The Contract Society
“I don’t kid people,” Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said on the floor of the Senate last October 20th. "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body." One might think Stevens was using this threat to protect the civil liberties of the people of his state, but he was instead referring to a proposal that would redirect $453 million in highway funds earmarked for two Alaska bridges to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. One of the bridges, at a projected cost of $223 million, would connect a small town to an island and was thus dubbed by critics as the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
Stevens is not alone in wanting to protect the pork barrel funding directed to his constituents. In 1991, the 13 major appropriations bills in Congress contained 546 pork barrel projects costing $3.1 billion. By 2005, the total of pork projects was 13,997 and the cost had increased to $27.3 billion. Welcome to the contract society.
In the contract society, “citizens” have become government “customers,” daily tracking polls are used to guide speeches and legislative proposals, and elected officials are expected to keep specific promises or be turned out of office at the first opportunity. Fund raising is nearly a full-time endeavor and those who supply the cash expect the implied contract to be fulfilled. Indeed, the notion of politicians contracting with those who elect them was at the heart of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the famous “Contract with America.” And, as any resident of West Virginia well knows, Senator Byrd has ensured that contractual politics is as much a Democratic as a Republican practice.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with elected officials representing their constituents. That is what the Constitution charges them with doing. But contracting with customers is much different than representing citizens. Its pervasiveness in our public life does not make it productive for our long run interests. By adopting contractual thinking, we accept a style of interaction that may be desirable in a business context but dangerous for the future of democracy.
Contracts are formal, rigid, and highly specific arrangements. They replace the need for trust (or make up for the lack of it), as Frances Fukuyama noted so well in his book of the same name. Contracts are generally short-term, both in real time and in our emotional attachments. We end them when they no longer serve our needs.
The danger of extending the contract model into our public life is growing. Entitlements, the largest (and largest growing) share of the federal budget represents a contract that most politicians are afraid to change, even as it becomes more unsustainable. Congressional earmarks for pet causes are not only growing in absolute terms but are turning us away from creatively competing for discretionary federal assistance, with the innovation that such competition brings. Political promise making – and the fear of what well-funded special interests will do if the promises are not fulfilled – pushes elected officials to pander to powerful interests rather than seek the public interest. Government agencies themselves “contract out” to deliver public services, though fraud and other contracting scandals suggest that they have not mastered how to contract out the commitment to the public interest that is equally a part of what government ought to deliver.
Short-term benefits – the heart of the contract model – replace the need for long-term thinking and the sacrifices needed to reach long-term goals. Contractual thinking applied to politics asks little of the citizen. Indeed, it does not ask that he be a citizen. Being a customer, whose only job is to pay and express her level of satisfaction with the purchase of government goods and services, is assumed to lead in our public lives to the good society as in our private lives it is assumed to lead to the good life.
The contract society is so well embedded that we wonder if there is any other way. There is. It will require a change in our language as well as our behavior to find it. We will first have to ask of ourselves that we become “citizens” rather than “customers,” which means we will have to ask what is in the public interest not just our personal interest. We will have to participate more actively in discussing our long-term needs – and the needs of our grandchildren – in a broad public dialogue rather than in narrow interest groups. We will have to be willing to give ground to gain it. We will have to enable our elected officials to represent us rather than demanding that they only deliver to us.
This has all the trappings of utopian thinking, except that it has happened before. We became citizens to form a nation, fight two world wars, climb out of a depression, extend civil rights, and invest in the public infrastructure needed to build a productive and wealthy society. We can do so again. We can address the problems of an aging society, pay down a massive debt that is mortgaging our grandchildren’s future, extend the health care, education, and income essential for all Americans to live a decent life and build bridges to their neighbors rather than building gated communities to wall them out. We can heal the partisan divisions that are rending the social fabric upon which all else depends. The answer will be found in the language of citizenship and commitment, not the language of customers and contracts.
Stevens is not alone in wanting to protect the pork barrel funding directed to his constituents. In 1991, the 13 major appropriations bills in Congress contained 546 pork barrel projects costing $3.1 billion. By 2005, the total of pork projects was 13,997 and the cost had increased to $27.3 billion. Welcome to the contract society.
In the contract society, “citizens” have become government “customers,” daily tracking polls are used to guide speeches and legislative proposals, and elected officials are expected to keep specific promises or be turned out of office at the first opportunity. Fund raising is nearly a full-time endeavor and those who supply the cash expect the implied contract to be fulfilled. Indeed, the notion of politicians contracting with those who elect them was at the heart of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the famous “Contract with America.” And, as any resident of West Virginia well knows, Senator Byrd has ensured that contractual politics is as much a Democratic as a Republican practice.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with elected officials representing their constituents. That is what the Constitution charges them with doing. But contracting with customers is much different than representing citizens. Its pervasiveness in our public life does not make it productive for our long run interests. By adopting contractual thinking, we accept a style of interaction that may be desirable in a business context but dangerous for the future of democracy.
Contracts are formal, rigid, and highly specific arrangements. They replace the need for trust (or make up for the lack of it), as Frances Fukuyama noted so well in his book of the same name. Contracts are generally short-term, both in real time and in our emotional attachments. We end them when they no longer serve our needs.
The danger of extending the contract model into our public life is growing. Entitlements, the largest (and largest growing) share of the federal budget represents a contract that most politicians are afraid to change, even as it becomes more unsustainable. Congressional earmarks for pet causes are not only growing in absolute terms but are turning us away from creatively competing for discretionary federal assistance, with the innovation that such competition brings. Political promise making – and the fear of what well-funded special interests will do if the promises are not fulfilled – pushes elected officials to pander to powerful interests rather than seek the public interest. Government agencies themselves “contract out” to deliver public services, though fraud and other contracting scandals suggest that they have not mastered how to contract out the commitment to the public interest that is equally a part of what government ought to deliver.
Short-term benefits – the heart of the contract model – replace the need for long-term thinking and the sacrifices needed to reach long-term goals. Contractual thinking applied to politics asks little of the citizen. Indeed, it does not ask that he be a citizen. Being a customer, whose only job is to pay and express her level of satisfaction with the purchase of government goods and services, is assumed to lead in our public lives to the good society as in our private lives it is assumed to lead to the good life.
The contract society is so well embedded that we wonder if there is any other way. There is. It will require a change in our language as well as our behavior to find it. We will first have to ask of ourselves that we become “citizens” rather than “customers,” which means we will have to ask what is in the public interest not just our personal interest. We will have to participate more actively in discussing our long-term needs – and the needs of our grandchildren – in a broad public dialogue rather than in narrow interest groups. We will have to be willing to give ground to gain it. We will have to enable our elected officials to represent us rather than demanding that they only deliver to us.
This has all the trappings of utopian thinking, except that it has happened before. We became citizens to form a nation, fight two world wars, climb out of a depression, extend civil rights, and invest in the public infrastructure needed to build a productive and wealthy society. We can do so again. We can address the problems of an aging society, pay down a massive debt that is mortgaging our grandchildren’s future, extend the health care, education, and income essential for all Americans to live a decent life and build bridges to their neighbors rather than building gated communities to wall them out. We can heal the partisan divisions that are rending the social fabric upon which all else depends. The answer will be found in the language of citizenship and commitment, not the language of customers and contracts.
posted by Responsible Leader @ 12:03 PM
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