NO ONE CAN SAY we live in uninteresting times! Even as nations and peoples formerly under the domination of the Soviet empire proclaim their political ideals in language that inspired and secured the founding of Western democracies; even as Russia herself, and the various successor states springing up in the wreckage of the terrible Soviet system, flail toward democracy or run away from it, our own democracy — I speak here as an American — is faltering, not flourishing. More and more, we Americans confront one another as aggrieved groups rather than as free citizens. In this first chapter I will explore flash points in established democracies with the American experiment as my chief example. The trials and tribulations of the American republic have a way of setting the agenda for other democratic societies, whether for good or for ill. In speaking about my own country I will refer to Western democracies more generally much of the time.
How will the drama of democracy be played out in the twenty-first century? Are we citizens of Western democracies, in fact, in the danger zone? The signs of the times are not encouraging. The perils facing our democracy are many. They include deepening cynicism, the growth of corrosive forms of individualism and statism, the loss of civil society. Democracy requires laws and constitutional procedures, yes, but it also depends on the everyday actions and spirit of the people. On that ground — we are in trouble. We have a veritable shopping list of disconcerting facts at our disposal that speaks to cynicism and a turn inward toward the self.
Many political commentators in the United States write of the growth of a “culture of mistrust,” aided and abetted by scandals, a press that feeds off scandals, and a public that seems insatiable in its appetite for scandal. The culture of mistrust fuels declining levels of involvement in politics and stokes cynicism about politics and politicians. Journalist E. J. Dionne’s book Why Americans Hate Politics offers a strong story of what has gone awry. According to Dionne, both liberals and conservatives are failing America. He laments in particular a false polarization in American politics that is more and more cast in the form of a cultural civil war. One sees, first, liberal Democrats who wish to tame the logic of the market in economic life but allow a nearly untrammelled laissez-faire in cultural and sexual life where individual rights are trumps. Their mirror image is provided by conservative Republicans who offer a story of constraints and controls in the cultural and sexual sphere but embrace a nearly uncon-strained market.1 Politics and citizens get stuck in the danse macabre of these two logics and see no clear way out.
A second perceptive analysis of America’s recent political travail is Chain Reaction, an account by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall of “the impact of race, rights, and taxes on American Politics.”2 The Edsalls unpack a conundrum that will not go away anytime soon. Theirs is a story of how, over the years, numerous programs targeted specifically at black and underclass Americans lost legitimacy. Preferential hiring programs, for example, provoke deep resentment and stoke racial divisions. Aid to dependent children and similar programs appear to sustain, even encourage, an out-of-wedlock birth rate running around seventy percent of all births to inner-city mothers, many of them teenagers.
Those who have paid most of the bills, being the majority — lower-middle-class and middle-class whites — no longer see a benefit flowing from such programs to the society as a whole (as evidence mounts about growing welfare dependency, inner-city crime, and the like) but perceive, instead, a pattern of redistribution through forms of assistance to people who do not appear to be as committed as they are to following the rules of the game, by working hard and not expecting government to shoulder their burdens. This, at least, is a widespread conviction. As a result, programs geared to particular populations have lost the legitimacy accorded almost automatically to inclusive programs such as Social Security. Despite their unpopularity, policies that target groups on racial, gender, or sexual preference grounds are difficult to alter given a phenomenon called “clientele capture. This means, simply, that a small number of vocal clients of such policies have a vested interest in preventing change, even though, over the long run, their own cause loses the support of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.
These and other examples of disaffection speak to a deeper matter, which I already noted briefly. The “loss of civil society” lies in the background to our current discontents, helping to account for why democracy itself is going through an ordeal of self-understanding as we near the end of the century. It is through the associational enthusiasms of civil society that the democratic ethos and spirit of citizens have been made manifest. By civil society I mean the many forms of community and association that dot the landscape of a democratic culture, from families to churches to neighbourhood associations to trade unions to self-help movements to volunteer assistance to the needy. This network lies outside the formal structure of state power. Democratic observers have long recognized the vital importance of civil society. Some have spoken of “mediating institutions,” structures between the individual and the government or state. These mediating institutions located the child, for example, in his or her little estate, the family, which was itself nested within a wider, overlapping framework of sustaining and supporting civic institutions — churches, schools, voluntary associations of all kinds, solidaristic organizations such as unions or mothers’ groups. American society was honeycombed by a vast network that offered a sustaining social ecology for the growing citizen.
Curiously the framers of the American Constitution paid little explicit attention to such institutions. Perhaps the framers did not mention the associations of civil society, including the family, because they simply assumed their vitality and longevity. They counted on a social deposit of intergenerational trust, neighbourliness, and civic responsibility. But we no longer can. That is why political theorists, of whom I am one, must tend explicitly to this matter. For we see the ill effect of a loss of civil society all around us.
Think, if you will and if you can bear it, of the growing number of American children for whom neither home nor street nor neighbourhood affords a safe haven. More and more American children grow up frightened, and increasing numbers are scarred by violence in schools and streets. Now we know certain things. The data is overwhelming and consistent. We know that the strongest predictors of situations in which children are abused are single-parent households, or households with an unmarried couple (often a biological mother and her children living with a male unrelated to those children either by birth or by acceptance of legal responsibility for their well-being). Undersupervised foster-care situations are another predictor. We further know that a stable, two-parent household is the best protection not only against child abuse but against the possibility that a child himself or herself will grow up to be an abuser.
Fully seventy percent of juveniles in state reform institutions grew up in homes with a serious parental deficit, as the sociologists like to call it. I refer to domestic circumstances with fewer helping hands than necessary and less than adequate emotional, economic, and social support. Beyond the tragedy of children assaulted in their homes, an astonishing number die from violence — especially gun violence. Homicide by firearms is now the second leading cause of death for fifteen- to nineteen-year-old white Americans (after motor vehicle accidents). For black Americans in the same age bracket, homicide is the leading cause of death. Over the long run, stemming the tide of family collapse is the best protection against being either the victim or the perpetrator of violence. But families cannot do this alone. They need neighbours to turn to, churches to give not only solace but solid, hands-on help, a network of friends, agencies that assist in a time of trouble such as a serious, prolonged illness, and so on. That socially rich world is the world of civil society. If we are to sustain our democratic culture, we depend on civil society.
Note that civil society is a realm that is neither individualist nor collectivist. It partakes of both the “I” and the “we.” Here I think of the many lodges and clubs and party precinct organizations that once dotted the American landscape. It is that world of small-scale civitate that is evoked by the Anti-Federalists in debates over ratification of the United States Constitution. The Anti-Federalists were not as confident as the Federalists about the long-term survival of robust civic bodies, and they hoped to make provision for their flourishing. No doubt these Anti-Federalists pushed an idealized image of a self-reliant republic that shunned imperial power and worked, instead, to create a polity modelled on classic principles of civic virtue and a common good. As Ralph Ketcham, a historian of this argument, writes:
Anti-federalists saw mild, grass-roots, small-scale governments in sharp contrast to the splendid edifice and overweening ambitions implicit in the new Constitution. . . . The first left citizens free to live their own lives and to cultivate the virtue (private and public) vital to republicanism, while the second soon entailed taxes and drafts and offices and wars damaging to human dignity and thus fatal to self-government.3
Despite the often roseate hue with which the Anti-Federalists surrounded their arguments, they were onto something, as we like to say. They hoped to avoid, even to break, a cycle later elaborated by Alexis de Tocqueville in his great work, Democracy in America. Tocqueville sketched as a warning a world in decline, a world different from the robust democracy he surveyed. He believed American democratic citizens needed to take to heart a possible corruption of their way of life. In his worst-case scenario, narrowly self-interested individualists, disarticulated from the saving constraints and nurture of overlapping associations of social life, required more and more controls “from above’ in order that the disintegrative effects of untrammelled individualism of this bad sort be at least somewhat muted in practice.
To this end, he cautioned, the peripheries must remain vital; political spaces other than or beneath those of the state needed to be cherished, nourished, kept vibrant. Tocqueville had in mind local councils and committees in order to forestall concentrations of power at the core or on the top. Too much centralized power was as bad as no power at all. Only small-scale civitates would enable individuals, as citizens, to cultivate democratic virtues and possibilities, to play an active role in the drama of democracy. Such participation turns on meaningful involvement in some form of community. Too much power exercised at a level beyond that which permits and encourages active citizen participation is destructive of civic dignity and, finally, fatal to any authentic understanding of democratic self-government. Anti-Federalist fears of centralized power presaged Tocqueville’s worries that imperial greatness bought through force of arms is “pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people” because it sends out lightning bolts of “vivid and sudden luster, obtained without toil, by nothing but the risk of life.”4
Tocqueville’s worries have been much debated by political and social theorists. Those who follow Tocqueville in this matter believe that the reality of American democracy freed individuals from the constraints of older, undemocratic structures and obligations. But, at the same time, individualism and privatization were also unleashed. Tocqueville’s fear was not that this invites anarchy, as antidemocratic philosophers like Plato and Thomas Hobbes insisted; rather, he believed that the individualism of an acquisitive commercial republic would engender new forms of social and political domination. He called this bad form of individualism “egoism’ in order to distinguish it from the notion of human dignity and self-responsibility central to a flourishing democratic way of life. All social webs that once held persons intact having disintegrated, the individual finds himself or herself isolated and impotent, exposed and unprotected. Into this power vacuum moves the organized force of government in the form of a top-heavy, centralized state. I will say more about this Tocquevillian anxiety where the state is concerned in a moment but, first, consider several additional criticisms, even indictments, of the contemporary Western, democratic way of life.
Keep in mind the concern, namely, that over time the stripping down of the individual to a hard core of an isolated or suspended self, the celebration of a version of radical autonomy, casts suspicion on any and all ties of reciprocal obligation and mutual interdependence. What counts in this scheme of things is only the individual and her choices. If choice is made absolute in this way, important and troubling questions that arise as one evaluates the distinction beteween individual right and social obligation are blanked out of existence. One simply gives everything, or nearly so, over to the individualist pole in advance. Ideally democratic individuality is “not boundless subjectivist or self-seeking individualism,” but the worry is that it has, over time, become such.5 The blessings of democratic life Tocqueville so brilliantly displayed, especially the spirit of equality, including a certain informality and mixing of peoples of different stations, gives way and other more fearful and self-enclosed, more suspicious and cynical, habits and dispositions rise to the fore.
In his recent book, The True and Only Heaven, the historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch tells the tale this way. In the eighteenth century the founders of modern liberalism embraced an argument that posited human wants and needs as expandable; indeed, nigh insatiable. It followed that indefinite growth of the productive forces of economic life was needed in order to satisfy and ongoingly fuel this restless cycle of needs-creation and satiation. This ideology, called Progress, was distinctive, Lasch claims, in exempting its world from the judgement of time, leading to an unqualified and altogether unwarranted optimism that a way of life could persist untarnished, undamaged, and without terrible pressure to its own, most cherished principles.
The joint property of various liberalisms and conservatisms, twentieth-century purveyors of Progress as an ideology celebrated a world of endless growth, which meant in practice more and better consumerism. Moving from a glorification of producer to consumer was key because the conclusion was that underconsumption leads to declining investment. We want more and we want it now! All of life is invaded by the market and pervaded by market imagery. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that in America’s inner cities young people rob, beat, even kill one another in order to steal expensive sneakers and gold chains, or that in America’s suburbs young people whose families are well-off shun school and studies and community involvement in order to take part-time jobs to pay for consumer extras.
I take Lasch’s argument to be similar to Pope John Paul IIs criticism of “liberal capitalism” in “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” his encyclical on social concerns. Rejecting the self-contained smugness of the ideology of Progress, John Paul scores a phenomenon he calls “superdevelopment, which consists in an excessive availability of every kind of material good for the benefit of certain social groups.” Super-development “makes people slaves of ’possession’ and of immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the so-called civilization of ’consumption’ or ’consumerism,’ which involves so much ’throwing away’ and ’waste.’”6
The “sad effects of this blind submission to pure consumerism,” John Paul continues, is a combination of materialism and restless dissatisfaction as the “more one possesses the more one wants.” Aspirations that cut deeper, that speak to human dignity within a world of others, are stifled. John Paul’s name for this alternative aspiration is “solidarity,” not “a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress as the misfortunes of so many people” but, instead, a determination to “commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual because we are really responsible for all.” Through solidarity, says John Paul, we see “the ’other’ . . . not just as some kind of instrument. . . but as our ’neighbor,’ a ’helper’ . . . to be made a sharer on a par with ourselves in the banquet of life to which all are equally invited by God.”7
To the extent that John Paul’s words strike us as Utopian or naive, to that extent we have lost civil society. Or so, at least, the sociologist Alan Wolfe concludes in Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. Wolfe updates Tocqueville, apprising us of how far we have come, or how rapidly we have travelled, down the road to more and more bad individualism, requiring more and more management, control, and concentration of political and economic power in order to keep us bounded in our little kingdoms of one. Wolfe suggests that for all our success in modern societies, especially in the United States, there is a sense, desperate in some cases, that all is not well, that something has gone terribly awry. We citizens of liberal democratic societies understand and cherish our freedom but we are, according to Wolfe, “confused when it comes to recognizing the social obligations that make . . . freedom possible in the first place.”8 This confusion permeates all levels, from the marketplace, to the home, to the academy.
The confusion has a lot to do with a new attitude toward rights that has taken hold in the United States during the past couple of decades. Americans have been speaking the language of rights for a long time. It is part of our heritage, as American as apple pie. Recall, if you will, the first noticeable mention of rights as the Bill of Rights got appended to, and became part of, the American Constitution. These rights revolve around civic freedoms — assembly, press, speech — and around what government cannot do to you, say, unreasonable search and seizure. Rights were designed primarily as immunities, as a way to protect us from overweening governmental power, not as entitlements. The rights-bearing individual was a civic creature, a community creature, a family man or woman located within the world of civil society I described above. But, as time passed, the rights-bearing individual came to stand alone: me and my rights. And rights got construed increasingly in individualistic terms as the civic dimensions of rights withered on the vine. What were previously seen simply as personal wants are now demanded as rights. These run the gamut from demands for sexual satisfaction, self-esteem, and uninhibited self-expression as “rights” to the notion that everyone, without exception, has a “right” to a vast array of consumer choices. As Mary Ann Glendon points out in Rights Talk, missing are dimensions of sociality and responsibility as rights and the rights-defined self stand alone.9
This dynamic helps us to make sense of the political fallout from “rights talk” that surely puts democracy on trial. Let me elaborate by developing further one of my earlier claims. We now witness a morally exhausted left embracing rather than challenging the logic of the market by endorsing the relentless translation of wants into rights. Although the political left continues to argue for taming the market in a strictly economic sense, it follows the market model where social relations are concerned, seeing in any restriction of individual “freedom” to live any sort of “lifestyle,’ as we call it today, an unacceptable diminution of rights and free expression. On the other hand, many on the political right love the untrammelled (or the less trammelled the better) operations of the market in economic life but call for a restoration of traditional morality, including strict sexual and social scripts for men and women in family and work life. Both rely either on the market or the state to “organize their codes of moral obligation, but what they really need,’ Wolfe insists, “is civil society — families, communities, friendship networks, solidaristic workplace ties, voluntarism, spontaneous groups and movements — not to reject, but to complete the project of modernity.”10
What is needed to speed this cherished end is a return to a more thoroughly social understanding of rights: rights are always transitive; they always involve us with others. Rights cannot stand alone. Rights cannot come close to exhausting who and what we are. Should we try to understand why we stay up all night with a sick child, or take our neighbour a pot of soup when she comes home from the hospital, or spend hours helping to provision the victims of a natural disaster (like a flood or a hurricane) in and through “rights talk,” we would seriously distort these socially responsible and compassionate activities. We know this in our bones. Yet each time we feel called upon to justify something politically, the tendency is to make our concerns far more individualistic and asocial than they, in fact, are, by reverting to the language of rights as a “first language” of liberal democracy.
None of the thinkers I have mentioned finds a solution to our Tocquevillian anxiety in a more powerful state, even if one includes the welfare state as we know it. The most highly developed welfare state in nineteenth-century Europe was Bismarck’s “welfare-warfare” state, one in which social benefits were geared explicity to making the poor loyal dependents on the state. Social control was the aim; welfare the strategy. For most of us in the modern West the welfare state emerged out of a set of ethical concerns and passions that grew as civil society began to succumb to market forces. These concerns ushered in the conviction that the state was the “only agent capable of serving as a surrogate for the moral ties of civil society.” But a half century of evidence is in and it is clear that the logic of state provision and the creation of classes of long-term dependents itself erodes further “the very social ties that make government possible in the first place.”11
Let me be clear here. I am not so naive or foolish as to believe we can do without the state. The state, properly chastened, plays a vital role in a democratic society. Rather, I am worried about the logic of statism. This logic is one that looks to the state first as the only entity capable of “solving a problem” or responding to a concern. But as the state expands its role, the capacities of local institutions are further diminished. That is one problem. Another is what might be called the ideology of statism, an ideology not so prevalent in North American democracy as it was in those civic republican polities imagined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and implemented over time by civic actors, including the French revolutionaries.
The statist is one who wants to thin out the ties of civil society even further, who hopes to erode the force of the plural loyalties and diverse imperatives these give rise to and sustain. The statist citizen is represented as unhesitatingly loyal to the state and prepared to give primacy to it and its purposes. The statist identifies us primarily as creatures available for mobilization by a powerful centralized mechanism, rather than as family men and women, neighbours, members of a fraternal order or a feminist health cooperative, activists trying to save the African elephant from extinction, participants in a reading group, Baptists, Catholics, and so on. The statist wants us hemmed in and obliged in all sorts of mandated ways.
But the citizen of a democratic civil society understands that government cannot substitute for moral obligations — it can either deplete or nourish them. As our sense of particular, morally grounded responsibilities to an intergenerational web and a world of friends and neighbours falters, and the state moves in to treat the dislocations, it may temporarily solve delimited problems broadly defined but these very solutions, in time, serve to further thin out the skein of obligation. Eventually support for the state itself begins to plummet — people feel anomic and aggrieved, their resentments swell — and one sees the evidence in tax evasion, an upsurge in violence against persons and property, the breakup of social ties, including families, on an un-precedented scale, the rise of political cynicism, even something akin to despair.
A number of contemporary observers see such signs of civic and social trouble even in the long-established welfare democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia. It is, alas, the by now familiar story: the loneliness of the aged; the apathy of the young; the withering away of churches and communal organizations; the disentangling of family ties and the rituals and rhythms of family life. I don’t want to say that welfare provision directly caused any of this. I do want to suggest that a strong, bureaucratically top-heavy state that numbers among its tasks defining populations by their “needs” and targeting them for various reform efforts based on assumptions about such needs really cannot help moving in a “social engineering” direction that exists in tension with democratic freedom, civic sociality, and individual liberty.
Now it is no doubt the case that there is a distinction to be made between the dominant rhetoric of individualism and the culture of cynicism and how, in fact, we act as members of families, communities, churches, and neighbourhoods. Perhaps. But surely it is true that our social practices are under extraordinary pressure. This means democracy itself is being squeezed. Fearful people want more law and order and stiffer penalties for offenders. In America they rush to arm themselves, believing safety is more and more a matter of aggressive self-help. Angry people want all the politicians kicked out, but they believe new ones will be no better. Anxious people fear that their neighbour’s child may get some unfair advantage over their own. Despairing people destroy their own lives and the lives of those around them. Muddled people flit wildly from one thing to another, disorganized and unsure of who they are and what they are to do. Careless people ignore their children and then blast the teachers and social workers who must tend to the mess they have made, screaming that folks ought to “mind their own business.” Many human ills cannot be cured, of course. All human lives are lived on the edge of quiet desperation. We must all be rescued from time to time from fear and sorrow. But I read the palpable despair and cynicism and violence as dark signs of the times, as warnings that democracy may not be up to the task of satisfying yearnings it itself un-leashes — yearnings for freedom, and fairness, and equality.
Let us take a closer look. Counsels of despair are of little help and rapidly descend into bathos and even self-indulgence. One sign that democracy is on trial is a falling away from the firm, buoyant conviction of democrats that a rights-based democratic equality, guaranteed by the vote, would serve over time as the sure and secure basis of a democratic culture. Political theorist George Kateb, for example, describes and celebrates “democratic individuality,” reflected in and protected by “the electoral procedure, the set of rules” that embody “great value of equal respect for persons.” Such rules, including the franchise as a right, radiate “a strong influence” that goes much beyond the formal prerogatives themselves, helping to instill a sense of dignity and permanently chastening political authority should it grow overweening.12 Kateb does well to remind us of the distinction between destructive individualism and the ennobling strengths of the democratic tradition of respect for the human person, taken as a single, unique, and irreplaceable self.
But a striking feature of our epoch is that those very rights, the terms of democratic equality itself, have fallen into disrepute. Rather than serving as a frame within which democratic individuality can be shored up — in which a self made possible by the debates and dialogues a rule-governed democratic culture sustains — we hear ever more cynical appraisals of the rules, regulations, procedures, guarantees, and premises of constitutional democracy itself. For example, fuelled by claims that wildly exaggerate the ubiquity of violence perpetrated against women — for media hysteria knows no restraint in this matter—various proposals have been made that begin from the premise that burdensome democratic procedures, including the presumption of innocence, be seen for what they are: bourgeois hypocrisy, nothing more, nothing less. Rather than recognize in the presumption of innocence (i.e., the need for my accusers to bear the burden of proof), protection for myself or my loved ones should we ever be called before the bar of justice, we read articles challenging the whole idea of evidentiary requirements, central to the ideal of equal standing before the law.
This short temper with honouring the rights of the accused and meting out punishment appropriate to fit the concrete, particular crime that may have occurred is, for example, powerfully evident in a piece of legislation pending in the United States Senate. Called the Violence Against Women Act of 1993, the legislation incorporates “gender motivation” into a law that presumes to find in rape the paradigmatic, indeed normative, expression of male domination. Thus one moves away from the guiding presumptions of democratic jurisprudence, namely, that each case must be looked at individually: one must assess what happened to this victim, what got perpetrated by that offender. But the defenders of this new approach assume an undifferentiated class of victimizers (male) against an undifferentiated class of victims (female). This notion raises the spectre that the concrete facts in a case of sexual assault will be much less important in establishing guilt or innocence than some vague “animus based on a victim’s gender.” The motive police here rely on the platitudes of radical feminist ideology, a view of the moral and social world that, in the words of Catharine MacKinnon, “stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment.” In this scheme of things sex is what men do to women. In a society characterized by what is routinely called the “systemic oppression of women,” men simply are rapists, either actual or in situ. What is lost is the truth expressed by our new Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that “generalizations about the way women or men are … cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.” We find, then, at this very moment the rather distressing spectacle of an assault on civil liberties coupled with a perfervid ideology of victimization. Small wonder American politics so perplexes those who observe it.
Charles Taylor rightly notes the tremendous amount of activity discernible in American politics, an incessant hubbub, as a matter of fact, but he describes the American political scene as dismal, in part because American society has grown ever more fragmented. He writes: “A fragmented society is one whose members find it harder and harder to identify with their political society as a community. This lack of identification may reflect an atomistic outlook, in which people come to see society purely instrumentally. But it also helps to entrench atomism, because the absence of effective common action throws people back on themselves.”13 We are thrown back on ourselves into the ever-raging currents of consumer excess, or the cold comfort of ever more computerized and centralized bureaucracies.
I think of the words now used to characterize American politics: stalemate, gridlock, cynicism. American politics is a miasma, so argue many of our experts and journalists, as well as our ordinary citizens. But this growing cynicism about politics promotes a spiral of delegitimation. How does a spiral of delegitimation get a society in its grip? Over a period of time what I called earlier a “culture of mistrust” grows, aided and abetted, by an ever more litigious society; by a determination to “get mine” no matter what may happen to the other guy; by salacious snooping into the private lives of public figures, which further fuels cynicism about how untrustworthy our leaders are even as we delight in their downfall.
It is quite a mess, but it isn’t America’s mess alone. Perhaps it is worth noting that the growth in American cynicism about democratic government shifts America toward, not away from, a more generalized norm. Most people in other societies are somewhat cynical about government, including citizens of the democracies of Western Europe. As James Q. Wilson points out, Americans “are less optimistic and less trusting than we once were. And rightly so,” he goes on, “if Washington says that we should entrust it to educate our children, to protect our environment, and to regulate our economy, we would be foolish not to be cautious and skeptical.”14 The problem, according to Wilson, is that government has become less effective, not so much as a result of its size per se but because government since the 1960s has taken on more and more issues that it is simply ill-equipped to handle well — abortion and race relations, to name two of the most volatile. Too many such “wedge issues,” as the pundits and strategists call them, were created, not by cynical demagogues, but by well-meaning federal judges presiding over courts who made decisions in the 1960s and 1970s on a whole range of cultural questions without due consideration of how public support for mandated outcomes might be generated.
Dealing with abortion, to take up but one example of a controversial ethical and cultural issue, is very different from building a great interstate highway system. All the cultural questions that now pit democratic citizens against one another — in addition to abortion I think of family values, drugs, and race relations — have been joined in ways that guarantee they will continue to divide us, in large part because of the means government used to put these issues on the table, often through judicial fiat. So it was in the deeply contentious Roe v. Wade case guaranteeing abortion on demand. This 1973 decision by the Supreme Court preempted a nationwide political debate that was raging in nearly every state at the time. Indeed, some sixteen states had already reformed their abortion statutes, making abortion more widely available. As well, as Michael Barone, a historian of this continuing saga has pointed out, “By the time the Roe v. Wade decision was issued, about 70% of the nation’s population lived within 100 miles — an easy two hours’ drive — of a state with a legalized abortion law. And just as the Supreme Court was speaking, legislatures in almost all of the states were going into session; many would probably have liberalized their abortion laws if the court had not acted.”15
I offer this example not in order to take a stand on abortion but to take a stand against juridical moves that freeze out citizen dialogue. Juridical politics is black and white; it is adversarial; it is winner-take-all. The juridical model of politics, pushed by liberal activists originally, now embraced by their conservative counterparts, preempts democratic contestation and a politics of respect and melioration. When the Supreme Court threw all its weight to one side in a highly fraught situation in which people of goodwill differed, it aroused from the beginning strong and shocked opposition from those who despaired that their government, at its highest level, sanctioned what they took to be the destruction of human life at its most vulnerable stage. By guaranteeing that pro-abortion and anti-abortion forces need have no debate over time with one another, other than through judges, the court deepened a politics of resentment. There are, alas, many more examples of this sort.
But I fear I shall weary the reader should I tell further tales of our discontents. Let us look, instead, at a few proposed solutions and assess whether they promise democratic renewal or something else altogether. One panacea sought by some impatient with the compromises and mediations of democratic civil society, and frustrated whether by government inaction or too much action but of a sort they oppose, is a direct by contrast to a representative democratic system. Let the people speak! This populist theme is a recurring refrain in American political life. Historically populists often wanted government off their backs and power restored to their own communities. Currently populists feed on mistrust and antielitism — and anyone unlucky enough to hold a government office of any kind is subject to their ire.
In the American presidential elections of 1992, populist fervour gained surprising strength in the person, and candidacy, of the Texas millionaire Ross Perot. Perot is far less important than the phenomenon he helped to catalyze. Consider, briefly, one of his proposed cures for democratic ills, a cure that has been endorsed, to ends rather different from Perot’s, by some commentators on the left, as well. Such populists, or strong democrats as they like to be called, would perfect democracy by eliminating barriers between the people’s will and its forthright articulation. Pure democracy beckons, whirring and humming in the background of such visions, sometimes called “the electronic town hall.”
It would work like this: American democracy is in trouble because the direct expression of the people’s will is thwarted. But technology will come to our rescue through instant plebiscites via interactive television and telepolling. Should we include managed competition in a health-care proposal? Press the yes button or the no button. Should we bomb Baghdad because of yet another Saddam Hussein blunder or nefarious scheme? Press that button. What those who push such techno-solutions fail to appreciate is that plebiscitary majoritarianism is quite different from the dream of a democratic polity sustained by debate and judgement. Plebiscites have been used routinely to shore up anti-democratic, majoritarian movements and regimes — Argentinian Peronism comes to mind.
Even if one could devise a way to “sample” the political responses of the 120 million households in the United States, the plebiscite solution to democratic disillusionment must be criticized no matter who is championing its use. The distinction between a democratic and a plebiscitary system is no idle one. In a plebiscitary system the views of the majority can more easily swamp minority or unpopular views. Plebiscitism is compatible with authoritarian politics carried out under the guise of, or with the connivance of, majority opinion. That opinion can be registered ritualistically, so there is no need for debate with one’s fellow citizens on substantive questions. All that is required is a calculus of opinion.
True democracy, Abraham Lincoln’s “last, best hope on earth,” is a rather different proposition. It requires, indeed its very lifeblood, is a mode of participation with one’s fellow citizens animated by a sense of responsibility for one’s society. The participation of plebiscitarianism is dramatically at odds with this democratic ideal. Watching television and pushing a button is a privatizing experience: it appeals to us as consumers, consumers of political decision-making in this instance, not as public citizens.
On the surface, being asked your opinion and being given a chance to register it instantly may seem democratic—one gets to make one’s opinions known. But the “one” in this formulation is the private person enclosed within herself rather than the public citizen. A compilation of opinions does not make a civic culture; such a culture emerges only from a deliberative process. To see button-pressing or making a phone call as a meaningful act on a par with lobbying, meeting, writing letters to the editor, serving on the local school board, working for a candidate, helping to forge a coalition to promote a particular program or policy or to stop something bad from happening parallels a crude version of so-called “preference theory” in economics.
This theory holds that in a free-market society individual consumer choices result in the greatest benefit to society as a whole at the same time as they meet individual needs. The presumption behind this theory is that each and every one of us is a “preference maximizer.” Aside from being a simplistic account of human motivation, preference theory lends itself to a blurring of important distinctions. According to preference maximizers, there is no such thing as a social good — there are only aggregates of private goods. Measuring our opinions through electronic town halls is a variant on this crude but common notion. It promises as a cure more of what ails us. Under the banner of more perfect democratic choice, we become complicit in eroding even further those elements of deliberation, reason, judgement, and shared goodwill that alone make genuine choice and democracy possible. We would turn our representatives into factotums, mouthpieces expressing our electronically generated will. This is a nightmare not a democratic dream.
Is there any way to break the spiral of mistrust and cynicism? Yes, but it will be difficult. Some, and I include myself in this number, embrace the idea of a new social covenant. What we have in mind goes like this: unless Americans, or the citizens of any faltering democracy, can once again be shown that they are all in it together; unless democratic citizens remember that being a citizen is a civic identity, not primarily a private sinecure; unless government can find a way to respond to people’s deepest concerns, a new democratic social covenant has precious little chance of taking hold. But take hold it must if we are to stem the tide of divisive wedge issues that pit citizen against citizen in what social scientists call a zero-sum game: I win; you lose — that juridical model of politics I have already decried. The social covenant is not a dream of unanimity or harmony but the name given to a hope that we can draw on what we hold in common even as we disagree.
Let us imagine how a new social covenant might work in America’s troubled cities and on her mean streets. A democratic social covenant would work to draw whites and blacks together around their shared concern for safe streets and neighbourhoods, in part by altering the terms of the public debate. The social covenanteer would tell liberals who espouse untrammelled lifestyle options that they must forgo their disdain for the more stable values — especially those of family and religious faith — that most people cherish and the concerns to which those values give rise.
The interviews I have conducted with mothers and grandmothers who are active in anti-gang and anti-drug politics in their communities show clearly how much at odds their views are with a certain sort of liberal dogma that refuses to confront the realities of violence and even chaos in housing projects and dangerous streets. The problem, say the mothers and grandmothers, is too much freedom for armed persons, many of them teenagers, who prey on others and who are not taken off streets and out of the neighbourhoods they terrorize. They want more police patrols, more neighbourhood power, less freedom for armed teenagers to run amok, tougher penalties for crime.
The social covenanteer also recognizes that market strategies are ill-designed to speak directly to what concerns people the most in the worst of our inner-city neighbourhoods. He or she would tell gun advocates and civil libertarians that, yes, murderers do kill people, but they use guns to do it. Surely you would favour removing guns from the hands of dangerous people. Can you not assume that a fourteen-year-old drug-using dropout is dangerous, or potentially so? Would his freedom be unduly hampered if we made certain that he did not carry a gun into a school, a schoolyard, or a supermarket? The libertarian might respond that it is already against the law for minors to carry loaded firearms. But the tough-minded advocate of a social covenant would respond, “Yes, I know that. But the fact of the matter is that children in America’s inner cities are armed and dangerous, primarily to one another. Surely we can begin the process of disarming!”
Take a second case. There are those prepared to excuse violent outrages on the grounds that looting, pillaging, burning, and beating are expressions of “rage at social injustice.” The social covenant message to them is to get a grip on reality and call things by their real names. When I read headlines in so-called progressive journals in the aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles proclaiming, “L.A. Uprising!” or “L.A. Rebellion,” I felt real chagrin. A paternalistic, liberal racism that refuses to see all citizens as responsible remains racist. To excuse or even condone utterly random violence, marked not by marches and organizing into councils and issuing manifestos but by a looting frenzy tied to a brutal destruction of persons and property, is to perpetrate a sickly fascination with violence, as if shedding blood was inherently a political act, and a radical one at that. Such enchantment with violence ill serves not only its victims, primarily those in the neighbourhoods in which the riots occurred, but perpetuates what Hannah Arendt found to be one of the most pervasive and dangerous of all political ideas—and she indicted left and right alike for their enchantment with it at different times and in different places — the idea that something good comes out of something evil; that authentic politics flows from the barrel of a gun, or a knife blade, or a gasoline bomb.
Government can be effective in lowering the homicide and terror rate in inner-city neighbourhoods, and we do not need to abolish the Bill of Rights to accomplish these goals. But we do need, as a first step, to break through cynicism and anomie and to reverse the spiral of delegitimation. The democratic social covenant rests on the presumption that one’s fellow citizens are people of goodwill who yearn for the opportunity to work together rather than to continue glaring at one another across racial, class, and ideological divides, assuming ill will on the part of others. To accomplish this reversal we must tend to the badly battered institutions of civil society I discussed at the outset.
An enormous task, yes, but worth our best efforts. As we enter the twenty-first century, we may learn, perhaps sooner than we would like, whether Lincoln’s expression of the hope of American democracy was an epitaph or the harbinger of a brighter democratic future for America and hence for the world. For if the American republic falters it will be the crash heard round the world. Our many friends in other countries, especially in the young and fragile democracies, will tremble, falter, and perhaps fail without the ballast America uniquely provides given her power and her promise. That is the glorious burden of American democracy in the next century.
Once I was asked by Jamie Swift, a broadcaster who was putting together a radio series on “The U.S.A. Today” for CBC Radio’s Ideas, “What does it mean to you to be an American?”
I faltered for a moment and mumbled that ubiquitous word “gosh” before I got my bearings and responded, “It means that one can share a dream of political possibility, which is to say, a dream of democracy. It means that one can make one’s voice heard. It means both individual accomplishment as well as a sense of responsibility. It means sharing the possibility of a brotherhood and sisterhood that is perhaps fractious — as all brotherhoods and sister-hoods are — and yet united in some spirit that’s a spirit more of good than ill will. It means that one is marked by history but not totally burdened with it and defined by it. It means that one can expect some basic sense of fair play … will be recalled and called upon. I think Americans are committed to a roughand-ready sense of fair play, and a kind of social egalitarianism, if you will, an egalitarianism of manners. I think that’s the best I can do.”
I will try to do better in the next chapter in which I will hone in on a politics of displacement, a politics that dislodges the concerns of the citizen and public life in favour of politicizing all features of who and what we are. At stake is the delicate intertwining of public and private life characteristic of the democratic drama.