Donald Trump is an unabashed bigot, a baldfaced liar and someone who bragged about groping women. But as nightmarish as it seems to have those qualities in the White House, sooner or later his presidency will come to an end. And when it does, we will be faced with the true American nightmare: that almost 63 million of us, knowing full well who Donald Trump was, voted for him anyway.
--DAVID BERMAN, Letter to the Editor of the NY Times
To Protect America, James Madison Advised Us To ‘Extend the Sphere.’ Now, It’s Contracting.
Without the villages and congregations that once bound Americans of divergent views, a different, darker brand of politics is emerging, one with far fewer protections from a general conflagration.
James Madison was angry. Two months into the Constitutional Convention of 1787, his efforts to marginalize state legislatures in favor of a strong, national government were melting into the sweltering summer heat. During the convention’s opening weeks, he’d prevailed in several topical debates. He’d convinced his fellow delegates that both houses of the new Congress should be apportioned by population—a victory that those representing small states would later walk back. He’d prevailed in arguing that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a free person. He’d even persuaded the delegates that the national legislature should have the right to “negative” (meaning veto) unconstitutional state laws.
But as June had turned to July, several smaller states, including Delaware and New Jersey, had grown concerned that proportional representation would empower slave-preponderant Virginia to dominate the new national government. When Alexander Hamilton suggested that the new government’s chief executive serve in perpetuity, the delegates began to focus more on how to rein in the new national government. What, they asked, would prevent a demagogue from wielding too much influence?
Stewing at his desk, Madison took careful notes when Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker representing Pennsylvania at the convention, stood up to argue that the new nation’s wide expanse would prevent the executive branch from becoming “the tool of a faction, of some leading demagogue in the legislature.” Boston College Law School’s Mary Sarah Bilder argued recentlythat Morris’ remarks helped to shape what would become one of Madison’s most famous essays, Federalist 10.
“Extend the sphere,” Madison wrote months later when the individual states were considering whether to ratify the Constitution, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
Nearly 230 years later, Americans still frequently assume that a divided government will be a more effective and responsible one. But in other parts of the world, the preponderance of factions tends to argue against democracy. When Americans hector government officials in Beijing to embrace democratic norms, the Chinese frequently respond that China isn’t properly equipped to devolve power to ordinary people. It’s too big and fractious. Sun Yat-sen once famously suggested that the Chinese were just a “heap of loose sand.” Absent the sort of unity prevalent in most Western countries, members of the Communist Party worry that democracy in China would lead to chaos.
What made colonial America different? In Madison’s own words: “the spirit of locality.” In 1807, Samuel Benninger, an Congregationalist minister visiting from England noted that, in contrast to Europeans, Americans tended to sort the world by “village and congregation.” In other words, rather than sorting themselves by class or nobility or profession, they identified themselves by geography—and each town or neighborhood had a whole mix of people from different background and with divergent points of view.
The result was that American factions weren’t isolated from one another so much as they were in perpetual contact. Every congregation had wealthy merchants and landed gentry and working stiffs alike—and none could avoid conversing with the others. Sure, certain corners of the country might work up some zeal for an agenda that might tyrannize a competing faction, but the workaday interactions of ordinary Americans would give everyone a greater appreciation for the common good. In essence, strong community would prevent rampant demagoguery.
Fast forward to today. For the first time since the Revolution, American communities aren’t organized along “village and congregation.” On the one hand, social media has made it possible for Americans to connect directly with people much further afield. On the other, those networks and other new technologies have made it much easier to keep in close contact with our most intimate ties. Lost in the middle are the informal, local relationships that propelled Madison to believe factions would temper democracy’s excesses.
Americans are more likely now to spend evenings with family members or friends who live far away but less likely to share a meal with a neighbor, according to the General Social Survey. That shift has opened the door to a different brand of politics. When you don’t know anyone who takes a different point of view, it’s much easier to caricature and dismiss those who see things differently. Compromise and collaboration become a kind of apostasy, rather than a virtue.
Near the end of Federalist 10, Madison wrote: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” That might have been true in 1787. It might still have been true in 1997.
Will the country ever be united? Of course not. Why would you think such a thing anyway? Dopey people who say we need to simply ignore our differences and come together and we'll all live happily ever after are, well, dopey. In the real world it isn't going to happen. We have fundamental differences in this country that cannot be papered over. The country was not united under George Washington. The Federalist Era so-called under the aegis of Washington and Adams was one of the most divisive eras in our history and this was the beginning of the country for heavens sake. Newly elected Thomas Jefferson said, "We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans." Jefferson was spouting political nonsense. The country was obviously not united under Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, our next two greatest Presidents. Even under Eisenhower in the so-called somnolent 50's the civil rights movement---the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Little Rock, Emmett Till--was happening while the Republicans never accepted the New Deal leading to today's problems. We have temporary governing coalitions. That's all. My President's Day soapbox is now closed.
". . . . It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grams a week. Was it possible they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the end of the table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too---in some more complex way, involving doublethink---Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?"
Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.
And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.
Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”
The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.
There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and textbooks.
The Confederate flag on display, from 1938 to today
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Public moments featuring the Confederate flag.
“It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.
If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its last battle.
Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to correct for what they said was a liberal slant.
Students in Texas are required to read the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
Rod Paige, a Republican who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past.
“I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are today,” Paige told the board at the time, according to the Texas Tribune . “We may not like our history, but it’s history.”
Hundreds rally for Confederate flag
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More than 500 activists cruised into Russellville, Ark., on Sunday to show support for the embattled Confederate flag, seen by many as a symbol of racism and slavery. (Reuters)
Historians acknowledge that disagreements over states’ rights played a role in the Civil War. But the states’ rights issue was inseparable from slavery, they say: The right that states in the South were seeking to protect, after all, was the right to buy and sell people.
Southern states made that clear in their declarations of independence from the union, said James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. Slavery’s primary role in driving the Civil War is a matter of scholarly consensus, he said.
“The War happened only because of the determination of the leadership of eleven states to defend the right of their residents to own other human beings,” Grossman wrote in an e-mail. “The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.”
Hardy, the Texas state board member who said the war was not about slavery, did not respond to requests for comment. The board’s chair, Donna Bahorich, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, said the new textbooks that will arrive in Texas classrooms this fall manage to “thread the needle,” meeting state standards while still acknowledging the importance of slavery.
“But the books muddy things by presenting sectionalism and states’ rights ideas throughout,” he said. “A lot of white southerners have grown up believing that the Confederacy’s struggle was somehow a noble cause rather than a war in the defense of a horrific institution that enslaved millions of human beings.”
Texas’s social studies standards are more politicized than any other state, said Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state standards for the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2011. He gave Texas’s standards a D and wrote that the board was “molding the telling of the past to justify its current views.”
Stern said the social studies standards in South Carolina — where the Civil War started, and where, in June, Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine black parishioners — deserve an “A” and honestly address slavery’s role in the conflict while also nodding to states’ rights as an important issue at the time.
“Are Southern states soft-pedaling the Civil War? By and large, the answer to that would be no,” Stern said. But he said there is often a difference between state standards and what children actually learn.
For decades, some Southerners have emphasized states’ rights as the cause of the war. Nearly half of Americans — 48 percent — believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the war, compared to 38 percent who said the main cause was slavery, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey.
Raul Cevallos, a 2015 graduate of Texas Tech University, said he was taught at his Dallas-area high school that the war was caused by slavery. But he said a group he founded to create political awareness last year found that many young people are ignorant about history.
The group asked students three simple questions about the United States, including “Who won the Civil War?” for a video that later went viral online. “The Confederates,” answered one student. “The South,” said another. Others said they’re weren’t sure. But the same students answered questions about pop culture — “Who is married to Brad Pitt?” — correctly.
“If you don’t know about the Civil War, and you don’t know about things like slavery, then you wouldn’t really be able to understand why our society is the way it is today,” Cevallos said.
James W. Loewen , a sociologist who wrote the best-selling book “Lies My Teacher Told Me ,” says textbooks perpetuate myths about the Civil War in order to avoid offending state textbook-adoption panels. Nineteen states, including almost all of those in the South, adopt textbooks at the state level, according to the Association of American Publishers.
“I think we are at last seeing the de-Confederatization of America,” Loewen said. “And I’m hoping that we will see some action towards de-Confederatizing our textbooks.”
Loewen, who has reviewed many textbooks, said he has found many errors and omissions that help de-emphasize the role slavery played in causing the war. Among the biggest and most common problems, he said, is textbooks’ failure to quote from key primary sources: the Southern states’ declarations of secession, which made clear that they were leaving the union to protect white citizens’ right to own slaves.
“Our position is clearly identified with the institution of slavery,” reads Mississippi’s declaration , signed in 1861.
Loewen identified one textbook — “American Pageant ,” in print for more than half a century — that quoted directly from South Carolina’s secession document. That’s admirable, Loewen said, but the quotation leaves out the document’s direct language about the role of slavery in driving South Carolina’s decision.
History can be a “weapon,” Loewen said, and it has been used “against all of us. It makes us all stupid about the past and thoughtless about the present.”
David M. Kennedy , a Stanford professor emeritus and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who co-authored “American Pageant,” said Loewen is nitpicking.
“I would defy anybody who read our text to conclude that we were unaware of slavery as the cause of the Civil War,” Kennedy said. He added that he and his co-author have bade farewell in the past to states that found the textbook’s content objectionable. Alabama has rejected the book for years because of what state officials consider derogatory portrayals of 19th century religious revivals, among other reasons.
“We’re not in the business of compromising our view of history so some state school board will be happy,” Kennedy said.
Publishers of other textbooks also pushed back against Loewen’s criticisms.
“Current titles for middle and high school students clearly state that the Southern states’ desire to preserve slavery was the primary reason for secession,” said Laura Gamble, a spokeswoman for Pearson.
Critics of Texas’s new history standards fear that their teaching about the Civil War will spread to other states via textbooks that cater to the Lone Star state; Texas is the second-largest market in the country.
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But that narrative appears to be changing as digital books help publishers become more nimble, said Jay Diskey of the Association of American Publishers.
A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”
Stephen Wright, an eighth-grade teacher in Nacogdoches, a small and conservative East Texas town, said some Texas students undoubtedly leave their classrooms believing that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War. But not his students.
Wright said he has his students read the Southern state declarations of secession to learn for themselves what the war was about. He deals with the Civil War standards — he has to teach the standards, because they might show up on the state’s history test — by explaining the reasons that “some people believe” the war happened.
“Man, it’s all about slavery,” he said. “The students know that.”
