Teaching American Government During Trump II

As longtime readers know, my academic background was in political science. The course I taught more often than any other is Intro to American Government. It’s a fun class to teach—most of the time.

But I really have to wonder about teaching it now.

Some parts of it still hold up: The Electoral College still exists, and Congress is still composed of the House and the Senate. But so many of the basic tenets we used to take as settled just aren’t anymore.

Remember checks and balances? There was a time when we assumed that no one branch of the federal government could dominate the other two to such an extent as to render precedent irrelevant. Yet, here we are. I’d have a hard time teaching checks and balances with a straight face now. The same goes for judicial review, stare decisis (the weight of precedent), judicial independence and even the idea of the rule of law. In my adult lifetime, they’ve gone from clichés to counterfactuals.

Before the last few years, the single greatest challenge of the class was usually unteaching much of what incoming students thought they knew. They had absorbed ideas from their parents, bosses and the culture at large, many of which were either false or misleading. (I can’t count the number of times when, upon hearing that each state gets two senators, a student would say, “One from each party, right?”)

That was a challenge. But at least then, most of the misunderstandings were either vaguely intuitive or the results of oversimplification. At worst, “negative campaigning” would blow minor issues out of proportion. Now there’s an entire industry devoted to simply making things up, and it has become so effective that basic fact-checking is taken as evidence of partisan bias. In the new politics, you don’t even have to bother with a kernel of truth anymore. Why distort reality when you can simply make your own?

And that’s before getting to AI and its efficacy at producing mediocre papers.

In this setting, it can be tempting to write off the entire enterprise. That seems to be happening; enrollments in the field aren’t looking great. I get it. But there’s an equally compelling argument to the effect that understanding what’s going on politically has never been more important. We’re at a point at which the president of the United States is using the military to intimidate cities that didn’t vote for him. That’s not checks and balances. It’s new, at least in this country, and young people will live with its fallout longer than anyone else. The argument for benign neglect was never strong, but it’s weaker now than it has ever been.

So, an honest question for my wise and worldly readers. Have you (or has someone you work with, or someone you know) found a way to help students engage thoughtfully with American politics without sliding into either partisan cheerleading or fatalism? Let me know at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll share the best/most interesting answers.