A Case For Government by Wilson Carey McWilliams ·

The author relies much upon Tocqueville. Too much? I think he misdiagnoses the American problem.

These current worries only underline a well-established point: in contemporary life, government cannot guarantee economic and civil freedom simply by protecting private rights, narrowly defined. Government must attempt to assure or provide reasonable security and socially adequate employment, the preconditions of economic independence and civic equality. Americans disagree, of course, about the kind and extent of government intervention in the economy, but even conservatives, on the whole, accept a fairly broad role for government. Ronald Reagan promised us a “safety net”; the Reagan and Bush administrations have committed billions to protect depositors in failing banks and savings and loans; it is agreed that the Federal Reserve Board should manage interest rates to promote growth without inflation or even to “jump start” the economy; it has became a political axiom that government needs a policy designed to result in something like full employment. And many diverse voices are urging heroic measures to make America competitive in world markets.

This call on government is given added force by the weakening of our social and moral resources. Technology, the media, and the market penetrate and transform the private spaces of life. It begins early, in the shaping of the souls of children. Families and localities have lost much of their old autonomy; the electronic media insert their “hidden curriculum” in infancy, before literacy and, to some extent, even before speech. But the media are not alone in promoting “spectatorial personalities.” Change and mobility teach us that persons, places, and ways of life are not safe or reliable for very long, and their implicit lesson is that one is well-advised to keep roots shallow and commitments superficial, protected against loss in a fortified self. This prompting to live for oneself and in the present injures the older disciplines of work and saving in favor of consumption and the hope of “striking it rich.”

There is a more sinister dimension. The growing sense of vulnerability to crime dissuades citizens from frequenting public spaces, and it bars doors when it does not prompt a move to some place of relative safety. The pattern is pervasive: the affluent are tempted to seek private solutions and immunities, while the less fortunate have their own forms of privatization, most destructively, in the autoanesthesia of drugs.

Once again, although their prescriptions differ, Americans across the political spectrum expect government to play a significant role in shoring up the republic’s social and moral foundations. Even presuming good will and concern for our fellow citizens, after all, the scale and specialization of our society mean that we will lack personal contact with those in need. Even benevolence must be administered by large-scale organizations which allow us to address the “needs of strangers.” There is not much debate about the proposition that the national government has a decisive role to play in law enforcement, education, and the care of the elderly. And while conservatives and liberals have plenty of heated arguments about the family, both look to the law to support and encourage at least the minimal decencies of family life. It is also indicative that, with little dissent, government is taking a stronger role in the preservation of national memory.

It is not hard to make a case for this turning to government. Government alone cannot make us good, but it can encourage decent behavior. Decency needs assurances: its self-restraint is threatened if we see—or even if we fear—that we are being victimized because of our decencies. As we all know, taxpayers are angry if they notice that others are not paying their fair share, and very few can resist the temptation, supported by a plea of self-defense, to imitate the underpayers. But let me offer my favorite example. The slow pace of airline baggage service leads more and more passengers to carry their own luggage, and this means that on crowded flights, there is likely to be a shortage of space for bags. Experienced travelers know this, of course. Consequently, when airline personnel announce that they are boarding the plane, beginning with the last dozen rows, a large number of veteran travelers rush on board, whatever their seat assignment, hoping to preempt space for bags. I have never seen an airline agent stop a passenger from boarding out of the announced sequence; airlines, part of the private sector, prefer not to offend a paying customer, even an offensive one, and this policy was tolerable when only a few broke the rule. Now, however, the violations are numerous enough that the reluctance to use constraint threatens another civility.

The value of constraint goes beyond deterring criminals; it reduces the psychological cost of decency and affirms the law-abiding. And when our social constraints, associated with coherent and stable communities, grow less effective, we rely, naturally enough, on the formal restraints of law. Of course, private organizations and corporations can and do constrain us, but such private governments are only distantly accountable, and we do not always trust their principles: their power, in fact, prompts us to ask public government to regulate their conduct by reference to public standards.

Government can also make decency more rewarding in a positive sense. Saving, that vital decency, is hard to begin, because at low levels of income, the cost of saving is relatively high and the return from saving (given the small amounts saved) is absolutely low. Like many decencies, saving gets easier as you go along, especially since the market always gives a larger return to large savers, for good economic reasons. The habit of saving, consequently, might be encouraged by tax laws that reward saving in small amounts and for the long term. On the same principle, we might benefit from laws rewarding investment in a genuinely long term (rather than the one year of the tax code), or that give benefits to stable families, or to the creation of jobs at socially adequate wages. In general, we need to evaluate laws and policies in terms of the moral “bottom line,” the impact of American life and law on the American soul.

Yet while government may have to play a major role in social reconstruction, it certainly is not type-cast in the part. Liberal democratic states are always uncomfortable with judgments about the soul, and this uneasiness is magnified to the extent that citizens distrust government and hedge it round with suspicion. So beset, officials are even more likely—and they are always over-ready—to prefer objective tests and quantitative standards to judgments of quality. We know, for example, that poverty, the social problem, is a “condition of life,” not an income level: monastics and graduate students can and do live below the “poverty line” without being worrisome. But a definition of poverty in terms of income has always been easier for officials and researchers, and such ideas tend to become the basis of policy. In the same way, critics of affirmative action are right to worry that, whatever the statutes say, the policy will result in quotas, because officials feel less exposed when they can appeal to quantitative measures.

And American citizens are feeling more distant from and distrustful of government. More and more of us experience politics as a sphere of indignity, an arena of massive scale and towering technicality in which we feel both weak and stupid and are treated with no respect. The political linkages that Tocqueville described—the interlocking hierarchy of local association, press, and party—have been damaged or shattered by a combination of technology and “reform” legislation, so that a growing number of citizens are connected to government and public life only by the mass media.

This is susceptible to being exploited by those who hold to a Nationalist understanding of the Union and statists. Where are the limits to what the National Government can do? Can how can the freedom of families and states be preserved? Local governments must respect the ethos of the people and first must do what it can to preserve the people in being.

He discusses equality:

In the end, however, we come back to the principle of equality that is the moral foundation of the regime and the ultimate standard of public’ regulation. We need to remind the partisans of multiculturalism, for example, that cultures are not always or not easily compatible—with each other or with democratic politics—that cultures not only contradict each other, but often include racism and sexism, and that they hanker after aristocracy or develop souls uncomfortable with democratic life. With all its ups and downs, America has accepted its diversity–attempting to make a nation, Chesterton said, “out of any nation that comes along”—not necessarily in the belief that old cultures will melt into indistinction, but out of confidence that the cultures will be forced to yield any claim to rule that runs counter to equality and equal rights. American multi¬culturalism is gently contemptuous of the cultures, convinced that equality and the rights that go with it are qualitatively superior because—unlike stories and legends—they rest on the facts of human nature.

Americans today have particular reason to cherish that older understanding of equality that is at least the counterpoint of the republic’s melody, and perhaps, the ark of our civic covenant. So conceived, equality does not insist that we all be treated in the same way. On the contrary, it often demands that government recognize and compensate for at least some of the inequalities of nurture and fortune in the interest of something closer to nature and to effective civic equality. Such compensations, of course, are properly relative, shifting with the terms of disadvantage: recent policy has been engrossed with the inequalities of race and gender, but as more women and minorities achieve places of advantage, inequalities of class may deserve first place in public concern. For example, it is absurd, as Justice Thomas said, that his children should qualify for scholarships denied to working-class Appalachian whites, especially since Thomas’s children would probably be closer to the cultural mainstream.

In the same way, equality is not simply a matter of rights and entitlements. Rather, it suggests that within the limits of our opportunities, we can be held accountable to equal standards. More and more Democrats—and even liberals, here and there—are beginning to observe that “in providing for the poor, we must also make reasonable demands on them—for work, schooling and, yes, sexual responsibility.” Human beings know they are more than appetites, and their dignity requires a contribution, within their means, to the common life. Perhaps it is even time to suggest that all Americans owe a period of service to the republic.

Closer to nature? Civic equality??? I find that he is too much of an egalitarian and cannot accept his vision of "conservatism."