Books Archive - Order this Book - Respond

October 1998 - Volume 30 Issue 10

THE GOOD CITIZEN A History of American Civic Life By Michael Schudson The Free Press, $27.50

There's a corner of the political world, which includes the kind of elected official who is praised for being "thoughtful," the foundation/think tank complex, prominent public intellectuals, and the high-end print press, that, for all its self-conscious depth and seriousness, operates on a series of unexamined assumptions about American public life. The most pervasive and least acknowledged of these is an automatic nostalgia, an idea of the present as a falling-away from a better past. We aren't as politically committed as in the '60s or as socially calm as in the '50s or as organized as in the '30s or as truth-seeking as in the Progressive Era.

At the moment, civic life is the main focus of the nostalgia of the better sort. The original bringer of the Word on the subject was Alexis de Tocqueville, who praised American society above all for its proliferation of voluntary associations. Today, matters ranging from declining voter turnout and newspaper readership to urban ghetto poverty to the rise of television and suburbia to the triumph of entertainment values over news are understood as examples of civic failure. Hardly a day goes by that my mail doesn't bring an announcement of a new study on civic renewal. The single best-known bemoaning of the sorry decline of American civic life since a halcyon baseline period, Robert Putnam's famous article "Bowling Alone," will soon be published as a book, and then the rhetoric of civic nostalgia will only intensify.

Michael Schudson's The Good Citizen is an admirable, consistently interesting attempt to lay out with some factual and conceptual precision the history of an issue usually discussed in platitudes. Like Robert Wiebe's underrated 1994 book Self-Rule, it helps to clarify terms like "democracy" and "citizenship," which lose all their meaning if they're used merely to signify something vague and unobjectionable.

Most of The Good Citizen is given over to an amiable but determinedly revisionist history. The oft-invoked founding fathers, Schudson says, had an idea of democracy that would be unrecognizable today. Features of the contemporary political system that we take for granted, like universal suffrage, direct election of candidates by secret ballot, equal opportunity, classlessness, political parties, and a free press, were completely foreign (or, if not foreign, horrifying) to them. To cite specifically just one of many possible examples of Schudson's merry contrariness, he argues, convincingly, that the First Amendment to the Constitution barred Congress from curtailing freedom of the press only in order to leave room for the state legislatures to curtail it - which is why editors were regularly jailed for seditious libel.

It wasn't until well into the 19th century that anything like democracy and civil society in their current forms existed. That the two sprang up simultaneously wasn't an accident; they were linked. To an extent we don't appreciate today, Schudson says, civil institutions did not stand magnificently apart from politics and government. Either they were explicitly political and partisan, like the 19th-century press, or the various interest and pressure groups that gradually joined and morphed into the modern parties (such as the anti-slavery societies that became the base of the Republican Party); or (as in the case of temperance societies) they were an attempt to reestablish elite control in reaction to the unruly newness of democracy.

When we finally arrived at the point of having a well-organized party system and high voter turnout, after the Civil War, the character of American politics, Schudson reminds us, was overwhelmingly that of an unlovely battle over money, jobs, and power, with little or no public-interest component. High-minded, educated people hated politics and fought to limit its power and purview, through means like the establishment of the civil service. The basic set of civic ideals we hold now - good government, an objective, reformist press, a powerful, benevolent president, and an idealistically engaged citizenry - originated with patrician reformers who thought of them as antidotes to pure party democracy.

Schudson understands American civic history as an endless, seesawing struggle between two forces that we no longer think of as being in conflict: on the one hand mass engagement in politics and public affairs, and on the other what he calls "state mugwumpery," that is, supposedly honest, efficient, depoliticized government in which experts have disproportionate influence. The first of these forces was triumphant in the late 19th century. The second has been triumphant in this century, and that (rather than disgust over official lying and corruption) is why the public is so apathetic and cynical about politics. If government is depoliticized, then politics matters less, and it's only natural that most people will therefore become less interested and involved in it. The rise of special-interest groups had been another direct result of the deliberate wing-clipping of political parties and the spoils system. The parties have to court the likes of the American Association of Retired People because its members aren't primarily loyal to the parties. Why should they be? Control of the government benefits they want have been taken out of the parties' hands.

As for Robert Putnam's idea that outside of the sphere of politics there used to be a vigorous associational life for ordinary people that has recently disappeared, Schudson seems extremely skeptical about that, too. He sees Putnam's high-civic-engagement period of the fifties as a Cold War aberration - one more object of useless nostalgia. And he reminds us that during what Putnam considers the heyday of American civic life, the Putnams of the era - intellectuals like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills - were in a state of despair over the condition of our civil society (on the grounds that we had become timid conformists) that was no less severe than Putnam's.

Just about the only element of the conventional wisdom about American society that Schudson agrees with is the idea that the "rights revolution" of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, during which judges and legislators made government the guarantor of a wide range of personal freedoms, profoundly changed our political and civic life. The essence of the rights revolution is encouraging citizens to seek specific redress on issues of paramount importance to them - everything from racial advancement to feminism to medical benefits to handicapped access to child abuse prevention - rather than interacting with the wider society primarily through a broad-spectrum organization like a political party. While granting that an emphasis on individual rights weakens traditional politics, Schudson is nonetheless a mild defender of the rights revolution. [C]ivic participation now takes place everywhere," he writes. "It exists in the microprocesses of social life... [T]he idea of citizenship has colonized Š many of the territories of private life that were once beyond its jurisdiction. Citizens still exercise citizenship as they stand in line at their polling places, but now they exercise citizenship in many other locations... [T]hey are citizens in their homes, schools, and places of employment."

Schudson ends by arguing, hastily and incompletely, that American life has gotten so complicated that perhaps we should give up on the goal of everyone's being politically engaged, and instead honor "the monitorial citizen" who swings into public action only when directly threatened. This isn't very satisfying; if Schudson is unusually successful at keeping his work free of what he calls "the rhetoric of decline," he has done less well at avoiding the other most common fault of intellectuals, presenting a recommendation that is much weaker than the analysis that has led up to it. You get the feeling he's kind of a hypocrite-in-reverse. As Jamie Stiehm demonstrated in a mischievous piece in The Nation a few years ago, most of the familiar hand-wringers over the sorry state of American citizenship don't themselves do any of the things (PTA membership, church attendance, even voting) that they demand of everybody else. Schudson, on the other hand, tells us that in 1996 he was a volunteer inspector in his home precinct. He admiringly mentions the lifelong devotion to public service of his brother, a judge in Wisconsin. He seems reluctant to preach what he himself practices, perhaps because he so badly wants to avoid the role of the stuffed shirt who excoriates ordinary people for their insufficiencies.

Never mind. The Good Citizen is an extremely valuable book. What it does best is insist on precision about a subject that is commented on constantly in a fuzzy, second-rate way. There isn't, Schudson insists, a single version of "good citizenship" that used to predominate in America and doesn't any longer. The longed-for good citizen of contemporary discourse is an ordinary person who faithfully votes and stays informed about public affairs, who is intensely involved as a community volunteer, and who wants government to be clean, efficient, and dedicated to the overall public good. Well, Schudson says, that kind of good citizen, as the typical actor in American public life, has never existed.

Up to at least 1830 the typical American probably did none of the things now thought to represent good citizenship. As a mythic figure, today's good citizen represents an unacknowledged blending of three quite distinctly different ways for the individual to interact with society. One is the interest-citizen, who actively engages in politics in the hope of gaining personal advantage - the prime example being the vanished urban machine Democrat. A second is the information-citizen, who wants government policy to rest on a bed of truth and expertise - the Progressive mugwump type. And the third is the rights-citizen, who relies primarily on laws rather than elections as the way to extract the most cherished goals from the political system - the crusader against sexual harassment, say.

Through our history, these versions of the meaning of citizenship have been in conflict; it isn't too much to say that each has consistently tried to blast the others out of existence. To understand this doesn't necessarily mean we now have to pick one version and reject the other two. It does mean that one shouldn't be able to get away with presenting oneself as blandly mystified over why Americans don't behave themselves perfectly, the way they used to - which is a precondition of getting to work on the problem of citizenship.

Let's try to move the discussion a little further than Schudson is willing to, but on the basis of his invaluable evidence. People become active citizens because they perceive it as likely to produce results for them. If you construct society so that the only reason to become an active citizen is that it's the right thing to do, then most people won't be active citizens. The way to encourage citizenship is to endow it with practical and psychological consequences. The more decisions seem to be in the hands of faraway experts, the more voters are treated as sheep who must meekly respond to the manipulations of public opinion experts, the deeper the slumber of the citizenry will become.

We tend to fall automatically into thinking that if people don't vote or otherwise engage themselves in public affairs, it's because they've become disgusted with politics. If we could only eliminate the money and the spoils and the hubbub and create a politics based on calm reason, they'd come back. Schudson convinces us that every step in that direction will only deepen the problem. Citizenship, it turns out, is fundamentally political. The best way to promote it is to make politics as broad, open, and consequential as possible.

~Nicholas Lemann