A Few Movie Clips to Finish the Course

Allegory:  The Lion King (1994)

where it came from....

The lure of fascism: Gabriel Over the White House (1933):

Prophecy: Contagion (2011!)

The rule of law:  A Man for All Seasons (1966)

What makes us Americans: Bridge of Spies (2015):

Practice Final

I. Identifications. 

Explain the meaning and significance of 12 of the 15 following items (4 points each).Each answer should be a brief paragraph. 

What is fair game for an identification?

• Items that we have discussed in class or on the blog;
• Items that appear in bold or italics in the readings, or are in the glossary or key terms lists in Lowi;
• Items that cover several pages in the readings.

1. Iron Triangle
2. Majority faction
3. Latinx
4. "Shadow machines"
5. Civil religion
6. National Economic Council
7. PAC
8. Party identification
9. Socialization
10. Amicus curiae
11. The House Bank
12. Exclusionary rule
13. Unfunded mandate
14. Expressed powers
15. Descriptive representation

II. Short answers. 

Answer 3 of 5 (6 points each). Each answer should be a brief paragraph.

1. Briefly explain: “I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous.”
2. Briefly explain: “Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure and out of research of the common man than a law founded on precedent.”
3. Briefly explain: "The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error."
4. Did the Framers believe in "republics" but disdain democracy?
5. How did the structure of local government hinder the response to the Eaton and Palisades fires?

III.  General Essays. 

Answer 2 of 3 (17 points each). Each answer should take 3-4 small bluebook pages.

1. How would Tocqueville explain why a case such as Edwards v. Aguillard came to the Supreme Court?
2. Explain the major ways in which Congress can check the president. Do they still work?
3. See this article. Why did the witness invoke Madison and Hamilton? What would supporters and opponents of the president say to these Founders? https://www.foxnews.com/politics/impeachment-witness-tells-lawmakers-to-consider-having-to-answer-to-hamilton-and-madison-in-the-afterlife 

IV. Bonus questions (one point each) Very briefly identify the following:

• Scott Bessent
• Beryl Howell
• James Clyburn
• Ryan Iwasaka
• Kari Lake

Religion, Immigration, and War

Will post a practice final this week.

Adjourn at noon for student experience survey

Bellah:

Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word "God" at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion. The inauguration of a president is an important ceremonial event in this religion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the highest political authority. 

JFK:

Solemn oath

JFK quoted the Protestant King James Bible, not the Catholic Confraternity Douay Bible.  Protestant Ted Sorensen actually wrote the speech.  

See his 1960 speech to the Houston Ministerial Association (start about one minute in):

• Winthrop's "City on a Hill" (New Testament verse)
• The Liberty Bell: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10)
• 1777 Thanksgiving Proclamation

SCOTUS 

• Supeme Court  door and a problematic frieze

Trends in religion

Immigration:

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (JFK supported, LBJ saw it become law)

Immigration trends (Mo is a CMC alum)

War

• Religion, immigration, and the Manhattan Project
• Forbes story

Disability:

Interest Groups II: Community Organizing

 For next Monday: http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm

Also on Monday, bring your devices to complete the Student Experience Survey

Review: Ballot measures: Dialysis example and SEIU

Tocqueville (Lawrence/Mayer ed., pp. 513, 518):

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth of propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

...

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

Nonprofits in the United States

DIPLOMA DIVIDE AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION

The epigraph page

Yes, Hillary Rodham did write her senior thesis on Alinsky.  Here it is.

Alinsky and the Capone Gang

"Rules of Ethics" according to Alinsky:

• One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue (26). [Also see Madison: As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.]
• The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment (26)
• "The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 percent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 percent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust" (28)

TACTICS

• RULE 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
• RULE 2: Never go outside the experience of your people
• RULE 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy
• RULE 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
• RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
• RULE 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. (compare with p. 139-41)
• RULE 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
• RULE 8: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
• RULE 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
• RULE 10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
• RULE 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
• RULE 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
• RULE 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

TIME IN JAIL" (156-158)

Interest Groups I

Crosstabs of the NYT Poll

For Wednesday:

• Tocqueville 189-203, 513-524.
•  Alinsky chapter (on Canvas). Don't worry: it's easy reading.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DISCUSS NEXT WEEK?

In Federalist 10, Madison described the sources of faction

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions... But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. 

Just about every group has an organization -- even this one. 

DO NOT REDUCE INFLUENCE TO CAMPAIGN MONEY

ALSO FOREIGN INTERESTS

Means of Influence

The Inside Game

VIDEO ON INTEREST GROUPS AND THE LOBBYING INDUSTRY

FEDERAL LOBBYING DATA

• Includes only a fraction of total spending on efforts to influence government;
• Does not include state and local spending;
• Does not include campaign finance.

In-House and Contract Lobbyists  (a CMC example!)

Lobbying activities

• Talking to members and staff
• Testimony
• Writing

Court cases and amicus briefs

The outside game

• Advertising
• Public relations
• Grassroots and Grasstops
• Charity (in CA, "behesting")
• Funding think tanks

More dubious stuff: Hunter Biden and Memecoin

Ballot measures: Dialysis example and SEIU

Parties II

For next time, Lowi, ch. 12

Party in Government (PIG)

• Party Divisions in the House
• Party Divisions in the Senate
• State Government Control 

Party Organization (PO)

Campaign Finance 

Party Outside Groups (POG)

Super PAC

 Political realism: How hacks, machines,big money, and back-room deals can strengthen American democracyBy Jonathan Rauch

Plunkitt, Tweed, and Machines

Transparency v. Compromise

Super PACs as "Shadow Machines"

Machines and Community Organizing (a week from today)

Parties I

For Wednesday:

Jonathan Rauch, "Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy," Brookings, May 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/political-realism-rauch2.pdf      

PIE/PO/PIG/POG

"Great Parties"

Tocqueville (175): “What I call great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities... America has had great parties; now they no longer exist”

In a 1793 letter to Madison, Jefferson laid out the battle lines on France, but really describes the embryonic first party system:

The line is now drawing so clearly as to shew, on one side, 1. the fashionable circles of Phila., N. York, Boston and Charleston (natural aristocrats), 2. merchants trading on British capitals. 3. paper men, (all the old tories are found in some one of these three descriptions).

On the other side are 1. merchants trading on their own capitals. 2. Irish merchants, 3. tradesmen, mechanics, farmers and every other possible description of our citizens.

Party in the Electorate (PIE)

History

• A cinematic map of presidential voting
• 1896 and 2000

Historical party affiliation  (Party registration and

•  party affiliation or identification are not the same thing)  
• Independents and "leaners"
• Recent trends
• Party coalitions

RELIGION AND THE PARTY COALITIONS

GEOGRAPHY

Party in Government (PIG)

• Party Divisions in the House
• Party Divisions in the Senate
• State Government Control 

Party Organization (PO)

Party Outside Groups (POG)