Self-government in a republic of 325 million

The present study argues that a middle way is possible. On one side, the extension of specialization in government is irreversible and certainly linked to largely beneficial trends, making it folly to strive for citizen self-government in any literal sense. Short of civilizational collapse, the government of simpler times will not be returning.

On the other side, there are serious downsides to specialization of public functions that must be vigilantly attended to by generalists. Representative government as instantiated in a strong legislature is our best chance at some kind of meaningful self-government and it should be defended as such.

As we have inherited it, the Constitution is a major resource for this defense—at least if Congress can be made to play its intended role. Realizing limits on the executive and judicial branches through an assertion of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives would therefore be the best way to serve the cause of self-government in America today.

The presidential campaign trail of 2016 still echoes with paeans to self-government—to the American people rising up to take our government back from those other people who have been making such a mess of things. For example, in announcing his presidential bid in Virginia, Senator Ted Cruz declared of ordinary Americans: “This is our fight. The answer will not come from Washington. It will come only from the men and women across this country, from men and women, from people of faith, from lovers of liberty, from people who respect the Constitution.” He later echoed a similar sentiment: “Here is the truth: You don’t need me or any politician.”

Likewise, announcing his candidacy from his native Detroit, Ben Carson sounded a similar theme: “I think it is time for the people to rise up and take the government back […] We, the people are the rulers of thought in this nation. We get to determine what kind of nation we have. Other people cannot dictate that for us. We need never allow anybody to take the right away from us.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, Senator Bernie Sanders told Iowans he was beginning “a political revolution,” in which “young people and working people and seniors begin to stand up and say loudly and clearly ‘Enough is enough!’ That our government—the government of our great country belongs to all of us and not just a handful of billionaires.”

And finally, in his inaugural address, even our billionaire president-elect himself ran with the theme:

What truly matters is not which party controls our Government, but whether our Government is controlled by the people. January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this Nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.

From all of these speeches, it would seem that self-government—the idea that government in all aspects must emanate and draw its authority from “the people themselves”—is highly prized by America’s citizenry as the central feature of our political life.

But, to use a technical philosophical term: Is all of this just so much bullshit? That is, are these just the kind of rhetorical tunes that Americans like hearing, irrespective of their relationship to any meaningful reality? After all, Americans may want their high office-holders to flatter them with pieties about the power of the people—running against Washington is, by now, a venerable tradition in American politics— but collectively, our desire to exercise that power is mostly rather flaccid. Moreover, our willingness to invest our time and energy in knowing about the affairs of state, such that we might responsibly influence the debates of the day, is downright miniscule.

Evidence to support these propositions has never been more abundant. An enormous political science literature developed over the last half-century establishes that the average American knows shockingly little about current national politics and is likely to have rather murky views about which policies are desirable. But people do have political predilections in favor of one party (or sharply against another), and they tend to reason outward from this: where they have a strong view, they tend to believe their party shares it, whether true or not; where they do not have a strong instinct, they are likely to take instruction from their party.

Given this starting point, it is perhaps unsurprising that most Americans do little to directly engage national politics. American voter turnout is among the lowest in the developed world, the majority of Americans are wholly disconnected from politics in a given year and a growing portion of the political activity that does occur falls into the category of online emoting. As much as Americans like to say they would govern differently and better than their professional politicians and bureaucrats, then, as a whole they do not do much to prove it.

And why should we expect anything different? After all, we have given ourselves over to specialization and the division of labor across nearly the whole range of our activities. We complain about slow airplane boarding processes and rough landings but we do not expect people to start learning about what it takes to run an airline or fly a jet. We protest high produce prices but we are not surprised that people have nextto-no concrete ideas of the costs of fertilizing, growing, picking or transporting our peaches or avocados to market. And we may curse our smartphone providers when our devices make ceaseless demands to update themselves but that hardly means we have any real sense of the coding and cybersecurity imperatives behind these technologies. Indeed, our lives are full to the brim with things we do not understand and this basic fact is one of the defining features of modern life.

And given that this is the case, why would anyone think modern citizens would somehow make serious investments in understanding how banks should be regulated or how tax exemptions should be configured or what kind of curricula our schools should use? To be sure, those we vote into office are charged with settling these matters—but the causal connection between one person’s vote and the substance of policies is so attenuated as to be imperceptible (if not wholly fictitious).

In light of this, perhaps self-government is not much different from autarky or self-reliance—values with powerful intuitive appeal but little value in the modern world as it currently exists. Maybe government just is not actually that different from “the market” when it comes to these questions.

Such a logical conclusion is simply unacceptable to many. Our inherited ideas about self-government make us think that division of labor applies in the private realm but surely must be irrelevant to the public one. Our Constitution instantiates a highly stylized division of labor meant to ultimately empower and serve “the People” but by preserving a preeminent place for elected representatives who possess no specialized knowledge, it clearly limits just how specialized and removed from the public the exercise of public authority can be.

Accordingly, the thrust of this study is to consider whether such a privileging of generalists makes sense in our modern America, 325 million citizens strong. The way that our administrative state has grown up along with the nation seems to suggest it does not. As government has acquired more functions, more policies have effectively become the province of bureaucratic specialists. The role of generalist legislators has receded. One may reckon this development welcome or pernicious but either way, there is a sense that it is somehow inevitable; a simple function of economic and technological development and population growth. Is that feeling of inevitability misguided? Or is it correct, and does it render our constitutional structure unfit for the modern world?

The present study argues that a middle way is possible. On one side, the extension of specialization in government is irreversible and certainly linked to largely beneficial trends, making it folly to strive for citizen self-government in any literal sense. Short of civilizational collapse, the government of simpler times will not be returning. On the other side, there are serious downsides to specialization of public functions that must be vigilantly attended to by generalists. Representative government as instantiated in a strong legislature is our best chance at some kind of meaningful self-government and it should be defended as such. As we have inherited it, the Constitution is a major resource for this defense—at least if Congress can be made to play its intended role. Realizing limits on the executive and judicial branches through an assertion of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives would therefore be the best way to serve the cause of self-government in America today.