The Bloom on the American Rose
The full force of warranted optimism lies behind a sophisticated, technical understanding of the American political system // This breeds productive action
In 1997, New York City Council Member Juanita Watkins addressed the council’s governmental operations committee. Her remarks were sharp. She had given a civics workshop to a group of public junior high teachers, and they knew essentially nothing about the government at any level. This is what she said to the Coordinator of the New York City Voter Assistance Commission, which is now part of the New York City Campaign Finance Board (emphasis added):
The Chair spoke about educating the school children, I'm really chagrin[ed] to report that I was asked to go to a junior high school to do a workshop for some teachers about City Council, and so on. I took packets of material that had to do with the whole history about the City Council, what we do, committees, and so on. And I started, because I come from a background of being a teacher, trying to assess what they knew, and how many people know this, that, there were about two people out of approximately 25 to 30 in that room who had even a working idea of what the City Council was.
And when we asked about things like what was the document called that governed the work of City government, had no idea about a City Charter. They had no idea what the arms of City government are. They didn't do any better with the State government, either they didn't have an idea about, of the difference between a unicameral or a bicameral house, nothing. So, obviously, if the teachers are clueless, the students are clueless…
I was, frankly, shocked, I didn't expect them to know a whole lot, but, I mean, they knew absolutely zero in all of about two cases had no idea what a City Charter was, and the only Constitution they knew about was the U.S. Constitution, didn't even realize that the State had one.
Everything she said is still essentially true today, about any profession.
No one knows how the government works, not even the people who appear to, or who should
This is, of course, a bit of hyperbole. Some people do, in fact, understand how the government works. But not very many, and vastly fewer than all those who give the impression that they do.
This drives the mission of Maximum New York: train more people to understand New York City government and law, and see the political system improve as more kind, smart, ambitious people engage with it.
The general responses I get when I put forward my mission can be put into two categories:
People don’t believe me. They think their “smart politics friend” knows what’s going on, and they assume most of the people working within government could do something like draw a basic diagram of the system they’re in.
People believe me, but they proceed to become horribly despondent, or use my contentions as fuel for their own pessimism (“it’s all broken and will only get worse”).
Here are my responses to those:
It’s pretty easy to check whether someone understands the political system in important ways. Ask them “What is the law?” or a similar question, and see if they have a technically good answer, or some vague “the rules we have to follow” answer. Ask them what a borough president does. Ask them how a rule becomes a law. Ask them what their favorite Supreme Court case is, and then ask them for the facts of the case, the question(s) before the Court, and the Court’s ruling. No one knows everything about the government, they should be able to answer questions about their alleged areas of expertise.
Becoming pessimistic is the wrong response here. Most people not knowing about government is the default state—it has ever been thus, just like the sentiment of “the kids these days,” and yet our system works pretty well. Like Hayek’s description of price signals in an economy, the government has many incentives and mechanisms for aggregating disparate knowledge held in the heads of many unrelated individuals. Further: this means there is an opportunity for any enterprising individual who can increase the average governmental understanding in their local political ecology. Whoever can do that will increase the talent, nature, and comportment of individuals who enter the civic sphere, for the policy benefit of us all. This last thing is, indeed, what I do full-time.
It is important to emphasize how few people understand the government, although one must then take action
We must understand the world that we live in, and part of that is understanding how many competent political technicians we have. If you observe that your political system has stopped producing the good things it used to, or is failing to produce new good things, you should check how deep your bench of political knowledge is.
If it’s sufficiently deep, no problem. But if it isn’t (and it isn’t), then the beacons must be lit, and stay lit. Gondor calls for aid…in the form of civics schools. But while Gondor faced an external threat, America’s chief challenges have generally come from within—whether Americans can perpetuate and improve their great institutions, or create new ones. In short: whether they are good political technicians. In the grand tradition of Ben Franklin’s “A republic, if you can keep it,” Abraham Lincoln said the following in his 1838 Lyceum Address, aptly titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
New York City Mayor Abram Hewitt echoed these sentiments in his 1888 address before the city’s Board of Alderman when speaking about the city’s future:
"[New York's] imperial destiny as the greatest city in the world is assured by natural causes, which cannot be thwarted except by the folly and neglect of its inhabitants."
Do not despair. Call for aid, raise a force, save the realm. It’s up to you!
Pessimism is cheap, free, and available to anyone.
Warranted optimism is often only the domain of the sophisticated practitioner.
If you look around you, and you wonder why people are not operating the way you think they should politically, consider it a skill issue on your part. It is up to you to understand the political world with higher fidelity, and to elevate your skills sufficiently to alter it in the most beneficial fashion. If you do this, you might be surprised to learn that things are far better than you ever hoped in the first place from your previously low-resolution, naive posture.
The physicist Richard Feynman had this to say about beauty increasing with technical understanding:
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than [the artist] sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds.
