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.
This reminds me of an experience I had while I was in public policy school when I had to articulate to my seminary friends what "policy" was. They had confused what I was studying with horse-race politics or the culture war issues.
My definition of a policy was something akin to "fixing a decision on behalf of many people for a duration of time" — for example, construction of a highway decides the best commute for many people for many years going forward; or, setting tax rates decides how much certain people will give to our collective endeavors until the next time the tax rate is changed.
I purposely reached for a definition that highlighted how in the policymaking process that an individual's capacity for personal decision-making was somehow violated or "given up" (using your language that I'm finding really helpful). To my seminary friends, this helped explain the "vocation" of a policymaker: a sort of divine call to make good on (and be sensitive to) this sacrifice of personal will.
This is all a long-about way of saying that your writing here seems to touch on this same dilemma between personal will and collective interest, but from the vocation of a citizen rather than of a policymaker. If you continue this line of thought, I'd love to see some reflection on how much of the responsibility to reconcile competing interests and various points of view (or, as you say, "translate their personal and private sentiments into the public") falls on the individual citizen versus how much of it falls on the policymaker. Or, under what conditions can the citizen trust the policymaker to do this translation on their behalf?
This reminds me of an experience I had while I was in public policy school when I had to articulate to my seminary friends what "policy" was. They had confused what I was studying with horse-race politics or the culture war issues.
My definition of a policy was something akin to "fixing a decision on behalf of many people for a duration of time" — for example, construction of a highway decides the best commute for many people for many years going forward; or, setting tax rates decides how much certain people will give to our collective endeavors until the next time the tax rate is changed.
I purposely reached for a definition that highlighted how in the policymaking process that an individual's capacity for personal decision-making was somehow violated or "given up" (using your language that I'm finding really helpful). To my seminary friends, this helped explain the "vocation" of a policymaker: a sort of divine call to make good on (and be sensitive to) this sacrifice of personal will.
This is all a long-about way of saying that your writing here seems to touch on this same dilemma between personal will and collective interest, but from the vocation of a citizen rather than of a policymaker. If you continue this line of thought, I'd love to see some reflection on how much of the responsibility to reconcile competing interests and various points of view (or, as you say, "translate their personal and private sentiments into the public") falls on the individual citizen versus how much of it falls on the policymaker. Or, under what conditions can the citizen trust the policymaker to do this translation on their behalf?