(Electronic music)
- (Michael) What’s up Wisecrack, Michael here. Today I want to talk about something
we’ve all been watching. A story that explores America’s founding principles by adding
a hefty dose of hip hop.
Parks and Recreation.
(Parks and Rec theme music plays)
- (Michael) You likely think of Parks and Rec as a show about small-town government,
woodsman libertarianism, or the dangers of doing business with the Saperstein family.
- (Jean Ralphio) The worrrssst! She’s the worst.
- (Michael) But what if it’s an accidental masterclass in the struggles of founding a
new country?
Now, to say Parks and Rec is a show about America’s founding might sound like a stretch,
but, remember that co-creator Mike Schur is the same guy that made an entire sitcom about
philosophy.
- (Eleanor) It’s like who died and put Aristotle in charge of ethics?
- (Chidi) Plato!
- (Michael) Ok, even if Mike Schur wasn’t reading the notebooks of Thomas Jefferson,
his comedic musings on life in Pawnee may help us learn more about a very basic problem
for people trying to start a country from scratch, that is: how do you stop it from
collapsing in on itself?
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the political philosophy of Parks and Recreation. And spoilers
ahead for the show and Hamilton.
Parks and Rec follows the inner-workings of Pawnee, Indiana’s parks department headed
by Ron Swanson and his over-eager deputy, Leslie Knope. Leslie has an almost childlike
admiration for American style Democracy and believes that with good-natured leaders the
government has the ability to make our world a better place. However, she is surrounded
by people who are at best, apathetic, and at worst, down-right hostile to her grand
plans.
- (Ron) I don’t want this parks department to build any parks because I don’t believe
in government.
- (Michael) Leslie is thwarted at every step as she tries to build a park where an empty
pit once stood, take on big sugar, or stop people from drinking from water fountains
like assholes.
- (Ann) Yeah so the idea is to make a fountain that he can’t do that to!
- (Michael) Before he was famous for being a deft Broadway lyricist, Hamilton (along
with James Madison and John Jay,) wrote a series of articles meant to sway public opinion
towards the creation of a unified nation of states through the constitution and a strong
national government. You know, the United States of America. These articles, referred
to as the Federalist Papers, were responding to existing criticisms of the proposed union
and pre-empted any yet to come. And while the stakes of forming a union out of thirteen
individual states and throwing a Pawnee Unity Concert might not be quite the same, these
early debates about American government can help us better understand what’s really
going on in Parks and Rec.
So let’s start with problem one: The danger of factions.
Whether you’re a local parks department or the head of a national government: there’s
one thing you gotta watch out for: Different groups of people, all with very specific interests,
all yelling at each other in a way that devolves into chaos.
- (Twilight Man) No! You promised! - (Woman) You promised? That’s not fair!
- (Man) It’s not a question of fairness -
- (Woman) Oh go back to Russia commie! - (Twilight Man) Hey, YOU go back to Russia!
And you go back to… wherever you came from!
- (Michael) If you’re a student of Pawnee’s town hall meetings, you might have noticed
a theme. No matter what level-headed plan Leslie unveils, there is some person or group
who feels like their rights as an American have been trampled upon.
- (Man) I mean, what’s next, income? - (Leslie) Sir you don’t pay your income
tax? - (Man) Whether or not I pay income tax is
none of the government’s business.
- (Michael) Try to make Pawnee healthier, and this guy is mad he has go out of his way
to the nearest Paunch Burger.
- (Man) Now if I want to start my day off with a triple decker pancake pizza, I gotta
go to the one that’s ten minutes away and that makes me 20 minutes late for work everyday.
I work from home. - (Chris Traeger) Have you ever considered
not eating that for breakfast? - (Man) I’ll never consider that.
- (Michael) During these meetings and throughout the show, Leslie and the parks department
are met with an onslaught of hyper-specific and constantly annoyed citizens and interest
groups who are never satisfied with anything.
- (Man) There is a disturbing lack of benches in Ramset park!
- (Michael) These factions, in turn, trample on the rights of others, like when seniors
can’t learn how to not catch chlamydia because it offends the Society for Family Stability
Foundation.
- (Woman) If we allow this filth to be taught to our seniors the next thing you know it’ll
be in our high schools and our kindergartens, and before you know it we’ll have babies
in thong underwear. Is that what you want? - (Leslie) Yes, that’s what I want.
- (Michael) Believe or not, it was exactly this kind of chaos that James Madison was
trying to avoid by creating a federal republic to unify the states. Sure, he might not have
meant “bench people,” but he was acutely aware of how, say, one religious group could
tyrannically impose their will on others. Madison, in Federalist number ten, defines
a faction as, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the
whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest,
adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests
of the community.”
While Leslie’s chipper attitude tries to solve the problem of factions with inclusivity
-
- (Leslie) So, what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me
- (Michael) Madison argues that the solution to factions is to either destroy their cause
or limit their effects. And while removing the causes for the faction sounds convenient,
Madison points out that the only ways you could do this would be “by destroying the
liberty” that lets factions exist in the first place, or more creepily, giving every
citizen “the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” In other words,
if Leslie simply indoctrinated everyone into her binder cult, there would be no pesky Jeremy
Jamms trying to put a Paunch Burger on her beloved park.
- (Jeremy Jams) I want to sell this lot to Paunch burger. Here’s why. We make money,
they make money. They make burgers, we eat burgers!
- (Michael) Since removing the causes of factions isn’t really an option, how does one limit
their effects?
For Madison, factions are especially bad in smaller republics: local politics makes it
easier for super-rich neighborhood weirdos like the Newports to impose their will on
an entire area. If you go bigger, Madison thought, the competing factions might balance
each other out a bit. But then again, he didn’t really foresee the rise of the internet or
multinational corporations, but that’s a video for a different day...
Parks and Rec, on the other hand, has a novel solution to a certain kind of factionalism
in the time capsule episode. In this episode, a man with a creepy Twilight obsession wants
to get the book put in the town’s time capsule to impress his daughter. The town hall meetings,
predictably, spiral out of control as groups and individuals with mis-aligned interests
all fight to have the bible, weird paintings and dead people’s ashes included in the
project. We can get a little Madison in here
- (Ben) Sure.
- (Michael) Since it would be a huge overstep to try to eliminate the source of people feuding
about whether Twilight is demonic propaganda or an important cultural touchstone, the role
of government is to develop mechanisms for controlling the fallout. One of Madison’s
solutions was to have a space for the rabble to express their grievances, while making
sure the system kept their shenanigans contained. In this light, we might consider the town
hall meetings as an important pressure valve for public sentiments.
- (Man) What are you some kind of moron? Why don’t you have hand dryers in the park bathrooms,
they’re so much more sanitary than paper towels!
- (Michael) Letting the people air their grievances might just keep the weirdos from lining up
outside city hall with muskets. And weirdly, this is a huge mechanism of the constitution’s
design: letting all the chaos and anger of a democracy be “expressed” without giving
in to the actual, unfiltered will of the people.
There’s two ways we can look at this. On one hand, having just survived a revolutionary
war motivated by a factional dispute between England and the colonies, the founders understood
the importance of controlling angry minorities who would inevitably be at odds with government
rule. On the other hand, they were equally worried about the poor masses, who were larger
in numbers than the landowning classes, rising up and taking power from their buddies who
owned both land, and people. And that’s not even getting into how afraid they were
of slave revolts, again, a topic for another time.
Besides revolts of the poors or slaves, or both allied together, Madison and his fellow
federalists had another problem:
How do we convince the skeptical states to join our new union? And while Pawnee isn’t
even a state, we can see some of the same exact problems play out in Indiana.
Eagleton, Pawnee’s ritzee neighbor, seceded from Pawnee long ago, disgusted by the filth
of the undesirable poors of their neighborhood. That all changes, however, when they go bankrupt.
While Eagleton isn’t pushing for a compromise over slavery (thank god), they are, like many
of the Southern states, hesitant to give up their freedoms and rejoin the town of Pawnee.
Built over a hot spring with a microclimate all its own, it’s an example of how hard
it can be to get different cities or states to join together for the greater good.
Eagleton is richer. Cleaner. The town hall meetings are *exquisite*.
- (Tom) Look how pretty the people are!
- (Michael) Why would they ever want Pawnee-ans to come ruining their nice parks?
Eagleton is, in this sense, like an anti-Federalist state. Unlike an Eagletonian, Leslie Knope
sees the value in Pawnee being part of something greater than itself. Even when Eagleton is
broke and full of condescending assholes.
- (Eagleton Man) I live in Eagleton and frankly I don’t like the idea of living in Pawnee.
They’re a little, oh what’s the word… have no money.
- (Michael) And believe it or not, Eagleton’s bankruptcy is actually a pretty great stand-in
for one specific hesitancy in joining into a union of states: debt. If you’ve seen
Hamilton, you’ll remember the definitely historically accurate rap battle between Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in which they use their lyrical prowess to debate the
question of whether debts (and wealth) should be shared through the federal government,
or, if a state being broke was their own dumb problem to worry about.
- (Jefferson) Oo if the shoe fits wear it, if New York’s in debt, why should Virginia
bear it? Uh our debts are paid, I’m afraid. Don’t tax the South cut we got it made in
the shade.
- (Michael) This was an important question in the wake of the Revolutionary War, as both
the federal government and the states were in massive debt, to the tune of 54 and 25
million dollars, respectively. With paper money as useless as stock in Entertainment
720, and no country wanting to loan money to dead-beat America, Hamilton’s big idea
was to absorb all this debt at the federal level and establish a national bank. For heavily
indebted states, this was awesome, but for states like Maryland, Pennsylvania, North
Carolina, and Virginia who already paid their debts, it meant getting taxed to pay off the
debt of your broke-ass neighbors.
Somewhat like the debt-ridden states, Eagleton’s only way to survive their crushing debt is
to be absorbed into Pawnee, forming a new economic union of sorts. Pawnee, since they
haven’t “repeatedly failed to pay back their debtors,” ostensibly can borrow more
money to build more parks and schools, especially after the keen fiscal management of Ben Wyatt.
In the case of the constitution, the idea was that, say, France, would be less willing
to lend money to, say, New Jersey, and more willing to trust their cash with a larger
and fiscally savvy federal government. So here Parks and Rec falls on the side of New
York Based hip-hop artist Alexander Hamilton, who said that "A national debt, if it is not
excessive, will be to us a national blessing..."
But now that we’ve seen why the founding fathers thought that factions should be tolerated
and why a union was stronger than a collection of states, the question still remains: is
Democracy even a good system? Do we really want the type of government that requires
years of meetings and compromises to turn a pit into a community park? So here we go
with Problem 3:
Does Democracy Actually work?
We all know that America is a democracy, and democracy is about we the people, so obviously
our friends Hamilton, Madison, and Jay got sweet democracy neck tattoos? And for everyone
mad that “well actually, America is a democratic republic,” zip your burger hole for a second,
we’re getting there.
The founders were pretty skeptical about the whole “we the people” part of government,
and were downright opposed to a world in which each citizen has a direct say in what’s
going on. John Adams, in “A Defense of the Constitution of the United States,” flat
out worried that unbridled democracy would lead the masses to give up their power immediately
to some king or “idols of their own creation.” He also worried, like Madison, that the poors
would start using their power to rob the rich blind, and to be fair, that the rich, when
left to their own devices, would simply rob the poor blind. It’s worth noting that Adams
admired the British form of government, with its balance of powers and representative nature.
Parks and Rec, despite being oh-so-optimistic about the power of one woman to change the
world, really dives into the shit show that is democracy. There’s city councillors serving
for way too long with their own, dumb ingrained ways and clear conflicts of interests, along
with the bonkers ideas held by some of Pawnee’s citizens.
- (Woman) But isn’t all food bad for you? I’ve been eating lasagna and muffins every
day of my life for 40 years and I feel terrible.
- (Michael) It was because of all this messiness that the founders preferred to call their
invention a democratic republic instead of a literal democracy. For the authors of the
Federalist Papers, “Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste
themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest,
and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.”
A republic, in the eyes of the founding fathers, is a system of government which is indirectly
controlled by the people, with many barriers between individual citizens and direct decision
making at the government level. In other words, you need a principled Leslie Knope or Anne
Perkins to act on behalf of this guy-
- (Guy) I’m not worried about swine flu, I’ve already had the swine flu. I worried
about the turtle flu.
- (Michael) And rather than hoping for some shared patriotic interests. Hamilton, for
one, thought that it was commerce, not democratic ideals, that would be the true unifying force
of the union. To put it bluntly, they figured that people would get over their fights and
squabbles if it would keep their bank balance looking pretty. This, in turn, would keep
them faithful to the nation keeping their accounts in the black.
While we’ve more than covered the town halls, we can consider this quote from the federalist
papers, “Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment,
jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known
that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence,
and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals?”
In other words, there’s a few jerks who are going to push public sentiment in a pretty
bad direction.
While the media during their time amounted to rumors spread at the tavern and the printed
pamphlets, we can see the “danger” of misguided masses with Pawnee’s own gin-soaked
Katie Couric, Joan Callamezzo. Calamezzo’s talk show Pawnee Today has the clout to make
or break local political careers. And it can do this all through using emotions like rage
and jealousy to rouse TV-addicted citizens in the service of the absolute worst ideas.
- (Woman over phone) Yeah, how can you justify raising taxes over something that’ll hurt
the town? - (Ben) I… uh…
- (Michael) But this of course leaves us with the question of whether the founders were
correct in thinking that we weren’t capable of handling an actual direct democracy and
instead needed the barriers of a republic to keep us from ruining things. After all,
we’ve got plenty of problems caused by special interests groups and career politicians. It’s
not that Parks and Rec is a perfect one to one stand-in for the arguments of federalists
versus anti-federalists - but it can serve as a pretty good lesson in what these people
were thinking.
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Does Parks and Rec show us the best that American democracy
is capable of when well-intentioned folks work together? Or does it instead lay bare
the problems and limitations inherent to a system of government developed over 200 years
before it was possible to “slide into those DMs”?