Which Comes First: Good Citizens or Good Governments?
Two new books consider whether one depends on the other.
Constitutional scholar C. L. Skach begins How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Be Civil Without the State with an engrossing account of her own foray into crafting the law of a land. The land in question was American-occupied Iraq, to which Skach traveled in 2008, full of enthusiasm and feeling she’d reached the peak of her profession. She recalls, “As one of my students at Oxford put it, ‘You are writing constitutions, Professor Skach; it doesn’t get any better than this.’”
Readers old enough to remember the many failures of the US government’s efforts to export democracy to the Middle East won’t be surprised to learn that her story soon takes a chaotic turn. With the work far from finished, Skach’s camp in Baghdad is hit by a rocket meant for the nearby US Embassy, and just hours later she’s riding a tank back to the airport, leaving Iraq with democracy stuck in customs.
“I realized that nothing or no one could help these people but themselves,” Skach writes. “No law, no rule” imposed by outsiders could force the culture into a shape foreign to its norms. So unsettling was the experience that, by its end, the professor of law had lost her “faith in formal rules—in the law” itself.
But the problem at the center of How to Be a Citizen is not simply a matter of law, and it has that in common with another recent book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, by political scientist Yuval Levin.
Both authors write in response to a diagnosis with which almost no observer of modern American politics could quibble: Things are not working as they should. We can’t seem to get along as a people, ...