Hoover Book Club Interview: Equality of Opportunity (45 min.) June 26, 2023
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Hoover Book Club: Equality of Opportunity, A Century of Debate, June 22, 10 AM June 20, 2023
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In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism and David Davenport, research fellow emeritus, and co-author of the recently released Hoover Institution Press book Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate on Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET.
Thursday, June 22, 2023, 10:00 AM PT Hoover Institution, Stanford University interview with David Davenport
Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.
In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism and David Davenport, research fellow emeritus, and co-author of the recently released Hoover Institution Press book Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate on Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET.
WATCH HERE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Davenport is a research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution specializing in constitutional federalism, civic education, modern American conservatism, and international law. Davenport is the former president of Pepperdine University (1985–2000). Under his leadership, the university experienced significant growth in quality and reputation. He is the cofounder of Common Sense California and the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership. He also served on the board of California Forward, a major bipartisan reform group, and was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Performance Review Commission. He is a former senior fellow of the Ashbrook Center, where he worked on civic education projects. With his colleague Gordon Lloyd, Davenport has authored How Public Policy Became War (2019), Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive? (2017), The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry (2013); a fourth book, Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate, is forthcoming in 2023. These books offer distinctive ways of understanding both historic and current debates between progressives and conservatives in the United States. Davenport is also completing a coauthored book on the civic education crisis.
ABOUT THE BOOK
For over one hundred years, Americans have debated what equality of opportunity means and the role of government in ensuring it. Are we born with equality of opportunity, and must we thus preserve our innate legal and political freedoms? Or must it be created through laws and policies that smooth out social or economic inequalities? David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd trace the debate as it has evolved from America’s founding into the twentieth century, when the question took on greater prominence. The authors use original sources and historical reinterpretations to revisit three great debates and their implications for the discussions today. First, they imagine the Founders, especially James Madison, arguing the case against the Progressives, particularly Woodrow Wilson. Next are two conspicuous public dialogues: Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s debate around the latter’s New Deal; and Ronald Reagan’s response to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty. The conservative-progressive divide in this discussion has persisted, setting the stage for understanding the differing views about equality of opportunity today. The historical debates offer illuminating background for the question: Where do we go from here?
Whatever Happened To Equality Of Opportunity? (Defining Ideas) June 19, 2023
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Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from a new book, Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate, by David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd, just released by the Hoover Institution Press.
Americans have consistently said they believe in the principle of equality of opportunity. As the authors of a Brookings Institution study on the subject concluded: “Americans believe in opportunity. . . . They are far more interested in equal opportunity than in equal results.” These days, however, that notion is under constant challenge and even attack. Indeed, there are suggestions that it be scrapped and replaced with newer ideas such as equity or equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is also challenged on the policy front, with proposed new economic and social plans that would move America down a very different path.
Opportunity vs. Outcome
The argument today seems to be that if equality of opportunity was once the goal, it is no longer enough. In the 2020 presidential campaign, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris called for this kind of change, saying in a campaign video about equality that “we should all end up at the same place.” She argued that if two people had the same opportunity, but began from different starting points, the results would not be equal. Equality of outcomes has experienced a renewal of interest during the social justice movements of the 2020s. For example, Kent State professor of African-American history Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor has written that equality of opportunity may have worked for whites but is a myth for blacks, calling for “equality of results” as “a more concrete response to our current yet long-standing crisis.”
There is also a lively argument about the extent to which different outcomes are necessarily unfair or created by unfairness. Economists have pointed out, for example, that much of the gap in earnings between white and black workers is explained by variables such as education, test scores and work experience. If, as labor economist Harry Holzer suggested, “differences in educational attainment and test scores together may account for most of the racial differences in earnings,” that would suggest a different policy approach from trying to equalize bottom-line incomes.
Then there are questions of fairness in a system of equality of outcomes. Equality of outcomes requires that individuals and groups of people be treated unequally, giving more to some and less to others, taking from some to give to others. Does government really belong in the business of taking money from someone who devoted his or her life to developing a particular talent or career and giving it to someone who did not make such a commitment?
Is pursuing equality of outcomes consistent with the American understanding of liberty as well as equality? Is America ready to trade in being “the land of opportunity,” still sought after by millions of immigrants, in order to pursue only equality? Should government be in the business of equalizing people’s economic or social status and could it even accomplish that if it sought to do so?
What Is “Equity”?
A more current debate, but one that follows similar lines of argument, concerns equity. Equity seems to be the new code word to describe the pursuit of a more just society and the new replacement for equality of opportunity as a goal. We need “equity” for people of color, for women, for transgender individuals, and others—these are the claims of the day. Some say we need it because equality of opportunity is no longer sufficient. Others say we need both equality and equity.
The increasing and current use of the term equity is puzzling because it is not clear what it means or how it may be different, if it is, from equality. The term has a history of use in finances to denote the building of capital. The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is simply “justice according to natural law or right.” Scholar Shelby Steele, reviewing its previous meaning, says the current use of the term “has no meaning.” Perhaps it derives from a sense that a new term is needed for marketing purposes, or because the term equality hasn’t really accomplished all it should.
What Government Can and Can’t Do
At the same time we ask these fresh questions, we continue to face the question debated by the founders and Progressives about the proper role of government in equality. Conservatives argue that America is fundamentally built on individual liberty and that the proper role of government is to protect that. Liberals, on the other hand, argue that individual freedom has led to too much inequality, especially inequality of income and wealth, and that only the government has the power to step in and correct these inequalities. In some ways, the history of the past century has been one of increasing the government’s role in favor of greater equality, with only occasional returns to the primacy of individual liberty promoted by the founders.
A series of initiatives has empowered the government to bring about greater equality for groups of people: senior citizens, those living in poverty, the disabled, those who cannot afford health care, and so on. It began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the development of Social Security to afford special protections for the elderly. But Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s greatly accelerated government intervention by providing equalizing assistance to groups of people seen as needing that boost. The Great Society premise was LBJ’s view that, as he stated in his 1965 Howard University commencement address, it wasn’t enough to open the gates of opportunity, but you had to have a real chance to walk through them. This would require extra government assistance if you had been held down by poverty or racism, and his Great Society implemented many such programs, especially its War on Poverty and related job and education efforts. Critics questioned whether government should be discriminating in favor of certain groups, as well as whether government could actually accomplish any meaningful leveling of the playing field in this way.
The president who tacked back in the direction of the founders’ understanding of equality of opportunity was Ronald Reagan. His view was that government not only should not, but it could not effectively, create equality of opportunity. He famously said that the government had declared war on poverty but that poverty had won. Government was not, he said, the solution to the problem; “government is the problem.” Reagan’s understanding of what he called “the opportunity society” was to shrink government and its taxation so that it got out of the way of people’s individual freedom and choices, including the freedom to pursue their own opportunities. In particular, Reagan objected to government planners who ran programs trying to direct the choices and opportunities that individuals might make.
By and large, however, the policy debate since the time of Franklin Roosevelt has not been whether but how much government can and should help those needing special assistance. The welfare state has continued to grow. In the twenty-first century, however, the terms of the debate have shifted quite dramatically. With proposals that government must tackle income inequality, or even wealth inequality, the pendulum is shifting away from equality of opportunity to something else.
Piketty and the Demand for Redistribution
French economist Thomas Piketty is the harbinger of an even more sweeping view of equality in the twenty-first century. The new conception of equality concerns itself primarily with income and wealth, arguing that until those are addressed, there is no real equality in our society.
Piketty presents extensive data showing a dramatic rise in global wealth since the 1980s, due especially to inherited wealth and investment gains, unrelated to work or effort, which he calls “patrimonial capitalism.” Piketty argues that government’s normal fiscal and social tools would not be enough to address this new, sweeping inequality. Instead, he argues, there needs to be “a progressive global tax on capital,” not so much to “finance the social state but to regulate capitalism.” Piketty’s most recent book, A Brief History of Equality (2022), argues that the whole idea of human progress is to move toward greater equality.
Piketty seeks something well beyond equality of opportunity: he is pursuing nothing less than a complete reordering of the economic system. He is as much concerned with taking power and money from the wealthy as he is with creating greater opportunity for the poor, if not more. The levers he would push are power, justice, capitalism, and wealth, not mere opportunity. And there are signs that some progressive politicians are paying attention. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, has advocated a special tax “on the extreme wealth of the top 0.1 percent.” President Joe Biden has jumped on this bandwagon, proposing his own new tax on billionaires (based not just on income but also on wealth). These moves are short of Piketty’s call for an economic revolution, but they advance his core thinking about power, wealth, capitalism, and inequality.
Can Equality of Opportunity Be Saved?
One end of the spectrum is traditional equality of opportunity as envisioned and embraced by the founders. In this view, men and women are created equal and therefore have equal rights, especially political and legal rights. From that starting point, people are free to make their own choices on how, as the Declaration of Independence put it, to pursue happiness. Guaranteeing individual rights, so that people are free to choose, is the primary role of government in this traditional view of equality of opportunity. Paring back the role of government regulation in people’s lives, reducing taxes, and promoting individual freedom was President Reagan’s path back toward this more traditional view and many conservatives still advocate this today.
But liberals argue that the government must engage in programs to increase equality of opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged, and also for ethnic groups that have been left behind in society. Johnson’s Great Society sought to move the federal government strongly in this direction, but history suggests that it is very difficult for government to move the needles on opportunity and equality. Government keeps adding to the social safety net and building out the welfare state in the hope of creating greater equality. Do we need to add universal health care to the social and economic agenda? Should we pay off everyone’s college debt? Conservatives argue that this is not the proper role of government and such programs do not work, but the debate and policy implementation continue.
Now, several movements on the left have created a new end of the progressive spectrum; perhaps we could call it a super-progressive stance on equality or “the new, new left.”
Immigrants Keep the Dream Alive
Does America continue to be a land of opportunity? Interestingly, the strongest answer comes from immigrants, who overwhelming state that this American characteristic is why they have come to the United States. Two economists, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, recently pulled together what they call “the first truly big set of data about immigration” from census records, presenting them in their new book: Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. They found that second-generation immigrants, especially, found strong job and economic opportunities in the United States and, in fact, outperformed native-born Americans. As coauthor Abramitzky told the New York Times, “The American dream is just as alive now as it was a century ago.”
The huge demand from immigrants to come to America and find greater opportunity is strong evidence that opportunity still works and remains a key to the American dream. More evidence is offered by economic mobility. While studies have shown growth in economic inequality, other studies have shown that economic mobility—the ability to move from one quadrant of income to another—is still alive in America. Perhaps the most important factor in developing opportunity, and one that finds broad support in the middle ground, is education. This is where both liberals and conservatives agree and could work together effectively.
Progressing Toward Greater Equality
Equality of opportunity, rightly understood, is not really a set of government programs or policy prescriptions. Since we understand that complete equality is not possible, the proper understanding of equality of opportunity is as a point of departure and an aspiration, both a starting point and a goal toward which the society is always working. The key question, then, is not whether equality of opportunity is outdated as a goal but whether we are continuing to make progress toward it. Measuring and discussing progress is the key, not changing the finish line. This is especially so since, as it has been since the founding, the goal of equality in American terms must also be balanced with individual liberty.
There are reasons to be optimistic about the future of equality of opportunity. For one thing, the American people believe it describes the American dream—and describes it better than equality of outcome or other goals. For another, immigrants by the millions keep coming to America in search of opportunity; they see something here that perhaps long-settled Americans have lost. Then, too, young people keep looking for new frontiers and opportunities, finding new jobs, new careers, other parts of the country that support their dreams. There is cause for philosophical optimism in that some are deeply committed to equality, others to liberty and opportunity, but the combination—equality of opportunity—is still a middle ground upon which they can gather.
We should acknowledge, however, that there are also reasons for pessimism about the future of equality of opportunity. In this day of hyperpartisanship, those on the left could dig in ever deeper on equity, while those on the right advocate liberty and opportunity. Compromise has become a dirty word.
Whatever happened to equality of opportunity? It is alive and well, but it needs to be appreciated for what it is—a point of departure and an aspiration—not for what it is not, a set of policies or government programs. Government can and will contribute to the pursuit of the goal, but not to the exclusion of efforts by individuals, nonprofits, and the larger society.
To view the essay at Defining Ideas:
https://www.hoover.org/research/whatever-happened-equality-opportunity
What The Presidential Candidates Tell Us About Equality In America (The Messenger) June 9, 2023
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As the 2024 presidential election shapes up, one important issue — equality of opportunity — sounds very much like the 1932 campaign between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. In the throes of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover maintained that the American system of individualism coupled with equality of opportunity was not broken and need not be replaced. Franklin Roosevelt, advocating a much more aggressive role for the federal government in economic regulation and security, argued that “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.”
Fueled by social justice movements of the decade, the 2024 presidential campaign now revisits key questions about the doctrine of equality of opportunity. Is it still what Americans believe in? Is it enough? What does it mean? How do we advance it? What is the role of government in providing for it?
Here the candidates are still as far apart as Hoover and Roosevelt 90 years ago.
On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden has been busy expanding legal rights to greater equality, especially in transgender and racial protections. As he said in a recent statement on the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia: “Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and equality — no matter whom they love, or how they identify.” Biden has signed executive orders and promoted legislation to expand legal equality.
Vice President Kamala Harris would apparently go further. In the 2020 presidential campaign, she seemed to favor a shift from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes, an important debate at least since the 1960s. In a campaign video on equality, Harris said “we [should] all end up at the same place,” pointing out that not all people begin from the same starting point in the race toward equal opportunity. Harris joins a growing chorus saying that the traditional American value of equality of opportunity is not enough. How government would do this is not entirely clear.
On the Republican side, candidates such as former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have called moves to expand equality — especially in transgender rights and protections — part of a “woke” agenda to be opposed. If reelected, Trump has said he would cut off funding for transgender rights and has referred to a Biden executive order on racial equity as a “Marxist concept of equity.” DeSantis is very much out front in opposing many new equality measures, with his “Don’t Say Gay” legislation in Florida and signing a new law blocking use of pronouns, gendered facilities and so forth in schools.
These Republicans see efforts to expand legal equality as a threat to traditional American values and actively oppose them. Other Republicans — such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — are less strident but appear to favor a similar approach.
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), preaches a more positive message about equality of opportunity, saying in his campaign announcement: “I choose freedom, hope, opportunity.” He has actively pursued the development and support of “opportunity zones” in distressed areas. He is FOR equality of opportunity — but wants to see government more active in giving a helping hand. Scott echoes Ronald Reagan’s call for an “opportunity society,” which for Reagan meant less federal taxes and regulation and more individual freedom.
Americans have long favored equality of opportunity over outcomes. But, with growing income inequality and unrest over social injustice, there is greater pressure in favor of bolder approaches, whether equality of outcomes or the vague notion of equity. By now, most agree that providing legal equality, through civil rights legislation, is appropriate. And there has long been bipartisan support for education as a government-sponsored program to create greater equality.
But after that, there is little agreement. In particular, is it the role of government to create greater equality? If so, is it appropriate to use economic tools such as higher taxes on the wealthy or perhaps a guaranteed minimum income for those in need, an experiment being carried out in several cities across the country?
When the French journalist Alexis De Tocqueville toured America in the 19th Century, he observed that America was a land of liberty but added, “what [Americans] love with a love that is eternal is equality.” We ask again, as we did in the election of 1932, what does that mean today? Perhaps the candidates and voters in 2024 will tell us.
David Davenport is a research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution and the coauthor of a new book with Gordon Lloyd: “Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate.”
To view the article at The Messenger:
https://themessenger.com/opinion/what-the-presidential-candidates-tell-us-about-equality-in-america
New Davenport-Lloyd Book May 31, 2023
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PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact: Jeffrey Marschner 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu
June 1, 2023
Hoover Institution Press Publishes Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate by David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd
Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – The Hoover Institution has published Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate by David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd, a work that examines – from America’s founding to today – the discourse over the definition of equality of opportunity and the government’s role in ensuring it.
Davenport and Lloyd use original sources and historical reinterpretations to revisit three great debates and their implications for discussions today.
Davenport and Lloyd first revisit the Founding era of the American nation, when equality of opportunity was understood as a question of securing rights through limited government. They then travel to the early 1900s, when Progressives argued that the limited role of government advocated by the Founders had left in place vast inequalities in living conditions. The authors continue by examining how this divide played out during the era of Roosevelt’s New Deal and, later in the century, with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Ronald Reagan’s rebuttal to it.
According to the authors, equality of opportunity is a long-held American ideal, but this is not a term the Founders used. They felt that equality, broadly speaking, was a natural right that the government should defend and protect. It was not until the twentieth century—with the closing of the frontier and all the social mobility it portended—that equality of opportunity was considered anew, as something that had been lost.
To others, it is more a question of economic and social circumstances and the limits those may place on one’s ability to make life choices. Soon this debate turns to the role of government: setting forth and defending individual rights and the freedom to choose; or creating a more level playing field, with education and policies designed to achieve economic and social equality.
Davenport and Lloyd imagine James Madison, the father of the Constitution, arguing the case against Woodrow Wilson, one of our first progressive presidents. This framework effectively sets the stage for understanding the differing views about equality of opportunity today.
Acclaim for Equality of Opportunity
“The dichotomy between liberty and equality has remained the question most relevant in the American experiment. Dr. Davenport and Dr. Lloyd give us the best chronological examination of the question.”
—J. R. Carman, founder, New Jersey Constitutional Republicans
“[Davenport and Lloyd’s] unique ability to use language as a lens through which to understand American history and current events makes this a fascinating book on many levels.”
—Pete Peterson, Braun Family Dean’s Chair, Pepperdine School of Public Policy
“A must-read for students of all ages who want to understand the ‘equality of opportunity’ versus ‘equality of results’ debate today.”
—Cathy Gillespie, CEO, Constituting America
About the Authors
David Davenport is a research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution, senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center, and former president and professor of public policy and law at Pepperdine University.
Gordon Lloyd was the Dockson Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center, and the creator of Americanfounding.org.
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
One More Davenport-Lloyd Go Back To Come Back (for future blogs please sign up) March 13, 2023
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Here is the most recent entry from our new blog, Go Back To Come Back. These will no longer be provided here so if you are interested please sign up to receive emails from https://goback2comeback.com.
Go Back 2 Come Back: The Homelessness “Emergency.”
One thing political leaders are good at is declaring wars and emergencies. Starting with Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, presidents have declared war on several domestic policy challenges including crime, drugs and terror, to name a few. Notably, none of the wars has been won and all continue in some form or another.
The close cousin of the policy war is the declaration of an emergency. More than 75 national emergencies are on the books, including at least one dating back to the Jimmy Carter administration in the 1970s. Emergencies may come and go but emergency declarations remain.
The latest trend is declarations of emergency over the problem of homelessness in America’s cities. San Diego County declared such an emergency last fall, with Los Angeles County following suit. The new mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, made such an emergency declaration her first official act as did the new governor of Oregon recently.
What does emergency government accomplish? Primarily these emergencies draw attention and resources to a problem. But they also allow the government to ignore checks and balances as well as deliberation in order to move more quickly. As Oregon Governor Tina Kotek put it, “It’s about changing how we do business.” In the end, it’s part of the larger movement for government to “do something” about a problem, even when we are not quite sure what to do.
We would “go back” to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal to find the origin of emergency action for domestic policies. When he came to office during the Great Depression, he started with a national emergency banking regulation and proceeded to grow executive power, saying the American people wanted “action and action now.” Admitting he wasn’t sure exactly what to do, he called for “bold, persistent experimentation.” He signed more executive orders than any president and formed new agencies that he could control. His New Deal policies could have been described by Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when he said you never let a good crisis go to waste, it’s an opportunity to do things you could not ordinarily do. Of course, none of this growth in executive power was rolled back and, instead, FDR created the large federal bureaucracy that persists today.
We could also go back to Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. He wanted to do something about poverty but relatively little was known at the time about poverty policy, so he declared a war on it, increasing federal spending and regulations. As Ronald Reagan later put it, we declared war on poverty but poverty won.
So now, not knowing exactly what to do about homelessness, the new approach is to declare it an emergency. This way, mayors and governors can spend more money while ignoring normal checks and balances and deliberation. Unfortunately, homelessness, like poverty, is a complex problem and no one is certain how to tackle it. It is a complicated mix of housing costs, unemployment, poverty, crime, drugs, and mental health to name a few. Declaring an emergency implies that we know what to do and it’s time to get on with doing it. But we don’t really know what works best. It is a time for experimentation and deliberation, not wars and emergencies.
As economist Lee Ohanian has pointed out, creating centralized housing policies, rather than allowing local markets and governments to work, has not been successful. We predict that years from now, we will still have homelessness amid a plethora of homeless emergencies, government spending and the suspension of study, debate, and deliberation. That’s been the unfortunate pattern of government by war and emergency.
David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd
New Davenport-Lloyd Blog: Go Back to Come Back March 2, 2023
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Gordon Lloyd and I have started a new blog, Go Back to Come Back. We feel that some of our best work is going back into history to locate useful principles and practices to better understand today’s policy challenges. We plan to write blogs a couple times a month, starting with our first entry: Go Back to Come Back on Equality of Opportunity.
The website is still being improved but it’s up and running if you’d like to visit and/or sign up to receive email updates when new blog entries are posted. Please visit us at: goback2comeback.com.
Meanwhile, here is our first entry:
Welcome to our new blog, “Go Back to Come Back.” We are scholars who have worked and written together now for 20 years. We have co-authored 4 books, numerous book chapters and essays, and too many newspaper columns to count. What we have learned, and are eager to share with you, is the value of going back into history to learn about the origins and development of policy questions in the air today, then come back to apply what history teaches us to our current problems and questions.
For example, we have recently completed a book manuscript on equality of opportunity, something that has been front and center in the many social justice debates of the 2020s. Where did equality of opportunity come from, is it still an adequate goal today, or does it need to be replaced by something else such as equity or equality of results?
We begin, as we usually do, with the Founding period and, in this case, the Declaration of Independence which famously stated that “all men (people) are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Founders believed equality was a natural right that every American possessed and the role of limited government was to protect that right.
But a century later, the Progressives came along and said that was no longer sufficient, if it ever was. With the closing of the American frontier in 1890, people could no longer move West and find free land. With industrialization, there were larger economic forces at work and people were moving to the cities. It was high time, Progressives argued, that government play a larger role in regulating the economy and making certain people really did have equality of opportunity. In short, the Founders thought equality was something people moved from and Progressives thought it was something government moved toward.
All this came to a head in 1932 when President Herbert Hoover ran for reelection touting his “rugged individualism” coupled with “equality of opportunity” and his opponent, Franklin Roosevelt arguing that “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” In the throes of the Great Depression, people voted for Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal promises that government would protect “the forgotten man.” Roosevelt greatly expanded the regulation of big business and the economy, and instituted Social Security to help protect people’s equality of opportunity.
In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson thought even Roosevelt’s approach did not go far enough. He said that it wasn’t enough to get people to the starting line of the race for opportunity, but some people needed help being able to compete. Johnson’s “Great Society” instituted a War on Poverty as well as major new federal investments in education, job training, and civil rights. He sought to assure not only legal equality but some measure of economic and social equality as well. Some even argued that Johnson moved the goal line away from opportunity to equal outcomes.
Not until the 1980s did a president, Ronald Reagan, tack back in the direction of less government and more freedom of individual opportunity. He cut taxes and government programs, arguing that leaving money in people’s pockets and the freedom to use it as they wish was how you really created what he called “an opportunity society.”
This is the very debate we are having today. The American principle has long been equality of opportunity, not results, but is that still sufficient with so much inequality? Does government need to do more or less? Should government be in the business of equalizing wealth or income, as some have suggested? Or is there room for both individual freedom and government action in the equality arena?
Fred Hoyle pointed out, things are the way they are because they were the way they were. Understanding equality from the Founders through three consequential presidencies should help you better understand the equality debates today. We have our own view—which tends toward limited government emphasizing legal equality and a hand up, especially through education—but, having gone back into history, you can come back and reach your own conclusions.
David Davenport & Gordon Lloyd
Isn’t This Stuff Taught In School? (Stanford Magazine) March 8, 2022
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Isn’t This Stuff Taught in School?
By Rebecca Beyer
WHEN IT COMES TO K-12 civic education in the United States, by almost any measure, the system is failing. A 2018 Education Week survey found that only eight states require a yearlong civics course in high school—and 15 states don’t require one at all.
It’s not because students are gaining that knowledge earlier. On the most recent national assessment, only 24 percent of eighth graders were proficient in the subject. One obvious problem: Half of the students tested hadn’t taken a civics-focused class.
Civics is the study of how our government was formed, how it functions, and what roles individuals play in that process—and currently, its teaching is a hodgepodge. With federal legislation that would authorize billions in grants for civics education stalled, nonprofit organizations and academic researchers are trying to fill the gap. And their efforts are gaining traction.
“On my good days, I’m very optimistic,” says Louise Dubé, executive director of iCivics, a nonprofit civic education provider founded in 2009 by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52. “This is a unifying idea for all Americans to get behind.”
David Davenport, ’72, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, agrees. In 2020, Davenport authored a report for the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation called “Commonsense Solutions to Our Civics Crisis.” In addition to more funding, testing and teacher training, Davenport recommends the so-called layer cake approach to civics, which begins introducing children to age-appropriate ideas in elementary school. “If you wait for a single, one-semester course in high school, kids don’t have any context,” Davenport says. “They’ll show up at class with nothing.”
One resource for middle and high school teachers is iCivics, which aims to cultivate an appreciation for civic engagement among young people. The organization provides hundreds of free curricular resources—including 14 nonpartisan educational video games, such as Argument Wars (in which players argue real Supreme Court cases), Counties Work (which asks players to manage a county and get reelected) and Do I Have a Right? (which tests players’ knowledge of the Constitution). According to assessments that iCivics embedded in two of its election-related games in 2021, students’ knowledge of civic content improved by 26 percent after playing the games. Perhaps as notable: There was a 38 percent jump in student interest in learning about topics like the Electoral College or participating in voting.
Anyone can access iCivics content on their own at any time—and more than 145,000 teachers and 9 million students in all 50 states do each year. But iCivics has also worked through the Educating for American Democracy initiative to design a roadmap for effective civics education, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. “The American democratic system is not an intuitive system—it needs to be taught,” Dubé says. “Our goal is to rebuild a healthy American democracy and to reimagine civic education to do that.”
For Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Sam Wineburg, PhD ’89, that work begins where American democracy has faced the greatest challenge in recent years: the internet.
In 2014, the Stanford History Education Group that Wineburg leads started the Civic Online Reasoning (COR) program, which provides free lessons designed to help students evaluate information they find online. “We are in an incredibly polarized time, and what’s feeding that is the spread of misinformation,” he says. “If we want to be informed citizens, the way we do that in the 21st century is we go online. We don’t go to the public library to learn about the efficacy of a soda tax or whether we should ban private prisons; we google it.”
In fact, Google is one of COR’s key partners. Last year, the search engine—based in part on research by Wineburg and Michael Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public—began including an icon designed to help users in the United States assess the credibility of search results. The feature, which appears as a three-dot menu next to your search results, encourages COR skills such as lateral reading (checking what reputable websites say about a source) and click restraint (intentionally skipping over the first search results, which are often advertisements). Wineburg says the feature is a “small nudge to see if we can make things a little better.”
The primary focus of COR, like iCivics, is to make materials teachers can use in the classroom. Its curriculum—based on the work of professional fact-checkers—includes nearly 30 lesson plans that cover using Wikipedia, evaluating claims on social media and identifying trustworthy evidence, among other topics. “You can preach to teachers until you’re blue in the face,” Wineburg says. “We need materials. We need concrete things. That’s where my efforts are.”
Rebecca Beyer is a Boston-based journalist. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
Retirement 2022 January 10, 2022
Posted by daviddavenport in Op/Eds.comments closed
I will be retiring from full-time employment and the Hoover Institution this summer. In order to complete two additional books before then, I’ve decided I need to retire now from writing regular columns for the Washington Examiner. So you won’t be seeing much from daviddavenport.com, though if I continue to do some writing, I will still post here, at least for another year til I see how retirement goes.
Conservatives Must Grow Their Tent (Washington Examiner) December 20, 2021
Posted by daviddavenport in Op/Eds.comments closed
Conservatives have a shrinking tent problem. Rather than growing their movement with addition, or even multiplication, they seem determined to shrink it by division and subtraction. If they want to be relevant, they will need to relearn important lessons from William F. Buckley in the 1960s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and figure out how to build a bigger tent.
The foundational premise for growing a tent is to recognize how many different kinds of conservatives might, if welcomed, choose to camp there. In fact, the number of adjectives that go with the noun “conservative” is almost mind-boggling. There are national security conservatives, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, crunchy conservatives, neocons, paleocons, libertarians, traditionalists, and on we could go. If conservatism is about conserving something, these are all things that one conservative or another would like to protect.
The problem is that today’s conservatives would rather be part of a smaller group with which they agree entirely than a larger extended family that is related but not identical. If you don’t believe in limiting abortion, for example, then some Christian and social conservatives will reject you. If you believe the 2020 election was stolen, or not, that puts up more barriers. Are masks an appropriate requirement in a public health crisis or an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom? Be careful, conservatives, your answer to that question could also put you outside the tent.
The failure of conservatives to accommodate a bigger tent affects the Republican Party and risks its future electoral success. While Republicanism and conservatism are not identical twins, they are at least cousins, and what one does often affects the other. In February, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the Republican Party should be “a very big tent,” one with room for both anti-Trump Rep. Liz Cheney and pro-Trump Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. But later McCarthy moved away from his support of Cheney. If the Republican Party will still be fully devoted to former President Donald Trump, and leave no room for other conservatives, it may face further losses such as it suffered at the polls in 2020.
Conservatives should revisit two times in their history when they built and occupied a big tent. Buckley built the first big tent with his National Review journal, making space for the varieties of conservatism. In fact, his editor Frank Meyer called the approach “fusionism,” a philosophy holding that liberty and virtue, or free markets and traditional values, were not in conflict and should live comfortably together. This is precisely the kind of conversation conservatives should be having instead of debating the 2020 election results.
Reagan is the second conservative who managed a big tent. But as the late Bob Dole pointed out, many of the Nixon-era and Reagan-era conservatives would not be welcome in the tent (or in the Republican Party) now. In those days, some conservatives accepted abortion and some did not, a tolerant range of views that would be widely rejected by many conservatives today. Reagan was a pragmatist who accepted tax and debt increases as necessary from time to time. He even managed to reach a large number of working-class “Reagan Democrats.”
Conservatives need a big tent revival. Rather than purging their movement of people with whom they disagree, they need to relearn the lessons of Buckley and Reagan and build a bigger tent. The alternative is irrelevance.
To read the column at the Washington Examiner:
David Davenport 