MY SOCIAL AND POLITICAL AWAKENING: A SPECIAL THANKS TO SYDNEY VERBA AND BIRCH BAYH

By Ronald T. Fox

 

My Social and Political Awakening

I read in the March 18 New York Times that two men who were importantly responsible for my political awakening and the development of my thinking about government and politics had passed away. One was political scientist Sydney Verba and the other Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. Their passing moved me to reminisce about their roles in my intellectual and political maturation.

I grew up in a Republican family, though my parents were not ideologically driven or politically engaged. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, I grew up with a soft spot for the underdog. This inclined me toward the Democratic Party, so I favored Adlai Stevenson for president in the 1950s. I hadn’t formed a political ideology, however, perhaps I chose Stevenson just to be different. I remember, though, that I liked Ike’s smile.

In 1960, I was captivated by the candidacy of John Kennedy, which helped solidify my identification with the Democrats. News about the burgeoning civil rights movement, and visuals of dogs and firehoses being turned on protesting black people, along with a trip through the deep south in the summer of 1964 where I witnessed segregated restaurants, hotels, and bathroom facilities, drew me to the movement and turned me on to the world of politics.

In the 1965-66 academic year I went to Sweden as part of the California State University international program. This was an eye-opening experience. I was taken with the harmony in Swedish life. There was virtually no poverty, hardly any unemployment, few murders and very little crime. I observed a highly egalitarian society and a governing system that provided an abundance of social benefits, including free health care and education. To be sure, taxes were high, especially on higher incomes, but this seemed to me a fair bargain given the social harmony social spending helped nurture.

Sweden had enjoyed centuries of peace, embracing a foreign policy of neutrality that kept it out of World War II and distanced it from the machinations of the Cold War. From its non-aligned stance between East and West, Sweden was positioned to offer its services for international mediation and conciliation endeavors, which it did on numerous occasions.

I couldn’t help but contrast virtuous Sweden with an America that treated blacks, native Americans and women as second-class citizens unworthy of enjoying equal rights, an imperial America that had no qualms about intervening in Iran, Guatemala, the Belgian Congo, Cuba and elsewhere in the Third World.  While I was in Sweden, the United States embarked on an ill-feted catastrophe in Vietnam.

Sweden was a harsh critique of the Vietnam War. I hadn’t yet thought much about the war and in debates with Swedes found myself resistant to their anti-war arguments. Gradually, however, their arguments began to resonate. I came to see Vietnam as an misbegotten war with no end in sight. It alerted me to an imperial pattern of behavior that contrasted sharply with the benevolent America I was raised to believe in.

Aroused by the civil rights movement, my experience in Sweden, and the music of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, among others, I began to understand what I liked and didn’t like about the United States, but I  lacked a substantive basis for my political beliefs. Education would provide an academic foundation.   

I returned to college in America in 1966 and having developed an interest in social science while in Sweden (not to mention several units of course work), I declared social science as a new major (after five previous majors).  It required course work in political science, economics and history.

In a course on comparative politics, I was introduced to a book written by Sydney Verba and Gabriel Almond titled The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. It had been published in 1963.

The Civic Culture broke new ground in using surveys research for a cross-cultural analysis. The authors were looking for cultural conditions common to stable democracies. For their study, they compared civic cultures in two stable democracies, the United States and Britain, two countries emerging from autocratic experiences, Germany and Italy, and one country, Mexico, struggling with democratic development.

Although I remember little about the details of their comparative analyses, I have a clear memory of the book’s general conclusion: stable democracies require the widespread sharing of democratic values, strong family institutions, and an organized civil society. Without these ingredients, democracies were unlikely to be stable and sustainable.

I drew two lessons from The Civic Culture. The first was that although the United States generally fit the stable democratic model, contrary to convention wisdom in America it was far from exceptional. Political inequality and civic participation left much to be desired. It seemed to me the Swedish model of democracy was based on a more solid civic culture than existed in America. This inspired me to think critically about the United States. For this, a comparative context was essential. How was America similar and different from other countries? What were the facts?

The second lesson had an even greater impact on my political consciousness. The close connection between culture and democracy meant that constitutional democracy could not be imposed on countries lacking the necessary civic conditions-- and certainly not through the use of external force. This is a lesson our lawmakers should have learned from history, if not from several misadventures in the developing world, then certainly from the disastrous Vietnam debacle. Unfortunately, our leaders in Washington don't appear to have learned anything from our post-war history. They persist in trying to impose democracy on ill-prepared and unwilling countries (if that, in fact, was our true purpose). Our military and civilian leaders can't seem to be shaken from the belief that our overwhelming superiority in firepower ("the greatest military in the world") will enable us to impose our will.  When things don't go so well, as they repeatedly don't, our response has been to define a new strategy, change generals and throw more money at the Pentagon, never rethink the wisdom of our interventions. 

The result of our hubris has been a proliferation of autocracies, failed states, instability and regional conflicts from Latin America, to Africa, to the wider Middle East and Asia. If Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos didn’t hammer home this lesson, it’s no surprise neither have Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia or Yemen.

Sydney Verba

The Civic Culture was wrong in one of its key predictions. Like many political thinkers throughout history (Thomas Jefferson comes to mind), Sydney Verba believed that education would transform societies, making them more secular, rational and virtuous. He reasoned that as civic education spread divisions based on race and ethnicity, religion, gender and class would diminish, paving the way to a more democratic and peaceful world. Things clearly haven’t worked out so well. Education, especially in America, instead of promoting democratic values has served to widen class divisions, inequality, racial and ethnic discrimination, and a myriad of resentments. Verba, later in life, lamented the failure of education to lead to democratic utopia.

The erroneous prediction about education, however, hasn’t diminished the importance of The Civic Culture in my political life. It helped cure me of ugly American arrogance, led me to think systematically about political systems, and inspired me to endeavor to base my political opinions on facts and reason. It also inspired me to a career as a political scientist.

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The failure of government to respond to the demands for equal rights emanating from the civil rights and women’s movements, and to the demands of a national peace movement to end the Vietnam War, left me with a bitter taste for politicians. The principle of equal rights was enshrined in our constitution. Why weren’t lawmakers ensuring its realization?

I came to realize that part of the problem was the Constitution itself. The structure of our government, and legislative rules passed down over the ages, lent themselves to frustrating the popular will, particularly when it came to the enjoyment of equal rights.  It seemed obvious to me that a more just and inclusive American democracy required, among other things, amending our constitution to remove impediments in our governing structure that sustained what in effect had become minority rule.  It was clear that our founding fathers ceded far too much power to small population states who collectively could block initiatives that didn’t square with their parochial interests. This made amending the constitution to strengthen equal rights for all Americans a near impossible task, even when there was solid majority support.

With constitutional amendments requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, amendments that would run contrary to the perceived interests of small states have little chance of success. (Since 1788 more than 11,000 amendments have been proposed, but only 27 have succeeded.) With these hurdles raising the odds to a successful amendment to astronomical proportions, it is not surprising that few politicians are willing to spend the time to write amendments, let alone to see them through the ratification process. Why bother?

Indiana Senator Birch Bayh

One legislator who bucked the amendment odds during my formative political years was Birch Bayh, a senator from Indiana, who died on March 14 at the age of 91. After John Kennedy’s assassination, Bayh drafted and steered through the congressional labyrinth the 25^th Amendment which set out rules for the temporary replacement of a president or vice president who dies, resigns, or becomes incapable of performing the duties of his office. It gave the president the authority to nominate a new vice president and provided for the removal of a sitting president. A few years later he pushed through the 26^th amendment that lowered the voting age to 18. It became part of the Constitution on July 1, 1971.

Bayh was also the driving force behind the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which would enshrine in the Constitution protections against discrimination on the basis of sex. It cleared all legislative hurdles, but failed to win the approval of the required 38 state legislatures (it ultimately got to 37).

Bayh also championed Title IX, drafting the language for that landmark national legislation which barred sex discrimination at schools and colleges and greatly expanded sports programs for women. Bayh said that Title IX brought him his greatest satisfaction.

In addition to these impressive achievements-- and near achievement--Bayh also led the drive to abolish the Electoral College and directly elect the president by popular vote. A relic of our constitutional compromise with slave-holding states, the Electoral College can result in a candidate winning the presidency with fewer nationwide votes (as occurred most recently in 2000 and 2016), hence preserving the privileges of small states over the will of the broader electorate.* As such it is incompatible with the values of American democracy.

Bayh took his popular vote campaign to the general public, arguing that abolishing the electoral college was the “logical, realistic and proper continuation of the nation’s tradition and history—a tradition of continuous expansion of the franchise and equality in voting.” According to a Gallup poll, by 1968 Bayh’s direct popular vote campaign had won the support of 80 percent of the country. The next year a direct popular vote bill overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives. With President Nixon expressing his support, conditions seemed ripe for a landmark constitutional change. Unfortunately, even though Bayh had lined up strong support in the Senate, the proposed amendment was steamrolled by southern segregationists led by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. Their filibuster eventually killed the amendment until it finally died on September 29, 1970. Under the guise of states’ rights, millions of black voters throughout the South would continue to be disenfranchised by restrictive registration and voting laws.**

Birch Bayh was a politician I could identify with (as was, at the time, Senator William Fulbright, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War). He taught me what an individual politician could accomplish against great odds. Here was a politician who dedicated his political life, not to fund raising, ass-kissing, spitting out platitudes and hollow promises, but to the advancement of democratic values. Here was a politician committed to doing the right thing.

Unfortunately, principled, accomplished politicians like Birch Bayh have been few and far between in my lifetime. The chance that a Bayh-like statesman will emerge in today’s fact-adverse, highly polarized political culture is extremely remote. The power of big money and social media almost guarantee this won’t happen. The success of a politician nowadays is defined mostly by their ability to get reelected, which requires bringing rhetorical and fund-raising skills to the political table. We may not see the likes of a Birch Bayh again.

I’d like to thank Sydney Verba for widening my intellectual horizons and inspiring me to think analytically about politics. And, a big thanks to Birch Bayh for remaining true to his vision of a more just and democratic America and for accomplishing the improbable. He boosted my spirits at a time when it especially needed boosting.

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* The occasional discrepancy between popular and electoral votes also stems from the winner-take-all election system in place in all but two of our states.

** I would also like to see changes in the authority of the Senate to have exclusive control over the confirmation of major presidential appointments, such as to the Supreme Court, the ratification of treaties entered into by the President, and conducting trials of presidents that have been impeached by the House. These critical powers should be reserved to the House, which reflects the wider American population.