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This being an election year, we are sure to hear plenty
about values,
as in a candidate who says it's
time to elect someone who shares our values
or who
promises to take our Colorado values to
Washington.
It's a clever hustle, when you think about it. A
candidate might not care whether jobs pay decent wages, or
whether families can get medical care, or whether families
can afford housing, or whether children learn anything in
school -- but he can still campaign on family values
if he says the right things about abortion, school prayer,
homosexuals, etc.
Over the years, I've tried to argue that our elections should be about interests, not values. People take their values very seriously, and values are not a matter for compromise. Yet our entire political system is based on compromise -- and interests are amenable to compromise.
Just look at the U.S. Constitution of 1787. The big states wanted the national legislature to represent population. The small states wanted each state to have the same representation. Those weren't values. They were interests, which could be settled by compromise: a House of Representatives allocated by population, and a Senate wherein each state got two members.
Or look at how things have been done in Colorado, back when Denver wanted a railroad tunnel under the Continental Divide. That would have hurt Pueblo, which had the route. So Pueblo protected its interests by blocking every effort to use public money to build the Moffat Tunnel. Then a major flood hit Pueblo in 1921.
Pueblo wanted state help with some flood control, Denver wanted its tunnel, and our compromising political system was able to serve those interests. Similar processes occur whenever the legislature, or your local city council, or Congress, is in session.
Compromise
has a rather ugly sound these days, as
in he was caught in a compromising position,
or I
will hold the course and I shall not compromise,
but
without compromise, no case would ever be settled out of
court, and our judicial system would be even more
expensive.
Crass as it sounds, our elections would be much better if we just forgot about values and watched candidates argue about which ones would better serve our interests. In other words, I'd have an easier time on Election Day if candidates made it clear which interests they would promote -- highways, libraries, recreation, etc. -- rather than what values they hold (after all, who's in favor of divorce, child abuse, crime, etc.?)
But there may be a way that values
could fit into
our political system. Thomas Jefferson and his followers
were proud that they had helped establish a republic, and
their prose sometimes mentions republican
values.
How might we fit those values -- the values consistent
with a Jeffersonian republic -- into our modern civic life?
What would change if republican values
rather than
Republican Values
or Democratic Values
were
part of our political discourse?
A citizen of a republic is supposed to be a participant, rather than an observer, so we should have more people running for office, and attending meetings and speaking of them. As a journalist, I don't know that either would be a blessing. More candidates means more people to interview, and more people at meetings generally means they last longer. Further, if people participated in public life, rather than just sporadically followed it in the media, it would reduce the influence of us jackals in the Biased Liberal Media.
That's a general tendency, though. How might republican values fit into specific current political debates?
Consider the airline industry. It's losing money, to a great degree because Americans have sensibly cut back on travel. In part, that may be because when you're at an airport, you're not a citizen of a republic with dignity and certain rights. Your speech is limited, and you're treated like a criminal suspect, subject to arbitrary search.
And then there's the industry's demands for public money. The airlines got a $15 billion bail-out last year, and now they want another $5 billion.
Could either the subsidy, or the way passengers are now treated, be fit into republican values? It's hard to see how, but if candidates wanted to talk about it, we'd enjoy an informative political debate.
The same holds for the prospect of a war to force a regime change in Iraq. Is that an expression of republican values, or of imperial values?
As much as I would prefer that we retire values
from our public discourse and discuss interests
instead, values seem to be here to stay. And they'd be a
worthy part of our campaigns if we examined issues in light
of republican values
rather than Family
Values
or Colorado Values
or whatever values the
focus-group testers come up with next.
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