MEMBERSHIP, EQUALITY & FREEDOM: WHAT THIS SERIES IS ABOUT
Post 1: 7 January 2025
Why don’t Americans have a right to an adequate education, to healthcare, or housing, or income? What can we do about it?
These things are called social rights, and together they define that aspect of our membership in the community that we call social citizenship. A better definition goes something like this: The social rights of citizenship are public guarantees to the resources we need to participate fully in society. In America, these guarantees range from weak to nonexistent.1 In this series, I will advocate for social citizenship. I will explore the historical and cultural reasons why social rights are so poorly developed here. I will propose ways of changing that. And I will explain why achieving true social citizenship is so important.
I’ll start with the last of these. Social citizenship sits at the intersection of membership, equality, and freedom. We can’t be full members of the community, we can’t relate to one another as equals, and we can’t be really free unless we secure the social rights of citizenship. It will take a bit, and several additional posts, to unpack these big claims; I’ll start with a flyover today. This also makes it sound like social citizenship is some kind of magic bullet. It isn’t. It can’t address all the ills attributable to inequality, but establishing social citizenship is the best first response to that inequality and is foundational to creating a democracy that includes all of us.
Deep breath. Social citizenship is an aspect of citizenship; that is, of membership in the community. A first way to think about the social rights of citizenship is as the substantive and material preconditions of full membership, just as civil and political rights are the formal markers of membership. We all know that our ability to exercise our formal rights is related to our socioeconomic position. This is evident at both ends of the spectrum. At the high end, the rich are able to abuse the legal system and exaggerate their political influence, among other things. At the low end, material inequality and lack of education reduce the ability of the poor to exercise these formal rights until, at the extremes, they can become virtually meaningless. The minimum guarantees of social rights apply to everyone, but this is where their value is most clear. They set floors below which no person is allowed to fall.
We are accustomed to think of floors like these as “safety nets” that mitigate the very worst outcomes that could result from the free exercise of market forces or just plain bad luck. The adequacy standards required for true social rights are much higher than that. Instead of being about survival or subsistence, social citizenship is about membership, so it requires that each person has access to the resources they need to be full members of society. That means, first of all, being able to utilize their formal membership rights effectively. That does not make everyone the equals of oligarchs, but it means they have enough personal economic and political independence to assert their formal rights, maybe by quitting an exploitative job, going on strike, or joining a lawsuit—all ways of resisting an oligarch. Regardless of the degree of material inequality in society, the full members of the community ought to be able to relate to one another as equals within the range of powers and duties associated with citizenship. I call this condition status equality. This kind of equality is part of the definition of membership or citizenship, at least if we believe there should be no “second class” citizens. This standard gives a second way to think about social citizenship and a first hint about how we should think about the standards of adequacy for social rights.
I opened with another statement about the standard of adequacy—everyone ought to be able to participate fully in society. That’s pretty vague, so let me restate. Everyone ought to have a set of life choices that are comparable to others in society and the capability to choose among them. That is mostly what we mean by “equality of opportunity.” It is also a good working definition of freedom as we really experience it in our day-to-day lives. This is not how we usually think of freedom, but we should. I return to this thought in a moment.
This is the point where the idea of membership, equality, and freedom touch. There is a kind of equality, which I will call status equality, associated with full membership in the community. This equality is constitutive of freedom. One cannot really be free, really think of oneself as a person who chooses, unless the threshold of status equality, and of full membership in the community, is achieved. This is a third way to think about the social rights of citizenship: social rights provide us with the tools to be free. We ought to support the programs that advance social rights not only because they are fair or just—they are— but because they make us more free. Ultimately, this is why social citizenship is so important.
The biggest reason social rights are so poorly developed in America is the way that the liberal tradition thinks about freedom. The dominant view—but not the only possible one—is that the essence of freedom is noninterference. That is, we are free when no one else, and specifically the government, forces us to do something. Using this principle, the opponents of social rights have been able to slow progress by claiming that every proposed governmental action is a threat to freedom. Even the most commonsensical new proposals are tagged with the bogeyman label “socialism.” Hardliners use these ideas to oppose every aspect of the modern welfare state, but their core is part of the worldview of most Americans. Anticipation of the “neoliberal” reaction leads even the most progressive reformers to tailor their proposals in “market friendly” directions. That’s why Clinton’s health insurance proposal and Obama’s ACA were so far from “Medicare for All” even though building on the wildly successful Medicare program makes the most sense.
Freedom is not simply the absence of interference. That’s incomplete and far too abstract. As I already suggested, real freedom is experienced as having a range of life choices that are comparable to others in society and the ability to choose among them. But choosing requires being in a position to choose, a certain degree of economic and political independence. Freedom, in this view, is a status marked by an absence of domination. It is not just about whether some external party is actively coercing you, but whether they can. Securing the necessary independence, in turn, depends on access to tangible resources and personal capabilities. These are what social rights are: the substantive requirements of personal freedom. The clincher is that this approach to freedom is much older than the standard liberal view; it is associated with ancient civic republicanism, and, in modern times, my guide is the work of philosopher Philip Pettit.2 This way of thinking about freedom was pretty common in America at one point and has not completely disappeared from our culture—we can still nurture it today.
Liberal principles are not the only barrier to social rights, of course. Efforts to expand social protections in the United States have also been limited by conservative pressures to preserve racial and gender hierarchies. Here, and in general, I will use the term conservative to refer to traditional concerns with natural hierarchies—especially with preserving one’s own privileged status—with order, stability, and safety, and with the maintenance of community identity. I will use the phrase traditional liberal to describe market fundamentalists, libertarians, and other stripes of neoliberals who, in America, often claim the label “conservative”. Traditional liberal ideas are at the core of both major American political party ideologies. American Republican ideology is mostly a mix of these two flavors of “conservatism.” Most Democrats, in contrast, reject traditional conservative ideas, to the extent they recognize them, but also subscribe to egalitarian liberal notions about how to respond to inequality—and some Democrats even act upon these. I will say a lot more about these kinds of categories in later posts. A classic example of the influence of traditional conservatism was the way the Social Security Act excluded whole classes of African American workers from coverage. But conservatives have been known to support welfare state programs generously when they reinforce rather than upset hierarchies of status. The conservative challenge to social citizenship is different than the liberal one; it goes to the very meaning of membership in the community. The truth is that conservatism responds to a very real human need for a sense of belonging in a way that liberal culture cannot. We all have this need and are all susceptible to conservative appeals.
Advancing social rights in America, in summary, requires countering the trap created by the dominant liberal definition of freedom and, at the same time, providing some counterweight to the identity-based appeals of conservatism. Both of these things are doable. Stay tuned.
Plans for this Space
I touched on most of the themes I will be exploring in this series in this brief introduction. I will start by giving more detail on what social citizenship is, as I understand it and as the sociologist T.H. Marshall originally presented it.3 I will explain in detail how it is that the dominant public philosophy of liberalism (understood as a legacy of John Locke and laissez-faire capitalism) fails when dealing with inequalities created by private economic power, as opposed to abuse of governmental power. I will wrestle with the efforts of egalitarian liberals like John Rawls to address this flaw in traditional liberalism. These are sincere efforts to respond to the problem of inequality, but they have had very little impact, it seems to me, on U.S. policy. The root issue here is inequality. I am claiming that social rights are the best response to the problems that inequality creates in our society; that claim obviously needs to be defended. Unpacking the root sources of inequality will help a lot, so I’ll be doing that. How much do we blame on market forces and how much on “conservative” factors (like racism)? That duality will be a regular theme. Finally, I will need to flesh out the ideas of civic republicanism. I suspect that most readers will not know much about it.
Many of the posts in this series will be based on my 2024 book, The Tools to be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century (Lexington Books).4 At least one post will summarize the book and its findings, but I encourage readers to check it out. I am currently also working on a book-length essay on social citizenship. This blog will help me work through some of the more difficult parts of that effort and provide a place to put the asides that I ought to keep out of the book. As I proceed, I will eventually introduce new questions. My plan is to keep clear of current events in this space but that may prove difficult. I plan to post about once per week, usually on Tuesday. The publication will live on Substack but I expect to cross-post to Medium (or somewhere else) at some point.
Next Post: The Idea of Social Citizenship (14 January 2025)
Notes
1. Americans do not have any secure social rights. We come closest for education; state constitutions guarantee a right to some education, but courts have not upheld any right to an adequate or equal one. Brown v. Board of Education might have gotten there but did not. We have a hodgepodge relief system for the very poor, but none of these programs are guaranteed as rights. An essential part of the system, the TANF* program, is not even a legislative “entitlement” program; it depends on annual appropriations. Health care is even more complex, with governments ensuring some direct access to care and other programs, like the ACA, providing some access to health insurance, and all of it always feeling precarious. And thinking about housing makes my head hurt.
* Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF replaced AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) after the 1996 welfare reform act. AFDC was an “entitlement” program, meaning that funding was guaranteed by law rather than via annual appropriation. In a later post I will discuss the relationship between the idea of entitlements and the notion of rights, per se. Whatever it is, it is clear that TANF is less secure, less rights-like, than AFDC. It was a big step backward in the quest for social rights.
2. Philip Pettit, On The People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A great introduction to this question is provided by Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). I will write about this in later posts.
3. T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto, 1992).
4. Stephen Minicucci, The Tools to be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2024). Available from the publisher ( https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666960136/The-Tools-to-Be-Free-Social-Citizenship-Education-and-Service-in-the-Twenty-First-Century ). Use discount code LXFANDF30.