by Donna Waller, President, League of Women Voters of Alachua County
Last month, because of an error on the part of The Iguana, the issue of whether the LWV is partisan surfaced yet again. Even after the mistake was owned and corrected, the LWV membership kept me thinking about the issue. Here’s how I addressed the issue in our monthly newsletter.
Early in my teaching career at Santa Fe College, one of my favorite colleagues was a historian named James Gregg. He was a wonderful teacher and researcher. He lived in a house that was like a museum of antique guns. He was from Illinois, and he was a Republican. He was what I now think of as a Lincoln/Eisenhower Republican. We often debated individual policies and political philosophy. We disagreed about the size and scope of government, economic policy, and the NRA, but not about equal rights and environmentalism.
Foreign policy issues were a mixed bag. We both hated corruption. But here’s the thing … we could talk about it because there was one huge area of agreement: the norms of what political science textbooks call “American Political Culture.” Our political ideas, values, and practices have defined what it means to be an American for 250 years. Our consensus on those basic norms is what allowed Jim and myself to engage in a productive and entertaining political dialogue without ever seeing each other as the enemy, despite partisan differences.
What are some of these norms? Both of us, like the founders of our country, believed that the government exists to serve the people, and not the other way around. We both thought that most things should be done by majority rule, but that the rights of minorities must be protected. That was the job of the court system.
We understood the foundational values to be both liberty and equality, and that how to balance those in the real world was what American history was all about. We both loved the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both of us believed in federalism and keeping as much local autonomy as possible. Most of all, what we agreed upon was the importance of citizenship and participation. We both wished more people voted. We wished more people would educate themselves about the system. We wished people made wiser electoral choices. We wished more people understood what it meant to be a Democrat or a Republican historically and ideologically.
I do not believe that either of us ever thought that this consensus that representative republican government was good for the country would ever erode. But it has. The regime in Washington calls into question the results of elections and ignores the will of the majority in many other ways as well. It openly defies time honored constitutional principles. It violates both the civil rights and civil liberties of American citizens whenever it feels like it. It discourages citizenship and participation in every way possible from breeding distrust in our fundamental institutions to mounting attacks on voting rights.
The state of Florida has followed that lead, while adding dismantling the public educational system and attacking home rule and local government autonomy to the agenda.
Of course, the League opposes all of this at all three levels of our organization. Does that make us partisan?
The people engaging in these acts would have you think so, but that is simply not the case. You may have noticed on the Vote411 site that many candidates do not respond to our questions, and that is deliberate. It is designed to make it appear that the LWV favors one party over another. Here’s a hopeful note. Many of our chapters in Florida have Republican members. In those areas, this year, a far higher percentage of local Republican candidates did participate in the Vote411 site than in previous years (about 40 percent). I hope it’s the beginning of a trend. James Gregg would have understood the difference between defending the fundamental principles of the American system and partisanship. As League members, it’s our job to help the citizenry understand that, too.
Our general election forum will take place at the Graham Center (Pugh Hall) on the UF Campus on Sunday, Sept. 27 at 1:30pm. We hope you will join us in person or in the live stream on the Graham Center website. The forum will also be available for viewing on Vote411.org.