Much of what we know of politics can be learned in 8th grade

Every year for the last six or seven years, we – two South Sound 8th grade English teachers – have turned over administration of our classrooms to a student leader for about a week.

While reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” we follow in the way of the boys stranded on an uninhabited island.

At the critical juncture, we absent ourselves from our classrooms, leaving instructions for the class to select a chief. That individual – or subsequent replacements – runs the class for about a week.

The exercise is invariably worthwhile and fruitful, though it always works out in different ways.

Sometimes, a self-selected leader steps to the front and says he or she should lead – sometimes giving a reason, sometimes not – and if no one objects, a de facto dictatorship is established.

Other times, classes create elaborate voting processes to identify a chief and, sometimes, an assistant.

Some classes even establish a cabinet to work with the executive. One chief, who is heading to West Point next year, divided his class into squads, with squad leaders and, of course, meetings.

Nearly every class –about 60 students between the two of us – experiences a leadership crisis. The majority of these result in coups, most of which succeed. In one case, a coup-plotting faction rallied the class by asserting, “We just want (the teacher) to run the class again.”

A few classes have argued over voting procedures as they try to construct something like a constitution, including rules for removal of the chief, as we suggest they do.

One class ran impressively thorough discussions about both the process and the nature of the order they preferred. Along the way, however, nobody noticed that their three-way runoff generated a chief who won only about 40 percent of the vote.

In another instance, someone pleaded, “Everyone, please vote,” which earned the rebuke, “In America, we don’t have to vote.”

This stimulated a declaration that, “This isn’t America.” Nobody offered an explanation of what it was, if not America.

These machinations might seem like juvenile play in a still highly controlled public school room. Indeed, we’re able to do this exercise because our students basically accept and even embrace the structures of order and authority — perhaps deriving from their experience of the Army, in which many of their parents serve.

But in other ways, these exercises are poignantly, even painfully, instructive. Pundits point out that American politics is more polarized now than ever; this, they argue, is not good for us or the republic.

Our little electoral exercise might show that we really shouldn’t be surprised at the intensity and frustration in American political life today. If decisions matter, then the process by which we make them matters, too.

At the same time, plenty of people think that pushing, pulling or otherwise prodding the process in order to achieve certain outcomes is tolerable. This is never clearer than when clever political actors recognize the ways different electoral rules generate different political strategies.

The American Electoral College is an obvious example.

To make an international comparison, winner-take-all single-member district systems generate significantly different possibilities and strategies than do proportional representation multi-member systems.

One needn’t make a claim about a preference for either type to recognize that differences in rules affect the nature of both the process and outcome.

In the end, we should reasonably expect that the integrity of the decision-making process will typically be under stress, insofar as we value our preferred outcomes just as much. This stress may seem more pronounced in 2019, but only in degree.

Homo politicus was Plato’s observation that we are all essentially political animals. Experience should convince us this identity has negative implications.

At the same time, our “Lord of the Flies” exercise sustains our hope. Even 13-year-olds intuitively recognize the significance of collective-decision mechanics, and invest energy and zeal in them.

In the end, our most ennobling political characteristics are also our Achilles’ heel. Wrestling with that duality is a healthy place to be.