Government as an instrument of change

I think that we liberals often overemphasize the power of government.  The enormous victory of the Civil Rights Act and other legislative and judicial advances have led us to slight the hard work of building broad support. In the last few decades, conservatives have been better at that.

Basically, you can't force people to do the right thing. No society can be healthy unless most of the people, most of the time, think the laws are good and are glad to obey them. When that isn't the case, you end up with all sorts of distortions: cynicism, manipulation, evasion, hidden resentment, sometimes open resistance.

Thus there's a necessary balance between government and civil society. When you pass a law, you need to ask: is there enough support? If not, you need to get to work building it. FDR, it is said, told his backers when they proposed policy changes: “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now go out and make me do it.”

This is why I'm having doubts about President Obama's entry into the transgender debate. His attempt to use executive power to force North Carolina to back down on their restrictions has polarized the issue. Those of us who agree with his moral stance feel heartened that justice is being done; but in regions where most people are less supportive, the lines may instead harden. If people are forced to allow transgenders into the bathrooms, they will find other, perhaps uglier, ways to harass them. And even those who are sort of sympathetic may take offense at the entry of the distant government using compulsion, overriding their local officials to whom they feel much greater loyalty. When people are dug in to a moral view, legal change is more likely to catalyze opposition than change.

Lasting change requires the mobilization of civil society - bringing together associations, spreading the moral argument, convincing waverers. And we on the Left have not done that well. The implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. a great advance in social rights during the 1990s, has fallen short of expectations because the movement has not been well sustained. The legal shift on abortion has fallen even further short of its moral goals because it has sparked intense movements of opposition. These conservative movements have made great gains on the local level, winning over city governments, counties, states. They have been able in this way to greatly weaken the effects of liberal legislative triumphs in much of the country.

It hasn’t been all one-sided, of course. The gay rights movement, like the civil rights movement before it, did indeed build wide popular understanding and support before the major legislative and judicial strokes; the government action came as a codification and recognition of a shift in civil society. That’s a more lasting and effective path to change; we need to rebalance our attention.