Which Comes First: Good Citizens or Good Governments?

Constitutional scholar C. L. Skach begins How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Be Civil Without the State with an engrossing account of her own foray into crafting the law of a land. The land in question was American-occupied Iraq, to which Skach traveled in 2008, full of enthusiasm and feeling she’d reached the peak of her profession. She recalls, “As one of my students at Oxford put it, ‘You are writing constitutions, Professor Skach; it doesn’t get any better than this.’”

Readers old enough to remember the many failures of the US government’s efforts to export democracy to the Middle East won’t be surprised to learn that her story soon takes a chaotic turn. With the work far from finished, Skach’s camp in Baghdad is hit by a rocket meant for the nearby US Embassy, and just hours later she’s riding a tank back to the airport, leaving Iraq with democracy stuck in customs.

“I realized that nothing or no one could help these people but themselves,” Skach writes. “No law, no rule” imposed by outsiders could force the culture into a shape foreign to its norms. So unsettling was the experience that, by its end, the professor of law had lost her “faith in formal rules—in the law” itself.

But the problem at the center of How to Be a Citizen is not simply a matter of law, and it has that in common with another recent book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, by political scientist Yuval Levin.

Both authors write in response to a diagnosis with which almost no observer of modern American politics could quibble: Things are not working as they should. We can’t seem to get along as a people, and this discord is not merely a normal cycle of history framed by our memory of midcentury consensus. Something is fundamentally broken at the institutional and cultural levels of our politics. The government and citizenry alike have gotten off-kilter—perhaps dangerously so. Something must be done.

Skach’s proposal for that something begins with the people, not the government. Having concluded that rule changes alone aren’t the answer—that you cannot have “a democracy without democrats”—she sketches a six-part solution for forming an engaged, empathetic, democratic citizenry that will no longer rely “on the law to do the work of living together.”

On the scale of chapter titles, there’s much wisdom here. “Hang out in a piazza, repeatedly,” she advises. “Grow your own tomatoes, and share them.” “Own your rights, but responsibly.”

But the details of Skach’s vision of “spontaneous, horizontal, non-hierarchical self-sufficiency” are rather less reassuring and often suffer from a lack of specificity around the role of the state. (This confusion shows itself in her subtitle, too, for we can certainly be civil without the state, but we can’t be citizens without it.)

Skach is careful to note that she’s not advocating violence or lawbreaking, or even for doing away with the legal order—at least not yet. She wants readers to take direct, usually local action, to self-organize, and to “begin building up the kind of inclusive self-care communities we want and need.” Usually this takes a progressive tone, but sometimes it swings libertarian, as when she argues that this will “leave less work for the elected leaders to do.”

At her best, Skach is calling for thick civil society, personal responsibility, voluntary charity, and good norms. Yet too often, she seems to imagine that a sprawling, diverse country can, with enough hard work and goodwill, function like a small village with no real crime and no deeply held religious or ethical differences, only “preferences” that may be set aside to help a friend.

And at her worst, Skach proposes outfitting our public spaces “with daily news reports for those who will not access them through cell phones.” These would broadcast on “environmentally discreet, solar-powered plasma screens displaying information from a variety of sources, with optional soundscapes for the visually impaired.”

Who decides what capital-T Truths the big TVs will scream at us? She doesn’t say. But the obvious candidate is the state, and it’s remarkable to see the technology of George Orwell’s 1984 reintroduced in a book about empowering the citizenry.

American Covenant takes a near-opposite tack. Though never neglectful of the importance of civil society, public virtue, and strong norms, Levin’s contention is that our Constitution

is not the problem we face. It is more like the solution. It was designed with an exceptionally sophisticated grasp of the nature of political division and diversity, and it aims to create—and not just to occupy—common ground in our society.

It does this because constitutional function extends beyond establishing the basic shape of our government to forming us as citizens, as “people well suited to living together.”

That formation doesn’t require ideological unity, Levin is careful to say. It has room for the deeply held differences Skach tries to brush away as petty self-interest. The Constitution “goes about creating common ground” by “compelling Americans with different views and priorities to deal with one another,” Levin writes. It forces us to negotiate, to compromise, to understand and accommodate as we wish to be understood and accommodated. It obliges us to “act together without thinking alike.”

Or at least it’s supposed to. But for a century we’ve been kicking against the constitutional goads, impatient with the very deliberation and domestic diplomacy the design is intended to produce. Core institutions are now bent grossly out of shape, and American politics are bent to match.

In a time as divided as ours, then, Levin argues that Americans must not lose faith in our Constitution but rather revive it:

Rather than throw out the system or deform it to better suit today’s grotesque civic vices, we should look to the logic of the Constitution for guidance toward constructive institutional reforms and healthier political habits.

My expectation, going into both books, was that I’d find Skach’s solutions humbler and thus more feasible. I can’t make Congress stop shirking responsibility, but I can plant a garden and share the tomatoes. If the Titanic really is sinking, perhaps arranging the deck chairs is truly all you can do (or even a service you should do).

But I finished American Covenant far more in Levin’s camp than Skach’s, persuaded that his approach is sounder on several counts, of which I’ll mention three.

The first is that Skach—an American living in the UK—writes about constitutions generally, but Levin is concerned with the Constitution. That is, his argument is specific to the American situation, to our culture and shared history. And that matters for precisely the reason Skach encountered in the Mideast: The Constitution is not an outside imposition in the US. It doesn’t resemble “human-to-human stem cell transplants”—which the body may treat as a threat with disastrous results—unlike the democracy she tried to help export to Iraq.

We have a lot of political dysfunction, but it is not the same kind of dysfunction Skach observed in Baghdad, and proffering our own Constitution as a remedy is not like flying in foreigners to build a new nation. Recent history in Iraq and beyond suggests Skach was right to lose faith in that kind of project. Happily, restoring the internal logic of our Constitution is not that kind of project.

Next is the question of how to address the erosion of the rule of law, a reality that both books have squarely in view. Skach dismisses “solutions [that] come out of the same toolbox we have drawn from for centuries,” like “more rules to fix our broken democracies.”

Instead of improving our laws, she says, we should be most concerned with improving our small communities, exercising “our own judgement and collective action” and showing that we do not need authority and top-down rules to behave ourselves and care for each other.

In one sense, of course, this is true: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up,” Galatians 6:9 says. Yet rule of law is also a real good, a valuable inheritance not to be lightly cast aside as an outdated tool. And if something’s gone wrong with our rules, then surely—unless we really are on the Titanic—fixing those rules must be some part of our response?

Skach’s interest in individual action highlights a third point in Levin’s favor, which is his more accurate notion of human nature. American Covenant repeatedly draws on anthropology, sketching a picture of humans as creatures of virtue and vice, “each fallen and imperfect yet made in a divine image and possessed of equal dignity.”

The design of the Constitution, Levin writes, citing framers like James Madison, assumes both sides of humankind. This is why it imposes real constraints while insisting citizens can rise to a demand of “selflessness, accommodation, restraint, deliberation, and service.”

Skach’s story is simpler, and worse for it. She argues that it’s fallacious to believe “nature needs authority for good order to exist,” contending instead that people, like bubbles in beer foam, will “spontaneously” “find their way” into “harmonious equilibrium” if they are simply “left to their own devices.”

It is not clear, given this view of humanity, why we’d need the Orwell screens. Nor is it really clear how Skach envisions handling real and durable disagreement about important matters, let alone crime. She admits intra-citizen negotiations “will sometimes fail, because some individuals will refuse to give up what they consider their due share”—as if the only reason people ever reach an impasse is somebody being a bit selfish.

One of her most striking scenarios of good citizenship, shared once as hypothetical and again in relaying a real conversation, is that “gays can buy a cake for their wedding, even from a Christian baker, who is able to see the humanity of the couple in front of him rather than sexual preferences that conflict with his.” The idea that there might be something more substantive than “preferences” at play doesn’t seem to enter Skach’s mind.

That is not to say How to Be a Citizen has no worthwhile instruction for citizens. Skach’s promotion of charity and life in the piazza—a public, physical “space where we can go regularly, where we feel known and accepted”—is exactly right. The church can and should be at the forefront of building the kind of communal life she envisions. In many smaller communities, it may be the only institution left with any capacity to do so.

And Levin, for his part, is not wholly consistent on whether the work of repairing our political dysfunction begins with our institutions or our culture. Earlier in the book, he says to start with the culture: “Our institutions aren’t going to change before our expectations do, only after,” so “we, as citizens, must move first by coming to better understand our Constitution and to better live it out.”

But at the end, he says to start with the institutions, because they “are much more readily changeable” than culture, “and so it makes sense to begin to approach deep cultural problems by considering what institutional reforms might be of use and work from there.”

I suspect the second answer is the wiser one, though that’s not to say I think it’s likely to succeed. For all Levin’s realism, American Covenant often feels like a fantasy. Its presentation of how our constitutional system is supposed to work emphasizes how badly we’ve broken it and how huge an endeavor restoration would be.

Yet on one point Levin did tempt me to hope: “It is easy to wave away such talk in modern America and insist that we no longer think this way, but our political life suggests that we certainly do.” We claim the best constitutional principles for ourselves and accuse our opponents of ignoring or betraying them. Even our debates about the hypocrisy of the Constitution’s framers evince an ingrained loyalty to their ideals. Maybe we have not entirely forgotten how to be citizens in this particular republic.

Bonnie Kristian is CT’s editorial director of ideas and books.

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