Voice and Judgment

The Practice of Public Politics

Robert J. Kingston

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781945577291
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Voice and Judgment: The Practice of Public Politics, Robert Kingston, senior associate of the Kettering Foundation, provides a comprehensive analysis of the continuing public deliberations carried out, nationwide, over the past 30-some years, under the auspices of the National Issues Forums and other organizations.

The task of publicly "talking through" a national or community problem is not always easy. Nor has an answer (or an agreement) always been found—or universally shared! But what regularly does emerge, when people deliberate, is a kind of shared understanding. At best, it is the sense of a shared public will. More important yet, such public deliberations suggest something of what it may take to make democracy work as it should. And, after several decades of deliberation, some of us have come to suspect that at the core of our democracy may be less the right to vote than the opportunity to deliberate.

This study responds to critical and controversial domestic and multinational issues that have challenged—and sometimes still do challenge—citizens' relations to each other and their degrees of trust in their elective government. Many such issues remain continuing problems for the American public and its leadership; but the public discussion of each reveals, in compelling ways, not merely the need for, but also the extraordinary promise of public deliberation as a means of moving tensely conflicting issues toward the kind of shared understanding from which viable public policies may grow—or to an increasingly shared understanding even of issues that, at points, have seemed to bear irreconcilable expectations.

The public voice is seldom the voice that the establishment—the political, corporate, and press establishments—is anxious to hear. And unless we are prepared to present and explain the dilemmas that the public acknowledges and is preparing to cope with—rather than primarily the opinions that people in their uncertainty express—we might as well leave the public voice at home.

The continuing practice of public deliberation itself reveals, in this book, the slow-paced movement that translates the idea of change into the conceptualizing of public action.

II.

SEARCHING FOR BALANCE
… AMERICA’S ROLE
IN THE WORLD

______________________

_____________________________

______________________

ALL OF US, I SUSPECT, while we were still young children, encountered some history-making event that we knew was to change the comfort of our little world. We did not surely understand it, nor even really “know” what it was; but we knew that it “happened,” that it “meant” something, and that someday, therefore, we should have to cope with it. To the now elders among American citizens, such an “event” may have been Pearl Harbor or the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; to a very few, even Poland, or Neville Chamberlain getting off a plane from Munich, a piece of paper (signed by Adolf Hitler) fluttering in his hand declaring, more wrongly than he could imagine, “Peace in our time!” Or for a somewhat younger generation, it will have been 9/11—and new enemies, new friends.

The long and continuing sequence of National Issues Forums—which (as this is being written) have addressed something near 100 issues, nationwide, over the past 30 years—provides now a valuable indication of the progress of public thinking, and the continuities in it, over time, otherwise unavailable, the likelihood of which was perhaps not fully apprehended during the earliest years of the NIF experiment. America’s sense of its place in the world is one such continuing theme.

In the 1980s, the country passed through the depths of the Cold War, which, in effect, culminated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Well, this was perhaps not the precise “depth” of the Cold War, granted Sputnik, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; but the period was certainly filled with deeply troubled and passionate concern about the relative nuclear strengths of the two superpower rivals. Three times in that decade the NIF forums took on a consideration of the US-Soviet relationship. Then again, immediately following the end of the Soviet era in 1989, they turned to consideration of America’s role in the world. And in the fall and winter of 2002-2003, within weeks of the US attack on Iraq, citizens were again discussing “Americans’ Role in the World” in their National Issues Forums.

History does play out on a large stage, where we all can see it and respond. So when listening for a public voice, it is convenient (and it may be helpful, since we have a quarter of a century’s records on hand) to begin here, with the way in which Americans have looked at their place in the world. The way we see others tells us more about ourselves than about them, often as not; so it may be useful to start with Americans’ sense of the world, before moving to the delights and dilemmas of our day-by-day domestic life as a people. That way, at least, if historic foreign affairs grow too tedious, the reader may skip at leisure to the continuing satisfactions and distresses of our domestic scene, which will occupy our later chapters.

Questions of international relations and foreign policy present a particular challenge to citizens of democracies, especially if they see themselves as a nation of immigrants. For most of the past century, fortunate Americans thought of themselves as somewhat better off than the rest of the world, and perhaps envied by it! When wars have had to be fought, they have been fought in places other than the United States itself and caused less of its citizenry to be directly involved in fighting. And the outcomes of the Second World War and the Cold War seemed to place the United States in a position where it could provide extraordinary assistance to the rest of the world, while fearing virtually nothing from it. At least, so some leaders and many citizens liked to presume, while others seemed sometimes to prefer to pursue a policy of strength through fear.

Among politicians and pundits, the wise and the not so wise, and quite a few scholars, the common wisdom seems to be that since 9/11, “everything has changed.” At least, our relationships (or lack of relationships) with other peoples have changed! After 20th-century wars with Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq—not to mention the quick or drawn out but relatively minor events in Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia, Lebanon, the Sudan, and so on—we have moved to 21st-century wars of a different style and in different neighborhoods. After almost half a century of “cold” war, and “wars” on poverty and crime-and drugs, we have moved to a “war on terror.” If we take these all to be genuine states of war, then we have been at war for more of the past hundred years than we have been at peace. But Americans have always been addicted to the metaphor of warfare; ideological divergences that Europeans take as the very stuff of democratic politics are, in America, argued as moral commitments with divisive implications for both social ethics and patriotism. So change attributed to 9/11 may turn out to be less than meets the eye.

Yet the record of deliberations among the American public, over the past 20-some years, about their nation’s place in relation to other peoples of the world is, if sometimes sketchy, nonetheless surprisingly persistent. Some patterns of thinking have emerged from those deliberations about the ways other peoples govern themselves, ply their trades, develop (or fail to develop) their societies, and deploy what might be forces of destruction against what they think to be hostile or threatening powers. Indeed, as we shall see, some public judgments have been made.

An absolute or world-without-end judgment about America’s role in the world is of course unlikely. Political leaders tend to articulate policies to which they are already (often for very good reason and sometimes for bad) committed; media tend to reflect the rhetoric and personality of those same leaders, their critics, and their advisors; and pollsters analyze only aggregated responses to carefully worded questions designed, more often than not, to reveal respondents’ reactions to those same policies, as articulated and reported. The concerns expressed by citizens, however, as they have talked together and shared experiences together of the impact or anticipated possible impacts of international events upon their own lives, and on the interests and aspects of life that they value most dearly, are revealing.

Now, the records of a deliberative public available to us begin in the 1980s. For the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, we do not have such deliberative records. We cannot therefore formally compare attitudes of deliberative Americans toward Iraq or Iran today with those of citizens during the oil crisis of the 1970s; nor compare divisions about this nation’s presence in Iraq with divisions in the 1960s and 1970s about our presence in Vietnam. We cannot compare people’s feelings about the hostages in Iran, 25 years ago, with comments about hostages taken by insurgent groups in Afghanistan today. Americans over 50 may recall the OPEC (Arab) oil embargo of the 1970s as a trade threat, different of its nature from one associated with religious fundamentalism and military force. We may genuinely remember students killed on an American campus by American military, or tear gas in the streets of our nation’s capital, and thousands “imprisoned” at a stadium in that same city—yet think that the nation was less clearly divided then than it has been, in this 21st century, between the “red” and the “blue.” And we may or may not think it reasonable that no heads rolled, nor was impeachment called for, over the “Irangate” conspiracy. These are merely remembered crises, about which “public opinion” is on record, but there are no reports of public thinking. Perhaps it is only nostalgia that talks to us about such remembered events. Or perhaps it is just, as Yankelovich has argued, that judgments, by the public, take shape only over time. To trace possible continuity in events of the past and traits of today’s public thinking is a challenging task.

Fortunately, however, since the fall of 1982, the National Issues Forums, convened in American communities by local institutions, have deliberated on issues both of national policy and community practice. Although these groups operate nationwide, they don’t constitute an association or even a formal network; and they are not the kinds of random samples from which social and political analyses—let alone national policies—are generally persuasively to be made. Yet they do tend to be representative of American popular life. And the records of these deliberative discussions we have, from various forums. Through more than 20 years, now, the convenors of such forums, with the help of the Kettering Foundation, have invited reputable analysts to visit and formally report the outcomes from such forums; further, some of these forums have been recorded on videotape each year and presented at the National Press Club, where members of Congress and the Washington Press Corp have “responded,” as it were, to what the citizens are saying. (The videotapes and the responses have then been broadcast as an annual public television program called A Public Voice.) From resources such as these, we can venture some retrospective observations about patterns and changes, over the past 20-some years, in what seem to have been compelling concerns (or aspects of interest) in the reactions of American citizens to the impacts of international accidents and policies upon their sense of America’s place in the world. We may report, at least, about reports.

THE ILLUSORY FLIGHT OF HAWK AND DOVE

The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was perhaps among those events that, from time to time, change the way Americans look at the world. It was by no means the start of the Cold War. That had begun when the victorious allies drew a line across Europe at the end of the Second World War. And cold “battle” had been first joined, so to speak, with the actual Soviet blockade of Berlin in the late 1940s. In the intervening years, the Soviets had developed nuclear arms, brought down the U-2 spy plane, and got into space before us; and Mr. Khrushchev had rapped the heel of his shoe on the table while delivering his “we will bury you” thoughts at the United Nations. Such images linger still in the popular mind of older Americans. But it was the confrontation, the crisis of nuclear fear of 1962, that occasioned the calculated stalemate of arms control agreements whereby the two superpowers rode out the remainder of the life of the Soviet Union.

From the time of the understanding between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev that limited the testing and production of nuclear weapons, until another understanding a quarter of a century later, between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev, Americans’ alternating postures of threat and ingratiation in relation to the Soviet Union determined their responses to the rest of the world. Strictly speaking, America’s interest in the world was not confined to its concerns about the Soviet Union; nor were those concerns only about the comparative nuclear strength and nuclear arms strategies of those two nations. But, by and large, each saw the world as prize or prey coveted by the other; and since both possessed nuclear arms, the apparently endless stalemate that evolved seemed to enfold all of the other possibilities of domestic and international life within the shadow of a mutually assured destruction (referred to often as MAD) that could follow the exercise of nuclear force, by either nation. MAD was, in effect, the basis of US Cold War policy, although a number of studies make it clear that neither experts nor the American people were confidently of one mind about that policy.

Without the threat of nuclear holocaust, the years of the Cold War might have filled themselves with North Koreas, Vietnams, Grenadas, and Iraqs, anyway. But both the early NIF issue books in the 1980s and the reports of public deliberation that they engendered suggest a people whose future may have been uncertain but whose frame of reference was—especially when contrasted with the first decade of this 21st century—remarkably sure in itself. Foreign policy for most Americans had become essentially a defense policy, designed to maintain the credibility of the threat itself of nuclear destruction as a means of keeping alien ideas and practices from infecting traditionally American principles. In this context, conservatives and liberals became either hawks or doves; the differences between them became degrees of anti-Soviet rhetoric; and their differing approaches to international relationships were measured by their relative willingness or reluctance to engage in talk and treaty. Three issue books produced for NIF during the 1980s reveal the currency of this preoccupation with defense; the few formal reports we have from the forums are dictated by its singular pervasiveness. As we shall see, commitment to the goals of containing communism and avoiding nuclear war framed public thinking, while reaction against the war in Vietnam had eventually come to color its expression.

Given the few formal reports from public forums and the fact that there are no Public Voice videotapes from this period, remarks from the forums are not plentiful. But enough can be found to elaborate upon this now historical mind-set, characterized by images of hawks and doves, and to reveal the reservations that appeared to be growing within it.

In the fall of 1983, when Public Agenda, in collaboration with The Center for Foreign Policy Development at Brown University, launched what was to become a four-year study of Americans’ attitudes toward the Soviet Union, it began with the observation that “the chasm in understanding and perspective between the public and its leaders could hardly be more stark or more potentially troublesome.” Public Agenda based that preliminary judgment on a long series of polls, some of which were to prove misleading, with conclusions that differed significantly from what Public Agenda would learn in its ensuing study of the deliberative public.

In one such poll that Public Agenda had examined, for example, almost two thirds of those questioned had given, Public Agenda observed, “answers more consistent with the world of the 1930s than the world of the 1980s.” In the event of a US/Soviet war, that poll had suggested, people thought “that a son or husband might be drafted; Americans might have to go abroad to fight; there might be shortages of certain goods and some economic hardships.” But “only 36 percent had mentioned the possibility of massive death and destruction.” The public, it was assumed therefore, held views that were “disparate, unfocused, and disconnected,” and its “thinking was marked by anxiety, confusion, unreality, a sense of powerlessness, and a rising tide of alarm.” This presumption proved accurate. The sense of powerlessness and the rising tide of alarm, the Public Agenda study learned, were certainly characteristic—as they might also be said to have been characteristic of the American public as a result of 9/11, twenty years later. But public deliberation in the three sets of NIF forums on the Soviet-US relationship in the later 1980s revealed divergent but considerably more sharply focused views that, as it turns out, did in fact offer increasingly clear indicators of what would eventually become a more appropriate policy—a more balanced public judgment—for greater national security by the end of the decade: attitudes both more realistic and increasingly less divisive than both political leadership and the media of the preceding 30 postwar years had presumed. By the middle of the 1980s, it had become abundantly clear, both from polls and from public dialogue, that an overwhelming sense among the American people was that the United States did not enjoy nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union; that they (like the rest of the world) would have little chance of surviving nuclear war; and that therefore nuclear arms should not be used except in immediate response to another’s nuclear attack.

A deeply rooted antipathy toward foreign ventures had been planted by the war in Vietnam, the last quarter of the 20th century had gradually become used to a kind of peace—albeit peace punctuated by occasional adventures, in, for example, Grenada, Panama, and, more consistently, in the Middle East. An ameliorating relationship with China had begun to enlarge the international marketplace; and that may have had more to do with the decline in people’s sense of a “communist threat” than had the posturing of the fictional Rambo character of Sylvester Stallone and the illusion of a Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”), both of which had a following, at the time. Increasingly, Americans in the 1980s were coming to think of foreign policy in terms of defense against the potential of the Soviet Union; so, energized still by the fear of communism and the love of profit, they went about their Cold War business—with growing reservations.

Thus, to suggest a people divided between “hawks” and “doves” does not accurately represent the American public that revealed itself in deliberation through the 1980s. Certainly, these labels represent attitudes commonly recognized and often talked about. The two images were consistently used—and public concern moved back and forth between them: between a commitment to “peace through strength,” through arms control strategies, to the goal of a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons, and even, now and again, of unilateral nuclear disarmament. And vice-versa! Keith Melville, who had written the first discussion guide used nationwide in the National Issues Forums confronting this international problem in 1983 (and who has an unusually sensitive ear for the complexity of public thought), reported:

Most of the people in these forums concluded that it would be foolish for us to renounce the use of nuclear weapons. It is one thing to conclude, as many people in these groups seem to have done, that the Soviets aren’t as implacable an enemy as they are often made out to be; it is another thing entirely to hand them military advantage by taking the radical step of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

This had the appearance of a public judgment: the Soviet Union apparently wasn’t all-powerful, but that didn’t mean we should renounce the use of nuclear weapons. So much, then, in these early forums, for both the hawk and the dove—who, Melville noted, tended, insofar as they were extremes, to become more extreme in their assertions as deliberation proceeded, while others moved together by a process, largely, of exploring contradictions.

Participants in these forums had little interest in the subtleties of deterrence theory, but its underlying premise came up again and again as a topic of discussion. What seemed so striking to people who confronted its meaning for the first time was the contradiction it contains. Its goal is to ensure the peace, to protect our sovereignty, to promote international stability. What it requires of us is to build and threaten to use an arsenal capable of massive destruction. In brief, we are keeping the peace by threatening annihilation.

This is clearly what Yankelovich had anticipated as the kind of tension that a public must face, working its way to judgment. As evidenced by the forums that Melville was describing, the US public apparently was facing it, albeit without conclusions that could promise comfort over the long haul.

It was apparent, then, in the analyses of public deliberations at that time, that the popular movie images of Rambo excited the imaginations of large numbers of Americans in a way more appropriate to World War II than to the occasional unhappy and indecisive military confrontations of the Cold War period. Still, the threat of the Soviet’s SS-18 (dutifully articulated in the discussion guides for these public forums) certainly occasioned in many minds an enthusiasm for response by way of the MX intercontinental missile (first test fired in 19...