Downsizing Democracy Crenson, Matthew A., Ginsberg, Benjamin
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Downsizing Democracy Crenson, Matthew A., Ginsberg, Benjamin Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Crenson, Matthew A. and Benjamin Ginsberg. Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.72712. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/72712 [ Access provided at 25 Sep 2021 15:31 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg Downsizing Democracy How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3068-3 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3068-1 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3067-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3067-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3735-4 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3735-X (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. Downsizing Democracy Downsizing Democracy How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public Matthew A. Crenson Benjamin Ginsberg The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London © The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crenson, Matthew A., 1943– Downsizing democracy : how America sidelined its citizens and privatized its public / Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg. p. cm. Includes bibliograhical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-7150-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political participation—United States. 2. Democracy—United States—Citizen participation. 3. United States—Politics and government. I. Ginsberg, Benjamin. II. Title. JK1764.C74 2002 323′.042′0973—dc21 2002005601 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. To Alene and Sandy Contents Preface vii Chapter 1 From Popular to Personal Democracy 1 Chapter 2 The Rise and Fall of the Citizen 20 Chapter 3 Elections without Voters 47 Chapter 4 The Old Patronage and the New 80 Chapter 5 Disunited We Stand 106 Chapter 6 From Masses to Mailing Lists 122 Chapter 7 The Jurisprudence of Personal Democracy 152 —vii— Contents Chapter 8 Movements without Members 182 Chapter 9 Privatizing the Public 198 Chapter 10 Does Anyone Need Citizens? 234 Notes 245 Index 285 —viii— Preface FOR MORE THAN two centuries, ordinary citizens were important actors on the Western political stage. Their vanguard entered political life with a bang in the eighteenth century, firing the shot heard round the world and responding with alacrity to the levee en masse. Over the ensuing decades, tens of millions more served loyally as voters, citizen soldiers, taxpayers, jurors, and the citizen administrators now disparaged as patronage employees. In these and other ways, citizens were the back- bone of the Western state, providing it with the administrative, coercive, and extractive capabilities that allowed the West to conquer much of the world. In return for their service, citizens received a variety of benefits including legal rights, pensions, and, perhaps most notably, the right to vote. The history of suffrage is often written so as to suggest that the opportunity to participate in national politics was wrung from unwilling rulers after bitter popular struggles. This tacit exchange of service for ben- efits, though, drew citizens further and more fully into political life. Citi- zen administrators became the mainstays of vigorous political party organizations. Expansion of the government’s revenue base to include tens of millions of ordinary citizens also expanded the power of the representa- tive and political institutions that encouraged popular compliance and negotiated conflicts of interest. Reliance upon citizen soldiers continually expanded the boundaries of participation as those asked to fight —ix— Preface demanded the right to vote. In time, the government’s reliance upon the support and cooperation of ordinary citizens had the critically important effect of expanding the universe of popular political involvement. The era of the citizen is now coming to an end. Today, Western gov- ernments have found ways of raising armies, collecting taxes, and admin- istering programs that do not require much involvement on the part of ordinary citizens. This underlying development has, in turn, opened the way for political elites to reduce their dependence upon popular political participation and to avail themselves instead of methods for securing and exercising power that do not rest on mass politics. In some respects, the symptoms of this change are most marked in America, where voter turnout has been declining for more than six decades as ordinary citizens have been banished to the political sidelines. Despite the nation’s initial democratic exceptionalism, contemporary political elites have substan- tially marginalized the American mass electorate and have come to rely more and more on the courts and the bureaucracy to get what they want. We call this pattern “personal democracy” to distinguish it from popular democracy, a way of doing business that required elites to mobilize non- elites in order to prevail in the political arena. It is personal because the new techniques of governing disaggregate the public into a collection of private citizens. Their experience of democracy is increasingly personal rather than collective. Ordinary Americans, in recent decades, have been reduced from citizens to what are in Washington frequently called “customers”— individual recipients of governmental services who are not encouraged to involve themselves as a group in the political or governmental process. Take, for example, the report of former vice president Al Gore’s National Performance Review (NPR). The NPR, one of the few Clinton-era institu- tions endorsed by most Republicans because of its “businesslike” approach to government, generally fails to use the term “citizen” in its references to the people of the United States. Instead, Americans are deemed “customers” for government services. In its preamble to Chapter 2, “Putting Customers First,” the report quotes Gore as saying, “A lot of people don’t realize that the federal government has customers. We have customers. The American people.” The transformation of citizens into customers is significant. Citizens were thought to own the government. Customers, by contrast, are merely expected to receive pleasant service from it. Citizens, moreover, are members of a political community with a collective existence created for public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking to meet their private needs in a market. What is miss- ing from the experience of customers is collective mobilization to achieve collective interests, and the omission is not just a matter of changing —x— Preface semantic fashions along the Potomac. In keeping with a customer- friendly orientation, government employees are advised to be courteous and more “user friendly” at all times. Agencies are admonished to pro- vide friendly surroundings for customers and are advised to conduct fre- quent customer-satisfaction surveys. The NPR report, however, has little or nothing to say about how customers might actually influence the sub- stance of federal programs and their administration. The declining role of the American citizen became even more evident during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. The national news media claimed that the so-called battle for public opinion was every bit as important as the legal and institutional struggle for Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes. This claim, however, was patently false. Although public opinion was not totally irrelevant—each candidate employed dozens of surrogates to trumpet his claims to the press— neither candidate made much effort to elicit popular support. Certainly, neither candidate heeded the calls of political activists like Reverend Jesse Jackson for mass demonstrations and protests. The two candidates’ occa- sional public appearances were not really designed to bolster popular enthusiasm. They were intended more to strengthen the resolve of important political allies and to induce contributors to keep their wallets open to finance the battle, which was costing tens of millions of dollars. While their public appearances were rare, both Al Gore and Joe Lieber- man spent hours on the telephone each day contacting contributors. GOP fund-raisers were active throughout the nation as well. Al Gore, for one, fully understood the minimal role of the mass public in the battle. In response to a television reporter’s question on November 28 about the role of public opinion in the presidential struggle, Gore said, “I’m quite sure that [public opinion doesn’t] matter in this, because it’s a legal ques-