Framework for Inquiry and Analysis for this Course

Introduction

The study of any government and political culture is a huge undertaking. It can be difficult to know how to get started and how to approach such a big subject. The suggestion of this course is that our values matter, our history matters, and context matters. The study of government simply can't happen in a vacuum without becoming vacuous and meaningless. We have to start somewhere.

It can be helpful to have a framework to help focus on key questions for inquiry and analysis. This shouldn't be confused simply with the notion of methodology that Giroux is critiquing in the interview. The purpose of a framework isn't meant to confine our inquiry into some particular methodological commitments - whether empirical, behavioral, rationalistic or normative. This course is more eclectic and interdisciplinary. However, I will encourage you to use three basic frameworks to help you engage the course critically.

Framework 1: The Context Lens (History and Culture)

This course, as noted previously, is different from the typical course and for the reasons highlighted in the Stroup and Garriott article and in the Giroux interview. Studying American government from the standpoint of "a one-institution-at-a-time approach compartmentalizes the political process" and I would add too that it seriously distorts it. While Stroup and Garriott also note that such a fact-based course is also boring for students, I want to go farther and echo what Giroux says in the interview. The traditional American Government course and text engages in a kind of violence against the mind and imagination. How can we hope to make sense of American government and politics and get a sense of what is possible in the future if we can't engage with the past, the questions and struggles, the missteps and successes that were wrought there? Why bother with a study of government and politics at all if all there is to it is the memorization of a litany of "facts"? As Stroup and Garriott argue, "If these [traditional American Government] books are representative of of how government is being taught, then government is a dead subject."

The context lens is the historical and cultural context of the questions and conflicts that we will be studying. It includes the economic, social, demographic, intellectual and technological circumstances that shape any time and place. How do we get at the historical and cultural context of American government? By using historical texts and primary sources. In each module, you will read at least a few primary sources. These might be official documents such as laws or legislative documents, court decisions, essays, or speeches. They may include contemporary primary sources as well, for example, video interviews or academic papers. Each will provide some background information that will be important for you to consider as you think through the questions and problems posed by each module.

We might call this the structural conditions that shape what happens. This lens encourages you to ask some basic questions about any question that you are concerned to understand more:

1) What's the question? While moving through a module, a text, or writing a paper, you should ask yourself what is the basic question I'm trying to answer?

2) What's the context? What else is happening in the time, place and circumstances of the issues you are inquiring into and how might those phenomena influence your question?

Framework 2: The Power Lens

No doubt you have come across Lord Acton's famous quip about power:

"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Power matters. It's no surprise that both liberals and Marxists have historically concerned themselves with the question of power. The difference, and this is a simplification, is that liberals believe the power of the state can be managed and Marxists believe the power of the state is basically repressive. Both of these ideologies also have views of power that can align around democratic values, and so as Michel Foucault notes, power is not always about domination, it can also be about resistance, and there's reason to think that democracy - a democratic culture - needs to keep alive the possibilities of democratic resistance - but this requires a kind of collective power best articulated by someone like Hannah Arendt.

Anarchism, as it is traditionally understood, imagines a world where people don't rely upon power and authority relationships understood coercively (at least not completely) to organize social and political life. Instead, anarchists desire to create a world where the organization of collective life can happen via mediated voluntary and cooperative relationships. As such, anarchism involves the active cultivation of a formative public culture that reduces the role of coercive power and authority and supplants that with collective power. It's important to point out that this, like many -isms is a kind of project that those who might valued such a world, have to work and struggle for.

Democracy is about making power visible. It is an ongoing struggle. Even realist treatments of American Government such as those like E.E. Schattschneider, who wrote a still compelling book called The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (1960), understood that "politics is the mobilization of bias." Some issues get mobilized onto the political agenda while other issues get mobilized off of the political agenda. How? By using power to shape people's understanding of themselves and their world and by privatizing public conflicts and making them invisible.

Faces of Power / Experiences of Power

Power is complex. In the introduction to Module 1, I mentioned the Pierre Bourdieu quote about the state. It should be noted that the quote not only provides an insight into the state but insight into the nature of power. Power has different faces or dimensions. These can be understood analytically along a continuum of visibility, however, the visibility of power is very much determined by the circumstances which shape our political and social identities, our ontological horizons, or our political consciousness. However, if the state shapes, consciously or unconsciously, those identities, horizons and consciousness, then power becomes invisible.

You will read, in the Steven Lukes article, Power, that power has three faces or dimensions:

1) 1st Face of Power - Power is objectively visible, observable, empirical.

2) 2nd Face of Power - Power becomes more subjective, opaque, possibly more covert, less objective, more unconscious and determined by those who control policymaking and discursive agendas.

3) 3rd Face of Power (Power in the Radical View) - Power becomes completely relative, opaque, hidden or covert, and unconscious, to the extent that it shapes people's very understanding of themselves, their values and needs and represses the possibility of people shaping their own values, needs and futures. The third face of power can be understood in terms of domination, manipulation and oppression.

Experiences of Power

We also need to understand that power is not just an analytic category. It's not just something that we have the luxury to study at college or university or in graduate school. Power manifests itself in the world every day and in ways both noticeable and not easily noticeable because some people in the world and in our society experience coercive, oppressive power disproportionately to others. Some people experience power as violence - both political, officially-sanctioned or determined violence, or as private violence. The subjective experiences of power and violence need to be a part of any critical study of power and it's effects and ways to transcend coercive power. In this course, the study of experiences of power will be primarily through reading a range of voices - again, via primary sources - who speak about the subjective experience of power. People who don't have power are easily silenced and made disposable. They are erased - historically, culturally, and pedagogically, from the public consciousness. The erasure or neglect of these voices is crippling to any attempt to generate alternatives to present circumstances.

Framework 3: The Democracy Lens

The third part of the framework that we will use to critically inquire into and analyze American government and politics is the Democracy Lens. I will note first, that throughout this course, you will not hear me allude to our system of government as "American Democracy" or "our American Democracy". As with several of the thinkers you will come across in this course, I understand that for most of our history, including in the present moment, the United States has not been and is not a democracy. You may find that shocking to hear, and part of the purpose of the course is to understand this claim. This is not the place to fully explicate this claim - the course, and your own inquiry and analysis will have something to say about this as well.

This is not to say that there aren't democratic elements to our politics and this is not to say that there haven't been periods in our history that have been more democratic in spirit and in outcomes than others. Taken as a whole though, I stand by the claim. Some of the readings in the course will end some support to the claim and you'll need to, ultimately, decide for yourself whether the claim is worthy of your support.

For the moment, you might think about this as a philosopher might. That is to say, in an open-ended spirit of inquiry. If you believe, prior to inquiry, that the claim is false, what kinds of questions, inquiries and ideas might such a belief undermine? Think about it this way though; if we make the claim that the United States is a democracy and though, even though there are shortcomings, all that is left to do is fix or reform around the edges, then one might as well conclude that the democratic project is mostly over and we might decide to not take much interest in any evidence to the contrary. However, one reason to take seriously the idea that United States is not a democracy and hasn't been for most of it's history is because power matters and because power corrupts. The question of democracy is tied to theories about who has power. If power has been held mostly by political, economic, religious and ethnic elites, then the democratic project is indeed an ongoing project - however, it's more aspirational than real.

This course takes the critical view following Sheldon Wolin, that democracy in the United States has been and is fugitive. To say that democracy is fugitive is to suggest that democracy is pushed to the margins, exiled, on the run, and more recently, struggling to survive. Regardless of that, to use democracy as a standard of analysis requires clarifying something about what democracy might mean.

I follow several long-time students of democracy, such at Robert Dahl, in supposing that democracy has four basic elements, each qualified by the adjective "significant levels of":

Political Liberty - people have access to basic and fundamental political liberties, including freedom of speech, assembly, religion, free political institutions open to all, and information.
Political Equality - (we can talk about the combination of political liberty and pollical equality as equal freedom), however, political equality alone means people, are for political purposes equal in terms of their ability to access, take advantage of and use the above political liberties consistent with the equal ability of others to use them. One way to think about this is that each person has an equal "amount" of political liberty.
Popular Sovereignty - the people are the source of political authority, meaning that the people play a significant role in ruling, and not just being ruled. We understand popular sovereignty as the root of and source of what counts as being free and equal. Another way to think about this is to say that our freedom and equality matter for purposes of three components of democracy:
1. 1. Agenda-setting
  2. Discussion and Deliberation
  3. Deciding

What this means is that people's freedom and power matter and leads to policies and outcomes that are in line with people's self-determined understanding of their needs and aspirations.

4. Social Freedom - Social freedom is the consequence of having the above three democratic elements. If, as the Indian political philosopher, Amartya Sen, says, we ask people around the world what kind of life they would like for themselves and we say that this is wholly their choice, what might they choose? We might hear things like the following:

1. 1. Freedom from want and deprivation
  2. Freedom from fear and terror
  3. Freedom to make meaningful choices about how society organizes itself and distributes social and political resources
  4. Freedom to health and basic human security
  5. Freedom of place (including clean air, water, access to natural and cultural resources
  6. Freedom of culture and identity (freedom to be who one is within one's group or identity)

Also following Amartya Sen, we can recognize that, based on these values and freedoms, that democracy is a universal value that free people everywhere would, if asked freely, have good reasons to embrace. Sen goes on to suggest that, part of this universality are the ideas that democracy is valuable in three basic ways:

1. Intrinsic value - democracy is a fundamental human good.
2. Instrumental value - democracy is valuable because it helps people realize other important values and goods and material conditions.
3. Constructive value - democracy is valuable because it affords people the opportunity to identify and come to understand their own values and needs.

Sen also adds a fourth idea about democracy which he recognizes makes complex demands. The fourth idea is that democracy has protective value - it affords people the ability to avoid and protect against the worst forms of human violence, predation, and oppression, as well as natural disasters which from time to time befall human beings (drought, famine, disease, climate disruptions and change).

As you move through the course and think about the various questions and conflicts that we will survey, ask yourself this basic question: how democratic was the context that shaped how the problem was understood and who had the power to shape the response to that problem.

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