Government, Politics, and Citizen Involvement; The Constitution and the Citizen

Good evening ladies and gentleman. I'm Richard Olsen and I'd like to welcome you to Boston College. This evening we initiate the first of a lecture series sponsored by The Boston College Bureau of Public Affairs which is entitled Government, Politics and Citizen Involvement. The purpose of this lecture series is to provide the interested citizen with the knowledge and skills needed in order to participate more actively and effectively in public affairs. We are most appreciative of the wonderful cooperation we have received from many individuals organizations and firms in setting up these lectures. A special thanks is extended to our distinguished guest lecturers who have consented to take the time from their busy schedules in order to participate in this series. The topic for this first lecture is the citizen in a democracy his rights functions and responsibilities. Our lecturer for this evening is Professor Norton E. Long who currently holds the James Gordon chair of community government at Brandeis University. Professor Long has received his avi

M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He has been on the faculty of many outstanding universities including Mount Holyoke College the University of Michigan, the University of Texas and Harvard University. Prior to coming to Brandeis Professor Long was a professor of political science at Northwestern University from 1961 to 1963. He was a consultant to Governor Otto Kearney of Illinois. In the national government he has served as Assistant to theAdministrator Office of Price Administration, Assistant Administrator National Housing Administration and consultant to the defense production administration. Last year he was invited to India to address the Golden Jubilee of the Indian Political Science Association on the topic of political leadership and public opinion. He is of the author of a book entitled The polity which was published in 1962 by Rand McNally.

He was also a consultant to the Republic of the Philippines for community development. It is with great pleasure therefore that I present to you our first guest lecturer Professor Norton E. Long [applause] I've given a pretty hefty assignment here Rights functions responsibilities of a citizen in a democracy. You know the term democracy don't say the United States but I take it they're really concerned with this country. Reason I mention that is because the United States though Some people think that as a democracy is not. It happens to be a constitutional democracy and a republic. And I'm not speaking as a Goldwater Republican and saying that but it does happen to make a bit of difference because the nature of a democracy is a government that is concerned with majority role

to be sure concerned with majority rule but we're also quite as much concerned with minority rights and with the protection of the individual. And in fact I think the philosophy of American government is far more concerned with the dignity of the individual and the Realize ation of the individual's potentialities than it is would enable a majority to rule. In fact I would say that our commitment to democracy and majority rule is based upon its value as a technique for achieving the best possible government for the individual. And this doesn't mean that we believe that the majority whatever it was or whatever it thinks is necessarily right. In fact we provide some very important limitations on government in a document that is known as a Bill of

Rights and the Bill of Rights provide insofar as you are citizens for the rights that you enjoy and they are rights already largely against government. Their rights. Freedom of thought and expression and freedom of worship these are exceedingly important. rights that you would find are not possessed over much of the inhabited globe. They are rare. Their precious heritage of the blood sweat and tears of free man over a century. And they represent a piece of human capital to be extremely costly to come by and which is far more precarious than most of us realize in terms of what it takes to retain it and what it takes to constantly renew that heritage and keep it viable in a world that is not

showing itself to be inevitably trending to democracy a constitutional government. In addition to freedom of thought and expression including worship, Americans have the right to fair procedures and these are exceedingly important. All you have to do is to glance at your newspaper. Consider how easy it is to handle any uncomfortable objective to any particular form of government. Whether it's a People's Court or a ?Folks correct? or the drumhead legal procedures of a so-called people's democracy or the firing squads of the Congo. We have precious procedural rights to protect the individual from being pushed around by governmental power. Always remember the people who framed the government of the United States framed it but they were very

clear idea in mind of centuries of tyranny centuries in which gradually our heritage of protection of devices for the individual had been developed so that people could be secure in their persons from unreasonable searches and seizures so that people could not be put into the jail and forgotten as the French kings did with a letter to cache or as happens now and all too many dictatorships and countries that don't even call themselves dictatorships can get a writ of habeas corpus before an impartial judge who can cause your accuser to bring you into court and show cause why you should be held to a very precious liberty. All too few Americans are aware of those values. That the police can't put a listening device in your

house and hear whatever's you say in order to entrap you. Pride of the right against unreasonable searches and seizures you mail can't be tempted. All of the things which gives you an opportunity to have a sphere around yourself which is ?Romi? involve when people possess in force in government to intervene. You have the right to be free from having to say what you believe or what you don't believe. You have a right to keep your thoughts to yourself except under very special circumstances in which you can be compelled to testify. Many of us who attended I think without adequate consideration look askance at the Fifth Amendment which was put in the Constitution for very good reasons by the framers and the founding fathers

who knew what could happen in a police state where people can be compelled to testify and all you have to do is to study the history of the Soviet Union and the so-called Moscow trials and you'll know some of the reasons why the framers of our Constitution who knew a great deal about compulsory testimony and how government could use its powers during confessions and extort them by torture by duress and by compulsion from people who could be compelled to testify against themselves. So this wasn't put in for any idle reason or any more sentimentality or concern with protecting gangsters communists, it was for protecting people like themselves. The founding fathers put those protections into the Constitution and so conservative a man is

Dino ?Ingrid's? of the Harvard Law School has written a treatise on the fifth amendment which I would commend to your attention. Now the right to speak openly and freely what you think you have a right to print this. Believe me if you travel around the globe you'll find that this is a very rare right indeed and becoming rarer. You have the right to freedom from double jeopardy. You have. the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments from excessive lines from ex post facto laws and bills of attainder. You may think it's someone I kid even mention Bill of Attainder Bills of Attainder used to be a legislative determination of people's guilt but by without any trial on the basis of no known law,

people could be just administer legislatively found guilty. And of course this is what happens in a dictatorship. Whole classes of people, I just found to be public enemies by legislative determination. Why do I sorrow we ourselves on occasion been guilty of things almost as bad as this. Every American I think must hang his head because of what we did the American born Japanese during the war when we put them in concentration camps and put only Japanese by the way in concentration camps not Italians not Germans. It's taken us some time to overcome the innate racism of our people. Americans enjoy equality before the law and they enjoy this regardless of race, religion, sex, national origin or political persuasion. Every individual has the right to equal protection of the law.

The right to exert his franchise and the right to have fair and equal representation in government and this is an exceedingly important right as you would know if you were a Negro in Mississippi and didn't have it, as you would know and you should know if your ancestors were denied these rights as many immigrants to the United States were or if in fact because of your religion as has been true in some sorry pages of American history you were discriminated against and not allowed the privileges of full citizenship. And you can see that the right to exercise your franchise is an important right of defense. In fact the origin of the franchise is very largely not so much as a right for self-government as a right to protect the citizen against a government which might oppress and in the franchise is a right of self-defense. This is not

an adequate or total definition of the franchise but believe me wherever people have been denied the right of the franchise and when there are not others to assert their rights and protect their rights as for children or is it one time is true of women. And I might say by the way women are not all so sure that they were happy to have men exclusively endowed with the right to represent them. This representation hasn't been clearly impartial as differentiation in salaries, job opportunities and so forth would indicate. Where you all have somebody powerful to protect you you better have the franchise because if you don't you can be oppressed with impunity and turned into a ? ? So the franchise and the right to equal representation are exceedingly important rights for vindicating the protection of one's own personality. But it seems to me that when we discuss these rights they really add up.

So what are the conditions for the preservation of individual personality and for committing the individual personality to have the kind of political atmosphere in which you can breathe and move and grow and fully develop itself. The protections against government are not designed to shackle government to hamstring affective government. They're designed to provide the individual with freedom of action, to provide the individual with assurance and security and to provide him protection against arbitrary callous brutal and one sided treatment. These rights are exceedingly important for the functioning of a constitutional democracy because a constitutional democracy uses the techniques of majority rule derived decisions. But it uses those techniques only

through the channels that are provided for by law and through legal procedures and through procedures that protect the rights of minorities. The protect future majority rights to come into being because one thing we will not commit any majority to do, if we can possibly avoid it, is to sell mortgage the future that no future majority can alter his will. We certainly do not propose debt of any majority any temporary majority set itself up in authority forever after. In fact this has been the technique of the dictators who come into power as an alleged majority on this basis. Deny the rights of any future majority to come into being and to have the capacity to overturn by peaceful and lawful means. The government in power in fact in so far as there is an ethical justification for the right of

revolution. That ethical justification as understood by Jefferson and the founding fathers of this country. Justification was the lack of any peaceful legal and lawful means of altering a government that had become oppressive of the citizens under its yoke. Now we believe, I think in a government of law and a government where individuals are to be dealt with not on the basis of extemporaneous and arbitrary creed by several policies that applied to all equally and fairly what applies to one applies to others. There isn't special justice for some and a different kind of justice for others. There isn't special schooling for some there isn't special housing for some, there isn't special zoning for some

there aren't special access to public services for some. Insofar as their citizens affairs these are matters of public provision. They're equal to all citizens and the citizen as such has no second class or third class or fourth class in this country. All American citizens are first class citizens in the eyes of the law and the eyes of the philosophy of American government. It doesn't mean that in practice we've succeeded in achieving this. It means at least insofar as we have a commitment and a spiritual commitment in this country it is to this basic equality and a basic equality it seems to me to be fundamental to the Judeo-Christian ethic and in this sense we belong to a Christian culture and constitutional

democracy rests ultimately on a spiritual affirmation. The brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. Now when you talk about rights quite clearly you talk about a one sided thing. When the late president said "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" he was speaking of the inevitable other side of rights which is if you want to possess them securely and they're to be meaningful they imply corroborative obligations. Rights have to be earned and they have to be constantly earned. We have a goodly heritage that has come to us from people who worked hard at the job of creating a magnificent constitutional structure. But very much like the heirs

to an estate who have no appreciation for what went into making it have little understanding of the enormous spiritual capital that has been built up over time. We can take it for granted, live off the capital, put nothing back and have it go to rack and ruin. This is true a system of constitutional government ,you get out of it to a very large extent which you put in when people lose this sense of the importance of the enterprise of the value of it and begin to take it for granted as a free gift of nature. They're well on the road to losing it. And I personally am very much afraid that many many Americans have all to light a regard for a heritage

that took centuries in the building. You can't face college under graduates today without finding that many of them give the right quiz kid answers but pursue the subject in depth and you'll find that the quiz kid answers are backed up by neither conviction or understanding. Most people perhaps this is harsh but I don't think it's so are free loaders on the body politic, freeloaders who expect to be carried on by some saving remnant some leaven that leavens the civic lump some George that will do it. They confuse citizenship with consumership, they vote with their feet. They don't like the goods enjoyed in Jordan March they go to Filenes . They don't like the goods in the central city they go to the suburban shopping center.

For them government is not an active enterprise in which they have an obligation to share in carrying it out. What is very much like their reluctantly dues paying members of the Union obeyed any attention to the operation of the Union. I don't attend the meetings. I don't elect the officers I don't work at it but merely expect to get the benefits of the enterprise. In fact sometimes I think as a citizen of Massachusetts as the man with the power more approaching the DPW for his $50. This is perhaps on the smaller side of what one can expect from one state as opposed to what one expects to give to it. Seems to me is I look at Massachusetts and Boston after being away for a while people still think the public service is a form of outdoor relief,

convenient place for hacks and stumble bums who couldn't make a living elsewhere. Despite the many excellent people in public life and in government that none the less government is looked upon as something to be rated something out of which one makes a fast buck rather than as a serious enterprise in which we are all involved and in which we are concerned with a common good and a common good that is not a material piece of the pork barrel but a common good which means something in terms of a common spiritual life that ennobles man rather than merely providing him with a cheap and easy way to get some income. Citizenship if it's to have any meaning has to transcend consumership, it has to be something more than being a

paying guest at a Miami Beach hotel in which you look upon your public officials as some kind of hotel keepers and you give them a vote of confidence by paying your taxes once in a while and if you don't like the services you go somewhere else. But you surely don't expect to be one of the Georges to do something about it. Who me? What's it to me? If I don't like it here I go somewhere else. Of course if you go far enough and you run far enough whether you're an individual or a corporation why you have to figure out what you're going to do in Mao's China or Kostigan's Russia or the Congo so that really at some point running itself can be no answer. Functions of citizenship are the functions that you know very well that the functions of any members of an organization that has a common purpose which

the members share and a common purpose which they intend to foster and further and this is true of business corporation the stockholders in it really have a common purpose. Although it may be simply a situation where you propose to loot it and gut the cooperation and move off with all that you can get. And citizenship becomes nothing but a legal right to pillage so that people are like ?glycine? with battle axes in the Roman Empire they tear the edifice apart. One of the most serious problems about American citizenship is whether you can produce citizens in this country whether you can produce enough of them, produce enough of them who care, who have some sense of dedication and commitment to the enterprise beyond simply a sense of being kibbutzes on the outside enjoying clever cracks made as a result of reading the newspaper accounts

of the Minsky burlesque show that the newspapers make of public life. Of course the extent that you look upon government as just the way of getting a handout just a way of getting a laugh say this isn't me. I'm just watching the circus. You are of course the real clown. Because it is your government and its failure is your failure and the failure of conditions of life for you in failure probably far more seriously of the conditions of life for your children. How many people have an uneasy feeling that they have some kind of obligations if they want rights. There's a look around the globe and see the contracting area of freedom and free man and dignified human

life, I have an uneasy feeling that this isn't a God given condition of the fortunate happy people of the United States that somehow or other was produced for them once and for all and that's an entailed inheritance that they can't lose. They feel they ought to be doing something about this that there are indeed things to be done. They feel frustrated. They feel helpless. They don't know how. I think the water is too cold. They got in the swim. They're afraid to get out on the dance floor to change the metaphor for fear that they might look awkward unable to keep in step. Not knowing what the tune was not knowing how to dance. Average American to some extent prides himself on his political naïveté the very word politics in this country is a dirty word. We made it a dirty word. Newspapers have made it a dirty word.

So the highest calling next to that a religion is besmirched and regarded as being filthy. It's been provided a neat justification for the free riders on the body politic the people who can sit on the sidelines and fault the players and at the same time feel that they're inactivity and being nothing but leaden lumps is a piece of virtue. At least I'm not stealing from the public till that oughta give me a halo. I'm not at all sure that some of the energetic thieves of Massachusetts who have at least built haven't been considerably better than some of the people who did nothing. I can remember looking at Louisiana and you could say at least of Huey Long that he built some schools and build some highways.

He took the people out of the mud. So if he was a thief he might have really fit in the Robin Hood tradition. And I'm afraid that some of the Robin Hoods locally are only hoods. And that they're robbing they do it for themselves alone.[Audience laughter] Very little seems to get to the rest of the people. Albeit you wonder whether were the people of Massachusetts a conviction in a jail sentence isn't a prerequisite to public office or at least a great assist. And given this strange attitude to the people of this commonwealth which I suppose is an excess of Christian charity and the belief in forgiving the senator you wonder what their sense of their own relationship is for the public good. You get on odd feeling with respect to some of these citizens that they still think that Massachusetts is being governed by the English and after all it's no sin to

steal from the English. Or that maybe it's being still governed by the Yankees and it's certainly no sin to steal from them. Of course I would think they have joined everybody else in the stealing so that it's fair for all rather than just for some. But quite seriously it seems to me that the average citizen feels both a sense of guilt and a sense of concern of his own political activity ineffectiveness and yet at the same time a sense of helplessness. How can you do anything about it? As long as you're alone helpless unorganized inactive individual you can feel awfully healthy. But if you were in the French Resistance after Hitler took over France there was an awful lot more difficult to do something about it.

It gets much more difficult the longer you put off doing something about it and the capacity to be an effective citizen. Like the capacity use your muscles grows with the exercise of it. One of the problems of the frustrated citizen is that he or she knows too many things that aren't so one thing they think the doors are close to public influence. They think the doors are closed but the doors ?allies it closed? in their own imagination. This doesn't mean that they aren't effectively closed because as long as you psych yourself into thinking you are faced with closed doors you're not going through them. But believe me for those who really want to do something there are great opportunities. The basis of active citizenship which in many parts of the world is seriously restricted and what you can talk about attempting to be a citizen and doing something

requiring almost heroic activity in this country and in most parts of this country requires no more than the wit and the courage and the will to act. It is a simple and as difficult as that. And I would suggest that the predominant reason why people do nothing about it. Why they are so interactive is because they don't know what they want because we have been mused with the ethic of consumership which we think we are nothing but empty boxes to be filled with gadgets that we procure by installment and that we are nothing but empty spirits to be somehow rather amused and entertained by the idiot box and the other

sports of our time and that we are nothing but a spectator culture, in which our role in life is to acquire enough funds to pay amount to banks to amuse us and to pile up objects to give us a sense of significance in the status race. Now this is fairly serious because democracy depends on citizenship in the last analysis. Not everybody has to be a citizen. Not even the majority have to be a citizen have to have enough. You have to have enough citizens to man the table of organization. You have to have enough citizens that care enough to take a few risks, to spend some time. Constitutional democracy is a highly aristocratic form of God. That might

seem a contradiction in terms we call democracy and aristocratic form of government. But I would call a constitutional democracy an aristocratic form of government because constitutional democracy depends for its success on the self-selection of a natural aristocracy that is willing to do the work of running a railroad and anybody who operates whether it's a fraternity a club or an organization knows that what makes the organization go is whether or not it has that saving remnant that's willing to do the job. That set of Georges who are willing to do it while the others freeload on the organization. You know it isn't serious if you have enough but we never do. Almost every local government that I know a state government is stricken with pernicious anemia

in terms of civic town. There aren't enough and many are involved or involved for bad reasons. It is not the worst thing in the world that American government has been a ladder of upward mobility for the hungry characters who found politics. one of the most efficient means of upward mobility. In fact you might say politics is very much like boxing. It's a dirty rough sport but it does have rewards for some and for the people at the bottom of the pile politics is a useful way of making it. The Irish of Boston battered their way up from the shores by the use of the vote to very considerable extent. Other groups in our society have similarly had to use politics as a mean.

Sadly though when people have finally made it they lose their sense of political interest, they develop too tender a nose for the aroma of politics they lose a zest for body contact no willingness of the give and take the name calling and the mudslinging and they take a run out powder on the job of running the community. So some of the most illustrious names I want to be dedicating themselves to paying back to the community some of the opportunities which it gave them to make a pile and have a family fortune and not particularly showing themselves in the front line trenches. We can get people willing to serve in Washington. They have a popular name get elected. We have all too few people willing to work in the relatively unsung job

of local government and state government. I know in the state of Illinois that I'm well familiar with we couldn't get any of the liberal eggheads or any others to serve for fourteen hundred bucks from the state government and the cow town of Springfield despite the mausoleum of Lincoln and all the other fringe benefits. No they were all talking a good game but they wanted no part of it. And yet the same time the same people who scream about this feel very superior about the quality of personnel you get in government they don't accept the obligation of being one to abide by their ?Porsches? teaching. But they're perfectly willing to teach and to preach. You wonder just how phony they must think they are. But this is a serious problem. How

do you get enough people to be citizens ,enough people to be citizens who are not either ideological cooks and fanatics like the commies of the far right and that hungry characters who are interested in politics to make a fast buck. But I have some sense of the professional capacities of politics to achieve a meaningful life for themselves and for others. And then politics is truly a medium for self-realization in a significant field of endeavor. I am afraid that the ethic of the Puritans hasn't been too helpful to turn people into civic actors. And I'm sure that the heresy of ?Jansoism? as dog Catholicism and at the one time in history when it was desperately bad that it should happen the clergy of

Ireland were the seminary of Menos was educated abroad took a very deep drop of ?Jansomism? so that the problem of evil is less one of the problem of filthy politics and one of filthy pictures and birth control so that as a matter of fact this fire is a dedication to what St. Thomas Aquinas would regard as the important virtue of the common good in its pursuit. Well we had was a pursuit of individual rectitude in a narrow and rather sanctimonious fashion that could co-exist with a complete demoralization of a significant conception of the common good. And I would hope that we might be able to resurrect what Ronald Lippman has called the public philosophy resurrect a great tradition. You see an Aristotle you see in St Thomas Aquinas which I think is part of the basic heritage of American constitutional democracy

which is a conception that the individual realizes himself in important ways through the pursuit of the common good and a merely private life is not a full life. Public dimension of the individual life is an important part of his own ethical self fulfillment that he is in some sense less than a full man if he is not an effective citizen. People who are outside of public life are not to be admired. The three pity that they are in the sense that the Greeks thought them slaves, they are aliens, they are free loaders they are mere traders. they're mere baggage may be necessary for the

conduct of a vitalized community but not participating in any full sense in the most important part. Certainly one of the most important parts of a spiritual life. Now the challenge of politics is the creative challenge. Working at the conditions of man's realization and I suppose we've never been really at a time when we had more to hope for and more to fear when the opportunities were greater. ?Drew Miller? of the giant evils of ignorance poverty misery disease and squalor. And yet precisely because of our great natural powers and powers of a nature our failure

to achieve political success can spell untold disaster. It seems to me that the enterprise that you're undertaking here which is as I take it, how do you recruit active citizens, how do you motivate them, how do you provide them with the weapons and knowledge perhaps the most significant thing any of us could be doing. Because on the saving remnant of those who care for those who are willing to devote themselves their time their energy their effort their heart their feeling their will and their courage. The future of our kind of civilization depends in a real sense that lies with you. Thank you. [Audience applauds] [Audience applauds]

You have heard Professor Norton Long of Brandeis University as he delivered the first in a series of 16 lectures on government politics and citizen involvement presented by the Bureau of Public Affairs at Boston College. Professor Long was introduced by Richard Olson a research associate in public affairs at Boston College. Now until 8:00 in time for folio we invite you to hear the symphonic poem they previewed by Franz Liszt performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Constantine Silvestri. [Music] [Music]

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[Music] [Music] [Music] A prelude by Franz Liszt performed on this recording by Constantine Silvestri conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. This is the eastern educational radio network.