Aristotle Can Help Resolve Our Crisis of Citizenship

In Aristotle’s Politics, citizenship is defined as a partnership of people committed to working on behalf of the polis. More than just a bundle of rights that belongs to those who are born or naturalized into a community, citizenship requires something of us. In particular, it demands deliberation— the practice of measured, rational discussion with fellow citizens on the most important matters of the day about the nature of good and evil, justice and injustice, and right and wrong. 

If Aristotle is right in his definition, citizenship is indeed a high calling. It demands a life of action with others for something beyond our private worlds, not a life of passive acquiescence to the status quo. Given this high standard, the question then becomes this: “How are we doing, as citizens, in contemporary America? What is the citizenship index in our country, if such a thing can be measured?” On examination, I contend that citizenship, particularly the practice of deliberation, is at a low ebb in American political life— it is at the point where our very humanity may be in decline.

The first place to look for deliberative politics is in the United States Congress, a body whose Senate was once dubbed “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” However, when you cast even a cursory glance at this once respected institution, you see a body allergic to anything approaching the Aristotelian ideal. For example, consider the long-term trend of congressional acquiescence to the executive branch. Beginning in the postwar period, Congress realized that a massive country and economy would be increasingly difficult to govern. It also realized that politically sensitive decisions could be passed on to apolitical experts in the bureaucracy, which would protect members from political blowback; this meant that the process of public and private deliberation in committee rooms and on the floor would be abandoned, and it would be in favor of career civil servants that have no need or requirement to deliberate at all. 

Passing the buck to the executive branch dovetails nicely with Congress and the American people’s odd relationship with modern science. Vapid debates about which political team is the Party of Science miss the point that science can only begin political debate, never end it. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed this confusion when calls to “follow the science” were really attempts to close off deliberation, as if following the science was straightforward and clear. Even if the “science” was clear on the causes of and treatments for the virus, it was less evident what that meant for school closures and openings, whether bars or churches should be forced to close, and whether vaccinations should be forced upon the American people. Each of these latter concerns needed to be informed by science, but the decision on each should have only come at the end of a deliberative process. The larger point is that our deference to bureaucracy and science go hand in hand; faith in either should complement the necessary work of deliberation, never short-circuit or replace it. 

Perhaps most important is the widespread observation that members of Congress, like so many individuals in our culture, use the institution as a platform to build their personal brand and not a site where a deliberative partnership can be fostered with their colleagues. As Yuval Levin argues, all people should ask themselves the following questions: “Given the institution to which I belong, how should I behave? What are the norms of behavior that govern me, that form me into the kind of person I am yet to be, but hopefully, one day, will be given the purpose of the institution to which I belong?” Just like a father asks— not on a public platform for clout— how fatherhood should inform his behavior toward his children, so a member of Congress should first ask how the institution’s history and structure inform their own role within it. Instead, like fame-seeking Instagram influencers in the wider culture, Levin contends that members of Congress seek to transcend their institution and party by making a name for themselves to build their personal brand, ego and pride, and possibly winning a higher office.

What do Josh Hawley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common? It’s not a reputation for deliberation, but it is being known as Josh Hawley and AOC, for being personalities, and for being people who stand atop Congress as a platform, not within it as a participant. They use Congress as a personal trampoline, not a workshop that prizes anonymity. What’s lost is a commitment to collectively weighing the merits of competing views on the most important issues of the day, a commitment to accommodation, cooperation, discussion for the sake of the country, and a devotion to the hard-won practice of deliberation.

The abandonment of deliberation begins with Congress, but it certainly doesn’t end there. Because all politics today is national (and not local), state and local affairs suffer from this same disease. Consider Anne Applebaum’s latest piece on the politics of Tennessee. Here you see a Republican Party captured by its Trumpist faction with a characteristic posture of working to annihilate the state’s Democratic Party. Why would they behave any differently, given their perception of the world? As one party official put it, Democrats “are not our friends,” only members of a party who want to “destroy our republic and the foundation of who we are.” No partnership of deliberation is on the table as an option when mortal enemies are on the other side. Complete destruction can be the only goal when political survival itself is on the line.

But the story in Tennessee is only an extreme outworking of the logic that frames politics across the country. Our main division today is basic— it is not a difference in policy, rather an antagonism borne from identity is the politics of our time, a visceral sense that those on the other side can never be reasoned with. How can you deliberate with the other side about the nature of good and evil when the other side actually is evil? If a parent that is both a Christian and a Democrat would rather their child marry a Democratic Jew than a Republican Christian, how can we have a cool, rational discussion about right and wrong with all our neighbors in the public square? Deliberation in this environment is indeed a ridiculous thing to contemplate.

Finally, we can take a more philosophical perspective. Consider Alasdair Macintyre’s classic diagnosis from 40 years ago of political culture in the West. Even with its age, his dissection of our problem is still on the nose. Take any major issue of the day like  war, economics, and/or abortion  and ask yourself this question: Is it possible to have a substantive discussion with fellow citizen-partners about the merits of the positions at play on these topics? Because of the reign of emotivism , or  the view that morally political positions are nothing more than mere preferences ,  Macintyre argues that these debates cannot happen today. If you say you’re pro-choice instead of pro-life, pacifist instead of a just war theorist, laissez-faire capitalist instead of a redistributionist, you might as well say you prefer chocolate to vanilla ice cream; the status of all moral, political, and ice cream assertions are identical. Citizens are reduced to preference-maximizers, debate is replaced by bumper sticker protest, and our deliberative public square is transformed into an ice cream parlor. The idea that citizens are those who partner with others to debate justice and injustice on behalf of the polis is an impossible, laughable proposition.

There are some who argue that deliberation is a naive ideal, at least for the vast majority of us who will never hold political office. Those who say this contend that civic education should mostly consist of training future voters in the task of responsibly selecting those who have the luxury of time to engage in real deliberation. Even if that’s right, what happens when our representative bodies no longer engage in the deliberation that is supposedly beyond the grasp of commoners? Shouldn’t we all be led along in the deliberative process, even if we ourselves don’t need to be the ones to participate in it? Are we not being dragged down by our leaders into the anti-deliberative morass of platform building, political enemy hating, and preference protesting that our elites practice on a regular basis? And, to turn the tables a bit, are we not complicit in all of it if we tolerate this kind of thing from our lead citizens?

The payoff here should be clear enough. If even some of this approaches the truth, the sad implication is that very few of us engage in the duties of citizenship even if we enjoy the rights that come from having the status. What’s worse is that our very humanity may be in the balance as well. Aristotle’s view was that human nature can only realize its purpose in political life, in a life of deliberation where we partner with our fellow citizens to use our reason and language to debate the great issues of the day. If a human being is greedy but not generous, cowardly but not courageous, and impulsive but not temperate , then they are not much of a human being at all. Can we say the same, with Aristotle, that a political culture indifferent and even opposed to deliberation actually threatens the human person? That seems to be what’s on the line in our contemporary society.

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