Road Trip
From Parks and Rec. (Season 3, Episode 14)
Categories:
Run time: 3:07
Clip Description: Ron Swanson explains to a child his views on government and libertarianism.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip can help facilitate discussions within government political ideology.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip is useful for discussions on political ideology and bureaucracy.
Discussion Questions
- Libertarianism turns on a line between what government may compel you to fund and what it may not. Pick one thing you relied on before noon today: a road, a water system, an inspected food supply, the licensing of the driver in the next lane. Say concretely what it would take for a market to supply it instead. The useful cases are the ones where you can imagine it working, but not working well.
- Americans have told pollsters for decades that government does too much, and in the same surveys supported nearly every specific program when asked about them one at a time. Is that hypocrisy, incoherence, or a reasonable response to two genuinely different questions? What evidence would let you tell which?
- Ron holds his views while drawing a government salary and running a government department. Name a belief you hold that your own daily life contradicts. Is that a failure of integrity, or is it what it looks like to live inside a system you would not have designed?
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 3: Political Culture and Participation
Topics: 3.3 Political Ideologies; 3.4 Political Values and Beliefs
Skill: Concept Application
Big idea: Internal and External Forces
Course countries: United Kingdom, Russia, Iran
Ron Swanson explains libertarianism to a child, sincerely and without irony. The course asks students to treat ideologies as coherent positions rather than as team names, and three minutes of somebody stating a position from first principles to an audience with no prior commitments is the cleanest version of that the library offers.
Discussion questions
- State his position on what government is for, in one sentence. Then name the ideology and one thing that ideology holds which he does not say out loud.
- Ideology and party are not the same thing. Explain how a country can have several parties and only two real ideological positions, or the reverse.
- Pick one course country and name the dominant ideological current in its politics. Then say what evidence you would use to establish that, rather than simply asserting it.
Short activity
One question, four ideologies (10 minutes). Give the class a single policy question — who should pay for health care. Students write a one-sentence answer from a liberal position, a conservative one, a socialist one and a libertarian one. Four sentences. Most students write two of them comfortably and struggle with the other two, and noticing which two they struggled with tells them more about their own assumptions than the exercise itself does.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.