Jason has correctly complained about claims that we are the government. He cites a ridiculous Salon article, but here’s a nice example from President Obama himself:

You hear some of these quotes: “I need a gun to protect myself from the government.” “We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,” Obama said. Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.

Now readers on this blog, including myself, think this claim is obviously false and that those who think it is true labor under a serious and dangerous delusion. Even if government isn’t inherently evil, the idea that it expresses our will to such an extent that the government should somehow be identified with its subjects is simply a quasi-theological belief that legitimates the power of the democratic state.

And yet, why do people think that this is true? Obama’s no moron, and he almost certainly thought this before he was president or even thought he could become president, so it’s not just power corrupting him.

The intuitive idea, I think, is that it’d be really nice if there was some way people could set aside their differences and come together to promote the common good. Democracy, at its best, can express our joint commitment to one another’s good and to our shared understanding of justice. The government is us because, at its best, it expresses our collective will. For a great many, this is what makes government legitimate, that it expresses the will of the people. It’s wishful thinking.

To vindicate the idea that the government “is us” in some interesting fashion requires a lot of heavy philosophical lifting. You have to do all of the following:

(1) Define the idea of a general will or collective will in a plausible fashion.

(2) Show that the idea does not contain an inherent contradiction (like an Arrow impossibility result).

(3) Show the ideal is normatively powerful enough to justify a state, any state.

(4) Explain how a government could be structured to express this will.

(5) Explain how individuals must be motivated in order to express this will.

And that’s just the normative part. On to the descriptive part:

(6) Argue that modern democratic governments are at least similar to the ideal institutional type.

(7) Argue that modern democratic citizens are at least similar to their motivational ideals.

(8) Argue that the relevant similarities are sufficient to show that democratic governments and citizens at least partly realize the ideal.

This is a tall order indeed. You’re going to have to be Rousseau, Kant, Rawls or Habermas or one who operates in their shadows to even formulate an interconnected and coherent series of arguments to reach these goals.

I know Jason thinks this can’t work. And I agree, sorta, but I would like to defend a more constructive response to modern-day descendants of Rousseau.

The deep, noble ideal behind much of modern democratic political theory is that politics can be something more than mere violence or force. The hope is that there are ways of organizing coercive power that allows us to be reconciled to one another, so that our social order is rooted in reason and agreement rather than mere power relations. That’s an attractive normative ideal, in my view, though I have a different way of interpreting it.

In case you’re interested, here’s my preferred way to go about combating the tendency to identify people with their democratic governments.

(a) Define the general will as the complete set of publicly justified laws and norms.

(b) Show that, by allowing diverse reasoning, incomplete rankings and convention-formation, we can block the worst threats from social choice theory.

(c) Show that the normative ideal of public justification is powerful enough to justify some set of coercive laws, as supplements to a broader justified system of social norms that include all other coercive social institutions. This set of coercive laws need not constitute a state.

(d) Explain how a basic structure or social order could be structured so as to be publicly justified (something classically liberal, as I’ve alluded to on the blog).

(e) Explain how individuals as they are could live in a publicly justified polity without all their failings and foibles, with a dash of idealization.

(f) Argue that modern property institutions and some constitutional rules are publicly justified, such that contemporary citizens of democratic states have sufficient reason to both endorse and stabilize these rules.

The differences between my public reason view and the mainstream Rousseauian ideal are several, most of which derive from a combination of the public reason literature and a British Idealist conception of the general will as embodied in the social order as a whole in ways that are generally too complex for us to grasp (smell the Hayek here):

(I) I understand the general will in terms of public justification (something that can be modified from Rousseau and Kant, via Rawls, Lomasky, Gaus and other contemporary contractualists).

(II) I deny the common claim that the general will should be understood as consisting in a single rational perspective with a shared set of reasons (a view I take from Hegel, Green, Bosanquet and Gaus).

(III) I think the object of public justification is not necessarily a state, but rather a series of social norms, with laws used to supplement areas of social life where non-coercive norms are inadequate from each person’s perspective (again following Hegelians, British Idealists and some contemporary contractualists).

(IV) I don’t argue that modern democratic states express the general will, but rather occasionally express a small part of this complex, diverse, organic rational whole (still following much idealist political thought).

(V) I don’t adopt a lofty ideal of democratic citizenship or a lofty conception of idealization (based on my interpretation of the public reason project in my book and articles).

So what I want to say in response to Rousseau-Obama-Salon is that in restricted cases, the government can express a small portion of the general will. But in fact, the general will pervades the basic structure of society, which goes far beyond the state, and indeed sharply limits its authority. In this way, I block the attempt to identify a democratic government with the will of its citizens by using many of the same tools as Rousseau’s modern day followers. The government isn’t us because it’s not a plausible expression of the viable and attractive ideal of a general will. We don’t need to do away with Rousseau’s fundamental political concepts to avoid the Rousseau-Obama conclusion.

Now you may be asking why any sane person would bother advancing my response in the first place. Isn’t Rousseau just crazy and bad? And aren’t all his modern progressive and Rawlsian followers? I don’t think so, in large part because they pursue a worthy ideal – being reconciled to the rest of humanity by living in accord with mutually acceptable rules. We do best to flesh out the ideal as plausibly as we can rather than abandoning it.

The Rousseau-Obama-Salon view is a perverse way of realizing an ideal of interpersonal reconciliation under conditions of diversity of action and opinion. But you can refute the view with the very tools used to defend it.