“We’re trying to do democracy without citizens.”
That’s Time columnist and author Joe Klein in an early 2016 interview. Those words haunt me as I observe the American political landscape in 2017.
This past summer, I’ve had the opportunity to observe, read, think and talk quite a bit about citizenship. It’s been a topic I’m increasingly concerned about in the American political context. While there are some reasons to be hopeful that the last presidential election helps us towards rediscovering citizenship, there’s work to be done in understanding just what it is.
The tricky thing is that American concepts of citizenship can often be at odds with theoretical concepts articulated in political philosophy. This can create confusion among people when it comes to talking about who citizenship is for and what it means. For those of us born citizens in the United States, we may have thought very little about that aspect of our lived experience.
It’s a big topic, so for this post let’s talk about who the citizen is in political philosophy and discuss how that relates to American citizenship.
The person of the citizen
As I often do when discussing political philosophy, let’s start with those fathers of political thought Plato and Aristotle. In their respective political treatises (Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics) both philosophers identify citizens as being the lifeblood of the polis. That’s a pretty basic definition of a citizen, really: those who are members of a political community. Not visitors, not passing through, but full members. Like membership in anything, this idea of political membership brought with it the basic distinctives of citizenship: rights and responsibilities.
However, classical citizenship stops looking familiar right about there. Because for both Plato and Aristotle the citizen was not the basic unit, the political atom. That was the polis, the city. Therefore, the citizen, though essential, is not an end in himself, but a component of the state.
Political thought in the early modern period largely kept the citizen in such a subservient state. Concepts like the divine right of kings, which reached its apex with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, focused on trying to define the ideal state. However, this is often at the expense of addressing the person or role of the citizen. With an enlightened despot in place, the thinking seems to go, everything and everyone will fall into line.
Then along came liberalism. Liberalism is nothing short of a revolution in political thought in that it flips the political equation on its head and assumes the individual to be an end in himself, which places the state subservient to the citizen. Crucially, this does not eliminate the need for rights and responsibilities, but rather, enhances it, especially in the democratic models favored by liberal thought. In order for democracies to work effectively, individuals must be free (rights), but also ready and willing to work for the good of the community (responsibilities).
Citizenship and Liberalism
Liberalism, however, did not reject the classical thought of Greece when it came to the citizen. Rather, it built on the established foundation. Think of it as building an addition onto a house.
A component of that addition is the recognition that liberal societies need classical citizens. Specifically, citizens who understand, develop and exercise virtue.
Virtue refers to the values that Greco-Roman thought believes to be essential for the good of the individual and society. Lists of virtues differ from thinker to thinker, but the idea that they are for individual and communal good remains.
In the liberal school of thought, virtuous citizens are believed to be necessary for a community to strike the balance between individual freedom and communal well-being.
Democracy Without Citizens
That brings me back to the Klein quote. “Democracy without citizens” is a scary thought. It might not be The Purge or 1984, but a democracy without virtuous citizens becomes increasingly reliant on state entities to run society. Among other problems, this creates an inherently unstable election process.
The exercise of democratic decision-making through elections becomes fraught with peril as we come to believe the state is all that stands between us and chaos. As such, we must choose the right people to lead every time. Democratic governance is messy, but a citizenry lacking virtue demands perfection as a mode of survival. Such a democracy has a short shelf life. The outcome is usually a dictatorship of some kind simply because it’s what can ensure stability.
America: The fearful democracy
So if you think the left and right wings of the American political spectrum have been sounding especially shrill and apocalyptic lately, consider that for many it’s borne out of a real fear. It’s a fear of chaos and disorder due, in part, to an absent framework for citizenship. In other words, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for different groups to view one another as part of the same society.
Unfortunately, this is a fear that many cannot articulate because there’s no shared vocabulary or understanding about citizenship. Citizenship is not interpreted as a moral good, but as a spectrum of social engagement. This is a critical distinction in that a moral good is understood to be right in itself. Because it is not conditional on circumstance, it sets a standard for individual behavior that all can be held to.
A spectrum of social engagement, on the other hand, creates an a la carté model of citizenship. One can pick and choose the actions and attitudes that will define their social engagement. As such, it’s possible for two well meaning citizens to talk right past each other when discussing communal needs. It’s not that they don’t want to understand one another, many do. However, they have no shared meaning on which they can build mutual understanding.
The result? Fear. Fear that we project onto opposition groups and unfamiliar ideas.
Recovering our citizenship
Franklin Roosevelt was right to intone that “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” A nice little turn of phrase for an America suffering through the Great Depression, but there’s a deadly seriousness to it as well. Fear is what every democracy should fear. It is what separates communities and individuals, and diminishes political efficacy. Fear can destroy citizenship.
If we’re to recover a sense of citizenship in America, then we need to start here. We need to acknowledge this culture of fear that we’re both imbibing and contributing to. Next, we need serious discussions about what it means to be a citizen – what that requires of us and what language we use to describe it. There will still be disagreements in those discussions, but at least we will have begun to build a sense of meaning around a common concern and a common goal: Fear and the ridding ourselves of it.