What is a Public Issue?
On Facebook recently, I have had occasion to criticize the
radical rightist point of view by saying that it ignored social structural and
institutional realities. Here, I would like to explain what I mean by that. In
his book, The Sociological Imagination,
C. Wright Mills wrote about the relationship between personal troubles and
public issues. He said,
In these terms, consider
unemployment. When in a city of 100,000 only one man is unemployed, that is his
personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the
man, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees,
15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find
its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has
collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible
solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the
society and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of
individuals.[1]
Mills’
point is that each of us lives in a particular time and place and that in that
time and place, we are affected by large, structural and cultural forces over
which we as individuals have no control.
Contemporary Public Issues: The Internationalization of
Business
The internationalization of business is a good
contemporary example. We live in a time
when large businesses are not bound to particular places. They can locate their
operations anywhere in the world, and when a hundred workers in Appleton,
Wisconsin are laid off because the factory where they work is closed and its
operations moved to Georgia, to Mexico or to China, the causes of their
troubles must be found in the changing character of the world’s economy. The
workers are not unemployed because they are lazy or because they lack skills.
They are unemployed because the economy of the world has changed under them and
rendered their skills obsolete in the place where they live.
If that
were all, we could still advise them to go to Fox Valley Technical College to
learn new skills and consider the problem solved, but that is not all. Their new poverty will reverberate through
our community. They will no longer spend
as much on food, clothing or entertainment as they did when they had jobs. So,
the profits of local merchants will decline.
They may no longer be able to pay their mortgages, and their houses will
be repossessed, which will cause a decline in the values of all of our houses. The decline retail sales and the decline in
real estate values will cause a decline in local tax revenue, which will put a
strain on all of our local services like schools, fire departments and
sanitation departments. The unemployed
workers will no longer have health insurance, and when they need care, they
will go to emergency rooms. Emergency room care is very expensive, and they
will have no money to pay for it. So, the cost will be passed to the hospitals
and ultimately to the rest of us in the form of higher health insurance
premiums. In short these workers and all
of us are caught up in the changes brought about by the internationalization of
the world’s economy, and we cannot deal effectively with this change by
thinking only of what each individual can do to survive. We have to think about
our common, structural situation. We
have to see the problem as a public issue and not just a scatter of personal
troubles.
Contemporary Public Issues: the Crash of 2008
The financial collapse of 2008
provides another example. Before the collapse, millions of people were caught
up in frenzy in which banks extended credit far beyond what the debtors could
reasonably be expected to repay. When
the credit bubble collapsed, millions of people, including many who had not
taken out loans during the frenzy, were affected. They lost their jobs. With
their jobs, they lost their health insurance. Some also lost their homes. The
entire economy was in danger of collapsing.
That it didn’t collapse is due to the fact that our government
recognized the structural nature of the problem. It was not just whole lot of
personal troubles. It was a public issue. The government did not waste time worrying
about the stupidity or selfishness of the people who had brought on the crisis.
Instead, it moved to prop up the banks. It took over the automobile companies
and restored them to health. It provided
extended unemployment relief to unemployed workers. All of these measures bought time in which
individuals were able to find solutions to their individual troubles.
The distinction between personal
troubles and public issues is important because a personal trouble can be
overcome by individual action, but a public issue cannot. A public issue can be resolved only through
collective action. For example, no
individual could have done anything about the financial collapse of 2008 (or
about the bubble that preceded it). An
individual could in some cases limit his or her personal loss by selling stocks
and holding cash, but that option was available only to relatively few people
and in any case did nothing to resolve the main issue. People who lost their jobs or their homes
could not do much about it. On the other hand, we were able as a society to
limit the scope of the damage through collective action in the form of the TARP
program and other programs.
Public Issues and the Radical Right
We Americans are often unprepared
to recognize public issues and to distinguish them from personal troubles. Our individualist culture encourages us to
think of situations in terms of individual persons and events. Our news media
reinforce this cultural bias in our perspective because they are focused on
each day’s news rather than on the forces that underlie the news. The media
tell us of exciting events, of heroes and of villains, but they do not tell us
much about structural forces because they operate over long periods that are
difficult to report on.
The radical right in the United
States turns this American cultural bias into a political principle. It rests on a denial of the existence of
structural forces or public issues. In the radical rightist view, only personal
troubles exist, and if a person has troubles, he or she is responsible for
dealing with them. The best thing that the rest of us can do for such a person
is to get out of his or her way. Offering things like extended unemployment
benefits does no good and in fact is harmful because it allows an individual to put off finding a solution to
his or her personal troubles.
In the radical rightist view, the
free market works perfectly and guarantees benign results. If, as happened in
the crash of 2008, the results are not benign, that must be because of
misguided and harmful government intervention in the free market. Thus, for example, the radical rightists
insist that the crash was caused entirely by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through
their insistence on promoting home ownership by people who could not afford to
own homes. The “creative” used of variable rate mortgages, interest-only
mortgages and mortgage backed securities with fraudulently high ratings would
never have existed if the Fannie and Freddie had not pressured the banks to
make loans to people who could not afford them, and without that pressure,
there would have been no crash. No
matter that such crashes have been a regular, periodic feature of our economy
at least since the Panic of 1837, and no matter that the 2008 crash occurred in
places like Spain and Ireland where Fannie and Freddie were not involved.
The radical rightists’ insistence
that only personal troubles exist would be only a curiosity if it were not used
cynically by some very wealthy people whose goal is to reduce the taxes they
have to pay. They spend huge amounts of
money on propaganda in support of the radical rightist doctrine and in support
of political candidates who advocate it. The argument is simple: if there are
only personal troubles, there is little that government needs to do, and if
there is little for government to do, there is no reason for it to collect so
much money in taxes.
The radical rightist denial of the
existence of public issues is wrong. Forces
like the internationalization of business or the crash of 2008 are real, and they
cause troubles for people. But those
troubles are not merely personal troubles. They are public issues, and only
collective action can solve the problems that they create.
