Helpin’ with the ‘splainin’

U.S. politics 101

I am most fundamentally a teacher; it’s all I know. My unlucky children learned early in their lives that I rarely missed a chance to try making something simply into a lesson. I know they still wish I could have just been a mom but it’s not in my DNA.

I think education is not so much ‘knowledge transmission’ as it is providing the message helping someone see something from a different vantage point. That’s always been how I approach it.

I am, of course, far from always successful but, to quote the wonderful Jackson Brown, you ‘get up and do it again. Amen’.

When I taught at a Midwestern university in the 1980s and 90s, I had a four-four load. This mean teaching two sections U.S. government each fall and two more in spring to complement what I really enjoyed: international politics and a graduate course on U.S. foreign policy.

Honestly, I considered it penance to do the U.S. politix as that was not my field. Having grown up overseas, I was rather snobbish that the real stuff was international (‘Ninety-five present of the world is foreigners’, the State Department film reminded us as we prepared for Bangkok in 1970). I have never taken a single U.S. history course after high school; colleges had retreated from lots of formal requirements back then so I could get away with it. Similarly, as a Government & International Studies graduate student, I did the bare minimum in U.S. politics because i saw nothing interesting about studying ourselves.

I taught Latin American politics, International Conflict, Latin America in the international system, and probably things I am forgetting. In my decades at the National War College, I think I taught more than two dozen different courses on parts of the world. That was what I knew best.

This worked because I enjoyed the courses that the bulk of the Political Science faculty disdained. I mean disdained. Early in the summer immediately prior to my departure, my political science colleagues turned down a gift to establish a endowed chair in national security or international affairs at the university because these faculty were overwhelmingly the Vietnam generation who did not want to acknowledge anything that could glorify the military or assumed CIA actions abroad; they did not even want to study the world where we lived. ‘Americanists’ and ‘Theorists’ sought to ignore international stuff altogether if they could. I suppose they also thought quantifying voting behaviour was cleaner than the ambiguity of so much of our world.

You think I am kidding but I am not. One of the Americanists asked me, sincerely, what the term ‘Third World’ meant because she had heard it but didn’t understand the term. This was not a philosophical question but knowledge transferral. I answered her but was utterly unclear how she received a doctorate from a major university under the circumstances.

But the bulk of the courses the department needed deliver were in U.S. politics because so many first-generation students planned to be lawyers. So, I learned to suck it up two sections every year with patience. It was just something one endured.

Thirty plus years later, I see I was a fool. Teaching about our political system made me such a better citizen. I had to learn (I choose my words deliberately here as I confess) about the Constitutional Convention because I had to explain it. I had to master the insanity of the budget process. I had to learn a bit about the history of major court cases that altered civil rights provisions, constraining behaviour. (I still want to pass out remembering the class in 1987 when a front row guy asked in the loudest voice ever why the Supreme Court limited his right to have oral sex when they voted for Bowers v. Hardwick. I never had anyone repeat that question, mercifully.)

I struggled with this realisation of my changing views for decades until I embraced it. A mentor, the legendary Frederick B. Pike, was one of the most prolific U.S. scholars on Latin American history between the 1960s and 90s. I noted keenly he had gradually but obviously morphed his own research from Latin American questions (Fred also moved his politic views considerably over those years) to the role that Hispanics play in the United States, thus he was really studying our political system. One could not miss that fact as his titles evolved. It was a revelation that a really well-established scholar could transition so clearly but I wasn’t going to go that far. I simply found my own system much more interesting than true decades earlier.

But I never engaged in original research on topics in the field. Never will as our academic model is so keenly and reflectively dismissive of one without formal ‘training’ in the discipline. Academics just are, as people investing so much energy in our long slog, prone to dismiss those who did not suffer as we think we did.

The result of all of this is a keen cast, replete with somewhat opaque theories for the average citizen, to most political scientists’ conversations about our system. I so hope we as teachers can help explain in clear, unvarnished ways what our government system says and does. Those lucky enough to study, then spend time in hallowed institutions are vital to deepening understanding of our government in the days ahead as we confront even greater splits across our nation. We as educators need not stand behind impenetrable theories but to communicate what and why and how our system operates. We have an obligation, in my mind, to help the country understand why our Constitutional and legal systems operate as they do.

It’s a common cheap shot to whine about ‘ivory tower academics’; it’s also a criticism with merit as professors aren’t always as clear (or even interested in discussing) as the listener wants or needs. We are, however, entering a time when political scientists actually can have a far more useful role than ever, providing explanations rather than a political partisan advocacy to provide some knowledge. But we need be clear, non-dogmatic, and patient because so few people understand the exquisite complexities of role of checks and balances or slow, deliberate governing.

We also must be as impartial about our own Politix. Too many critics think we cannot. I think that is absurd but it behooves us to show we can answer and explain to expand understanding rather than to focus only advancing our positions.

We may not succeed in helping with those questions but if we don’t make that effort, we are more deeply into that danger zone of ‘a democracy if you can keep it’. Overall levels of ignorance and associated conspiracy theorizing are remarkably high. The current challenges whether in the budget, the indictments, the implications of a third party candidate for president, and countless other truly multilayered topics require better understanding by Joanna and Jake.

We as the ones lucky enough to have studied this for decades must chip away at the ignorance and conspiracies, regardless of their origins or political perspectives. If we want to become politicians, we need do that but not pretend we are impartial scholars. I realise many disagree with me but the dangers of falling into an abyss which will hurt each and every one of us are real and immediate.

The cloud cover was awful this morning over our beloved Chesapeake. I offer you a pretty lovely pepper bush we found outside the building (i guess it just grew overnight as we’d neither one noticed it) to brighten you day. FI

N