Those of us who dare to haul our egos and ambitions across the stage of public life in the ersatz ‘service’ of our fellows are seldom rewarded with ‘burning bush’ epiphanies. Save for the saint-like few who dignify us with their stubborn willingness to endure the cold scrutiny (and paltry wages) of the public arena in order to breathe the ether of higher principle, most of us are six parts scoundrel, four parts choir boy/girl, give or take. As such we are most of the time begrudgingly content to splash about in the washing machine of public opinion without giving much thought to our wildly divergent motives and pathologies, taking our allotted 15 minutes of fame as they come.
I was lucky enough to experience one of those rare epiphanies a few years ago, when the president of the Oregon state senate, Peter Courtney, county commissioner Pete Sorenson, and I, got together to write the Oregon Human Rights Initiative. Our idea was simple. Public civility has become an endangered value in American society. Once ‘over the top’ political rhetoric is now the domestic currency of exchange. We wanted to do something to head off a full-blown culture war right here in our own home state.
For openers, we thought the principles laid out in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights were a great place to start. Conceived and written by Eleanor Roosevelt in the days following World War II, the New York Times has since called UDHR “one of the most important political legacies of the 20th century,” and a “beacon of hope” for oppressed people around the world.” We agreed, and thought it also served as a fine set of principles for public discourse right here at home.
Underfunded and under-staffed, we launched our campaign and waited for the inevitable reaction. We didn’t have long to wait. To listen to Republicans and the radical Christian right, you would have thought we were promoting a Bolshevik revolution. We knew there were plenty of loose cannons rolling around in Oregon, but wow, the fervor surprised us. “Socialistic tripe,” bellowed one prominent Republican. Another, Rep. Kevin Mannix, who would run for governor two years later, wrote that principles expressed in our initiative were “contrary to the spirit of most of our laws and the whole philosophy of our form of government.” Mannix and others, including Bill Sizemore, appealed to the Oregon State Supreme Court for relief from the threat of these dangerous ideas entering the public arena. You could almost hear the carpenter’s hammers building the hangman’s scaffolds on the steps of the statehouse.
It was a gloomy December morning when we drove to Salem. Our case was the first on the docket. We all rose as the seven judges filed into the courtroom and took their seats. Chief Justice Michael Gillette, a conservative Harvard educated jurist with a deliberate manner and a short fuse, didn’t dilly-dally. He gave a brief oral summary of the initiative in a stentorian voice, then called Rep. Mannix to the podium to explain his protest.
Mr. Mannix, no stranger to the court, cut to the chase. He told the court that Section 8 of the initiative, which read, “In an equal contest between the rights of an individual and the welfare of the community, the welfare of the community is usually superior,” was simply un-American. This concept, charged Mannix, was antithetical to every principle of freedom our nation stands for. If the attorney general was going to allow that language to remain in the initiative, Mannix told the judges that voters needed to understand what was at stake.
Mannix, not a tall man, thrust his chin into the vivid air. Suddenly, after a decent interval of electric silence, the larger-than-life chief justice rocked forward on his elbows and bellowed, “That principle, Mister Mannix, lies at the heart of American foundational law! When was the last time you read the U.S. Constitution? Exactly what is your problem with our Constitution, Mister Mannix?”
Mannix was stunned. Eyeballs shot astonished glances around the room. Finally, Mannix sputtered an incomprehensible drool of words, then wilted at the podium.
In one brief sentence, Judge Gillette had measured the ground we have lost since James Madison and Alexander Hamilton set out to illuminate and safeguard the precarious balance that exists in a representative democracy between the rights of the individual and the welfare of the community. Gillette’s rhetorical question bemoaned the ascendance of ignorance’s principle victim: political possibility underwritten by civic civility. Or, to paraphrase Mr. Madison – no democracy can survive the ideological storms brewed up by a rascal citizenry when individual rights and freedoms are allowed to triumph over the larger common good. The court agreed. We won that battle, 7-0.
In the midst of the culture war that now grips this society, a war in which verbal vitriol is the ammunition of choice — we are left to ask: How did so many American’s miss this civics lesson? How can so many American citizens have so many strange ideas about the founding principles that support the nation they live in? Tangentially, what price do we pay as a society for this collective ignorance? And more disturbing yet, how is it that we have spent more money on education than any other nation in the world and have so little to show for it?
This is a question that has been troubling the folks at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute since the agency (non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt) was founded, five decades ago, and they’re closing in on some very unsettling answers. A nationwide experiment/study conducted by ISI last year found that of the 2,500 college graduates and elected politicians who took their ‘civics literacy’ exam – an exam based on the same questions asked of people applying for American citizenship — more than 1,700 flunked. Seventy percent! Worse yet, the average grade among those who failed was 49%, not even close to passing. The group that fared the worst, at 44%, were elected politicians.
According to ISI’s director, Dr. Richard Brake, most who took the test did not know who was responsible for declaring war. Many others could not name the three branches of government. But how can this be shocking when the GOP’s candidate for governor in the state of Oregon doesn’t even know that the rights and welfare of the community are usually superior to those of the individual? (If you don’t believe this, try explaining to a judge why you can run a stop light with impunity). More to the point, how do we sustain and safeguard a representative democracy when it is assaulted from every side by the tyranny of individualism and corporatism?
As angry ‘culture war’ rhetoric boils over in town halls and political arenas across the land, the results of ISI’s study should give us pause. It’s deeply disquieting to realize that 70% of us can’t get the basic principles of democracy half right. At what point, then, do we cease to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and become a nation of the blind leading the blind?
Paul VanDevelder’s is the author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation, and more recently, of Savages and Scoundrels: the Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory.
Related Articles |
