|
The
New Citizenship
Redefining the Relationship Between Government and the Governed
Will
Marshall
From
Rebuilding
Civil Society. A Symposium from: The New Democrat, volume
7, number 2 March/April 1995.
After more
than a half-century of centralizing decisions in Washington, people
are beginning to reclaim power from government. The New Deal's
main motif-the confident and expansive use of federal power-is
fading into history. To replace it, Americans are inventing a
post-industrial model of governance that relies less on central
bureaucracies and more on citizen and community initiative.
Last year's
election emphatically confirmed that Americans want radical changes
in government. Yet while the nation's political and media elite
persists in viewing this phenomenon in ideological terms, as a
shift to the right, its origins are technological. Instead of
blaming Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh, defenders of Washington's
ancien regime ought instead to be pondering the political implications
of the personal computer and "real time" global communication.
Just as
the Industrial Revolution disrupted the rhythms of a predominantly
agricultural society, the techniques of the information economy
are reshaping the social and political order of 20th century America.
Specifically, they are diffusing information-and therefore power-from
large institutions to individuals. This decentralizing tendency,
in turn, is changing the way we organize private and public institutions.
During the
1980s, businesses began dismantling corporate hierarchies that
prevented them from swiftly adapting to fast-changing global markets.
Now it's government's turn. The Administration's National Performance
Review, led by Vice President Al Gore, represents the first serious
effort to "reinvent" the federal government for the Information
Age. So far, its focus has been on shrinking the federal workforce
and making agencies work better. That's progress, but a more fundamental
task beckons: returning power and responsibility to local institutions
and individuals.
In their
haste to shrink government, the Republicans have missed this essential
aim of devolution. They propose folding welfare and other federal
programs into block grants and dumping them on the states, offering
governors more flexibility in return for less spending. But block
grants merely reshuffle responsibilities. The point is to reduce
state as well as national bureaucracy and to redefine the relationship
between citizens and their government.
Civic leaders
already are taking the initiative. From the charter school movement
for public school choice to Boston's City Year youth volunteer
corps, from community policing initiatives to Habitat for Humanity
and other private community development ventures, public entrepreneurs
are creating a civic alternative to bureaucratic problem-solving.
The emergence
of the "new citizenship" movement, which unites civic practitioners
and theorists of civil society, also attests to the rebirth of
civic consciousness in America. In its Civic Declaration, for
example, the American Civic Forum urges national policymakers
to consult citizens, not just political elites, and to revisit
some basic questions: Which tasks are properly the responsibility
of citizens or community institutions, and which require direct
governmental action? How can citizens get more involved in public
decisions, to prevent experts and political professionals from
dominating that process? How can we better gauge the impact of
government actions on the character of our citizens or the health
of our social institutions, especially the family?
Such questions
rarely arise in conventional left-right debates. Modern liberalism
defines its very purpose as affirming governmental activism. On
the contrary, say conservatives, government is the problem, not
the solution. They are both wrong. It's clear that Americans don't
want a paternalistic state superintending every detail of their
lives. But there's scant evidence that they want to disable government
as an instrument of common purpose.
The new
citizenship represents a third choice in American politics. It
is defined by four key themes: reciprocal responsibility; catalytic
government; civic culture; and civil society.
Reciprocal
Responsibility
The decline
of contemporary liberalism began when its concern for broad social
justice degenerated into special interest politics. Having fought
honorably and successfully to secure equal justice for workers,
blacks, and women, liberals looked for new wrongs to right. This
led not only into the morass of preferential policies, but also
to the minting of new "rights" for children, welfare mothers,
homosexuals, the handicapped, and practically anyone else who
could claim that society or fate had victimized them. U.S. corporations
also got in the act, wringing billions of dollars in federal subsidies
to shield them from the rigors of market competition.
The politics
of proliferating rights and entitlements, unleavened by a corresponding
ethic of obligation to the commonweal, has literally and figuratively
bankrupted the nation. And by making government the ultimate arbiter
of every public dispute, it has sapped individual and civic initiative
and turned self-reliant citizens into passive consumers of public
benefits.
While liberals
have seduced the public with promises of something for nothing,
conservatives erode the civic ethic in a different way, by extolling
private competition and consumption over public life. Despite
their superficial differences, in fact, both the left and the
right validate a selfish materialism that encourages individuals
to grab all they can, whether from the welfare state or the market.
The civic
alternative is a new politics of reciprocity that links rights
and responsibilities: Government should expand opportunities for
citizens willing to give something back to their communities and
their country. National service is emblematic of this approach.
It offers young Americans aid for college or postsecondary training
in return for a year of community service work. Why not go further
and demand that all federal programs ask beneficiaries to contribute
something in return?
Catalytic
Government
Although
conservative propaganda has obscured the good that government
does, Americans lack confidence in government mainly because major
public sector systems are failing. Our public schools lag international
standards and provide poor students with an abysmal education.
Public housing has become synonymous with social dysfunction.
The criminal justice system seems powerless to stop endemic violence,
especially by juveniles.
Moreover,
these public systems have become formidable obstacles to public
innovation. In order to dramatically improve the quality of our
schools, liberate poor people from dependency, help low-income
families get decent housing, and protect our streets, we must
either bypass or dismantle bureaucracies that monopolize resources
and resist change.
The critical
task is to replace bureaucratic government with a catalytic model
for governing that equips citizens and communities to solve their
own problems. Such a model decentralizes decisions, puts resources
directly in the hands of citizens, expands choices in public services,
uses competition to lower costs and spur innovation, and focuses
relentlessly on outcomes rather than process.
A prime
example is the charter school movement, which harnesses the power
of choice and competition to reinvent public schools from the
ground up. Begun in Minnesota, charter schools break the local
school districts' monopoly by allowing people outside or innovators
within the system to start public schools of their own. These
schools must be chartered by a public agency, to ensure their
adherence to broad performance and non-discrimination standards.
Beyond that, however, they operate free of the yoke of bureaucratic
rules and restrictive union practices. The new schools give families
more choices and ossified school districts real competition. No
longer able to take their "customers" for granted, the districts
are forced to innovate and customize their offerings to meet the
community's needs. And unlike the conservative push to privatize
public schools through vouchers, charter schools retain the public
mission and character of our education system.
Civil
Society
The new
citizenship represents a fresh choice for Americans frustrated
by a sterile public debate framed in stark polarities: left versus
right; public versus private; government versus markets. It speaks
from the vantage of America's "third sector"-the myriad civic
enterprises, religious, education, voluntary, press, business,
labor, and charitable organizations that mediate between citizens,
government, and markets.
Yet America's
civic sector has long been in eclipse, squeezed by an overreaching
government and the market's "invisible hand." If the left remains
wedded to government action in pursuit of distributive justice,
the right seems oblivious to the destructive impact on civil society
of unrestricted competition. Today's global redistribution of
jobs and investment has devastated whole communities and driven
down wages for low- skilled workers. Conversely, the breakdown
of family, neighborhood, and social networks, combined with the
erosion of the values of hard work, self-reliance, and personal
and community responsibility, deplete the cultural strengths we
need to cope with fundamental economic changes.
Without
a new burst of civic energies and innovation, the United States
is unlikely to make much headway against our most intractable
social problems: teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, drugs, and
violent crime. As Peter Drucker notes in Post-Capitalist Society,
government's record in solving social problems is uninspiring.
Public sector productivity is very low, and government bureaucracies
have few incentives to improve performance.
Government,
therefore, should contract social work to social institutions,
which are both more productive and less impersonal. Non- governmental
organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous and the Salvation Army,
says Drucker, are virtually the only ones to show any sustained
success in helping people overcome the problems that hold them
back.
Government
can redistribute wealth to redress economic imbalances, but it
does not know how to reweave America's shredded social fabric.
Bureaucratic compassion has proven a poor substitute for the nurturance,
moral support, and guidance traditionally provided by families
and communities. We face no greater social challenge today than
socializing the children of broken and impoverished families,
many of them born to teenage mothers. Social institutions, which
operate within a framework of social discipline and community
norms, are best suited for this work.
Civic
Culture
Finally,
the new citizenship offers a unifying creed for a nation struggling
to build a strong multiethnic democracy amid incredible diversity.
America's racial, ethnic, and religious variety is integral to
our dynamism and creativity. But an obsessive emphasis on group
difference is corroding the bonds of mutual trust and common belief
that tie us together as a nation.
In a paper
for the Progressive Foundation, Jim Sleeper, author of The Closest
of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York,
describes those beliefs as a "civic culture" that transcends group
identity:
The democratic
precepts enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the
U.S. Constitution form the common core of our national identity.
Around these vital principles has grown a less formal but palpable
civic culture, emphasizing such characteristically 'American'
virtues as tolerance, optimism, self-restraint, self-reliance,
reason, and civic activism in the public interest as a function
of both benevolence and enlightened self- interest.
A civic
perspective is fundamentally at odds with the identity politics
that classifies Americans along lines of race, ethnicity, national
origin, and gender. The new ethnocentrism animates the quest for
ethnic and racial preference in hiring, college admissions, and
government contracting. It is behind the recent push for racial
gerrymandering of congressional districts, which has undermined
biracial politics, especially in the South.
In the American
political tradition, rights and responsibilities inhere in citizens,
not in groups. A robust ethos and practice of citizenship is an
essential antidote to the growing balkanization of America. As
Sleeper says, "Defenders of American pluralism need to make clear
that whenever multiculturalism turns into identity politics or
ethnocentrism-that is, whenever it becomes an ideology that forecloses
a common culture and a polity based on shared principles-it undermines
freedom and therefore the basis for multiculturalism itself."
The new
citizenship fulfills a deeply felt need in America for a middle
ground between the domains of government coercion and market competition.
It says to liberals that public activism need not be denominated
in the currency of bureaucratic programs. It says to conservatives
that the market cannot supply the civic values and skills necessary
to sustain family and community life. And it begins to resolve
the dilemma facing progressives in the late 20th century: how
to champion public purposes without embracing bureaucratic governance.
By decentralizing power from government to citizens and communities,
we point the way toward a new politics for the Information Age.
reg.
Will Marshall
is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Back
to Parties & the Public Index
|
