Presidents and Precedents

Today is the federal holiday for Washington's Birthday, which we now refer to generically as Presidents' Day. There are many reasons to honor the first president, if only because of the many positive precedents he set--eschewing any form of address that smacked of royalty, e.g., or not running for a third term. The latter is particularly important, because had he done so and won (which he likely would have), he would have died in office in 1799, meaning that the new United States would have had the example of a president holding onto the office until death, instead of voluntarily stepping aside.

In that same light, there was another precedent set by his less-revered successor, that perhaps deserves our notice on Presidents' Day. Few historians would place John Adams up there with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt in the pantheon. But he did at least one thing that should not go unremarked: he gave up power, not because he wanted to, but because the voters wanted him to.

Adams ran for re-election in 1800 and lost the hotly contested campaign to his vice-president, Thomas Jefferson. Throughout the contest, the two sides had predicted calamity if the other prevailed. Abigail Adams believed that "the peace, safety, and security" of the nation depended on her husband's re-election. If he were not returned to office, she wrote, "I am mortally certain we shall never have another" election.

Yet, when the votes went against Adams, he accepted the verdict. Perhaps the near-simultaneous death of his son Charles helped put his electoral defeat into perspective. Rather than plotting how he might remain in office, or how he might later re-gain power, Adams moved on: "The only question remaining with me is what shall I do with myself?" No unquenchable thirst for power consumed him: "I must go out on a morning and evening and fodder my cattle, I believe, and take a walk every afternoon to Penn's Hill--pother in my garden among the fruit trees and cucumbers and plant a potato yard with my own hand."

This precedent is among the most under-appreciated in our history. Yes, Washington chose not to run a third time and gave up power. But Adams had tried to remain in power. He hoped that the garden he would be tending the next four years was the United States. It was not his will to return to Massachusetts in March 1801. He believed in all sincerity that the voters were wrong. But when the vote went against him, he accepted it and went home.

This unquestioning respect for process should have our admiration and emulation. In an age in which far too many people believe that the definition of a "bad process" is one that produces a result they do not like, Adams shows us that respect for process transcends our personal desires, beliefs, and ambitions.

As Pope Benedict showed last week, sometimes the best example to set is not grasping for power, or desperately clinging to it, but the graceful relinquishment of it.

Another Measure of the Change ...

The opening paragraph from a New York Times article this past Tuesday:

WASHINGTON — With studies suggesting that long lines at the polls cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in November, party leaders are beginning a push to make voting and voter registration easier, setting up a likely new conflict with Republicans over a deeply polarizing issue.

Whether or not there should be long lines for voting--lines so long that hundreds of thousands of people were dissuaded from voting--is now a "deeply polarizing issue."

If there's one thing that ought to beyond partisanship, it is that we should not have undue burdens on exercising the right to vote. People should not have to choose between voting and going to work, picking up their kids from school, or caring for their loved ones.

It isn't. We now have a political party that is so desperate to win that it is willing to do anything--save making themselves appealing to a majority of voters--to make that happen. If that means making voting so burdensome that hundreds of thousands of people are unable to do so, they say "so be it."

We've been hearing a lot about GOP "re-branding" lately. No party, no group of people, can "re-brand" just by using different words and smiling a lot. Once you reveal who you really are, people know. Changing that negative view requires changing substance, not just appearances.

If Republicans really want to "re-brand," a good start would be to get on the right side of this basic American value. They need to stop trying to make it harder to vote. Then they can start trying to get those people to vote for them.

MOOCs and Books

What if we developed a technology that enabled an expert in a field of study to reach not dozens or even hundreds of learners but tens or even hundreds of thousands of learners?

That question was purposefully posed so as to make it sound profound in its potential possibilities. But if you think about it for a second, it's actually kind of dumb. We have done this, many times. Gutenberg did it with the printing press. Edwin Howard Armstrong (the true father of the radio) did it. So did the pioneers of TV and the internet. There's nothing fundamentally new about the idea.

Nonetheless, last week Thomas Friedman wrote one of his typically breathless columns on the promise of the new education technology tool called MOOCs (massive open online courses). Teasing Thomas Friedman about this tendency is shooting fish in a barrel, and he is right to see potential benefits from these courses, but as usual he goes overboard. In Friedman's view, MOOCs have the "potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems."

The historian in me views such proclamations with deep skepticism. The same potential was seen in radio in the 1920s:

Starting in 1921, broadcasting licences were held by universities in Utah, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (Casey, 2008, p. 46). By 1925, 171 licences had been granted (Farley, 1952, p. 18). In addition, K-12 education systems in Ohio and Wisconsin were developing “schools of the air”, that would provide curriculum for use within traditional schools and distance education programs (Reid, 1942, p. 118; Williams & Nicholas, 2004, p. 111).

Enthusiasts believed that not only would radio provide a new delivery vehicle for education, it would transform how everyone taught and learned: "the new medium of radio was seen as aiding in the promotion and implementations of new, promising educational theories for teachers and students alike."

How many of us today see radio as having prompted a revolution in education?

No doubt radio was sometimes put to good educational use (as the article quoted above argues). But a revolution? I don't think so.

In the 1950s, there was similar enthusiasm for the potential of television to educate the masses, and again, TV has been put to some good educational use. But did TV revolutionize education? Hardly.

The key trait in all of these reflexive embraces of technology is the perennial American desire for a cheap technological quick fix to our problems. The North American British colonies were founded during the Scientific Revolution and flourished during the Enlightenment. Americans love technology, and for good reason. Technology has been very good to Americans. Where we lose our way is when we see it as a panacea, or as an end rather than a means.

The simple fact of education is this: it is hard. It is hard for teachers, it is hard for learners. It requires work. It is labor-intensive. There are no short-cuts. No new technologies, no trendy new techniques from self-styled educational innovators ever have or ever will alter those facts.

In the end, a MOOC is an information delivery vehicle. So is a book. It is entirely possible for an individual with enough motivation to self-educate by going to a library and reading. But how many people actually do that? Precious few. Most of us need structure, incentives, and perhaps most of all, someone with expertise (i.e., greater knowledge and experience than ourselves) to hold us accountable for the quality of the work we produce.

Friedman uncritically quotes a Princeton professor who says his online version of one of his courses produced thousands of questions and comments, compared to the "few penetrating questions" produced in his actual classroom. "Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching," he says. His teaching improved as a result, he says.

That's great. But I have a question that wasn't answered by Friedman. Did each of those thousands of students get their questions answered?

The answer of course is "no."

So who really benefits from this, if the students do not get answers to their questions?

The professor writes: "Although it was impossible for me to read even a fraction of the pages of students' comments as they engaged with one another, the software allowed me to take note of those that generated the most discussion."

As is so often the case with exciting new ideas that purport to be all about the students, the benefit here goes to the professor, not the students. His ego is stroked, he gets lots of "feedback" on his ideas. And maybe the student learns a little something too. Whatever.

The professor openly admits he never reads even a fraction of the student comments, but he dismisses that as something of no importance. Why? Because now, the technology itself determines what matters. Note how the professor has shifted his emphasis--what matters now are not the "few penetrating questions" he used to get in the old-fashioned physical classroom but the most common questions or comments from the MOOC--as relayed to him by software. Since no software will ever be able to identify a "penetrating question," we just can't afford to worry about them. No doubt there were penetrating questions in those thousands of comments, but the professor never read, much less answered, them.

This, we are told, is a positive revolution in education.

There is no doubt value in the quantification of student reactions to class material. We get it all the time in traditional classes. If the vast majority of students do badly on a given exam question, I learn that either the question was not very good or my explanation of the relevant material was lacking. I know I need to improve something. That's good feedback.

It is not, however, necessarily the case that the most discussed point is the most important point. (Many students are remarkably skilled at driving discussion to areas of little or no significance.) That's where the judgment and expertise of the teacher comes in--we have the responsibility to know what is essential and what is marginal. In this case, the teacher has outsourced that job to the students via quantitative data-gathering software.

This, we are told, is a positive revolution in education.

Anyone who has spent time as a teacher knows that the best question is rarely the most common question. That one student who asks that great penetrating question brings value to the whole class, potentially--but not if no one (including the professor) ever hears it. In MOOCs, that's more likely than not.

This, we are told, is a positive revolution in education.

MOOCs can never truly replicate real teaching. Thousands of people listening to a lecture online will no doubt gain something from it. But when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a "course," there is no true feedback from the teacher. That person is no different from an author of a book. The material produced by the teacher may have great value, but that's where the influence ends. The students, like readers, are effectively on their own.

Just as I'd like to see more books made more available to more people who want to read them, I want people with no other educational options to have MOOCs. I'm sure the most determined students among them will gain real advantages from them.

Friedman promotes MOOCs as a solution to the very real problem of providing education widely and inexpensively. But no thinking person should be fooled that MOOCs constitute "education" any more than simply having a library makes for a college.

The Joni Mitchell Fallacy

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

One of the worst characteristics of modern journalism is the "both sides" reflex. If there is a political problem, we need to acknowledge the way "both sides" have something to do with it.

But sometimes it simply isn't so.

Last week, James B. Stewart, writing in the New York Times about the budget talks, gave us one of the more egregious and demonstrably false examples of this tendency:

What dismayed all the experts I spoke to was that the hostile tone was obscuring the fact that both sides agreed on the two most fundamental issues; the debt ceiling needs to be raised and a government default avoided, and the long-term deficit needs to be addressed through some combination of spending cuts and tax increases.

This is not a description of what "both sides" believe. It is a description of President Obama's position. 

We do not have an agreement because that is NOT the position of the Republican Party. The position of the Republican Party is that the deficit should be reduced with spending cuts only and with no tax increases, and that the threat of reaching the debt ceiling and causing default is a good way of getting what they want.

The Republican position for the last two years has been that we should not raise the debt ceiling without cutting spending--even if that means government cannot pay all of its bills. South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney said just last week that the government could merely pay Social Security benefits and interest on the debt: “Whether or not we keep the national parks open is not what people think of when they hear default,” said Mulvaney. “It’s certainly not what the markets think.”

Translation: as long as the banks and AARP members get paid, default is no big deal.

This past week, the House GOP recognized that its position was politically untenable and approved a three-month extension of the debt ceiling. But if it truly believed that the threat of default was unthinkable, it would never have created these debt ceiling showdowns. The House could have raised--or even better, abolished--the debt ceiling. If it truly believed in the need for spending cuts and tax increases, it could have gotten that deal from the president at several points in the past. When that deal was on the table, they said "no." Their entire negotiating posture is this: we prefer default to not getting our way on spending.

In reality, this is not a case of "both sides." We Americans want to believe that both of our political parties are, deep down, made up primarily of reasonable people. There are still reasonable people in the Republican Party, but they are being bullied by Tea Party extremists and purists. 

Perhaps John Boehner's decision to accept the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal (and its tax increase on incomes over $400,000) and the recent three-month debt ceiling extension represent an end to the Tea Party's dictation to the allegedly responsible leadership, but I doubt it. We'll know better in about three months.

One Measure of the Change Over These Four Years

Consider this paragraph from an AP story:

Obama is already asking lawmakers for a lot as he starts his second term. He needs their votes to increase the nation's borrowing limit and approve billions of dollars to keep the government running.

Think about that a moment. According to a news story--not an opinion piece, but an ostensibly "objective" news story--this is "a lot." Expecting the Congress to do what had always been routine until Barack Obama became president is now "a lot."

One could do worse if looking for a single factoid to illustrate how dysfunctional our politics has become.

Blundering Boehner

Back in graduate school, when I was first learning about schools of historical interpretation, I read about the so-called "Blundering Generation" theory of the Civil War. The idea was something like this: the Civil War was no inevitable conflict, but rather the result of a poor generation of political leaders. Whereas the first generation of the Founders and the second generation of the Jacksonian era found ways to compromise and preserve the Union, the third generation, coming into its own in the 1850s, had failed. Political ineptitude, not irreconcilable differences, produced the war.

The word "blundering" leapt to mind Thursday night when I heard that Speaker John Boehner was withdrawing his own proposal to avoid the ill-named "fiscal cliff" because he could not get his own party to vote for it.

What has happened to the GOP?

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a piece bemoaning the lack of party discipline among Congressional Democrats when compared to the lockstep nature of Congressional Republicans. The relative lack of success in passing Obama's agenda was due at least in part to the extraordinary unity showed by the GOP.

That was then, this is now. Of course much has changed. Republicans have controlled the House for two years now. But Democrats still control the Senate as they did then, and the president has been re-elected. And yet, the GOP is a mess. Even when the Republican Speaker of the House said he needed support for a bill in order to get leverage in negotiations with the president, he failed because enough of his own party members told him to take a hike rather than vote for even the most minimal tax hike (only on income over $1 million a year).

So who, or what, is to blame? Is Boehner a blunderer, someone who is (as Rachel Maddow has been saying almost since he became Speaker) simply bad at his job?  Or is there something deeper going on here?

I confess that I've always thought the "Blundering Generation" thesis of the Civil War was something of a cop out, a way of avoiding analysis of the complex political, economic, and social forces that produced the political failures of the 1850s and early 1860s.

In this instance, however, there is something to be said for the idea that Boehner is simply blundering. Friday morning on NPR's Morning Edition, correspondent Scott Horsely noted that while Boehner's "Plan B" could not pass without near unanimity among House Republicans, that did not mean that no plan could pass the House. A compromise proposal that garnered votes from both Democrats and at least some Republicans could certainly pass:

It could win a majority with Democratic support if Speaker Boehner were willing to bring it to the floor. That would take a level of statesmanship we have not seen so far and it could be the end of Speaker Boehner - his speakership.

And there it is: if there is no agreement, it will be because the Speaker is more concerned with keeping his title than in solving the problem, because he failed the test of leadership and did not rise to be a statesman. This is the "Blundering Generation" critique.

In a sense, Boehner is the victim of his own previous success. When he was faced with doing little more than saying "hell, no!' to whatever the president proposed, Republican unity served him reasonably well.

But now he is in the position of having to be for something, of needing to do something that will also be acceptable to the president and enough Democrats in the Senate to pass and become law. He cannot do that and maintain complete GOP unity, because at least some of the Tea Party members will never go along.

The question now is which he will choose.

I have observed many times (here and here, e.g.) that the Tea Party mindset shares much in common with the uncompromising southern position before the Civil War. As Rep. Steve LaTourette (R), from Ohio said last night, there was no use appealing to them: "we have been doing that for two years with these people and all they -- they become martyrs. They become martyrs in the eyes of these extreme groups."

Historians of the "Blundering Generation" school blame the extreme, uncompromising "fire-eaters"(and the other "leaders" who enabled them) for failing to find political solutions in the secession crisis. I suspect there were no plausible political solutions left to be found in 1860-1861.

There are solutions today, however. Our disagreements are not as fundamental as theirs were. Does anyone really think that Boehner and Obama cannot find a budget agreement that includes both tax hikes and spending cuts and that can win majority support in both Houses of Congress? Of course they can. As Horsely put it, however, it will "take a level of statesmanship we have not seen so far" from Boehner.

If he cannot find the courage to be a leader and statesman, if he continues to submit to the political blackmail of the Tea Party martyrs, John Boehner will truly have earned the title "blunderer."

The New Secesh

As someone who gets deeply invested in politics, I understand the despair that can set in when one's candidate loses. My first three votes for president went to losing candidates, and despite better luck recently, I'm still batting under .500 in presidential elections (4 wins, 5 losses).

So I'm fairly tolerant when anyone says something along the lines of "If [opposing candidate] wins, I'm moving to [Canada, Costa Rica, etc.]." I'm tolerant of it because the sentiment is roughly this: "My side lost, so I must either accept the will of the majority or separate myself from the country." In short, despite the frustration, it accepts the legitimacy of the process.

These thoughts were prompted by the secession petitions which have popped up ever since President Obama's re-election. Evidently petitions requesting peaceful secession coming from all 50 states now have been started on the White House website.

These are not serious proposals, of course. They are the equivalents of temper tantrums by spoiled children angry that they did not get their way.

But they are, I'd argue, different from the "I'm leaving the country" response. They question the legitimacy of the process based on a particular outcome, and that is an extremely dangerous idea.

I've noted in numerous posts (for example, here, here, and here) that today's Republicans increasingly evoke the mindset of the pre-Civil War secessionists. The point is not that they are neo-Confederates (though a few are), but rather that they take the same approach to politics: confrontational, refusing to compromise, and--as the secession sentiment makes crystal clear--more interested in achieving preferred outcomes than in preserving the democratic process.

This silly secession talk is part of a pattern among far too many Republicans: we can't win with the rules as they are, so let's change the rules. Too many young people and minority voters are voting? Pass laws making voting more difficult. Don't have a majority in the Senate? Filibuster every substantive proposal the majority puts forward, effectively requiring 60 votes to pass anything.

But the impulse toward secession is by far the worst. It is, at its essence, a repudiation of democracy--particularly coming, as it did, only after losing an election. Just like the secessionists of 1860, these tens of thousands of Americans who have signed the petitions are reacting simply to the fact that their guy lost. They are repudiating the process because it produced a result they do not like. What they are saying, in effect, is that if they do not win, the process itself is illegitimate.

After Lincoln's election in 1860, a Georgia secessionist argued that since Lincoln's policy was (in his mind) "treasonable and revolutionary," the election itself was "void." The states that had given him their electoral votes had become--by virtue of their political beliefs--"disenfranchised of all constitutional right to cast them." Secessionists claimed to themselves exclusive right to determine which elections were legitimate and which were not. And it just so happened that ones which they lost were not legitimate. Had that very same process produced a victory for their preferred candidate, John C. Breckinridge, there would have been no talk of secession.

That's what makes all this loose talk, even among some ostensibly serious people, so dangerous. It is not just the emotional outburst of disappointed partisans. It goes to the heart of what makes our system work: the willingness to accept outcomes that we do not like because we agree beforehand on the rules and that the process is fair.

The secessionist mind values results over process. It believes that our constitutional processes are not valuable in and of themselves, but only insofar as they produce the correct results. It says that the policies we favor are more important than maintaining a fair process that is equally open to all. It says that if the majority disagrees with us, we do not need to accept their judgment--instead, we can withdraw entirely from the process and create a new political unit that will do what we want it to do.

Once we start down that road, the republic truly is in danger.