ILLUSIVE SEPARATION?

Most of us are familiar with the political discourse that deals with the issue of whether government does enough for us or whether it does too much. Liberals (or what we call liberals in terms of this discussion) call for governmental programs that address a wide assortment of concerns such as poverty, health care, education, the environment, race issues, immigration, and the like. Conservatives, at almost every turn, call for a scaling back, if not eliminating or not funding government programs in these areas. There are some areas in which conservatives call for more extensive governmental action, as in abortion, but the general view is that conservatives are against government involvement in our private affairs. Much of this debate is based on an assumption: there is a private sector distinguishable from a public sector and each acts according to its own dictates and constitutes its own locus of power. That, in one realm of our society, lie those organizations – mostly businesses – that are apart from government and exist to provide goods and services for compensation. That while this realm is probably regulated by government to some degree, they exist as separate entities from government and their level of independence should be guarded and protected from the clutches of government to the extent possible. They should be able, for the most part, to act as they see fit and, by so doing, exercise their, mostly property, rights. On the other side, is a government populated by professional politicians and career government workers who operate in their own spheres with minimal involvement from outside actors. I would postulate that our civics and government instruction in schools across the nation teaches that these two sectors exist and that there exists a customary and legal separation between the two realms – the separation is part and parcel of our democracy or constitutional order.

There is a group of political scientists who question this assumption. According to Amitai Etzioni, the list of scholars who are doing (or did) the questioning include Grant McConnell, E. E. Schattschneider, C. Wright Mills, Theodore Lowi, and Mancur Olson. While these scholars might vary in their views of the extent of overlap between the two sectors and how the two act in coordination or in unison, each brings into question the view that the sectors are separate and mostly act independently of each other. They would argue, to some extent, that the sectors or realms act too much in tandem to be so independent as the assumption would have one believe.

Whether or not the sectors are independent or not or, if not, to what degree they are separate is a question that not only is important in understanding our system of governance, but dictates the types of questions that instruction should ask about our governance. A few postings ago, I reported on the use of Social Security numbers by private entities for a wide range of purposes. Etzioni reported on how the numbers are used to identify customers or clients or to categorize information about a whole slew of personal items such as medical, financial, or legal information. He used this case to illustrate how a line between the private and the public realms became blurred by the practice of utilizing Social Security numbers for private purposes or public purposes outside the Social Security program. In future postings, I will give other examples Etzioni provides. In this posting, the aim is to merely point out this scholarly area of interest that places in doubt a wide array of assumptions civics and government instruction holds – basic assumptions – of how our system is arranged and works. For if the private and public realms are not so independent from each other, many other assumptions come into question such as the essence of representation in Congress or the particularity of the policies of a specific Presidential administration. Our whole popular view of the democratic quality of our system can potentially come into question. Are these two realms answering to a third realm: corporate America, popular culture, or the political class? The point is that one cannot assume, as is the case of the Social Security numbers, that either the governmental/public sector or the business/private sector acts of its own volition – at least not entirely – and that such a possibility is not necessarily anti-democratic although it very well might be. What we can surely say is that such a reality is consequential.

The claim Etzioni is proposing is

… the deep divide between the public and the private realm (which plays a cardinal role in public discourse and is drawn upon in several segments of social science) is not nearly as deep as is often assumed, and that the two realms are intertwined and tend to change in tandem. Moreover, we often face the same forces on both sides of the divide; that is, they have a private face and a public face, but are actually often one and the same actor. Finally, the blurring of the realms has increased since the advent of cyberspace, although … it was in place long before the 1980s.¹

All of this, if true, belies the claims of the Tea Party and conservative politicians such as Paul Ryan. They push for policies or oppose policies – usually inhibiting the government from addressing pressing national problems such as unemployment – that assume the divide, that very likely, is not there.

1Etzioni, A. (2013). The bankruptcy of liberalism and conservatism. Political Science Quarterly, 128 (1), pp. 39-65. Quotation on p. 61.