Let's De-Nazify the First Grade

[SUBJECTS: Education, Politics, U.S. Constitution]

"The President makes his decision, and we obey it. That's democracy," the soldier explained to the pool reporters. He seemed like a no-nonsense, intelligent man, probably old enough to have been in the previous war. He appeared to know his profession thoroughly. But his conception of the democratic system he was supposed to be defending would have warmed the heart of a Chilean dictator. The real reason that this distressed me was that I suspected most of the people out there in TV-land agreed with him.

Much of the politics of the last three years has revolved around Americans' rather juvenile, mystical conception of the basics of democracy: We have a two-party state, and expect it to give us two presidential candidates every four years. People expect the president, or "commander-in-chief," to be the leader of his party, and to command the personal loyalty of every American once he is elected. He is assisted by Congress, a sort of sideshow that is supposed to make the laws he wants. To judge from the pronouncements of pundits and politicians, a good president is one who gets his program through congress, and a responsible congress is one that lets the president get things done. What kind of things? That's for policy nerds to worry about.

Besides the elective monarchy, Americans hold certain other truths to be self-evident. While there is a wide continuum from those who want their country to be the medicine man of the global village to those who see it as the robocop of a Hobbesian world, they all believe in what the Sudanese call "the personality of the state:" that the nation is more real and durable than any individuals, and that they owe their existence to it. Thus primordial principles like national security and the sacredness of the flag outweigh even the constitution.

The public image of the constitution is rather hazy, not because Americans are especially smoggy-brained but because we take pride in having quite vague conceptions of things we think we can do without. We assume the whole thing was conceived and imposed by the "framers," some quaint, prudish old men who had decided to make us a "nation" in the 20th-century sense. Since this is its spirit and purpose, anything in it that interferes with the ways we exercise our nationhood can be ignored as a technicality. Most of us assume the framers meant to include the right to free food, housing, health insurance, police, gun control, and a two-party system, but forgot them since they hadn't been invented yet. (They had.) We expect that the president and his little helpers on the Supreme Court will be men of vision, who will transcend the constitution when they sense their leadership is called for.

This mythology is mostly unrelated to history, though I realize that makes no difference to most people. Lincoln never pledged allegiance to the flag; the pledge was invented in 1892 and God was added to it during the Cold War. Our concern with oaths and flags has grown in spurts of xenophobia that accompany wars and anti-immigration frenzies. Hardly any other people is so fond of its flag or its status as a "nation." The nearest modern counterpart to our flag would be the divine Japanese emperor. Our storybook ideas of the presidency are based on Kennedy and the Roosevelts, which is why we call most modern presidents failures and scoff at most nineteenth-century presidents as absurd nonentities.

While the state of mind I have described is well-known, I believe I have discovered its principal cause, and a likely cure. It may be as simple as the order in which political concepts are taught in schools. Since people learn about flags and presidents first, and Congress and civil liberties last, they naturally assume that the former are the essential foundations of the republic, and the latter are trivial ornaments.

Most first graders are eager to learn things, and trust their teachers. They learn the pledge of allegiance and the name of the president, a figure somewhat like the kings in fairy tales. Later in elementary school, they learn about wars and party politics, and might hear congress mentioned. Meanwhile they are learning to value the opinions of their peers more than those of adults. By twelfth grade they believe that school is for children, and that anything they have to learn there is trivia, useless in the real world. At this unpromising moment, they have to take civics, and be told about how a bill becomes a law, and the contents of the constitution.

Adults remain sympathetic to their eighteen-year old selves, and suspect that anyone who makes too much of constitutional technicalities is an unscrupulous nerd. Yet they grow nostalgic for the earliest grades, and however much they may have lampooned the pledge of allegiance at the time, they believe that most social problems would be solved if only today's kids were taught the patriotism and discipline that were taken for granted back in the good old days.

Americans aren't completely apathetic about politics, they just believe that simplicity is a democratic virtue. They are not totally mistaken, and it shouldn't be too hard for schools to give them different fundamentals to be simple about, instead of insulting them by telling them they're not complex enough. Some of the basic values of this country are that we're ruled by a Congress which makes our laws, and that the Constitution is the source of, and limit of, all coercive powers. These are pretty simple ideas, though lifetimes can be spent exploring their implications. Kids can memorize these ideas early on, and much later in life they will think about what they mean.

I gave up on the pledge in Sunday school; as a Christian, I thought it was idolatrous to swear fealty to a mere thing, a piece of cloth, or to make it the center of a worshipful ceremony. A very few denominations make a point of this. But most of them wouldn't object to simply pledging "allegiance to the United States of America, and to the republic which they form (etc.)."
The part about "under God" probably must be removed from any government-sponsored version, but there is one good thing about it. It is a reminder that the "nation" is not omnipotent nor self-justifying, and that its actions may be judged by higher laws. It is like the line in a French constitution which conceded that "The constitution of the universe is superior to the constitution of France."

The fact is that you can pledge allegiance to your flag, or your country, in whatever words you want. Why don't teachers have kids pledge allegiance to the the constitution, as everyone from presidents to park rangers does when taking office? Why don't they have them memorize the Bill of Rights, or parts of the Declaration of Independence? It's true that kindergartners initially wouldn't understand half of what they were repeating, but they don't understand most of the words in the pledge, either, and nobody gets upset about that. For those who find these insufficiently warlike, there's always Patrick Henry's memorable phrases: "Gentlemen cry 'peace, peace,' but there is no peace! Is life so dear, or is peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" There is plenty of material in our history which is patriotic, easy for kids to learn, and consistent with the real values of America's founders. In a generation of two, it would close most of the gap between the theory and the practice of democracy.