine distinctions among different policies; and that they form meaningful patterns consistent with a set of underlying beliefs.” They qualify this conclusion with the caveat that politicians can, by misinforming voters, sabotage their capacity to make sound judgments.30 Misinforming voters is the function СКАЧАТЬ