Denying the Process

Another semester starts next week and I'll face a collection of young adults who haven't quite mastered the skills of adulthood so they seek to prolong their high-school days by attending the one-horse community college in their town. Some will be ambitious, some will be disadvantaged, some will be lazy and some will be hopelessly over their heads. Thirty will start the average course and a dozen will finish the semester with a passing grade.

This semester I'll once again have a course section of almost all dual-credit seniors bussed in from the local high schools. These tend to be more involved and more likely to aspire to a four-year college and an actual education. The effort in that class room is a bit more rewarding than the period before them which is the required state and local government course for completion of an associates degree in the state of Texas.

Both classes will get my standard introductory lecture on the definition of politics. I give it for two reasons. First, it is acknowledgement that I was half-way through my graduate degree in political science before I really came to grips with what "politics" is. We use the term freely but we seldom understand it. Second, it is to hopefully get students to focus on how a college course in American government or state/local government differs from a primary school civics class or even a high school government class.

Politics is about process. Yes, we'll get to how many seats in the legislature and how many terms can a President serve and how many justices on the Supreme Court. But, we'll also spend most of our time discussing how a republic functions in response to the will of the people governed; those that in Hobbesian terms provide the "consent" which empowers that government.

This year it may be appropriate to add Peggy Noonan's column from Saturday's WSJ to the required reading list. She clearly points out not only process but also how the current administration is ignoring and denying process in their governance:

Snatching Defeat Inexorably From Victory

Of particular insightfulness in that piece is her description of the occasional need for a President to act without regard to the public clamor and exercise true leadership. That sort of transendance is what marks the historically great leaders from the mundane. When the administration is tone deaf to the will of the electorate and continually denies them, the political capital is quickly expended and the response at the polls will affirm it.