Tag Archives: community

Charter Schools and the Ones Left Behind

My dad and I are in southern Wisconsin this weekend, visiting my grandmother for her 87th birthday. The impromptu family reunion has been a rewarding one, as I’ve been reunited with a cousin I hadn’t seen in about 15 years. My dad was the only one of my grandmother’s children to go to college, and without belaboring the details, let’s just say I grew up in an entirely different world from my cousin. It wasn’t the smoothest of meetings, especially since neither of us is all that extroverted, but we shared some laughs and found some common ground. I’m damn proud of that, and I wish I’d found a way to say more.

What on earth does this have to do with education? It’s simple. It made me wonder about her education, and even more importantly, about her 13-year-old son, whom she had while she was still in high school. I’ve never met the kid; he lives in Colorado, and my cousin doesn’t have custody over him. But I care about him. Who’s looking out for kids like him?

On the drive down, I found myself reading a Duluth Reader Weekly column under the tagline “Dish with Trish” advocating the selling of Duluth Central to the Edison charter school system for a new high school. Her experience in Duluth public schools was the polar opposite of mine, and she refuses to acknowledge them as a contributor to her education. She rushed her children out of ISD 709 and into Edison. Her argument is a sloppy one that relies on silly cherry-picked examples about kids holding open doors for her; it lacks anything resembling nuance. But that doesn’t take away from the sincerity of her perceptions. She clearly thinks Edison offers a better future for her kids, and for her, that is all that matters.

The argument in favor of charter schools is a pretty sound one. “Charter schools create competition, and competition is good.” That makes complete sense. Institutions that never face any competition can easily become stagnant or mediocre. But here’s the thing: charter school populations are entirely self-selected. Everyone there is there because they want to be there. No wonder people gush about the community and engaged families at charter schools: describing them that way is practically tautological. If you are an engaged parent, it also makes complete sense that you’d want your child in an environment entirely surrounded by other children of such parents. Add in the ugly class sizes in ISD 709, and it’s a slam dunk. What’s not to like?

However, this nation has made a commitment to universal public education. Unless you want to go and throw that out, you’re going to have to contend with the fact that there are quite a few people out there for whom education is not a priority. Perhaps their parents are unwilling or unable to support kids to the extent they need; perhaps it’s a conscious rejection, and most likely it’s a complex web of socioeconomic and family and psychological factors. It’s unfortunate in many ways, but that fact can’t be wished away. These kids are still going to go to school, and it’s going to fall upon the public schools to educate them. Because of that, public school test scores will always face some burdens, teachers will always be frustrated by certain kids, and while these kids are certainly not doomed to be disruptive or “bad,” they have an unfortunate tendency to become the face of public schools. Public schools will never be able to compete with charter schools on a level playing field. Ever.

If you pull the engaged families and students out of the public schools, it leaves the public schools in a downward spiral that’s hard to escape. If parents never think their kids are going to public schools, they don’t bother to support school levies, and the funding dries up. Parent volunteers disappear, and booster clubs that give private support to public school programs go the way of the dodo. Class sizes get even bigger, even more kids are pulled out, forcing even more cuts, leaving behind those kids who are all too often left behind by society. I’m not saying this is destiny; there are some exceptional individuals who come out of even the worst schools, and committed leadership can turn around struggling schools. But this is the exception, not the norm. Throwing up one’s hands and praying some good leaders will come along isn’t a winning strategy.

You would think that most liberal-leaning people respect the need to support the entire community, and to fight for public schools. (I won’t pretend to know Trish’s political allegiances, but aside from a few stray anarchists, social libertarians, and Harry Welty, I don’t think the Reader has ever run anything by anyone who isn’t somewhere on the leftward end of the political spectrum.) Duluth’s liberalism isn’t without its downsides (as with any political ideology), but it has allowed for relatively generous support for public institutions over the years. And yet, with our public schools going through a troubled time, the reaction of so many community-oriented people has not been to fight for that community, but to flee in search of something else.

I don’t say this in spite or judgment. It’s only human nature to care deeply about our children before anyone else, and I’m not among the cosmopolitan idealists who think we can or should get rid of that. When I try to weigh the moral implications of something, I often use my hypothetical future children as my test: would I let my children go here or do that? I certainly wouldn’t send them to one of the miserable inner-city schools I saw in Washington DC just to make a political point. (For new readers, I went to college in DC before coming home to the city I love most.) Duluth, however, isn’t there yet. Some perspective is in order: Duluth can still be rescued, if enough people pitch in and resist the atomizing tendencies that drive us all to pursue our own short-term personal interests at the expense of the communal good.

The problem with Duluth is that it’s small. Build a charter school and take 500 kids out of the Washington DC school district, and DCPS will keep on running (to the extent that it runs…) with fairly stable funding; there might be some ripple effects, but it isn’t going to reorder the entire situation. Take 500 kids out of a district that only has maybe 2800 high school students, and you have a potentially huge disruption. Duluth is small enough that the old cliché used by everyone from Marxists to Buddhists to Rand Paul (in very different contexts)—“we are all interconnected”—really is true. Charter school parents may not like to hear this, but in Duluth, it’s true: your choices affect everyone else. The good news is that, in a smaller community, a movement to change the course doesn’t take a whole lot of people. We can make this happen.

In a community of this size, it’s impossible to imagine a sustainable social fabric without public schools. To their credit, Duluth public schools have programs for the kids who aren’t on the fast track on college that teach them skills that will get them employed after their school days are over. I don’t know how well these programs work, but at least the effort is there, and that is essential. Students who aren’t going to college need to know that they aren’t failures, and that there is a group of people who care about their futures. By keeping everyone in the same building, we recognize that interconnectedness, even if they’re tracked into very different sorts of classes. Tracking can make sure that the highest achievers can get the courses they need to go to the best colleges (it worked for me), and the kids in the middle can find a happy medium, too. Money and support flows in to everyone, and not just the select few who already have strong support networks. If you get enough stakeholders on hand to fight the good fight, the class sizes will fall to normal levels, and these schools can reach their very real potential.

You might call that an idealistic stance, but it’s an ideal rooted in acceptance of reality. The people in public schools are going to be our neighbors. Some of them might even be our relatives. If you’re a liberal, the need here should be obvious, Red Plan rancor be damned: there is no other way forward if you really do support an equitable society. If you’re a conservative, giving these kids a chance can keep them off the welfare rolls, and creates at least an avenue to welcome their families into a community that will allow them to escape the pathologies of the past. Of course it won’t work out for everyone. Human nature is what it is, and people will make mistakes or not listen or face obstacles that simply cannot be overcome. But it is not destiny. And public education, for all its faults, is, from a societal standpoint, the only cost-effective way to keep it from being destiny.

Yes, this requires some active parenting. It requires a bit more engagement, perhaps, as people band together to fight for their kids and confront the bloated bureaucracy and inane love-and-happy-thinking education-speak that plague many school systems. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it for everyone that you share this community with, and for your own kids, too. Putting one’s children in a school that offers the whole gamut of students also broadens their horizons in ways that no self-selected charter school ever could. There is more to “diversity” than race or faith, after all. This is the world we live in. The empathy I feel for people from different backgrounds from mine does not come from the various service projects I’ve done among people from disadvantaged communities. It comes from living among them.

All of that said, I support the sale of the old Central High School to Edison. I can wish that all of the Edison parents are going to read my piece and change their minds, but I’m not delusional. Edison High is going to happen. I don’t like it one bit, but holding up some ideal in a desperate attempt to keep one’s hands off the inevitable is only going to hurt the district in the long run. Selling Central to Edison gives ISD 709 some chance to control the terms of the sale and cap enrollment, and I doubt it’s going to get a better offer for that financial black hole atop the hill. At the very least, Harry Welty’s lease idea could offer some sort of compromise. (Full disclosure: Harry and I did lunch after he read my last column on ISD 709.)

Antagonizing the charter school people even more certainly isn’t going to win them back, either. This is our future we’re talking about. We’re all in this together, even if we have some disagreements about methods. I hope Duluthians can come together and work some of these things out, perhaps over a drink or three. (I’d be happy to foot the bill, even on my underemployed recent college grad’s salary.) This town is unique because it has such a distinct communal identity; with enough effort, it has the potential to be exceptional. Getting there is going to require that people get out of their comfort zones, though. We’ll see if Duluth can pull it off.

Finding the Cyclical Life in Arendt and Vargas Llosa

This blog is, admittedly, rather eclectic, and I am proud of that. There are posts about high school hockey and posts about city council meetings and posts about obscure intellectual debates, and I am well-aware that a number of readers come just for one of those topics while ignoring the rest. The posts on hockey and local politics have a certain order to them, while the more theoretical ones, while united by some vague themes, are fairly disjointed.

With that in mind, I’m going impose some order and tease out some parallels between my post on Hannah Arendt’s theory on evil and another recent one highlighting Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize speech on the importance of literature. They might not seem to have much in common in subject matter or underlying theory, but they share a robust vision of human life that is not strictly individualist or collective, but one that cycles between the two and emphasizes the importance of each.

At a cursory glance, both of these outlooks can appear rather individualistic. Arendt is famous for her attacks on totalitarian governments and the mindsets they instilled in their citizens, argues for a distinct private sphere of life (albeit not a realm she celebrates much), and had no problem with Adolph Eichmann hanging for failing to exercise his own moral agency. Vargas Llosa, who once ran for president of Peru as the candidate of a right-leaning party, is a staunch defender of individual liberty.

But neither one is that simple. As I explained in the last post, Arendt was no rampant individualist. Instead, she subscribed to a different definition of freedom rooted in Aristotle that saw living in community as the very essence of being human. In fact, she rejected the label “philosopher” because she believed it referred to people who studied man (in the singular) instead of people and how they interacted, and preferred to be called a “political theorist.” She had no great love for collectivism, but she was well-aware that human flourishing does not involve autonomous humans operating in vacuums, but is forever tied up in daily interaction with other people—that is, politics. Her thinking, while not always easy to penetrate, has a clear logic.

Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, is very much a modern man, and posits the individual at the center of his philosophical outlook. In a 1992 interview in Sergio Marras’s América Latina (Marca Registrada), he celebrated the death of collectivism that he believed came along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and hoped “the death of all social utopias [will] lead us to search for utopias in activities where it’s not harmful, but actually very positive: for example, in art, in literature, and in individual life.” (Emphasis and translation mine.) Vargas Llosa’s profession also lends itself to an appreciation of individualism: as an author, his great creations emerge ostensibly from his own mind, and nowhere else. “A novelist is someone whose inner existence is as compelling as the details of his or her life,” writes Jane Smiley in her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Still, even Vargas Llosa is well-aware that every person’s individuality emerges in part as a response to the collective. Storytelling is not just a means of entertainment or self-improvement, but a necessary foundation for the move from the “tautological” tribal life of prehistoric homo sapiens and is the power that “makes the human being really human: the capacity to move out of oneself and into another, into others, modeled with the clay of our dreams.” Like Arendt, Vargas Llosa sees that human flourishing emerges from the political realm, and the ability to dialogue with others and imagine a different life.

From my own experience, I can endorse Vargas Llosa’s words wholeheartedly.  I don’t know that I’d completely accept a label of “communitarian” or “localist” or “republican” (small-R republican, not the political party) but I do often emphasize themes that are associated with these words, and that comes directly from my first attempt at novel-writing. While I was an undergraduate in college, I started writing a novel late at night while my roommate was trying to sleep, and slowly put together a novel. It was about as individualistic an act as can be; it was a creative attempt to create a sort of narrative around my life, and I never shared any of it with anyone. (In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.) While it was an alright story and offered varying degrees of subtlety, the book was essentially a justification for my political views and my lifelong project of relentless academic success and achievement. But as I wrote, the book collapsed in on itself: I came to see the humanity in the ideas and people and places I’d meant to attack, and I came to love the setting that my protagonist sought to escape. Literature is, ultimately, to blame for my decision to head home after college; without it, I never would have come to embrace my own roots. I’d always been socially conscious, but at the same time, there was a manner in which my well-intentioned desire to climb the ladder and go on to save starving children in Africa came at the expense of more immediate relationships and realms in which my political activity could have an immediate, tangible impact. I don’t mean to denigrate people who commit their lives to social climbing or saving people elsewhere, but I did realize that I, at least, wasn’t going to find happiness there.

Instead, I find that it comes in cycles, with my time split between introspective writing (a la Vargas Llosa) and outward engagement in the community around me, as Arendt prescribes. While I certainly haven’t abandoned my old sense of ambition, I have recalibrated it to an entirely different sphere of life; one that situates it within a community, forever in search of dialogue. I have a lot of work to do.

How Is Evil Banal?

I have not seen the new “Hannah Arendt” movie, but I am enjoying the recent outburst of commentary on her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is her account for the New Yorker of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Israel. The work is most famous for describing Eichmann’s brand of evil is “banal,” a wonderfully pithy phrase that has inspired generations of political thinkers to completely misunderstand her work. Writes Roger Berkowitz of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities:

Perhaps Arendt has been so violently misunderstood because her thinking is both provocative and demanding. Her blessing, and her curse was a facility for quotable aphorisms that, like Nietzsche’s, require whole books to reveal their unconventional meaning. It is easy to cite the “banality of evil.” It is much more difficult to make sense of what Arendt actually meant.

The common misunderstanding, says Berkowitz, stems from testimony at parts of the Eichmann trial Arendt did not attend, in which Eichmann’s anti-Semitism was on full display. Surely, her critics argue, had she heard his very willing embrace of Nazism, she would not have found anything banal in Eichmann. Berkowitz again:

The problem with this conclusion is that Arendt never wrote that Eichmann simply followed orders. She never portrayed him, in Cesarani’s words, as a “dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat.” Indeed she rejected the idea that Eichmann was simply following orders. She emphasized that Eichmann took enormous pride in his initiative in deporting Jews and also in his willingness to disobey orders to do so, especially Himmler’s clear orders — offered in 1944 in the hope of leniency amid impending defeat — to “take good care of the Jews, act as their nursemaid.” In direct disobedience, Eichmann organized death marches of Hungarian Jews; as Arendt writes, he “sabotaged” Himmler’s orders. As the war ground to an end, as Arendt saw, Eichmann, against Himmler, remained loyal to Hitler’s idea of the Nazi movement and did “his best to make the Final Solution final.”

The banality of Eichmann came not from his blindness, but from his idealism; his grandiose belief that he was a part of some movement that gave meaning to an otherwise fairly dull, bourgeois life. Arendt does indeed make Eichmann sound rather pitiful—not because he was an automaton, but because he had a desperate need to conform in his search for meaning. He abdicated his moral agency by accepting the ideas of others uncritically.

This argument could very easily turn into a rejection of all politics, for fear that it inevitably corrupts people and drives them to commit terrible deeds. Arendt, however, goes in an entirely different direction—one that is alien to the contemporary framing of politics as a fight between the state and the individual. In the words of Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez in Mexico’s Nexos magazine (translation mine):

What is notable about this theoretical construction is that, despite being a vehement denunciation of the voracity of totalitarianism and all nationalization, Arendt does not find refuge in the defense of the private or the apolitical. On the contrary, she restores the value of politics better than anyone. Far from distancing herself from this sphere, she was convinced that it was necessary to recover it, or occupy it, as we say today. In politics she did not see a prolongation of the war, nor a nest of bureaucrats or proxy representatives. Politics, for her, was a cultural treasure that permitted men to find themselves, and find they were truly human. Only in the common realm of politics could man find his authentic existence. He is not the man in private isolation, in the monotonous echo chamber of commercialism. Citizenship could not be the occasional episode of voting, but a daily experience of one exercising liberty with others.

The work that should have been titled Amor mundi [The Human Condition] sustains precisely this necessity to revitalize the public space and find means to act in concert. It does not look for refuge in the private realm but instead in the plaza, in places of deliberation and encounter. In the face of historical determinism and manufactured inertia, it offers a route of imagination and creativity. The most essential thing about man is his “talent to create miracles,” that is, “his capacity to initiate, to achieve the improbable.” Conformity is the negation of liberty. In this way, Hannah Arendt led the fight for a notion of liberty that has little to do with the normal sense of the word in our day in age. Beyond liberating us from exterior constraints, being free means becoming engaged with the world. Her vision of liberty is republican, and densely political. In his room, isolated, man cannot be free. He is, if he goes out the door and enters the city and acts within it. Arendt restored the liberty of the ancients, the liberty within the city, among others. Totalitarianism is the most radical negation of liberty because it not only prohibits action; it also negates man. It negates the victim but also the executioner: one or the other, nuts and bolts within the imposed machinery of power. There are no individuals, only the species; there is no man, only humanity.

Totalitarianism is no longer the existential threat it was when Arendt wrote, but her work is no less relevant today. Due to a long list of factors I won’t delve into here, political participation has declined, and it’s not uncommon to hear laments over the collapse of civic participation. On the other side of the coin, there are still plenty of mass protests and advocacy campaigns, but many of them operate in ideological echo chambers. People get together to fight for a cause, but there is little in the way of dialogue, save mutterings about “those people” on the other side and shaking one’s fist (or worse) at the counter-protesters. In Arendt’s reckoning, this is not only an impoverished view of political life; it is a negation of human freedom.

To be sure, it is easy to pine for “dialogue” and “civil debate,” but it isn’t always easy to make it happen, and proponents of such debates are often not all that interested in hearing what other parties have to say. Arendt’s politics, however, goes back even further. It involves such simple things as families around the dinner table, friends at the bar, and co-workers acting in concert. It involves casual give-and-take, a slow learning that builds a culture out of which one defines one’s individuality. Politics conducted in good faith within a community is anything but banal; it is absolutely essential to the formation of a free human being. Only through such a dialogue can a person learn to consider alternatives to the ideological conformity that so enthralled Eichmann.

It isn’t the answer to everything that plagues politics in this day in age, and it takes effort. The design, however, is startlingly simple, and it is a start.

Two Articles Worth Reading

Distractions have slowed my blogging pace, but here are a couple of articles I enjoyed. One came out today, while the other is an old one that I found myself revisiting after writing my last post on here. They are not all that related, though they do both express opinions that I would have frowned upon just a few years ago, but have come to appreciate since.

First, from the British newspaper The Guardian, an article telling us to stop reading news. (Ironic, no?) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli?INTCMP=SRCH

I’m not sure I could ever cut myself off as the author of that piece did, but there’s a lot to think about there, and I can certainly relate to some of his sentiments. It’s easy to convince oneself that reading lots news is one’s duty if one wants to be an informed and intelligent person, when it is often merely a somewhat more enlightened form of procrastination. I’m all for a healthy dose of vicarious living and sounding intelligent at cocktail parties, but following the news can easily get out of hand. This isn’t without its problems, especially when things do directly affect us, and it’s also difficult to know what the author considers “news”–does that include, say, op-eds? A longer analysis piece in a news magazine? Personal essays? This blog? Still, I agree there is a certain freedom in not being chained to the news cycle.

The idea of slavish devotion to the news was already in my mind this week; when I first heard of the Boston Marathon bombings, my first instinct was to glue myself to a news feed and follow along. But then, as I often do in such moments, I flash back to 9/11. I was at school that day, and while they told us what had happened, they never turned on the TVs. When I got home, my dad–a college professor and generally very well-informed man–wasn’t glued to the news and worrying; he was gardening. Even as an 11-year-old, I was in awe of such composure during a crisis. My understanding of that day was not hurt by not seeing video footage of the falling towers until weeks afterward; in fact, it may have let me think through it better–as well as I could at that age. In a certain way, that was our own little victory over the terrorists: there was no terror in our house. Instead, there was some sadness, some reflection, and then we all got on with life.

Fr. James Schall, a Jesuit priest and recently retired Georgetown professor, always told his students to “never major in current events.”  Such narrow focus, he reasoned, led us to ignore the bigger things. Sometimes I wonder where I’d be if I’d heard his advice as a freshman or sophomore, instead of as a senior–but that’s all water under the bridge now, and there were different rewards to following the route I did take.

Fr. Schall also serves as a good transition into the next piece, which was written by another former Georgetown professor. I had the pleasure of taking a class from Prof. Patrick Deneen in what was the final semester in Washington for both of us; I’d suspect he generally shares Fr. Schall’s disinterest in current events, though I’m afraid he’s the main reason that several of those news links are on the right side of this page. In this essay, he explains his decision to abandon a tenured position at Georgetown to seek out a different opportunity:

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/10/leaving-washington/

Prof. Deneen and I come from fairly different places in life, but when it comes to leaving Washington, we have a lot in common. The essay captures much of my own jadedness with D.C., and though coming home since has not been without its frustrations, it was also rewarding on many levels. I may not be able to stay in Duluth long-term, but even if I don’t, localism is (funnily enough) something that can be useful anywhere. As with the news, I’m not sure completely cutting oneself off is the way to go, but there is certainly some wisdom there.

The Elephant in Every Room

I ended my last post by suggesting that individual freedom is the driving force in just about every social change. Today, I’ll flesh out that argument a bit more.

First, the evidence: personal liberation has been at the heart of nearly every liberal or leftist achievement since the 1960s. The civil rights and feminist movements, while not necessarily complete, made great strides. Likewise, sexual autonomy has taken off dramatically. Yet when it comes to collective action, the left has stalled. Despite the efforts of many politicians and community activists, poverty remains entrenched in many American communities, and inequality has only grown. Unions have gradually lost their power. The environmental movement records most of its victories on an individual level, with consumers embracing green shopping but minimal political action on such issues as climate change. Universal health care came about only through appeals that every person deserved the right to some level of care, and remains far less centralized than Europe’s single-payer systems.

On the right, it hasn’t been any different. The past half century has seen decreases in tax rates, deregulation, and the proliferation of free-market economic theories that rally against state intervention. Most liberal social issues have done well over the past half-century, yet gun control legislation rarely goes anywhere, with the Second Amendment as the guiding light. The conservative ideals under duress are far more communal in nature: traditional family structures, church attendance, and perhaps the predominance of “traditional” American culture generally associated with white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

There are some issues that don’t line up so evenly. On abortion, for example, both sides can play the freedom card: the left demands rights for women to control their bodies, while the right demands rights for the unborn. National security—that paradoxical enterprise by which we take away freedoms so as to protect freedoms—doesn’t line up very nicely, either. On that front, the politicians in power almost always favor the collective definition of freedom, despite complaints from both ends of the spectrum. Still, I think this is the exception that proves the rule: collective action only seem to advance when the populace feels sufficiently threatened by some outside force, and enthusiasm for more rigid national security has faded away now that Islamic terrorism is not perceived to be the existential threat it was decade ago. Clearly, there are times when public opinion rallies against the steady march of individualism, and slows the tide for a spell. But the fact remains that the side that can best monopolize arguments for individual freedom just about always wins.

Appeals to individual rights resound with voters on a level that vague appeals to the greater good cannot, just as photos of a single starving child tend to move more people to action than a ream of statistics on child poverty. Self-interest tends to take priority, and in a society where the majority of people are relatively secure from outside threats, collective action often seems needless. On an individual level, this makes an awful lot of sense; the problems arise when we dare to ask what might be lost by such a narrow focus.

It’s important to note that this does not necessarily mean the advancement of individual liberties at the expense of state power. In some cases, government policy is seen as the best means to drive individual liberation, and the state sure hasn’t gotten any smaller over the past few decades, even with “conservatives” in control in Washington. Some even argue that individualism and growing state power feed off of one another in a vicious cycle. What have suffered, on the other hand, are voluntary associations that make up civil society—groups that citizens join to affect the communal good. In my opinion, the greatest threat this country faces is not its debt load, nor some external foe, nor an immediate lack of social justice. It is its failing social fabric, and without it, none of the other issues really matter.

My point here certainly isn’t to say that the government needs to control more things, or that we need to subsume all our individual desires to the collective. If I lived in a different country and in a different era, I might have lamented the opposite trend. My point is that our basic ways of thinking about politics—as a battle between the individual and the state—is fundamentally flawed.

Instead, we ought to recognize that humans, for all the unique traits of each one of us, are forever doomed to live within communities, and have to find some way to make them work as a collective. Certain problems can only be solved via collective action, and we also tend to be happier when we have our most fundamental beliefs validated by groups of people with similar interests or concerns. Conceiving of the human being as an autonomous individual who is forced into living with others is an impoverished view of human nature, to the extent that we can define such a thing. We have our moments when we operate alone, yes, but we also have moments where we must operate in concert, and we can’t ignore either one and expect to come out with a sensible philosophy about life.

At this moment in history, individualism has the upper hand, and while individual liberation has brought us many very good things, it isn’t without its dark side, and we must acknowledge it. This, of course, leads to the question of what can be done to counteract these trends; unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of great answers on this front yet, beyond the basic suggestion that we should all get out a little bit more. It may, in fact, be hard to do much of anything until a lot more people become aware of the trends driving modern American life.

To that end, I suppose, this blog post is a start. We’ll see where we go next.

From the Vault: Election 2012

The post I’d planned to write for today isn’t quite done yet, but since I’m sticking with my plan to put up a post a day, here is something I wrote on the eve of last November’s election. I have some other reservations about doing this; I don’t want to have readers of a newish blog judging everything I post from here on out through the lens of who I voted for in an election–especially one that, in the grand scheme of things, I do not think was all that relevant to most of what I plan to write about on here. But, much as I may wish to believe it, I am not purely objective. I have my biases, so I may as well note them, hopefully with enough nuance that any reader can respect it.

The Only Thing I Will Write About the 2012 Election

I’ve studied politics my entire life, and I spend a healthy amount of my time procrastinating by reading about it daily in any number of publications. So it might come as a surprise to some that I have intentionally avoided nearly every opportunity to express my opinion about the upcoming election. It all goes back to a moment not long after the 2010 elections, when I found myself standing before a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Mexico City in the dead of night and realized, finally, that my happiness in life was not remotely related to the results national elections. It was a delightfully liberating moment. Eternal student that I am, I’ve kept up with the endless intricacies of politics ever since, but always from a comfortable distance, and only rarely volunteering my opinion. But, as the saying goes, silence is only useful if someone somewhere expects you to be loud. Given the extent of the endless screaming about politics out there, it’s obvious my silence hasn’t meant much. Not that I expect to be able to drown out the din now that I am offering something, so I’ll be a good citizen and have my say on the 2012 election.

What a difference four years make: the incumbent President and his party find themselves in a conundrum. The new liberal majority proclaimed four years ago has been beaten into submission, and reality has taken root. This country is split almost evenly between its two dominant parties. This in itself is no great change; it’s exactly where we were twelve years ago, at the start of the George W. Bush era. But after a few wars and a giant recession, the mood couldn’t be any more different. Bush’s effort to remake the world in America’s image fell flat, and U.S. influence around the globe is waning, though in a number of cases that is not necessarily a bad thing. Likewise, the hopelessly high hopes for Barack Obama have resolved themselves into a murky mess, and even if the President is re-elected, the odds do not favor any sort of great shift in a second term.

In search of a pragmatic center-left candidate who disdained business as usual in Washington, I voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. That is more or less what I got, though I will not pretend to be thrilled with the results. Mr. Obama’s dislike of political wrangling led him to ignore the dirty work of consensus-building, and his eagerness to be all things led him into unsavory alliances with much of the entrenched political and economic elite. A necessity for survival in modern government, perhaps, but the consistent caution in the President’s dealings has often allowed others to dictate the terms of the debate. Even when Mr. Obama has tried to be tough, it hasn’t seemed very natural or effective for anyone beyond the base; that just isn’t who he is. And for all of the post-partisan rhetoric, the legislation produced was decidedly liberal; sure, many liberals had their quarrels with certain points, but when one considers the arc of liberal history in this country, there is no doubt Mr. Obama is one of its greatest champions.

After four years in the city, I don’t have many illusions over what Washington does; by in large, I can live with Mr. Obama’s major legislative achievements and foreign policy. Both have elements that I find worrisome, at times even deeply troubling: drone strikes, coziness with big banks and insurance companies, an extremely narrow view of faith, and a well-intentioned but sclerotic continued expansion of the ever-growing, ever-centralizing federal bureaucracy. Still, given the constraints of his office, I think he has done some good where others may have done none.

Yet through it all, I’m reluctant to reward him with a second term. The Democratic turn to class warfare, coupled with canards about taxing the wealthy—though true in the sense that everyone will have to pay in somehow—often rely on fanciful math and willful ignorance. Make no mistake, this country faces a fiscal crisis, and the Democratic Party has yet to offer a substantive approach to reining it all in. None of Mr. Obama’s achievements on the health care front will mean much if this country goes broke sometime down the road. Many of the narrow-minded defenses of government intervention that have emerged this election cycle are cringe-inducing in their portrayal of how the state interacts with individuals, seeming to dole out benefits from on high out of the goodness of its heart, replacing any need for such trivialities as families or communities. I still admire Mr. Obama’s measured seriousness, and perhaps a President freed from worries over future elections could again rise above the fray. But Mr. Obama’s message is no longer something fresh or terribly inspiring beyond the base, and after the exhausting scrutiny of the past four years, he may have neither the will nor the authority to do so.

And so I have done my best to give Mitt Romney an honest appraisal. It wasn’t easy. Though he is more complicated and decent than the all-too-easy caricatures make him out to be, Mr. Romney remains a graceless political chameleon. I think a President Romney would have more in common with the Massachusetts governor than the version of him we saw in the Republican primaries, but his self-serving rush to please does not suggest much potential in the way of executive leadership, and his apparent ambivalence over issues unrelated to the economy is troublesome. Sure, it’d be nice if the economic recovery went a bit faster (no guarantee), but where is the grand scheme? I find his recent adoption of the rhetoric of “change” amusing; he has adopted the vagueness of the Obama ‘08 message without any of the interesting backstory that made Mr. Obama likeable.

All in all, I think Mr. Romney is a distraction; the man who best captures the Republican moment is not the former governor but Congressman Paul Ryan, his lieutenant. There is little doubt Mr. Ryan is the intellectual heavyweight of his party, and he is among the few who take the country’s fiscal situation seriously, even if his proposed solutions are, in the end, no less fudged than those of the Democrats. I have my disagreements with the man, but I’d like to think he has both the political clout and the sense of duty necessary to eventually get something done. Yet I cannot embrace him: he is an enigma, and in the end we are left with this curious fusion of Ayn Rand and Catholic social teaching. Whether the congressman from Wisconsin recognizes it or not, he embodies the contradiction that has poisoned his party: the union of conscientious (if often self-righteous) religious and community-oriented conservatism with a free-market ideology of individualism. Each has its merits (particularly the former, in my opinion), but the resulting policies—slashed taxes without fiscal restraint, a missionary zeal to Americanize the rest of the world, the hypocrisy of conservative government overreach in an effort to impose the alleged solutions—usually manage to combine the worst of both.

It’s enough to make a man go screaming into the night in search of a third way.  At the moment, the most prominent of those options seems to be the Libertarian Party, a freedom-loving alliance of free-market (and sometimes pro-gold standard) adherents and elements of the anti-war, drug-legalizing left. The movement’s standard-bearers, Ron Paul and his son Rand, have sat out the general election, leaving us with the capable but unremarkable Gary Johnson. I find myself in agreement with Mr. Johnson on a number of fronts, just as I have some lingering sympathy for other alternatives such as the Greens, but I do have some serious reservations. Promoters of the third-party vote will sensibly dismiss these reservations; they know their candidates cannot win, so my qualms with Mr. Johnson’s economic plans really don’t matter. The vote is instead a matter of principle; a form of protest, such as it is.

Still, the certain failure of these third-party candidacies simply goes to reveal the folly of the anti-establishment movement in modern American politics. Sure, bits of the Libertarian or Green or Constitutionalist platforms may worm their way into our two behemoths, and though they may be hijacked or lose their purity, this mild populist influence is not insignificant. Yet there can be no victory of any magnitude. It all gets swallowed up by the beast. It’s only natural, and it makes sense: it’s an attempt to change the system from the top down, and labors under the delusion that the president will be the one who sets the agenda. It outsources the responsibility for meaningful change to yet another distant figure who, for some unexplained reason, will allegedly be less constrained by the twin leviathans of the modern state and liberal (in the broad sense of the term) culture. It’s not coincidental that the most successful of these third-party figures are never moderates, but those who best outline a distinctive, and often radical, agenda either largely wedded to a single issue (as with the Greens) or a clearly ideological worldview (the Libertarians). They are admirable voices in the wilderness on hand to ease the consciences of certain idealists, but little more.

The road out of our political malaise is not in the worship of a single candidate or a vision of the world as it should be. It is a return to the particular, to the things we really can control, a realm not yet totally captured by the Washington bureaucracy or the vagaries of the market. While this means paying a bit more attention to state and local races, not even that gets to the core of the issue. Too often local politicians simply ape the talking points of their party, and hatred can run just as rampant at a city council or school board meeting as on the national stage. Yet any serious inroad against the two-party system fostered by our electoral laws will have to start on the local level, where elections are actually winnable without an absurd amount of financial investment. From there, a movement can grow to regional and state levels, a process that would only make sense given the great regional disparities in this country. In nearly all countries with a multi-party system, at least one party is a regional bloc. No, this process would not change things overnight, but that is the point—and a real strength—of democracy.

I am sympathetic to those who would like to just shut out all this political bickering; it all seems so petty, and I’m sick of it, too. But politics isn’t just Obama versus Romney. It is how we interact with people on a day-to-day basis, and need not involve the formal structures of government. It involves our interaction with other people in any walk of life, from churches to schools to private clubs to our decisions in where we do our shopping and to whom we give our money. It is, in short, how we interact with our community; whether we like it or not, we all live in a community of some sort, and we must find a place within it, amongst the competing interests and crazy ideas of those people who surround us. Whatever the libertarian or liberal-state-providing delusions of individual autonomy may say, we’re stuck with those other people, and we’d better learn to live with them. Many liberals will nod and smile when they hear ideas such as these, but liberals do have a tendency to favor certain aspects of “community” over others, and liberal tolerance is often stunningly intolerant of views that drift outside the constraints of the ideology. Truth be told, a robust civil society is, in fact, traditionally a “conservative” talking point, and there are still plenty of examples of this great conservative tradition in such projects as faith-based initiatives and even some of the Tea Party rhetoric. Still, the Randian, hyper-individualist wing of the contemporary American right has dismissed any sense of obligation to the community, and Congressman Ryan’s effort to at least keep it in the conversation was largely ignored.

I’ve spent enough time studying autocracies that I take democracy seriously, so I will be voting; as unappealing as U.S. politics may sometimes seem, five minutes in a developing nation is usually all it takes to reaffirm one’s faith in our decidedly imperfect system. Being jaded enough in my ideals, I will likely vote the straight Democratic ticket. A second Obama term seems like the somewhat lesser of two evils, and in my dreamland, President Obama might find some way to work with a Republican House led by Congressman Ryan. I am less enthused by an alliance between such opportunists as Mr. Romney and Sen. Harry Reid, neither of whom seem to grasp the scope of the challenges this nation faces. I’m very open to voting for an agreeable Republican, but my state’s Senate race is a foregone conclusion in favor of a hardworking and largely positive-messaged incumbent, and my Republican congressman does not even feel the need to post a political platform to his own website. (Apparently my disgust with Obama and/or love for him is supposed to speak for itself? Given the mediocrity of his Democratic opponent I could have been convinced, but at least the Democrat actually says he’ll do things.) In a refreshing bit of clarity, I am untroubled with my ‘no’ votes on constitutional amendments aiming to ban gay marriage and enact a voter ID law, though even there, I tire of the rhetoric used by many fellow ‘no’ voters. Believe it or not, conscientiously following one’s faith is not bigotry.

So on Tuesday night I’ll settle in with a drink or three to watch the results come in (though I doubt it’ll be nearly as glamorous as my Mexican penthouse election party two years ago, or my run to the White House two years prior). It’ll be a pleasant evening of politics as a spectator sport. But to me, it’s no longer a whole lot more than that. On Wednesday morning I’ll get up, tune out the chatter, and get to work. I’ll make a conscious effort to spend less time glued to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and re-commit myself to this city I’m in, whether it’s serving the needy, being a good neighbor, or simply enjoying such communal rites as a parade or a hockey game. I’ll spend fewer nights on the couch and more nights finding new ways to fall in love with the people around me, and their own rather distinct culture that must be preserved and carried forward. After all my study of politics, it is here, I believe, that we find our happiness. I hope a few others will join me.