I teach a weekly Current Events class at Literacy for Life. I started teaching this class in 2018, I think, continued teaching it in 2020-2021 through Zoom for 18 months, and have been teaching it in person again since the fall. The class meets in the Education Building at the College of William and Mary, and the program follows William and Mary COVID protocols. These protocols require every who comes on campus to be vaccinated and boosted and also require everyone to wear masks in “congregate settings” — which means classrooms.
My “job” (is it a job if it’s a volunteer position?) is to talk about what’s going on in the news and explain things to people who didn’t grow up in the United States. In 2018, I often had as many as 20 learners in my class, from a dozen countries around the world. They didn’t know much about the United States Constitution, Federalism, or Separation of Powers. I was always madly drawing diagrams on the whiteboard — the three branches of government, the division of powers between the states and the federal government, the organization of Virginia State Government — and using those diagrams to explain what was going on.
This is not very different from what I did when I taught High School Government. The difference is that the things that were going on in the country back then fit reasonably well within the frameworks I used to help my students understand them. It’s been a challenge to teach current events through the Trump administration, the 2020 election, and the first year of the Biden Administration. Nothing is working the way it was intended — or even the way it worked, albeit it a little creakily, up until about 15 years ago. The election of President Obama broke American politics — up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle at least maintained the pretense of governing the country. Once Mitch McConnell proclaimed that his primary purpose was to make President Obama a one-term President, things stopped working in any way that made sense. Birtherism further de-legitimized not only the President but the Presidency. Congressional scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann wrote about this in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. You should read this book.
Then Donald Trump was elected, and it’s all been nuts.
A couple of years ago, when the country was entering yet another of the we’re-going-to-shut-down-the-government budgeting crises, one of my students asked “how long is the President allowed to shut down the government?” She expected that this activity was governed by some set of rules that she just didn’t understand. When I told her there was no such set of rules, my learners all seemed perplexed. If it didn’t fall under some set of rules, why was it happening? Off and on over the past several years, my answers to their questions have often fallen into the *waves hands in the air* category. I tell them repeatedly that this kind of dysfunction is unprecedented, that our system is not set up to deal with it, and that I have no idea how things are going to work out.
Since we have moved back to in-person sessions, my numbers have been way down. For a variety of reasons, the immigrant clientele the program serves are not vaccinated in high enough numbers to populate the classes the way they used to. Last Monday I reached double digits for the first time since we started back in person, so I’m hopeful that things will continue to move in the right direction.
I don’t have as much hope for the country whose politics I’m trying to explain.
Unfortunately, a better model for understanding what is happening right now might be that of the emergence of authoritarian states, particularly fascist states. The relevant point about our "system" (or any democratic political arrangement) is its fragility, and we are experiencing that now. Democracy is protected not by any system of rules but by the commitment of the people to its values. At the moment there is a substantial minority of US people who do not share those values.
Toter explosion! I couldn't agree more. Been thinking a lot about Abraham Lincoln over the last few days. Don't fret; you're a great teacher during calm/logical times (?) and during crazy times.