State and municipal law will have more immediate importance to the citizen than federal law.
By Nazarul Islam
Citizenship as an office, or as a duty, is a discordant note in an age of “rights talk.” Yet we can exercise our rights only because we live under a government that rests on the consent of the governed. We give our consent in many different ways. We pay taxes, of course, and we obey the laws. But the same might be said of the citizens of Canada, or France, or many other free nations. What makes American citizenship so unique?
The first difference is federalism. We are citizens of the United States, but we are also citizens of the state in which we live. Every American citizen obeys three sets of laws and elects three sets of “governors.” Federal law, state law, and municipal law all are obligatory, each in its own sphere, and it will often be the case that state and municipal law will have more immediate importance to the citizen than federal law.
Depending on where you live, your state and/or town can take away your house (if it’s falling down); your child (if you are an abusive parent); your car (if you have repeated drunk-driving convictions); and even your dog (if it has become violent and uncontrollable). The federal government can’t do any of these things.
Citizenship is often most robust at the local level, another feature that makes American citizenship unique. Throughout the country, people serve on juries, and depending on where they live, they may also serve as town meeting members, or serve on local planning boards, finance committees, school and library committees, and many others.
In these venues, citizens have a chance to learn, up close, what governance means. They learn, first of all, how hard it is. When it comes to finding a new location for the town dump, for example, there are no easy choices. Nor is it easy to determine teacher salaries, how many additional firefighters to hire, or whether the town needs a new library more than it needs a new school building.
This kind of learning exposes the citizen to the kinds of choices that must be made by their elected representatives and executives. What members of the House and Senate must do – indeed, what the president must do – differs in magnitude but not in kind from the demands placed on local citizens.
We point this out in order to reinforce an important truth: American citizens have much work to do, but local citizenship strengthens our “civic muscles,” which then get put to work in the choice of representatives and executives.
Citizens of most other democratic countries have a simpler task. Their governments are primarily national rather than federal, and even where local governments have important duties they are carefully limited and supervised by the national government. In France, to use one example, educational policy for the entire country is made by the national government – as is also the case in Japan. In England, the “common schools” (what Americans would call public schools) are likewise run from the Ministry of Education in London.
In the last few decades, there has been some movement in the direction of decentralization – moving democratic decision-making closer to home. Brexit is the most important example of that movement, but there are others: Scots and Catalans have historically agitated for more self-governance or even national independence. But these are exceptions to the general rule in modern states, which equate democracy with rule by a central government chosen by a national majority.
It has often been pointed out that the United States is a republic rather than a democracy. What this old distinction means is that, beyond the service opportunities presented by local governments, the basic task of citizens is to choose who will govern them. This choice requires something more than voting for candidates who promise to satisfy our immediate demands; it means selecting candidates who will govern us within the limits established by the Constitution.
The Constitution creates a limited government; the demands that citizens make must likewise be limited. In other words, citizens need to think constitutionally. For example, they need to avoid the habit of believing that the president can do everything, or that states must all adopt the same policies, or that the federal government can solve every imaginable problem.
This view runs counter to what has become a norm in modern discussions of citizenship: the notion that the citizen’s chief task is to become a more effective person who demands. The “citizen as demander” is the hero in much of the modern literature on citizenship, in which political participation is simply a synonym for “making demands.” It follows from this perspective that becoming a more effective citizen simply requires honing the arts of demanding (protests, petitions, and so on).
The Constitution, of course, protects the expression of grievances: the rights to assemble, to speak, and to petition are essential to the American understanding of liberty. Citizenship does involve acting. Yet thought should precede action; one obligation of citizenship, therefore, is to think clearly, and carefully, about the consequences of what one is demanding.
Put simply, the citizen needs to be prudent.
The third difference involves a contested idea: nationalism, which is blamed for the catastrophic wars of the 20th century. How can nationalism be a good thing? Ever since those wars, we have seen a steady movement away from nationalism and toward a cosmopolitan internationalism.
Sometimes this movement takes institutional forms – the most obvious of which is the gradual emergence of the European Union – and sometimes more subtle ones, as in the reluctance to use the word “foreigner” or “alien” to describe someone, from another country.
Research: Govt. / Citizenship Statutes & History
[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.[/author]
