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In mid 2010, I engaged in a spontaneous conversation in passing with a man who told me that he was the manager of the diving facilities of the Rockford Country Club in Illinois. I was stunned to learn that that country club had only two black members out of what must have been at least a thousand, if not more. He told me there were not many “people of color in positions” in the city. I stood there stunned. In 2010, people still have that mentality? He said the city was twenty years behind.  I would say more something more like forty. Yet strangely, he noted that because families had changed, he had recently changed the dress code in one of the dining areas so kids from the pool could be accommodated. So, we are to believe that the situation of blacks hasn’t changed, but families have. To be sure, the family structure and dynamics had indeed changed in the last quarter of the twentieth century as women entered the workplace en masse and the number (and proportion) of diverces increased. However, it is unclear to me how these changes translate into making a dining area “informal."

The caucasion manager’s selective view of societal change—being no doubt convenient for him—struck me as strange. I got the impression that people in that city must be averse to (or scared of) virually any kind of change. How is it, I thought to myself as he spoke, that people could find so much satisfaction in the status quo? The manager told me that status and race were still important in that city. Relatedly, he characterized the city of 150,000 as a southern town interlarded in the north. His country club was the epitome of consciousness based on status and race.  Moreover, that club evinced what both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson called the artificial aristocrisy, which is comprised of wealth and birth.  This kind of elitism is distinct from the natural sort, which the two American founders took to be based on virtue and talent. Racism, and the segregation that ensues from it, is of the artificial sort.

Lest any kind of segregation be excoriated against, it should be noted that it can be quite natural for polite people to want to segregate themselves from the vulgar. There is indeed a marked difference in how people have been raised, and in how they conduct themselves.  This is not to say, however, that manners are on the side of the country club, for arrogance and elitism are quite rude qualities.  It seems to me that politeness can be reckoned as a virtue, and thus placed in the natural aristocrisy.  Perhaps education too, or at least valuing it, is also akin to virtue. The city in which the country club is located is at least historically heavily blue-collar.  Traditionally, the people holding such jobs felt threatened by education, and thus looked down on it.  Is it not natural that a highly educated person would rightfully want some distance from being disvalued?  There is, I submit, a natural aristocrasy that legitimates the natural grouping tendency of human beings.  We tend naturally to segregate ourselves. It is difficult to generalize against this propensity.  A mother of young kids is apt to segregate her family from a known child molester (one of the Catholic churches in the city had one as a priest). Ex-smokers are apt to segregate themselves from people who impose with their addition.  Furthermore, people with common interests are apt to associate. An apologist for the country club might say that it is composed of members who have common interests and generally get along. In this respect, it seems quite natural. However, it is not clear to me that these qualities cannot pertain to people of different races. Such artificial delimiters are perhaps why artificial aristocrisy is so squalid; there is also a rather significant opportunity cost to it. Sadly, the manager seemed utterly unaware that he subscribed to it at all, yet fully sure of himself nonetheless.

A venture more useful than bashing presumption at a country club involves coming up with a criterion on which “good” from “bad” segregation can be determined. Generally speaking, segregating a virtue from its associated vices is justifiable. Immediately a problem can be detected. Namely, although there are a cluster of virtues on which most people would agree, there is no fixed number. Furthermore, people such as the dining manager at that country club can use a virtue (e.g., gaining a vocational position through talent and effort) to attempt to justify what is really just garden variety racism and elitism.  In short, segregation of virtue from vice, while in itself laudable, can involve a slippery slope that can essentially whitewash segregation that could be considered as a vice.  Can we trust in nature, such that the natural associative instinct can be distinguished from the squalid instances of segregation?  Furthermore, are there certain virtues that can be deemed as legitimate sources of segregation—such virtues being agreed to explicitly or tacitly in a social contract?  In modern society, segregation by race is explicitly excoriated against, though I’m not sure if it is implicitly agreed to by all. There might be a natural instinct to associate with similar people. Just as people include physical appearance in determining whom to date, external features could be part of the mix in how humans are hardwired to associate. Likeness might be associated in evolution with survival as like is not apt to fight with like.  However, external features are an imperfect indicator of whom a person is apt to get along with—though not irrelevant.  So modern man may well have to sometimes choose to override instinct in the knowledge that going by virtue can have more survival value.  Similar values can trump similar skin-color, even if the clubby vestiges of racism make it more difficult to trust across the artificial lines even in the twenty-first century.

In the art of politics and government in a republic, there are necessarily periods of electoral contest.  Yet as decision-points, they are not meant to be of a considerable duration, particularly relative to that of governing.  The reason is that the function of elected representatives is to govern. When the interstices because the duration, and the duration becomes the interstices, one can expect popular fatigue from incessant fighting and frustration from a lack of attention on governing. Electoral campaigns are a means to a further means, that of governing, which is in turn a means toward whichever goals government is established to achieve for a society. It may be that the American citizenry is too prone to relish the fights of a campaign while evading the civic responsibility of keeping informed on the governing. One can see in political discussions on television that policy alternatives tend to give way rather quickly to sideline "issues" that are more tantalizing but less on point.  For example, during the health-insurance debates in 2010, the question of whether there should be a government alternative to private health insurance companies quickly gave rise to "discussions" on death-panels and whether Barak Obama is a socialist. For whatever reason, it is difficult for us to stay on point where governing is concerned; our attention is too easily swayed by campaign-like fights.

So I was not surprised to read on roughly the two-year half-way point of President Obama's first term that he would shortly close the office of political affairs at the White House in order to prepare for his re-election campaign, which was shortly to start building a fund-raising and grass-roots operation based in Chicago. Lest one be led to believe that this move is geared to giving governing some room from the pressure of campaign politics, the move coincided with the arrival of David Plouffe, who managed the president’s 2008 campaign, in the West Wing as a senior adviser. Coincidentally, the President was planning to begin engaging in day-to-day campaign activity, including fundraisers, in late spring--just a few months into the second half of his term of office.  In other words, out of a four year term, half of it--two years--is in campaign mode. This does not go along with the idea of a campaign "season."  Moreover, it treats the selection-process as more of an on-going activity rather than a decision-making point in time. I don't see much real change in the president's approach to politics and governing; in fact, it seems to me that he is merely perpetuating the encroachment of the campaign "season" onto the duration that is meant for governing, or doing the people's business. Perhaps this is akin to the Christmas advertising season.  First it overtook Thanksgiving, then it overshot Halloween. Now Christmas displays are up in some stores in September. Consumers enable the merchant's behavior by taking the bait.  Likewise, I believe we have been unwittingly enabling our representatives to draw us into their campaign fights because we can't seem to resist the excitement of it. Ignoring the early campaigning and telling our representatives to focus more on governing is comparatively bland.

A crucial difference between representative and direct democracy is that in the former governance is delegated to representatives. In other words, the citizenry is not obliged to remain engaged once governance again takes over after an election. Yet this does not mean that the citizenry must take the bait when some representatives are tempted to divert from governance by starting the next election cycle too early. Campaigning early might be in their particular self-interest, but is it in ours? Perhaps the underlying question is whether a representative democracy necessarily sinks to the lowest common denominator, or whether a citizenry has the requisite impulse control to maintain the viability of the political system by calling its representatives to account--holding them to the fire, as it were, to govern between elections. It is essentially a matter of what the citizenry values: the duration wherein representatives govern or the titilating excitement of a childish fight at the expense of governing. The funny thing about a republic is that what we observe in our representatives can be a reflection of ourselves.  We blame them exclusively at our own folly.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/us/politics/21obama.html?_r=1&hp