Today’s culture wars have disturbing historical precedents, both in the U.S. and abroad, reflecting fundamentally contrasting approaches to managing the tradeoffs between unity and diversity and to the very role of the nation-state in a free society. This explains the recent uproar over Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s already influential 2020 Arizona Law Review article “Homeschooling: Parent rights absolutism vs. child rights to education and protection.” There she essentially advocates outlawing homeschooling, characterizing it as threatening both individual children and national unity, since homeschooling parents dare to impose their faiths on their children. For the Left, such traditions are triggering. These tensions underlie religion and school-choice politics generally, and Blaine-amendment court cases such as the recently decided Espinoza v. Montana. They involve the heart of American governance, with two distinct approaches to politics and bureaucracy, one prioritizing diversity, the other unity.
As shown by the late Vincent Ostrom in The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, the American Founders sought a federalist republic enabling local and individual initiative, with diversity in public administration fostering and fostered by social diversity. In a free society, no one size fits all. Moreover, rule by any single faction, including an elite faction, would likely degenerate into tyranny. In short, the Founders anticipated Alexis de Tocqueville, enabling a localized, diverse society and polity. In contrast, Progressive bureaucratic thinkers like Woodrow Wilson prized centralization and uniformity. In government, this meant clear lines of accountability, with experts imposing the single best method in all things, reflecting values of the dominant faction.
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