Sheila Kennedy – Page 1068 – A jaundiced look at the world we live in.

Review of Public Freedom

Vol. 18 No. 11 (November, 2008) pp.

Public Freedom, by Dana Villa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 448pp.

Cloth. $75.00/£44.95. ISBN: 9780691135939. Paper. $24.95/£14.95. ISBN: 9780691135946.

Reviewed by Sheila Suess Kennedy, School of Public & Environmental Affairs, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Email: shekenne [at] iupui.edu.

Some scholars stake out an area of inquiry that is tightly focused and contained, scholarly real estate small enough to be examined and parsed so completely as to be effectively “owned” – an academic phenomenon sometimes described as knowing everything there is to know about not very much. Dana Villa is obviously not one of these scholars. To the contrary; in this book, he has shared with his readers an ambitious, intellectually rich and often provocative effort to engage with one of the most persistent questions of political philosophy, and to make a cogent (and I believe persuasive) argument for a particular conception of civic life and the public good.

In PUBLIC FREEDOM, Villa addresses what may be the thorniest issue of governance in a free society – the persistent tension and proper balance between the individualism nurtured in and privileged by liberal democratic regimes and a civic republican tradition that he admits has “often displayed a deep-seated resistance to pluralism and anything resembling open-ended argument” (p.3). Villa’s willingness to confront the dangers of a too-enthusiastic embrace of a poorly-conceived public realm informs his careful, nuanced argument for a reinvigorated and reconfigured public square and a more robust conception of citizenship and the public good. The intellectual rigor and honesty that characterize this book serve to distinguish Villa’s arguments from those offered by advocates for a vague and idealized communitarianism.

Villa believes that the abandonment of active participation in the public sphere (as he defines both participation and the public) is transforming Americans from citizens to subjects, changing them from empowered participants in public life to relatively powerless, passive observers of governing elites. He draws upon Tocqueville, Hegel, Mill and Arendt, among others, to argue for a new balance between the universal and the particular, the common good and enlightened self-interest. At the heart of his argument is an echo of an admonition that has been attributed to both Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry to the effect that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” (Phillips 1853, at 13) – here, that sentiment is expressed as the notion that “citizens must be given something to do for the public if they [are] to become capable of exercising the ‘active and constant surveillance’ of governmental authorities that a representative system demands” (p.17).

The main focus of the book is an extended consideration of what genuine democratic participation might look like – an effort to define what Villa calls “the generalization of interests,” the relationship between our individual interests and those of the society within which we inevitably pursue those interests. What, he asks, is the nature of the public spaces our particular governing decisions have created? How do individuals exercise power within those spaces, and how might we strengthen their ability to do so? How do we prevent both the market and the state from dominating and ultimately extinguishing the public sphere? How do we retain the capacity to exercise genuine and meaningful citizenship and how do we protect the rule of law?

In order to answer these questions, and to flesh out his conception of the public sphere, Villa traces the Tocquevillian notions of civil society and local and political associations, reminding readers that the distinctions between our governing institutions on the one hand and religion, the marketplace, and public opinion on the other are relatively modern phenomena. Tocqueville’s signal contribution, according to Villa, was to identify civil society as a mediating realm between and among these newly separated social institutions, a realm where citizens acquire and hone associational and political skills.

Villa proceeds to build upon Tocqueville’s conception of civil society and the public sphere by examining the contributions and arguments of other philosophers, primarily but not exclusively the philosophies of Hegel, Arendt, Mill, Foucalt and Heidegger. In each of these discussions, he offers penetrating insights and displays a sometimes dazzling scholarship. While the language of the book is accessible, the analysis is demanding and closely reasoned (this is not a book to be blithely assigned as undergraduate background reading). I found his analysis of Arendt particularly insightful – especially his interpretation of what Arendt means by the “Social Question” and what she suggests about the differences between the American and French Revolutions.

In his concluding chapter, Villa draws heavily on Arendt as he returns to the question of the proper balance between positive and negative freedom – or, as he frames it, “the freedom to be a ‘participator’ in government” on the one hand (positive freedom), and the “emphasis on civil rights and ‘negative’ freedom” on the other. “We move,” he says “from a civic republican understanding to a liberal (and increasingly economic) one” (p.343). In a particularly penetrating paragraph summing up what he believes to be the proper conception of the public realm, he writes that

“The idea of community that haunts the Western tradition, then, is one that repeatedly sacrifices the fact of human plurality on the altar of unity, wholeness or oneness. It is an idea of political community that is not, in Arendt’s view, political at all. A political community is precisely a ‘community without unity.’ It is an association of diverse equals whose shared care for the public world takes the form of intense and open-ended debate, deliberation and decision. What is at stake in these political discussions and decisions is the best way to ‘preserve and augment’ the space of public freedom these citizens have either constructed or inherited.” (p.352)

This description, it seems to me, is exactly right; it captures the reality – both the promise and the challenge – of the public realm and the American community in ways that more idealized versions do not.

Throughout the book, it is clear that Villa’s concerns about the viability of the American public realm have been exacerbated by the actions of the Bush Administration. He notes with disapproval the Administration’s use of fear (notably its ‘War on Terror’) to facilitate the accretion of executive power during the Bush Administration, and he links that phenomenon with the corresponding atrophy of the robust citizenship for which he is arguing. As he concludes,

“At a time when our public world is under attack by an array of economic, technological and ideological forces (to say nothing of the cabal of unwitting Schmittians currently occupying the executive branch), it is important to realize that ‘care for the public world’ is the furthest thing from a ‘leisure-time sport for aristocrats.’ It is, it turns out, a responsibility we all share; a responsibility that grows heavier each day as the boundaries of our public world – and the attention span of many of our fellow citizens – perpetually contracts.”

In his introduction, Villa tells us that this book was written over several years. It was published in 2008, meaning (academic publishing being what it is) that it was completed well before the recent national elections. The obvious question that arises is what Villa would think about the ability of the Obama campaign (aided by the disaster that has been the Bush Presidency) to generate massive participation in the political process. The campaign had in excess of three million discrete donors; even more astonishing, it enlisted millions of volunteers who canvassed their neighborhoods, called their friends, wrote letters to the editors of local papers, delivered absentee ballots and drove people to the polls. Is this increased political activity an anomaly, or could it be the harbinger of a return to the sort of participatory civic life that Villa believes essential?

For obvious reasons, that is a question this book cannot answer. However, in his argument for a more vital and robust public square and a more capacious conception of freedom, Villa makes a substantial contribution, both to the political theory literature and to a more textured understanding of the nature of a genuinely free society.

REFERENCES:

Phillips, Wendell. 1853. Speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28, 1852. – “Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.”

*********************

Comments

Review of Democracy in a Democratic State

Book Review

Bureaucracy in a Democratic State: A Governance Perspective

Kenneth J. Meier

Lawrence J. O’Toole, Jr.

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Kenneth Meier and Lawrence O’Toole are to be complimented for wading once again into the muddy waters of the ongoing public administration debate over “which is the dog and which is the tail”—the thorny question of the relative power of democratically elected political representatives and the bureaucracies through which they must act to effectuate the presumed will of the people.

As the authors are quick to acknowledge, this is an issue that has bedeviled scholars and generated contending theories for years. Their book focuses upon two streams of scholarship, political science and public administration, disciplines which bring different normative assumptions to the inquiry, and they do a good job of summarizing and reviewing the relevant literatures of those disciplines. As the authors note, however, much of the scholarly literature has been rendered inapposite by today’s “governance” environment, where policy mandates are carried out not by easily defined “bureaus” or “agencies” staffed by government employees, but by often ad-hoc networks of government employees, contract employees (for-profit and non-profit), public-private partnerships and the like.

The New Public Management, outsourcing and various approaches to privatization (which is generally not true privatization at all—the term is most frequently used to describe some sort of contracting arrangement) have dramatically changed the context within which scholars attempt to answer questions of transparency, control and democratic accountability.

“ These differences—in patterns of bureaucratic recruitment and socialization, decision making, links to interest groups and arrays of formal and informal advisory committees, degrees of decentralization and rule-boundedness, and so forth—definitely matter in any assessment of the fit between bureaucracy and democracy. some versions of bureaucracy and some contexts are much likelier to facilitate popular influence than others.” (p.13)

The increasing variety and complexity of government service delivery methods leads Meier and O’Toole to conclude that we need a general theoretical perspective within which context-specific analyses can be conducted. (As they note, there are more than eighty-five thousand “governments” within the United States, all but fifty-one of which are local. That sobering number alone persuades them—and should persuade us—that sweeping generalizations are likely to be imprudent.)

After laying out the limited nature of their inquiry, and reviewing the relevant political science and public administration literatures, the authors turn to an empirical analysis intended to illuminate their inquiry. They use data gathered from Texas school corporations to probe various methods of political control—policy-setting, political appointments, and other techniques—intended to make bureaucratic performance more amenable to majoritarian preferences. Their choice of school boards and the educators who report to them is explained by the comparative simplicity of the bureaucracies involved, an organizational simplicity that allows them to conduct empirical research in an environment where the identification of bureaucratic and political actors remains relatively uncomplicated.

Based upon their review of the literatures and their analysis of their data, the authors conclude that “top-down political control of the bureaucracy has only modest impact at best” on the actual performance of bureaucracies in the United States. While that conclusion will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the literature, Meier and O’Toole go further. They conclude that bureaucrats and political actors share a commitment to democratic values and norms, and that these shared democratic values operate to create a bureaucracy that is surprisingly responsive to the popular will.

The accomplishment of this slim volume is to make explicit the disparities between political science and public management theories of democratic responsiveness, to forge a hypothesis that builds on the insights of both, and then to test those assumptions empirically, in environments thought least likely to be affected by the rapidly changing character of bureaucracy itself. However, the real contribution of the book may lie in the way the authors highlighted questions that they did not choose to research.

While it is obviously unfair to fault a study for failing to explore different issues, or for failing to test a hypothesis different from the one they have chosen, the book raised several tantalizing issues that the authors did not pursue, and that would be—for this reader, at least—fascinating topics for further research.

One example is the identification of “democratic” values. It is notoriously difficult to determine empirically the values that animate large numbers of individuals, and the comparative importance of those values to the decision-making process. The authors are understandably reluctant to open so subjective an area of inquiry, and instead identify the presence or absence of values through more easily measured proxies or “surrogates.” For example, they use the percentage of Latino school board members and staff as their proxy for a commitment to the value of providing expanded educational opportunities for Latino students. It would be interesting to compare the methods employed by Latino and non-Latino Board Members and staff to operationalize that commitment—to see, for example, whether non-Latinos were really less focused upon the value of expanding educational opportunities for Latino youngsters, or whether those who did share that commitment differed from their Latino colleagues in their choice of methodology for achieving that goal.

The broader question—and clearly outside the scope of this particular book—is the nature and derivation of the democratic values that lead bureaucrats to be responsive to the public will, and for that matter, whether “responsiveness” is the appropriate metric. This is a less abstract question than it may first seem. John Rohr and David Rosenbloom, among others, have argued that governmental legitimacy depends upon consistency with the values of the constitution. Meier and O’Toole seem to imply that sensitivity and responsiveness to the constituencies being served should be an important, if not overriding, value. But these are potentially conflicting approaches; our constitutional system does not privilege majoritarianism to the extent that other democracies do. A public figure in the United States—whether bureaucrat or politician—may find it ethically or legally necessary to resist the “majority will” if compliance would violate a right protected by the Bill of Rights. And then there are the “values” questions posed by the public management literature, questions of professionalism and the ethical constraints that operate in specific subject-areas. Are some of these values more consistent with a responsive bureaucracy than others? Are there instances where “responsiveness” is a negative, rather than a positive, attribute, and can we identify such instances? Given the potential for conflicting values, which conflicts are to be avoided, and which embraced?

Even more tantalizing is the issue of increasing complexity in service delivery that Meier and O’Toole highlight. Over the past thirty plus years, units of government have moved—seemingly inexorably—toward greater use of contracting and outsourcing, making it (as they note) increasingly difficult to identify who is principal and who is agent—let alone the consistency or lack thereof of the values held by these multiple actors. There is a robust literature dealing with issues of privatization, particularly but certainly not exclusively the management challenges that these outsourcing arrangements present. Legal scholarship, too, has been increasingly concerned with the consequences of a “governance” that is altering traditional definitions of public and private, and with the effect of that alteration on a constitutional system that depends upon the distinction as a fundamental safeguard of private rights. Nonprofit scholars, in particular, have grappled with the effects of this transformation on the nonprofit and voluntary organizations that have become—intentionally or not—a significant part of today’s bureaucracy. As a number of scholars in a wide number of disciplines have noted, the networks of public and private actors to which we allude when we talk of “governance” rather than government require rethinking administrative ethics, and refashioning mechanisms intended to insure transparency and accountability. (see Gilmour and Jensen, 1998; Frederickson, 1993; Kettl, 1998; Jensen and Kennedy, 2005, among many others).

We are indebted to Meier and O’Toole for raising these issues, and for reminding us of their saliency. Bureaucracy in a Democratic State: A Governance Perspective reminds us that we need to surmount the academic “silos” that tend to frame—and constrict—our inquiries into these important questions.

References

Jensen, Laura S. and Sheila Suess Kennedy. “Government Ethics and Constitutional Accountability” in George G. Frederickson and Richard K. Ghere, Ethics in Public Management. M.E. Sharpe, 2005

Frederickson, H.George. 1993. “Ethics and Public Administration: Some Assertions.” In Ethics and Public Administration, ed. H. George Frederickson. Amonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 243-61.

Gilmour, Robert S. and Jensen, Laura S. 1998. “Reinventing Government Accountability: Public Functions, Privatization, and the Meaning of State Action.” Public Administration Review 58: 247-58.

Kettl, donald F. 1988. Government by Proxy: (Mis)Managing Federal Programs. Washington, D.C: CQ Press.

Comments

Health and Prosperity

In 2006, the Economist—hardly a leftwing publication—had this to say about the U.S. healthcare system:

“America’s health care system is unlike any other. The United States spends 16% of its GDP on health, around twice the rich country average, equivalent to $6,280 for every American each year. Yet it is the only rich country that does not guarantee universal health coverage. Thanks to an accident of history, most Americans receive health insurance through their employer, with the government picking up the bill for the poor (through Medicaid) and the elderly (through Medicare).

[…]

In the longer term, America, like this adamantly pro-market newspaper, may have no choice other than to accept a more overtly European-style system.”

We have all heard the litany: Forty-six million Americans are uninsured. America spends more per person than any other country, but ranks 37^th in overall quality of service. If our infant mortality rate was as good as Cuba’s—Cuba’s!—we would save the lives of an additional 2,212 babies every year. Duplicative paperwork wastes billions each year. People with pre-existing conditions are chained to jobs they don’t like. The list goes on, and I don’t intend to stand here and repeat it, or add to it. Most of you are already all too aware of the problems.

Instead, I want to make an economic development/American competitiveness argument for single-payer national health insurance—something along the lines of what United Senior Action has called, if I am not mistaken, “Medicare for all.”

As I analyze the situation, if the United States adopted a “single payer” health insurance system funded through tax revenues and administered through a single insurer, we could expect a number of positive economic results, in addition to better health and reduced social anxiety.

First of all, we would see an increase in economic development/job creation. The business sector currently spends an amount in excess of its net profits to provide health insurance for employees, and the cost of health insurance is the single largest “drag” on new job creation. The difference between what it costs an employer to create a new position and the amount that employee actually receives is sometimes called the employment “wedge.” As health costs and insurance premiums escalate, the wedge grows larger, and inhibits hiring additional workers. In good economic times, that is troubling; in times like these, it can be catastrophic.

For the shrinking number of companies that can afford to offer health insurance, negotiating and administering medical benefits, and complying with the government regulations attendant to them, consumes untold hours of HR time. This is a drag on productivity—a generator of overhead costs that reduce profits and divert effort away from the core business operations. Single-payer would remove those costs and that burden. If you don’t think that would be economically significant, let me share an example. In the case of our struggling auto industry, amounts paid for employee health adds somewhere between 1800 and 2000 of the price of each new car. No wonder American automakers find it difficult to remain competitive! It should be noted that in a single payer system, doctors’ overhead would similarly decline: currently, medical offices spend considerable sums on personnel whose only job is dealing with insurers—confirming coverage, complying with insurer regulations, submitting claims on multiple different forms and collecting amounts due. The US could save millions of dollars each year JUST by standardizing insurance forms!

Smaller companies—the engines of economic growth and job creation—are increasingly unable to offer benefits, and that puts them at a competitive disadvantage when they try to hire good employees. If health coverage were de-coupled from employment, the United States would become a much more attractive location for new businesses, and incentives to outsource production to overseas workers would be reduced. (Tell Toyota/Canada story.)

We should also note that, if the burden of providing health care coverage were removed from employers, they could increase wages by some percentage of the amount currently being paid for insurance.

There are two predictable, immediate responses to suggestions that we provide national health insurance. The first is that we can’t afford it; the second that quality of care would be compromised.

Let’s dispose of the question of costs first, because there is enormous public ignorance of the costs we already incur. It may surprise many of you to know that any additional tax revenues needed in order to accomplish universal basic coverage would be minimal, for the following reasons:

· government at all levels already expends huge amounts for health, through Medicaid, Medicare and other federally required programs (Mothers and Children, AIDS, etc.), through health care research grants, through insurance for public employees (Universities, police, public school teachers, state and municipal workers, etc.), and through support for public hospitals like Wishard. By some estimates, American government at all levels already pays for over 60% of American health care now. We just do it in the least efficient, most wasteful way imaginable. In single-payer countries, governments pay an average of 70% of all health costs.

· Furthermore, the economies of scale available in a national system would allow us to effect significant savings. We could save money not just by standardizing paperwork, but also by lowering the costs of administration. It is estimated that between 25-30% of private U.S. healthcare expenditures are eaten up by administrative overhead. Medicare, on the other hand, keeps its overhead costs between 2 and 3%. It’s not just big salaries for the insurance executives—although that’s part of it. The biggest chunk is marketing, including the costs involved in “cherry-picking” (explain). We could save a very large percentage of these overhead costs by administering insurance through government, or even by doing as some European countries do—by contracting with a few insurers to administer the program on government’s behalf, on condition that the premium structure eliminate the marketing costs that are now included.

· An often-ignored benefit of a national system is that it would provide an incentive for more effective public health and prevention services—incentives our current, patchwork system lacks. Total costs decline when people are able to access routine medical care soon after the onset of symptoms, rather than visiting far more expensive emergency rooms when they can no longer ignore the problem.

· A national system could—and should—save money by negotiating with drug manufacturers and other medical vendors for lower prices. Every other industrialized country does this, and to be honest, I was outraged when the Bush Administration prohibited such negotiations in the bill that expanded Medicare’s prescription drug coverage. That bill was a cynical give-away to drug and insurance companies. I used to believe the drug company argument that research and development would suffer if they couldn’t price new drugs at high levels. But that was before I understood how much medical and pharmaceutical research is underwritten by taxpayers through grants from institutions like the NIH. Frankly, we would all be better off if drug companies diverted some of the five billion dollars they spend each year on television ads for Viagra and the “purple pill” to research and development.

· Cost controls would also be enormously enhanced by eliminating the practice of cost-shifting by hospitals. Those practices are increasingly irrational; as you all know, those of us who are hospitalized and who have insurance pay prices that have been inflated in order to cover the costs that cannot be recovered from those without. On the other hand, because insurance companies exercise considerable pressure on hospitals, those same providers will often charge uninsured but solvent patients more for the same procedures. There is no uniformity to these practices, and they make rational cost accounting difficult, if not impossible. (Dan Hodgkins story)

These savings are often identified by proponents of national health care. What is far less frequently recognized is that even if taxes did go up, individuals would save money as well.

· Automobile and homeowners insurance premiums would decline significantly, because the underwriting would no longer need to take the costs of medical care into account.

· The considerable percentage of citizens who are currently uninsured would not incur significant out-of-pocket costs attributable to illness or accident.

· And of course, those who are currently paying for their own insurance would have that considerable expense lifted. I had a student a year or so ago who did not have employer-paid coverage. She worked for a nonprofit CDC, and she and her husband were paying over 12,000/year for their family of two adults and two children. That is without co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs.

Those are just a few of the quantifiable, cash savings we could realize under a single-payer system. But there are also significant social costs associated with our current haphazard approach to healthcare. If all citizens had basic health coverage, America would arguably see a decline in the social costs associated with the current dysfunctional system. Let me just give you a few examples of what I mean:

· Over 50% of personal bankruptcies are attributable to medical bills; those bankruptcies cost local businesses millions of dollars, and are a drag on the economy.

· Employees with pre-existing conditions would no longer be chained to jobs they dislike.

· Absenteeism could be expected to decline.

· Immunizations would increase, and infant mortality decline.

· Studies also suggest that violent crime rates decline and social trust climbs as social safety nets increase.

Even a small drop in crime yields huge savings and increases the quality of life.

While not quantifiable, these consequences are far from insignificant.

So much for costs. What about the argument that “socialized medicine” will cause a decline in the quality of American health care? That markets are most efficient way to allocate services/costs?

I am a great believer in markets. But functioning markets require a willing buyer and seller, both of whom have access to adequate relevant information. They do not work in areas where there is unequal access to information and widely unequal bargaining power. Both of those situations characterize the sale and purchase of medical care.

Even if markets in medical services did work, however, we don’t have a market now, if we ever did. We already have socialized medicine, but we have the very worst possible system—we have socialized medical care through the private insurance companies. The result is that we have the worst of both systems. A recent study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 82% of Americans are dissatisfied with our current patchwork approach to health care, and believe the system should be fundamentally changed.

One in three adults reported their doctors had ordered a test that had already been done, or had recommended unnecessary treatment or care within the past two years. Forty-seven percent had experienced poorly coordinated care—meaning they hadn’t been informed of test results, or had to call repeatedly to get them, or that important medical information had not been shared between doctors and nurses, or between primary care physicians and specialists.

We hear a lot about waiting times in nationalized systems, but wait times are a significant problem in the US right now. Nearly 3 out of 4 Americans reported difficulty getting timely doctor’s appointments, telephone advice, or after-hour’s care, and that included people with health insurance. There is a reason that America consistently ranks 37^th or 38^th in quality of health care, despite the fact that we spend over twice as much per person as the next most expensive system.

I do not pretend to have expertise in how we should proceed to overhaul our system, but I do know we are not limited to Canada and Great Britain as models. (Which is not to say those systems aren’t working; despite the criticisms we hear, I have friends in Canada and a granddaughter in Great Britain, and they are very happy with their care.) But France and New Zealand have widely praised systems, just to name two others. My son lived in France for three years (explain).

We have the luxury of learning from the history and performance of multiple other systems. All that stops us is ideology and a stubborn refusal to believe that other countries might have lessons to teach.

The one bright hope is that the bankrupt nature of our current system has become apparent to anyone who cares to look. Large employers like GM, who have historically been opponents of national health care, are now favorably inclined. Even the AMA has offered a plan—although it is a pretty flawed one. Doctors have largely come to recognize that their interests would be better served by a single-payer system, and groups like Physicians for National Health Care are working hard to make that happen. There are rumors that Senator Kennedy is working feverishly on a plan, because he wants health care to be his legacy. And with the election of a President who actually understands the economics of our current situation, I am cautiously optimistic that the time for change may FINALLY have come.

It can’t happen a moment too soon!

Comments

Civics Lesson

Last weekend, we saw evidence—preliminary and tentative, to be sure—that the massive public participation generated by Obama’s Presidential campaign may prove more durable than most of us imagined. Spontaneous demonstrations protesting the November 4^th passage of California’s Proposition 8 erupted across the country. (Prop8, for the unaware, amended the California constitution and repealed the right to same-sex marriage).

Large crowds of protestors turned out across California. No surprise there. There were equally spirited turnouts in the nation’s largest cities—New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington D.C. Again, not surprising. But how do we explain demonstrations in places like Peoria, Illinois; Missoula, Montana; Greenville, South Carolina; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Lubbock, Texas; or Little Rock, Arkansas, to list just a few of the more unlikely venues? Even in Indianapolis, approximately three hundred people gathered on a rainy Saturday in front of the City-County Building sporting homemade signs and rainbow umbrellas.

The protestors were not all gay, as evidenced by signs saying things like “Straight but not Narrow” and “If everyone doesn’t have rights, no one does.” All across America, citizens got off their couches and rallied for equal civil rights for their neighbors, their families and their friends.

With so much opposition, why did Proposition 8 pass?

The New York Times reported on the “11^th hour effort that saved the ban,” which ultimately garnered 52% of the vote. According to the Times, “Interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure show how close its backers believe it came to defeat—and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.”

Now, religious people have every right to contribute to causes they believe in, and to make their positions known in the public square. Religious crusaders helped end slavery. Churches and religiously-motivated opponents of segregation worked tirelessly in the 1960s to put an end to Jim Crow laws. The more legitimate issue raised by the Times concerned the shady tactics employed in the guise of religion and morality.

When the campaign began, a clear majority of California voters opposed Proposition 8. When polls in mid-October showed voters continuing to reject the ban, supporters raised enormous amounts of money for advertisements claiming that churches would lose their tax exemptions if they refused to perform same-sex ceremonies, and that elementary schools would be forced to “teach homosexuality” to young children. Both of these claims were demonstrably false. Worse, proponents clearly knew their ads were dishonest. But they were effective.

California is a huge state, and advertising is costly. Opponents of Prop 8 simply didn’t have the resources to effectively counter the distortions, even though Governor Schwarzenegger, Senator Feinstein and the California teacher’s association all cut ads rebutting the charges. In the end, money talked. It was politics as usual.

But then a strange thing happened. Citizens all across America decided to flex the civic muscles they had just discovered they had.

I don’t know what comes next, but it promises to be very interesting.

Comments

Review of Public Freedom

Review of Public Freedom by Dana Villa

Princeton University Press (2008)

Sheila Suess Kennedy

Professor, Law & Public Policy

School of Public & Environmental Affairs

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Some scholars stake out an area of inquiry that is tightly focused and contained, scholarly real estate small enough to be examined and parsed so completely as to be effectively “owned”—an academic phenomenon sometimes described as knowing everything there is to know about not very much. Dana Villa is obviously not one of these scholars. To the contrary; in this book, he has shared with his readers an ambitious, intellectually rich and often provocative effort to engage with one of the most persistent questions of political philosophy, and to make a cogent (and I believe persuasive) argument for a particular conception of civic life and the public good.

In Public Freedom, Villa addresses what may be the thorniest issue of governance in a free society—the persistent tension and proper balance between the individualism nurtured in and privileged by liberal democratic regimes and a civic republican tradition that he admits has “often displayed a deep-seated resistance to pluralism and anything resembling open-ended argument.” (3) Villa’s willingness to confront the dangers of a too-enthusiastic embrace of a poorly-conceived public realm informs his careful, nuanced argument for a reinvigorated and reconfigured public square and a more robust conception of citizenship and the public good. The intellectual rigor and honesty that characterize this book serve to distinguish Villa’s arguments from those offered by advocates for a vague and idealized communitarianism.

Villa believes that the abandonment of active participation in the public sphere (as he defines both participation and the public) is transforming Americans from citizens to subjects, changing them from empowered participants in public life to relatively powerless, passive observers of governing elites. He draws upon Tocqueville, Hegel, Mill and Arendt, among others, to argue for a new balance between the universal and the particular, the common good and enlightened self-interest. At the heart of his argument is an echo of an admonition that has been attributed to both Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry to the effect that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty;”[1] here, that sentiment is expressed as the notion that “citizens must be given something to do for the public if they [are] to become capable of exercising the ‘active and constant surveillance’ of governmental authorities that a representative system demands.” (17)

The main focus of the book is an extended consideration of what genuine democratic participation might look like—an effort to define what Villa calls “the generalization of interests,” the relationship between our individual interests and those of the society within which we inevitably pursue those interests. What, he asks, is the nature of the public spaces our particular governing decisions have created? How do individuals exercise power within those spaces, and how might we strengthen their ability to do so? How do we prevent both the market and the state from dominating and ultimately extinguishing the public sphere? How do we retain the capacity to exercise genuine and meaningful citizenship and how do we protect the rule of law?

Villa proceeds to build upon Tocqueville’s conception of civil society and the public sphere by examining the contributions and arguments of other philosophers, primarily but not exclusively the philosophies of Hegel, Arendt, Mill, Foucalt and Heidegger. In each of these discussions, he offers penetrating insights and displays a sometimes dazzling scholarship. While the language of the book is accessible, the analysis is demanding and closely reasoned (this is not a book to be blithely assigned as undergraduate background reading). I found his analysis of Arendt particularly insightful—especially his interpretation of what Arendt means by the “Social Question” and what she suggests about the differences between the American and French Revolutions.

In his concluding chapter, Villa draws heavily on Arendt as he returns to the question of the proper balance between positive and negative freedom—or, as he frames it, “the freedom to be a ‘participator’ in government” on the one hand (positive freedom), and the “emphasis on civil rights and ‘negative’ freedom” on the other. “We move,” he says “from a civic republican understanding to a liberal (and increasingly economic) one.” (343). In a particularly penetrating paragraph summing up what he believes to be the proper conception of the public realm, he writes that

This description, it seems to me, is exactly right; it captures the reality—both the promise and the challenge—of the public realm and the American community in ways that more idealized versions do not.

“At a time when our public world is under attack by an array of economic, technological and ideological forces (to say nothing of the cabal of unwitting Schmittians currently occupying the executive branch), it is important to realize that ‘care for the public world’ is the furthest thing from a ‘leisure-time sport for aristocrats.’ It is, it turns out, a responsibility we all share; a responsibility that grows heavier each day as the boundaries of our public world—and the attention span of many of our fellow citizens—perpetually contracts.”

[1] WENDELL PHILLIPS, speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28, 1852.—Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, p. 13 (1853).

Comments