Mark Bauerlein of Emory University interviewed me for First Things, and this is the result. We ranged from youth voter turnout to civic education, from Jane Addams and Emerson to Seamus Heaney. I enjoyed it and appreciated Mark’s questions.
Several political theories and ideologies are invested in distinguishing the state from the private sector (which may encompass the market, families and civil society):
Here is my objection. I don’t think that people experience actual institutions differently depending on whether they belong to the state or the private sector. Phenomenologically, the political and the civil are not sharply distinct.
I had that realization a year or so ago when I was with classical liberals/libertarians in the conference hotel of Michigan State University. I wondered idly whether that was a public or private space. It was not easy to tell, given the complex relationships between a state, its university, and the university’s hotel. But I realized that I had no reason to care. The distinction would make no difference to how I was treated.
I had the same thought again recently in New Haven, the city where I first became politically active three decades ago. We were discussing Ian Shapiro’s fine recent book, Politics Without Domination. I agree with much in it, but not with this distinction on p. 31:
Political institutions are centrally concerned with power. This differentiates them from civil institutions, which, though invariably suffused with power dynamics, are ultimately geared to the pursuit of other goals. … Governments should stay out [of the affairs of civil institutions] unless people’s basic interests are at stake, and even when they are, it is best to seek the least intrusive available means to protect them. But political institutions are different because politics is about power through and through.
Compare a classroom in Shapiro’s university, Yale, with a street nearby in New Haven, and think of the various people who populate these spaces: students, workers, shoppers, professors, salespeople, bosses and administrators in various roles. To students, I think Yale will feel the most like a government, with its centralized authority and formidable power to judge, exclude and punish. New Haven will generally feel more permissive and informal.
If they are activists, students may find themselves working voluntarily with New Haven municipal employees on common goals, like making the city more beautiful or safer. The city employees and the students wear different hats, but they all have complex lives and multiple attachments. A city official is also a parent; a student is also a shopper. The official normally has very limited scope to compel but may have tax dollars to allocate. Those dollars work just the same as the money that students might generate from a fundraiser. Students, other citizens, and workers all contribute to making the city with their bodies, their voices, their purchases, and their choices to stay or to exit.
If we start with a fundamental distinction between the state (with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force) and voluntary civil associations (with their non-political purposes), then we will strive to disentangle hybrid cases–a Yale police officer who carries a gun as a sworn peace officer but gets her paycheck from a private institution; a lab that is funded by the NIH but employs Yale students; a university disciplinary hearing the enforces Title IX; a campus/community event that is funded by the city and philanthropy.
I think such hybridity is not the exception but the norm, because all institutions are composed of people who have multiple identities and objectives. The state is not made up of human beings “centrally concerned with power” but is composed of teachers, accountants, counselors, office managers–just as Yale is. A government or state is not one thing, a leviathan that derives all its powers from its ultimate ability to compel. It is rather a bunch of schools, parks, military units, prisons, welfare offices, scientific labs, deliberative fora, authoritarian fiefdoms, secret agencies, purchasing offices, etc., etc. It is pervasively related to various “private” entities that have similar functions. In New Haven, the Alders have what passes for state sovereignty, but all of them are also mainly other things: business owners, activists, teachers, and one Yale undergrad. When they define and address problems, they probably don’t sharply distinguish their roles.
As Shapiro argues (p. 21), Foucault went too far in seeing every space as equally suffused with domination. A prison is different from a classroom or a clinic. But Shapiro draws the distinction too sharply. A classroom may be no easier to escape than a prison, even if it’s in a private school. Yale may dominate much more thoroughly than New Haven does, and Yale may dominate because of its function as a gatekeeper to a corporate sector that determines what the US government does.
I would propose this alternative view. People are involved with “politics” at all scales, in all sectors, and in a vast variety of forms. “Politics” does mean domination and exclusion, but also deliberation, problem-solving, and co-creation. These are the two sides of the coin, as powerfully illustrated by the Book of Nehemiah.
The venues of politics constantly influence each other, and often those agencies that are officially arms of the state are not the most influential or the most likely to dominate.
We are all subject to domination, prone to dominate others, and capable of improving our shared condition. Our degree of power and vulnerability varies with our social position; to be a just person requires attention to those differences. But there is room for everyone to combat domination, everywhere. And how we manage that task in smaller settings may affect what happens at larger scales. The Tocquevillian argument for the importance of civic culture is that citizens who learn to deliberate, cooperate, and respect each other in associations may be more likely to choose national leaders who do the same.
Elinor Ostrom concluded her presidential address to the American Political Science Association (1996) with a call for a different approach to civic education:
All too many of our textbooks focus exclusively on leaders and, worse, only national-level leaders. Students completing an introductory course on American government, or political science more generally, will not learn that they play an essential role in sustaining democracy. Citizen participation is presented as contacting leaders, organizing interest group and parties, and voting. That citizens need additional skills and knowledge to resolve the social dilemmas they face is left unaddressed. Their moral decisions are not discussed. … It is ordinary persons and citizens who craft and sustain the workability of the institutions of everyday life. We owe an obligation to the next generation to carry forward the best of our knowledge about how individuals solve the multiplicity of social dilemmas- large and small-that they face.
See also polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; from classical liberalism to a civic perspective; against state-centric political theory; is our constitutional order doomed?; the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution; and free speech at a university.
On the one hand … The recent shutdown and the threat of a second one result from the Democrats’ choices as well as Donald Trump’s. Nancy Pelosi could reflect that she previously supported legislation that expanded walls on the Southern border, that $6 billion is a mere 0.16 percent of the federal budget, and that closing the government to thwart the president’s desire for a wall causes real people real pain–above all the low-income contract workers who will never be repaid for missed work. These might be reasons for her to compromise. I might add that the shutdown gives me the satisfaction of a successful political brawl without costing me anything. (I wasn’t even inconvenienced at the various TSA inspections I crossed while the TSA workers weren’t being paid.) And there is a long, very ugly tradition of sacrificing other people’s immediate interests for political purposes, sometimes justified on the ground that you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs or that the revolution is more likely to begin if the government gets worse. This is a path to evil paved with dubious intentions.
On the other hand … The president was elected with (although not necessarily because of) racist and factually false claims: migration from the south is hurting “us,” a wall would stop it, and the republic to our south can be forced to pay for it. In a world of partisan polarization and weaponized disinformation, there are scant consequences for making such claims. A shutdown forces Trump to pay a price. For the American people and the political elites who watch the public’s reactions, it sharply clarifies what is at stake. It has reminded many voters of the value of civil servants’ work. It deters similar behavior by Trump and by his allies. Along with a few more such conflicts, it may prevent him from being reelected.
In the end, I favor playing hardball. I think the last shutdown was a good moment, and it is worth risking a second one by negotiating hard with the president.
We must be constantly attentive to the dangers of forcing conflicts when other people bear the costs, and we must resist the narcotic attractions of partisan victory. I’ve been reading a lot of Gandhi lately and can imagine him fasting or doing something self-sacrificial after having heightened tensions in this way–for the good of his soul and as a method of preventing hubris.
But he and other nonviolent political leaders do intentionally heighten tensions. When the openly racist Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, “Bull” Connor, was defeated by a White moderate candidate, the Civil Rights Movement rushed to take advantage of his lame duck months in office. They knew that he would turn firehoses and dogs on the children and teenagers in their movement. His reaction was an opportunity for victory that they didn’t want to squander.
Just because the end does not justify the means, it doesn’t follow that you can’t strategize with goals in mind. We must not forget the contract workers who go without pay in a shutdown. Neither can we overlook the long, slow, and vast injustices of our immigration and criminal justice policies. A shutdown forces those issues onto the agenda and may increase the odds of a new coalition governing the country.
If public deliberation is a value (as I think it is), then there would be better ways to reason together about public policy. We wouldn’t have to force vulnerable people to sacrifice in the interest of clarity. But the reality is a system of unaccountable government plus partisan polarization and hypercharged misinformatibon. Under those circumstances, nothing cuts through the fog and illuminates citizens’ choices as well as a crisis. Wise leaders must be ready to force crises if they think they can win.
See also: should Democrats play constitutional hardball in 2019-20?; game theory and the shutdown; moderation, civility, and bipartisanship are not the same; Brag, Cave and Crow: a contribution to game theory; and Gandhi on the primacy of means over ends.
I’m on Amtrak, en route from Boston to New Haven. I’ve also been in Newark, Delaware, the Philadelphia airport, and other points along the Northeast Corridor this week. This means navigating portions of a fragmented public transportation network that is composed of long-distance train lines, commuter rail lines, subways, public buses, and even some ferries. It extends from southern Maine well into Virginia, serving a population of 50 million or more.
In a way, this network is already connected. Google Maps does a fairly decent job of telling you how to get from an address in one city to an address in a different city by public transportation. Since all these transit systems take US currency, your cash or credit card enables you to move from one mode of transit to another. But because the systems don’t coordinate themselves, the whole network is less efficient, useful, and enticing than it could be.
Imagine that the various transportation networks (municipal, regional, long-distance) kept their autonomy–for political reasons and because a behemoth agency might perform worse–but they coordinated closely through a compact. It could have these features:
I’m certainly for subsidizing public transportation, but it’s significant that other OECD countries actually charge transit customers more, spend proportionally less government money, and provide much better service for many more people. Once public transportation becomes a welfare good, it may be subsidized, but it is degraded. A unified northeastern system should receive federal and state support, but the ideal is a more attractive business model that encourages the riders to pay more for investments. The goal would be to get a lot more people more efficiently from A to B with a lot less carbon.
(Newark, DE) In 2010, I wrote a post entitled “British exceptionalism: how the UK is different from Europe.” It still draws traffic these days, probably because people want to understand Brexit and the roots of anti-“European” sentiment in a country that most Americans consider a part of Europe. My theme was the dramatically different level of economic development in Britain vs. continental Europe ca. 1930. I doubt that such differences explain Brexit, but I remain interested in ways that the UK has diverged from its continental neighbors.
Here’s another way. William D. Rubenstien observes, “In 1789…, it is generally estimated that there were about 250,000 members of the French nobility, but only about 300 members of the British aristocracy!” In France and (I believe) in every continental country, the aristocracy was a substantial caste, delimited by naming conventions and granted hereditary privileges under the law. The French nobility voted away their own privileges during the heady night of August 4, 1789, but until then, they had been exempt from regular taxes while permitted to tax peasants, allowed to wear swords and hunt, guaranteed a separate justice system, and in many other ways, set apart. These privileges applied to whole extended families and were by no means limited to the individuals who held the aristocratic fiefs and titles, from baron up to duke.
In contrast, since the Middle Ages, the English (and then the British) aristocracy consisted of the “peers” who held specific titles, of which there were only a few hundred. These titles were possessions that could be granted, inherited, or confiscated, although not sold. One person held each title at a time (or one couple, if you consider married peers to share in a title). Peers had very limited privileges, such as the right to sit in the House of Lords and be tried there. The rest of their extended families were not aristocrats.
Britain also had (and to some extent still has) a gentry, composed of ladies and gentlemen. Traditionally, they were defined as people who made their living from rents on land, clerical or military offices, or professional fees for lawyering or doctoring–not from labor or “trade.” As economic power shifted to merchants and manufacturers, they increasingly entered the gentry–no longer having to buy land or professionally educate their sons to count as gentlemen.
More like a class than a caste, the gentry has been defined by its social role and power. That makes the borders fuzzy. It creates some opportunities for mobility, and also a stronger ideological assumption that upward mobility (as opposed to equality) is the hallmark of a just society. I’d speculate that this is one reason “neoliberalism” has more of a hold in the UK (especially England) than it does on the Continent.
See also: British exceptionalism: how the UK is different from Europe; two approaches to social capital: Bourdieu vs. the American literature; when social advantage persists for millennia; sorting out human welfare, equity and mobility; and why some forms of advantage are more stubborn than others.