The recovery of the crucial educative function of politics

Politics as a Form of Public Education

By Stephen M. Krason

As we head into another election season, we’ll see the customary television sound bites, vague bloviating speeches by politicians far and wide, politicians pandering to different groups with a host of promises, and the usual recent practice of “gotcha politics.” While the fundamental causes of the woes of our electoral politics are poor citizenship formation and democratization—the Founding Fathers established a republic, not a democracy, and as Federalist 10 makes clear they shared with all the great classical political philosophers a deep suspicion of democracy—we can’t expect in the short run to do much about this. We at least can try to get those politicians inclined to the “conservative” side—to use an inadequate and misunderstood term—to see that the stakes in American politics nowadays are nothing less than the preservation of our constitutional principles and what’s left of Western civilization. Further, the politicians who do apprehend this reality, even if inadequately, need to be urged on to recover the long-lost educative function of politics and to develop both the sophistication and courage to carry it out.

That means, of course, that sound bites, platitudes, avoiding “touchy” subjects, gearing political discussion to the least common denominator in terms of voter understanding, and, yes, utterly sacrificing the “bigger,” long-run questions to the often elusive hopes of immediate electoral success cannot be the norm. Immediate electoral success accomplishes little if the Republic and the culture are in shambles.

In The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, I tried to show how the political order fashioned by the Founders progressively—especially in the twentieth century—turned into something much less desirable. The overriding object of our politics now has to be to try to recover it—and, to the degree that politics can, the culture that spawned it.

The recovery of the crucial educative function of politics requires, to be sure, a political savviness—I like the 1930s term “moxie”—that seems so often to elude the politicians, and others, who go up against the left. Besides having a sound substantive understanding of the questions of the day, they have to master rhetoric (in the best sense of the word). The old expression, “it’s not what you say but how you say it,” is pertinent here. The left should not be permitted, as is so often the case, to define the terms of the debate. There needs to be a proper mix of education and confrontation.

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