Citizen Obama

So, that was a pretty good speech. Not one of his entries in the annals of great American rhetoric, but a very solid group of policy proposals with some very nice philosophical defense of liberalism sprinkled in. Of course, none of the stuff will happen, but it's nice to see him advocating good stuff nonetheless.

The thing I noticed in particular, though, was the continuation of Obama's "citizen" theme. I don't remember whether it was in the Inaugural or some slightly previous speech, but there was a nice long passage about citizenship at some point over the past couple of months. (Possibly his election victory speech, actually.) I like this because it's more than a mere ideological philosophy (though those are good too), it's an actual political philosophy. And it's an important one. I don't have a lot of original stuff to say on the subject, but I've been thinking over the course of the past couple of days about how categorically different democratic government and non-democratic government are. In fact, I think that describing them that way is misleading. It makes it sound like they're two somewhat different ways of doing the same thing, "government." That's wrong. Democratic governance is, ultimately, the process by which the peoples of a nation come together to make decisions about the direction of their society. Non-democratic "governance" is when some completely random person, or group of persons, who happens to have a lot of dudes with guns loyal to and/or paid by him (it's usually, but not always, a him), sets up in the middle of some country and tells everyone in said country that, if they don't do exactly what this "sovereign" says, they'll be killed. Those aren't the same thing at all.



People sometimes describe democracy as the merging of the sovereign with the subjects. I don't think that's right: in a true democracy there is neither a sovereign nor subjects. There are only citizens, and citizenship isn't remotely a combination of sovereignty and subjugation. The key feature of citizenship is that it is free and equal, to use the Rawlsian terminology. Subjugation is obviously neither free nor equal, and sovereignty is obviously not equal. One might think that sovereignty is free, since if you're the one bossing everyone else around, no one's bossing you around. But I think the key point is that being on even the "winning" end of a sovereign-subject relationship is still being part of an inherently unfree relationship. Perhaps I mean something like the Lockean distinction between license and liberty: a sovereign has license to do as he or she pleases, but as that includes a license to oppress other people, it's clearly not something that can exist in a free, liberty-filled world. 

Perhaps the brightness of the dividing line is blurred because nations like the U.S. and Britain and the like democratized very gradually; by the seventeenth century, Britain had institutions that resembled democracy, wherein a certain set of elites were allowed to vote to elect a Parliament that had a substantial portion of political power in the nation, and the early American republic was very similar, only without the king constantly getting in the way. But that doesn't mean that genuine democracy, such as that which exists in many countries these days, is just a somewhat differently-organized version of the same basic thing that had been called "government" for most of human history. One consequence of this, by the way, is that any political theory or political economy written in the pre-democratic age is likely to say a lot of stuff about the nature of government that just plain doesn't apply to a real democracy, or at least which must be presumed not to apply. (This is why I was thinking about this subject earlier today.)

Overall, I'd say that a democratic polity of free and equal citizens is pretty clearly the greatest philosophical invention in human history, and possibly the greatest invention outright. It is by no means a version of the same thing as despotic government, and I was very pleased to see our awesome President continue his recent trend of talking up the philosophical foundations of this wonderful thing that allows us to live in peace, prosperity, and liberty in ways our ancestors could never have imagined.