What We Give Up with Government

What is politics for? Why would a person participate in politics?

The simple, popular answer that we hear from public service announcements, voter registration campaigns, teachers and politicians—the popular sentiment we glean from the way this is discussed in our everyday lives—is that we participate in politics to express ourselves, and to build the world we want for ourselves. Politics is your chance to be heard. When you don’t participate in politics, you allow others to speak for you.

While you’ll certainly hear other kinds of calls to political participation based on duty or concern, the individualistic and self-expressive are pervasive. Political participation is framed as either reactive defense (I participate so they can’t get what they want) or as individualistically positive (I participate so that I can get the kind of policies that are right for me).

I bring this up to move in a particular direction, but this basic observation can lead us down many interesting roads. For instance, I wrote a post over a year ago that many told me they found to be helpful about how to consider one’s vote, that follows from this same thread.

I want to go in a slightly different direction here, which is to say that this vision of political participation leads to misguided expectations for political outcomes, indifference and then antagonism toward one’s fellow citizens, and a harmful misuse of public policy. A politics of unmediated self-expression is unable to resource self-constraint on one’s political ambitions. We are left with a politics that might be tempered by a sense of what one can get away with politically, restrained by an analysis that one simply does not yet have the power to do exactly what one wants to do. However, for many, outside of a power analysis, there is little difference between what they currently advocate for politically, and what they would advocate if the political community was constituted entirely of people who shared their own individual interests. We are losing the capacity to believe that there is anything we should not do or accomplish through government that we could do.

One essential development that is needed if we are to stem the rising tide of political sectarianism is the recovery of the idea that our political ideas are for the political community we inhabit. In one sense, our political participation and desires must ultimately be a matter of self-expression—there are great dangers in the pretension of posing as if we are literally “giving voice to the voiceless,” for instance—but we mediate what we might call our “private” views through the reality of the context which we are in, and a concern and recognition of the interests and dignity of those with whom we share a political community.

I want to be clear here: this is not a matter of believing one thing privately about a discrete matter, and being forced to misrepresent or mute one’s actual opinion in public. We need not mute or sacrifice our convictions or values when we make political decisions. I’ve argued against that kind of disintegrating approach my entire adult life, and continue to believe that false separation, that “practical absurdity,” does great harm. Instead, what we must understand is that when we act politically there are other convictions, other considerations (broadly summarized above as a concern and recognition of the interests and dignity of others), that must be at play as well. Our “political views” should only be deemed such in light of these convictions and considerations. Rightly construed, there is no such thing as one’s “private political views”: politics is inherently social, always contextual; never individual and never ultimate. Our political views are our views about what is appropriate and best for our politics as it is. Government does not act in the abstract, but in particular circumstances, with and on particular people. Our ideas about government and public policy must not become removed from this fact, this obvious reality that so often seems absent from our political discourse and ideas.

How might a right appreciation of this reality change our politics, government and our own political participation?

The first thing to say here is that politics is largely about adjudicating this very question. The U.S. Constitution offers a framework for this adjudication, but we make a mistake if we let the Constitution do all of the work for us. The constitution, generally speaking, offers a floor for civic consideration of difference, but it does not require all of the consideration that may be wise or warranted. I do not offer myself an irrefutable, precise approach to this question, but I’ll lift up some examples from recent history to elucidate my point.

Take the Tennessee state legislature’s attempt to make the Bible the official state book of Tennessee. One reason I love, respect and appreciate former Governor Bill Haslam is because he used one of his few vetoes to prevent this from taking place. It wasn’t because Gov. Haslam thinks poorly of the Bible; we share a conviction that the Bible is nothing less than the inspired word of God. Here’s what Gov. Haslam said about his veto of the bill:

"In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text," Haslam wrote in a letter to House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville.

"If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn't be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance," the Republican governor said. "If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book."

In his book, Faithful Presence, he elaborated:

"The beauty of the idea of America is that we can all bring our most deeply held beliefs to the public square, without the government declaring one faith or no faith the winner — and without any faith or person of faith being excluded from the debate," Haslam wrote.   

Haslam’s convictions about the importance of the Bible did not change, but the nature of government and of the context of his public service led him to steward his convictions in a certain way. There are some things we shouldn’t seek to accomplish through government. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that as Haslam eludes to, the fact that it is government acting makes it so that the very nature of what you’re seeking to accomplish is mutated and potentially undermined.

What we gain with government is scale, levers for accountability, a system of consent. What is lost with government, at least in a liberal democracy like ours, is the ability to completely identify our aims with the aims of government. What is lost is an immediate responsiveness. Government lags our individual judgment, because government cannot act at the level of the individual (again, generally speaking).

It is our government as a political community, but it is not our government as individuals. Some efforts that should be advanced through private endeavors, should not be advanced through government coercion, even if we think the effort to be noble and just. Some risks that we might take as individuals, or that we might advise private organizations should take, are not risks that government should take.

So many of our most toxic political battles touch on these kinds of distinctions: school prayer, public health decisions, education curriculum, free speech and civil rights.

Now, it seems to me this moves in two directions related to representation and responsibility. There are cases where our politics (voters, elected officials, bureaucrats…) ought to restrain themselves from advancing certain causes or viewpoints because though they have a prudential point of view, one that might even be supported by popular will, to use their power to act on that view would violate the will of a significant portion of the population, or leverage the power of government to move in a way or in an area in which government should not move, or otherwise tear at the civic fabric. In government and politics, to appropriate the Apostle Paul, everything (with sufficient public support) is permissable, but not everything (with sufficient public support) is beneficial. Elected officials do not just represent the majority. Government is not simply meant to serve and advance the desires of the majority.

The flip side of this, though, is that the government sometimes must act as an expression of collective will, even if there is significant disagreement, in order to carry out its duties and serve its function. I think this is especially true when it comes to areas like public health, national security and basic civil rights. Government intervention is a blunt instrument, and negative consequences can (and often does) flow from it. That should be a caution, in line with what I argued in the previous paragraph. However, because of government’s responsibility to serve the whole, that will often require prohibiting/compelling citizens from/to taking action they would otherwise not take.

There are few clean answers here. The dictates of representation and responsibility are always at tension. There are different ways to navigate these tensions, and that is why debate, advocacy, and yes, even political parties, are helpful. What I would like to see is for more of us to check our impulses. If you’re advocating for public institutions to take some action or drive some point of view, say a public health mandate or the inclusion of material in a school curriculum or library, ask whether the use of government power in that particular situation is justified and vital enough to overcome objections from those whose rights, interests or preferences mght be violated by that action. Are you supporting that government action for everyone only because you’re comfortable with it, either because it won’t really affect you or because it aligns with your personal point of view? Do you really think it’s for the public good, and so much so that others who disagree should accommodate themselves to it?

Similarly, if you tend to oppose government action in a particular case—let’s stick with public health mandates or schooling issues—are you asking for the government to deny authority that is its to steward and act on? Are you asking for government to risk the well-being of the whole, in order to cater to the disagreement of individuals, in a way that would amount to obfuscation of responsibility?

Whoever you are, whatever your general approach, our politics would be much healthier if citizens thought about what it meant to translate their personal and private sentiments into the public for the purpose of self-governance, as opposed to merely using the political to enforce their personal and unmediated will.

There is so much more to explore here, and I’d love to continue this conversation. Reply in the comments or via email, and I may do a follow-up post to share reader feedback, and further explore this important topic.

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