Civil Society in Question by Jamie Swift

Author:Jamie Swift [Swift, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Advocacy, Globalization, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), Political Process
ISBN: 9781926662589
Google: THfYBAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1619572
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 1999-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

In 1995 U.S. political scientist Robert Putnam reported to the Trilateral Commission on the state of democracy in the nations of North America, Europe, and Japan. He cited “substantial evidence . . . of mounting public unhappiness with politics and government, discontent deriving in part from real shortfalls in political and government performance.” It was not surprising news for the Commission, a think-tank for the Northern corporate elite. Some twenty years earlier the same Commission had heard other academics predict “a bleak future for democratic government.”36

A sense of anomie, of things falling part, is nowhere more apparent than in the United States, the society that is also the most fertile seedbed for the revival of ideas about civil society. Americans, with their roots in a frontier society of immigrants seeking opportunities and freedoms, have a long tradition of individualism. Although highly patriotic about their homeland, they are suspicious of large government. The French aristocrat de Tocqueville noted that Americans leave society at large to itself. Over a century and a half later, Robert Bellah’s team of social analysts observed that their fellow Americans, confronted with dysfunctional public (government, schools) and private (corporate, family) institutions, have remained passive rather than attempting to revitalize them. The result has been a “palpable malaise,” a distrust of politics, the loss of meaning in family, a powerless cynicism about business. Bellah and his co-writers say that rather than actively challenging crucial institutions, “American culture has focused relentlessly on the idea that individuals are self-interest maximizers and that private accumulation and private pleasures are the only measurable public goods. We have been blind to the way that institutions enable or cripple our capacity to be the persons we most want to be.”37

Powerful corporate and state bureaucracies are taken as natural—and unchangeable—features of the landscape, even though long-standing fears of corporate concentration and the inordinate influence of business on government loom ever larger. A job culture threatens to overwhelm family and political culture. The 1996 presidential election saw a record low voter turnout, with almost five million Americans saying that they were too busy to vote or could not take time off work.38 The 1994 mid-term election that brought a Republican majority to Congress on the promise of a Contract with America (Locke would have been proud) saw fewer than 40 per cent of the electorate bothering to vote. Many remained at home in gated communities, perhaps watching the results on television. Less fortunate Americans, excluded by an electoral system that puts the onus on the individual to register and makes it hard for the poor to do so, shrugged that politics were meaningless to their lives. In Why Americans Hate Politics, E.J. Dionne tells his fellow citizens: “We have less and less to do with each other, meaning that we feel few obligations to each other and are less and less inclined to vindicate each other’s rights. . . . The abandonment of public life has created a political void that is filled increasingly by the politics of attack and by issues that seem unimportant or contrived.

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