Public vs. Government

The era of big government is over, or so said Bill Clinton. Unlike many liberals, I think he was right to say this, just not in the way that conservatives or the media meant it. I think that the day when America's problems could be centrally managed from Washington is probably over, due to both political obstacles (i.e. conservative propaganda), historical change (we have different problems now) and because there was always a problem with liberalism's overly technocratic impulses.

The difficulty with technocracy (rule by experts engaged in central planning) is that it is demobilizing and undemocratic. It replaces one sort of elite (the corporate or social ones) with a new form (the supposed "new class" of liberal intellectuals) that pursues egalitarian ends by inegalitarian means. The liberals reliance on national planning to solve problems is party responsible for the conservative ascendancy. It allowed the right to steal the populist label and define liberals as elitists, as absurd as that may sound. Now this accusation may be unfair, but it does contain that essential kernel of truth: we have been too in love with big government. Let's admit it.

This isn't to say that I think that we should sacrifice the country at the altar of the free market. We all know how that has worked out. I am less in sympathy with the conservative critique here than with the agenda of the New Left in the 1960's and the civic republicans today. What liberalism has failed to do is operate with a sufficient eye to the procedures of democracy. People feel governed, they feel the recipients of government services, they feel like subjects. What we want is a republic full of active citizens involved in self-government. It was this yen for greater participation and civic involvement that was at the heart of Kennedy's appeal ("ask not...."). It underlay the thinking some of the left-wing attacks on liberalism and has been exploited by the right.

There is a crucial distinction between what is public and what is government. Public and government action are not the same thing, although they are frequently conflated. The word "republic" is a derivation of the Latin "res public," the public thing. Democracy means rule by the people. Nowhere do we see in these terms tax policy and legal sanction. Self-rule is a far greater enterprise than any law. Democracy transcends government. We have fallen into a conservative trap if we confuse the political and the public with the government. Liberalism has been reduced to a caricatured champion of government, which is not what we should be about at all. Political leadership involves mass mobilization beyond that required by government. We want leaders, not managers.

Of course government plays an important role, particularly in terms of imposing fair rules and providing resources. Of course we liberals must champion policies that, in the language of reinventing government, leverage public and private action. But we must stop thinking that the government is synonymous with the political. Citizenship is a thing of the every day, government a force abstracted from us. We are liberals, not technocrats. And we must remember this.