Remember comic Rodney Dangerfield and his “I don’t get no respect” routine? Recently, a faculty colleague told me a story that illustrates perfectly why so many of us view government with a mixture of bemusement, annoyance and even contempt—why so often, government gets even less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
My colleague’s fiancée had just completed renovating a double in Lockerbie Square. He’d finally moved in, and needed garbage cans. Lockerbie is one of the central city neighborhoods in whichhomeowners are required to use garbage cans provided by the City that have been engineered to be picked up by automated garbage trucks.
My colleague called the Mayor’s Action Line and asked for two garbage cans. She was told that she would first have to call the police and report the old cans as stolen. Once she had obtained an incident report number, she was to call back, and the cans would be ordered.She patiently explained that no cans had been stolen; they simply hadn’t gotten any because no one lived there during restoration. She was told that truth was immaterial; if they wanted garbage cans, they had to follow procedure and report that the old ones were stolen.
When she called IMPD, she felt compelled to tell the person on the phone that there hadn’t really been a theft. (As she said when telling me this, “Isn’t filing a false police report a felony?”) The person on the other end of the line said it didn’t matter, this was “procedure.” She was then required to give her driver’s license/social security number in order to get the report issued.
Eventually, she got the incident reports, called back to the Mayor’s Action Line with the required numbers, and the garbage cans were duly delivered. Why the “theft” charade was necessary remains a mystery.
In the scheme of things, the saga of the garbage can is a minor irritation. But there’s a lesson here.
So often, Americans remain fixated on policy itself, on the question “what should government do?” In this case, for example, policymakers have determined that municipal governments should collect garbage. Public administrators then decided how to deliver the service—should employees be hired, or private companies contracted?—and how to fund it. Those are all proper matters for public discussion and debate, because decisions about what government should do and how are most likely to be driven by ideology, and thus most likely to generate political conflict.
Those of us who teach public administration must focus on a different question, however, and it is equally important. Once policymakers have given administrators a job, how well do they perform?Are they efficient? Ethical? Competent? Do they treat citizens equally and constitutionally?
Respect for our governing institutions has taken a real beating lately. Local governments can’t do much about the daily drumbeat of reported corruption and incompetence in Washington. But citizens might feel better if we didn’t have to visit an alternate universe just to get a garbage can.
Along with all of our other problems, today’s Americans face the grand-daddy of true-false tests.
Ironically, with information more available than ever before, with literally mountains of data at our ever-googling fingertips, we are losing the ability to tell the difference between fact and fabrication. I’m not talking just about the beliefs held by folks who are, shall we say, lightly tethered to reality—the holocaust deniers, the JFK conspiracy theorists, etc. They’ve always been around. I’m not even talking about the loonier precincts of the blogosphere, or the so-called “pundits” like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who make big bucks playing to limited constituencies with unlimited grievances.
I’m talking about people who should know better.
Recently, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota gave an interview in which she criticized the stimulus bill for giving ACORN five billion dollars, even though the organization is “under federal indictment for voter fraud.” There were only two things wrong with this criticism; ACORN is nowhere mentioned in the stimulus bill, and it’s not under indictment.
Or take the recent rash of revisionist “scholarship” about FDR, ranging from “he actually caused the Depression” to “the New Deal didn’t work.” Reputable historians agree the depression began well before FDR took office, and while it is perfectly legitimate to question the adequacy of the New Deal, or to debate the causes of the improvements that occurred on Roosevelt’s watch, suggesting that there were no improvements is simply not true.
Falsehoods also appear in the so-called “mainstream” outlets we trust. George Will’s column originates in the Washington Post. A couple of weeks ago, he dismissed the evidence of climate change, noting that “according to the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” Within hours of the column’s appearance, the Center posted a rebuttal on its website. “We do not know where George Will is getting his information… the decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California and Oklahoma combined.” To date, there has been no correction noted either by Will or the Post.
Often, when people are too invested in an ideology or position, they create alternate realities, selecting—or inventing—“facts” that bolster their beliefs. As the saying goes, however, we are entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.
Let me be perfectly clear: people are entitled to draw different conclusions from a given set of facts. We may conclude that a stimulus bill is necessary, or believe it’s the wrong approach. We can acknowledge that WWII finally ended the Depression without denying the earlier, well-documented improvements in employment figures. We can quibble with certain aspects of the (overwhelming) scientific consensus on global climate change. Such debates are necessary if all sides of important issues are to be understood.
People will draw different lessons from a given set of facts. But when one or more parties to the debate occupies a fact-free zone, truth and illumination both suffer.
Whoever said “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” was probably thinking of Indiana.
Governor Mitch Daniels recently held a press conference at which he addressed the critical challenges now facing our state. He was flanked by former Governor Joe Kernan, a Democrat, and Indiana Chief Justice Randall Shepard, a Republican. The message was simple and direct: Indiana’s looming fiscal crisis makes adoption of the Kernan-Shepard Commission recommendations especially urgent.
The response of Indiana elected officials was dispiriting, to put it mildly. According to the Indianapolis Star, “ County officials said they don’t want to give up their elected positions. School boards stressed that they oppose forced consolidation. And House Speaker B. Patrick Bauer said the General Assembly has more pressing matters to consider next year than ‘an academic’s view of how government should operate, without any consideration given to whether such ideas are practical, or even feasible, in the real world.’”
Bauer’s comment, in particular, reminded me why the late Harrison Ullmann used to call the Indiana General Assembly “The World’s Worst Legislature.” It also reminded me of a lengthy conversation I had some years ago with George Geib, Indiana’s pre-eminent political historian. As he told me then, what really drives Indiana’s political culture is not ideology, but patronage.
Patronage and political self-interest have kept Indiana’s government bloated, costly and inefficient. In fact, the only good thing you can say about our resistance to modernization is that the effort to keep state government mired in the late 1800s has been entirely bipartisan—a lonely example of co-operation in our otherwise polarized politics.
It is understandable that people whose jobs are on the line would resist efforts to bring Indiana into the 21st century. But it was Pat Bauer’s snide dismissal of the Kernan-Shepard recommendations as “academic” that provided us with a perfect example of what is wrong with the Indiana General Assembly.
Leaving aside the use of the word “academic” to mean nonsensical (okay, I’m a bit sensitive there!), how many overlapping units of government does Bauer’s “real world” need? Indiana has 3100 units of government, run by 10,300 people paid for with our tax dollars. We have more counties than California. The reforms recommended by the Commission have long characterized government in most other states.
Maybe this slicing and dicing of jurisdictions into so many small units made sense when it took half a day (by horse) to reach the county seat. But in the “real world” I live in, it takes half an hour or less. Increasingly, I don’t need to travel at all; I can renew many permits and obtain needed information online.
The Kernan-Shepard Commission studied Indiana’s multiple levels of government, held hearings around the state, reviewed reforms instituted elsewhere in “the real world” and issued recommendations of 27 ways to cut waste, become more efficient, increase accountability and save tax dollars.
Government officials are supposed to work for us. Thanks to Indiana’s entrenched patronage, we seem to be working for them.
I know that the Rick Warren prayer controversy has been the subject of way too much discussion, outrage and analysis, but I’m going to beat this not-dead-enough horse one more time, because there was a lesson here, and I’m not so sure that it’s the lesson many activists learned.
In the days following the announcement that Warren—along with the (pro-gay-rights) Reverend Joseph Lowery—would be delivering an inaugural prayer, I got multiple emails bemoaning Obama’s “treachery.” Several were really over the top; one in particular was an “open letter” to Obama, and said something along the lines of "I supported you but now I wish I’d voted for Hillary Clinton and I’ll never give you any more money, and I won’t help you get national health insurance either."
To which I wanted to say: Grow up, get a grip and give it a rest.
Do I understand where these partisans are coming from? Of course. But I found it difficult to get worked up—let alone as hysterical as many of the people blogging or emailing about it. Obama will be the president of the whole country, after all—including the fools and bigots and other people I don’t like and don’t agree with—and it is naïve to expect him to surround himself with only people approved of by gays and progressives. To me, what is much more important—and telling—is the caliber and political orientation of Obama’s appointments, and in my opinion, at least, those have been excellent.
So Rick Warren was invited to say a prayer at the Inauguration. That will make religious right people feel included. It won’t change public policy. What it may (or may not) change is the difficulty of making policy in our polarized country—making it marginally easier to achieve Obama’s (progressive) policy goals. Gestures of respect for other people’s right to hold opinions with which we disagree—which is not the same thing as respecting or agreeing with the opinions themselves—can only advance policy in those areas where we do agree. And despite most descriptions of Warren on gay and gay-friendly blogs, those areas exist.
Warren is probably the least objectionable of the right-wing nut clergy. He focuses primarily on ameliorating poverty and (ironically) curing AIDS, and conducts comparatively few campaigns to demonize “abortionists” and those of us working to advance the “gay agenda.” I certainly don’t agree with him, but I think reaction to the invitation was overwrought and ultimately unhelpful to the cause of gay rights. As I noted in a post on my American Values Alliance blog, politics isn’t softball, and politicians who actually want to get stuff done don’t do it by avoiding people deemed insufficiently pure.
Obama has reiterated his commitment to choice and gay rights. He has broken ground by appointing an out lesbian to a high-ranking White House energy post. It isn’t like he’s backing off these issues, or softening his positions. But critics insist that the symbolism is powerful–that by including Warren in this ceremony, he is "legitimizing" everything Warren stands for. Folks on the other side, however, are saying the same thing about Warren’s acceptance. As the Washington Monthly reported, “In an interesting twist, plenty of conservatives are mad, not at Obama for inviting Warren, but at Warren for accepting the invitation.”
David Brody, a correspondent for TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, reported being flooded with emails. “Most of them absolutely rip Pastor Warren for doing this."
Brody published a couple of them, and they sounded a lot like the ones I got—only with a different villain.
"Unless Rick Warren has changed, he is very disappointing in the pro-life cause. Just ask pro-life leaders their opinion. He doesn’t like to deal with it at his church. It just seems funny that he is known as ‘pro-life’ when he largely ignores the subject and teaches others to do the same. I fear God for these ‘men of God’ "
And this one:
"I have had about all I can stand of Rick Warren’s double standards. WHOSE side is he really on anyway? … This is a complete mockery of all things sacred."
Meanwhile, back in Bush country, the U.S. was the only major western nation to refuse to sign a UN declaration calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality. Sixty-six of the U.N.’s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration in an effort to push the General Assembly to deal with anti-gay discrimination. More than 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality, and in several of them homosexual acts can be punished by execution.
Delivery of a prayer—however “symbolic”—pales in comparison to the persistent, insistent and fully intentional homophobia of the late, unlamented Bush Administration.
Reviewed by Sheila Suess Kennedy, School of Public & Environmental Affairs, IndianaUniversity-PurdueUniversityIndianapolis.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.”
