Study of US government requires examination of conflict

The April 19 decision by the Williamsburg-James City County School Board to cancel purchase of new textbooks for the district’s Advanced Placement government and politics classes undoubtedly came as a surprise to many. Money had already been allocated and the current texts are at least 12 years old. My interest in this subject is not merely that of a Williamsburg resident.

Every semester for more than 40 years I taught Introduction to American Government at the college where I was employed. I am also a coauthor of such a text, and I have spent my career teaching, researching and writing about American politics. The rejected book, “Government in America: People, Politics and Policy,” is coauthored by three distinguished political scientists, two of whom are acquaintances of mine.

How could their book, I wondered, be found objectionable, especially since the content of these texts offers a standard treatment? This book, like the one I coauthor, examines its subject matter thusly: the Founding period, the Constitution, civil rights and liberties, political behavior, governing institutions, and policymaking. Given that high school AP coursework is designed to prepare students for college-level instruction and pedagogy, the book was an excellent choice.

The backdrop for this local decision is an ongoing national culture war involving public school curriculum where, sadly, outrage is high and fact-based analysis low. The extreme case is Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. Currying the national spotlight, he signed legislation to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” — even though it’s not taught in public schools, nor does it “cultivate Black communism” or “teach kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” as DeSantis falsely asserted.

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order calling for ending “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory” in public schools. School superintendents from around the state pushed back on the governor’s insistence that “inherently divisive concepts” be somehow scrubbed from schools.

Here’s the thing: it is not possible to meaningfully teach American government without teaching about the country’s divisions. Politics is all about how political systems confront the struggle between division and unity.

This dilemma was brilliantly analyzed by founder James Madison when he wrote in the Federalist Papers about “faction,” his term for a group of people brought together by a “common impulse of passion” who are “adverse to the rights of other citizens” or to the “aggregate interests of the community.” In other words, factions embody divisiveness to advance their cause.

Madison deplored factions as dangerous to the political system, but knew they could not be banished, an effort he dubbed “folly,” any more than the discussion of them could be — what the likes of DeSantis and Youngkin are about. There are, he wrote, “two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction. ….removing its causes” or “controlling its effects.”

The first remedy would be “worse than the disease.” It would be like eliminating air, essential to life, to stop fire: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” Madison’s alternate remedy is to control their bad effects through constitutional structures and protections. That would surely extend, as it must, to instruction about not only the good, but the bad and the ugly woven into the American political system.

One of the four people who spoke out against the rejected American government textbook at the board meeting objected to the book’s cover photo of a Black Lives Matter mass demonstration in front of the U.S. Capitol. The speaker reportedly called the photo “divisive.” One is tempted to retort, welcome to American politics.

Madison would have understood the dismay, but he would have deplored the remedy. Divisiveness cannot be eliminated. It is in America’s DNA; fortunately, though, it is only part of who we are. But that is why it must be taught.