In the Beginning Was the Public, Not the Government

by David Muthews*

he American formula for good government begins in the insistence that “good” government must be ‘‘just’’ government. And the first principle of just government is that it rests on the consent of the

governed. Think about the phrase “. . . that to secure these rights, governments are

instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the gov- erned. ” Centuries of human experience and wisdom are packed into that thought. It is a major canon in what some call our civic religion, the basic principles that govern our dealings with one another. In any discussion of “good government,” the topics may concern techniques or practices, but the not-so-hidden agenda will often be the restatement, rehearsal and revalidation of the founding principles. That exercise should always precede any discus- sion of the practice of good government because no practice can be judged “good” without knowing what basic purpose it serves. One practice is as good as another-any road will do-if you don’t know where you are going.

A recent examination of what schoolchildren know about government re- vealed that they know a great deal about the practice of government. What they don’t know is what the practices are for. It is interesting, if worrisome, to consider how adults might fare in such a survey.

Knowing what we mean, knowing what principles we have in mind when we say that all just government rests on the consent of the governed, is essen- tial to sorting out which practices in government serve us well and which

The implication in the first principle of good government is that the legiti- mate authority for government rests somewhere other than in government itself. There is something prior to, more important than, government. In the beginning . . . was the public, not the government. The public is not a crea- ture of government. It is the source of government. That is part of what is

Poorly.

*David Mathews is president of The Kettering Foundation, Dayton. This is based on his ad- dress before the Seasongood Symposium “In the Public Service,” in Cincinnati, December 7, 1983.

49 1

492 I NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW

meant by “alljust government rests . . . . ” Unfortunately, we have forgotten that the public and the government are not the same.

Ask for a synonym for public, and most people, without thinking about it, will say government. What is a public official? A public official to most people is a mayor or a legislator-that is, a government official elected or appointed. It is not being antigovernment to recognize that the public came first. It is true, of course, that there is a relationship between the public and the government. It is somewhat like the relationship between Pilgrims and Puritans. All Pilgrims were Puritans, but all Puritans were not Pilgrims. All governments are public (or have their origins in publics), but all publics are not governments. The public is pre-governmental, even pre-political. The public is our shared life in all of its forms. It is the environment out of which governments grow.

The point is that to talk about good government, the starting point can’t be missed. The quality of the public determines the quality of government. There is no such thing as good government in the absence of a good public. Good government doesn’t start in government; it starts in the quality of our public life.

Civic organizations and voluntary associations, .the young people’s softball league and the college students’ voter registration drive, the town meeting and the fund drive to save the oldest house in the city-all of those things consti- tute our public life. And the people who lead these groups, the latter day Ben Franklins, are public leaders-even public officials.

To paraphrase the first principle, then, “All good government has its foun- dation in the public’s consent. ” But that principle raises a second series of questions: what creates a good public and what informs the public’s consent? The American formula for resolving those questions drew heavily on the clas- sical theory of democratic participation.

Participation is not just a boon granted by politicians, or a civic sport. Advocating participation in government is not just a public relations tech- nique or a clever way to get reelected. Participation provides the essential ingredients for democratic government.

First, democracies, in order to flourish, require people with a certain level of civic intelligence. Public rather than just private skills have to be devel- oped. There is a number of things we can’t do until we can think about them, but being a good citizen is probably something that we can’t think about until we do it. Participation is important because it develops the public side of human nature.

As the first function of participation is to create the public person, its sec- ond function is to create the public itself. The public is not just a mass of

November 1984

IN THE BEGINNING.. . I 493

people, but people bound together by common interests. Participation is the means of identifying those shared interests. We can only find out where we and our neighbors have a common stake in things by talking to them. Democ- racy begins in conversation, in that most basic form of participation. Town meetings and community forums, even the old discussions in the post office, are not just nice, they are indispensible. One of the best testimonies to their importance appeared in the Cenrury magazine in 1919. A man named Glenn Frank recalled his own experience:

To this day, when I return to this mid-Western village and go to the post office, I am struck by the original and independent . . . thinking that is manifested in these free-for-all discussions. These men may wear “hand- me-down” or ready-made suits, but not so their opinions; they, at least, are personally tailored. They do not surrender their day’s opinion to the chance impression of headlines. Each for himself as he goes about his work, they mull over such headline and hearsay information as may have come to them respecting the things that are holding the center of the stage in war, in diplomacy, in politics, and in industry; then later at the post office they lay their minds alongside the minds of their neighbors, they pit their opinions against the opinions of their fellows, and before they get through they have made up the public opinion of the village. A sense of shared interests is, in turn, the basis for the broad-based coali-

tions that give direction and legitimacy to government and assure that it is both efficient and effective. One of our most experienced and thoughtful con- gressional leaders, Richard Bolling, said this well when he said that we need to:

provide a rational opportunity for people to understand what their govern- ment is doing and how it’s doing it. This involves looking at everything. It involves taking on, in the interest of the generality, each particular party. And the only way that you can possibly succeed in that is to work out the roughest parts of the problem, in the beginning. That’s exactly what hap- pened with the Marshall Plan . . . . Coalitions were put together of differ- ent groups led by people of established reputation; people in politics, peo- ple out of politics; all working together on a common cause, fighting out their difficulties, to the point where they could have an acceptable program. Fighting out their differences as one group. They came to a policy decision so that Congress was not confronted with absolutely impossible black and white decisions . . . . In recalling the traditions of our civic religion, it is useful at this point to

remember that participation in the original sense did not mean participation as in a football game, or in a contest that you must lose in order for me to win. It meant sharing in, as it is used now when talking about participating in a

November 1984

494 1 NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW

communion or potluck supper or family reunion. Without denying the legiti- macy of competition, as when we debate political issues and select candi- dates, it is nonetheless the sharing kind of participation that creates a public.

But even participation in the classical sense does not guarantee happiness and harmony. It is important to recognize that democratic systems tend to produce discord. That is their nature. The function of participation is not to secure agreement on every point. Good participation should lead to a larger view of how others’ interests are affected and a sense of the common stake in the business of the community. It should produce a basis for action, even when there are strong differences of opinion.

Finally, participation is indispensable to a democratic government because it creates public knowledge. A government that rests on the consent of the governed demands an informed public. But is it enough just to know the facts, both those that persuade and those that bolster opposing points of view, or to be sensitive to the preferences of others? Probably not. A point must be reached at which it is possible to discover what is common to the vaned perceptions of a problem-and beyond that to arrive at choices that reflect what is common to those vaned interests.

Effective participation creates what the public alone can create-a shared knowledge of what choices will serve the community’s values and common interests best. The first step in that process is to stir first impressions, personal biases and special interests into the caldron of public discussion and meld them into second opinions, which are more likely to be shared by others. It is from those second opinions that people can identify commonalities and fash- ion choices consistent with them. That process can unlock political machin- ery, creating a basis for action where it was impossible before-as occurred in 1982 in finding solutions to the highly incendiary social security issue.

As those who are experimenting with new negotiated strategies for solving governmental problems know, the working through of an issue can even pro- duce something totally new-a basis for action where interests are redefined and accommodated rather than just partially met. The institutions that foster such public discussions are indispensable. Lamenting the atrophying of the town meeting in his own generation, Woodrow Wilson wrote perceptively:

. . . There has been no sufficient opportunity for counsel among the peo- ple. We must learn to meet as our father’s did, somehow, somewhere for consultation. . . . The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend on the understanding of one man, but to depend on the counsel of all. For only as men are brought into counsel can the general interest of a great people be compounded in a policy suitable to all.

November 1984

IN THE BEGINNING.. . I 495

It is fallacious to assume that the public can make detailed governmental decisions, but it is imperative to recognize that the public, and the public alone, makes the broad choices and sets the common standards on which successful policy rests. And the public makes those choices best when it is not just informed but “knowledgeable. ”

Thomas Jefferson wrote: I ‘ . . . I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves . . . . And ifwe think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it awayfrom them, but to inform their discretion. ” In establishing our government, no one ever assumed that participation in and of itself would give us good government, not unless it was informed. But how does the kind of learning take place that results in a knowledgeable public?

The public should be, and probably is in the final analysis, in charge of its own education. We have assumed that public learning goes on without inten- tion, that it just happens, but that is a questionable assumption. Groups of people, like individuals, are informed or not, educated or not, knowledgeable or not. In either case, not much learning goes on when everything is left to chance. We certainly don’t leave the education of individuals to chance. Why should we leave the essential education of communities of people to chance?

Those communities that have a basis for good government are probably those where the institutions that can affect the community’s learning- forums, schools, foundations, media-see themselves as instruments of inten- tional community education and work together to meet that responsibility. A postscript:

The American formula for good government, which has placed an increas- ing premium on participation, has, at times, been challenged by seeming conflicts among the several values embraced in our civic religion. Do we value participation more than freedom (which includes the freedom to be left alone)? Is majority rule more important than equity? Without denying the validity of these problems, recalling the origins of our democratic faith may be of some use in sorting out disputes over values just as it is in sorting out disputes over practice.

Participation was, in fact, a basis for many other values. More value came to be placed on freedom because full participation was impossible without it. Freedom of speech, for example, was not an end in itself. It was something needed to make the system work. It was the same with equity: in order to have a valid debate, everyone had to have equal standing. So equity was valued, not as an abstract principle, but because of its utility in making the system work. The point is that democratic values are not unrelated, and those rela- tionships are more obvious if we return occasionally to the roots of our faith.

November 1984

496 I NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW

“All just (good) governments depend upon the knowledgeable participation ofthe public . . . ” is a precept that distills a long tradition of political wis- dom. And for that reason it is a rich resource on which to draw in charting our political course these days. That is the general thesis of this argument.

Participation is conventionally thought to be of questionable importance. At most, it is assumed to be a political right, often begrudgingly acknowl- edged. Americans prefer to filter it through representation, fearing that its direct properties may be corrosive rather than constructive. But that percep- tion robs us of an appreciation of participation’s creative functions-as do the overextended claims for participation as a kind of universal panacea or opiate. At low moments, the democratically inclined should recall that participation has been best understood not as a right to be conferred, but as an expression of our best nature.

It was noted earlier that participation meant to share in, not to contest with. The words and the ideas of participation came into our political vocabulary from metaphysics, where the term was used to describe the relation of the parts to the whole. We are inextricably parts of the body public. And in that admittedly archaic but nonetheless useful sense, participation describes a rela- tionship rather than just an activity.

The use of that historical excursion is to remind us that it is not just the fact of participation or its frequency that is important. It is its quality as well. We often think that the principal way to improve participation is to increase it. All to the good. But more is not all that is better. Improving the quality of partici- pation, that is, enriching the education of young people in the civic arts, improving the models for facilitating public learning, strengthening a commu- nity’s network for learning about the community’s business-all of those things affecting the quality of participation are integral to the formula for good government.

All-America Finalists (continued from page 490)

-Creation of neighborhood mediation panels for conflict resolution as an alternative to formal hearings and litigation procedures.

-Development of a major neighbor- hood park as part of a community ef- fort to deter juvenile violence and street gangs.

Tempe, Arizona (pop. 106,743) --Integration of youth into the

November 1984

problem-solving process through “Town Hall” meetings planned and run by the young people who make up the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Committee.

-Creation of the Tempe Center for the Handicapped to provide a wide range of vocational training services.

-Transformation of a dry riverbed into higher quality land usage incor- porating a linear park.