Can Americans Be Trusted to Govern Themselves?
This is Part 4 in a symposium on "I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance" that seeks to answer the question posed within this essay: "Can 'We the People' be trusted?"
Can Americans be trusted to govern themselves? asks Tony Woodlief, executive vice president of the State Policy Network, an umbrella group that promotes right-wing state think tanks. His answer is yes – provided they form the kinds of little platoons represented by right-wing state think tanks. When Americans do so, they’ll form bonds of friendship and gratitude, like the gratitude Woodlief expresses in his book to donors of the State Policy Network.
Woodlief’s question is a serious one: many Americans believe that we’re not quite up to self-government. That’s what the Left thinks when it calls people with whom it disagrees deplorables, and it’s what libertarians at my shop think about people with retrograde ideas about tariffs. Where they go wrong, Woodlief argues persuasively, is in confusing means and ends. We all want a form of health care that provides decent coverage for all Americans, for example, but we’re rationally ignorant about the means to get there.
So it makes sense to rely on the opinions of others. The problem is that, even as we can’t trust ourselves, we also can’t trust other people. Many of us have learned to tune out Washington Post stories that begin, “Experts say.”
Trust is earned. It is best relied upon when we’re permitted to choose our own experts. I rely on one set of experts with a thick set of rules called the unam sanctam ecclesiam catolicam, but that’s my choice. When we’re bound by one polity that doesn’t appear to reflect our preferences, we’re better served if we can migrate to a different one – either by moving to another state or, at the outer limits, by secession.
The problem today is that the exit option is difficult to exercise, both because of the expansion of the federal footprint and the decline of federalism and because of the reach of social networks that police what can be said. The manner in which our thoughts are policed begins to resemble China’s “social credit system,” which ranks people according to good and bad behavior and punishes the wicked.
It’s the kind of soft totalitarianism from which liberalism was meant to protect us. We’ve also seen our principal media outlets descend into paranoia, spreading false stories about their ideological enemies and covering up the dirt about their ideological allies. The guardrails have been pulled down, and we rationally refuse to trust almost every thought leader.
When that has happened in other countries, it didn’t end well. That’s why the bridge-building exercises Woodlief recommends are so needed. But I wonder whether the little platoons he has in mind might actually make things worse. We’ve become sequestered into small groups sharing the same ideological beliefs and hatreds, and that kind of social organization tends to magnify animosities, not quell them. The neutral groups, such as churches, that once brought together people with different political beliefs are weaker today than in the past. If I had to hold out hope for greater unity, it would be because of the natural tendency of hatreds to weaken over time. People whose lives are consumed by resentment lead miserable lives, as we’ve discovered.
F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School, and is the author of "Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America's Natural Governing Party" (Encounter, July 2021).
