Raising Expectations: The War We Must Fight to Prevent One

• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Author: Jeremy L. Hall
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13544

Raising Expectations: The War We Must Fight to PreventOne 789

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government

when it deserves it.

Mark Twain

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it

is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

Mark Twain

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were

a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Mark Twain

I am concerned. In past editorials, I have lamented the

hyperbole, propaganda, and increasingly vile rhetoric

associated with modern politics in the U.S (Hall and

Battaglio2020b). In particular, from the top, it seems

that policy choices are framed as wins and losses

such that, when anything at all is passed into law, it

endows one group with victory and one with loss—

victors against victims. The consequence is that each

election cycle is viewed not as a contest to advance

the nation (state, county, city, or school board)

with bright ideas, but to implement one-off policy

reversals of the preceding political opponents. Policy

seems to have come unmoored from the standard

of improving our collective lot to find new harbor

in doling out individualized particularistic benefits.

I have expressed frustration over the vitriol that has

permeated our discourse through social media (Hall

and Battaglio2020a). I have watched in amazement

as individualism has been pitted against the common

good (and often common sense), with sides polarizing

on virtually every issue facing society—and facing

government (Hall2021a). And most recently, I have

connected these shifts to value differences as a source

of division, even to the point of losing our tolerance

for individuality, instead assigning “us versus them”

classifications to everyone who dares participate in

political dialogue (Hall2021b). I remain concerned.

In recollecting my thoughts from those previous

editorials, it is somewhat clear that I share

characteristics with a broken record, repeating

myself at regular intervals. That my concern has not

abated is troubling for the direction things seem to

be heading. During the antebellum period, as the

states inched ever closer to the shot heard ‘round

the world that promulgated the U.S. Civil War,

similar division was apparent. Pulitzer Prize-winning

author James McPherson has suggested that it is

impossible to understand the issues of our own time

unless we first understand their roots in the era of

the Civil War: racial inequality, the conflict between

the North and South, and such questions as state

sovereignty or the role of government in social change

(McPherson2015). Those questions are at the center

of our discourse today, with social equity continuing

to permeate political discourse at all levels. The

proper place for critical race theory in curricula from

Kindergarten to college, for example, has become a

focal point of education policy at the state level as well

as the local school boards where parents are, perhaps

rightly, coming unglued about some of the things

they have uncovered. A positive side effect, I suppose,

is that people are once again demonstrating that

they care, and they are rising to become involved in

governance at all levels.

So, let us look back, briefly, at the context in which

the Civil War emerged. Slavery has been widely

portrayed as the issue that caused our Union of

several sovereign states to cascade into the calamity

of war, but, in truth, slavery was less a flashpoint at

the beginning of the conflict than at the end. At the

beginning of the conflict, Abraham Lincoln stated

that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to

interfere with slavery in the states where it exists,”

a position overwhelmingly endorsed by the Union

congress in July, 1861 (McPherson1988, vii).

Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy,

stated in an 1864 reply to James Gilmore that “The

war…must go on till the last man of this generation

falls in his tracks…unless you acknowledge our right

to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery.

We are fighting for Independence, and that, or

extermination, we will have” (https://www.goodreads.

Raising Expectations: The War We Must Fight to

PreventOne

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

Editorial

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 5, pp. 789–794. © 2022 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13544.