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The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups

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Jeffery M. Berry's study makes the case that congressional policy has shifted from responding to material concerns of economic equality to responding to "postmaterial" or what he calls "quality-of-life" concerns. He traces the path of legislative initiatives in congress during sessions coinciding with the years 1963, 1979, and 1991. He attributes the rise of postmaterialism as a policy motive to the actions of what he calls "citizen groups." He claims that the investigative value of postmaterialism is that it "challenges our common notions of liberal and conservative. [49]" Liberalism, of which a "new" incarnation lends the titular impetus to Berry's work, is seldom defined directly. Rather it is reified in absentia, as the definitional agency behind the result of Berry's study. By exploring another curiously ill-defined term, that of the "citizen group," as a "lobbying organization," I hope to arrive at a clearer understanding of the author's deployment of liberalism.

The deployment of a rhetoric of citizenship contradicts the author's assertion that "this study is restricted to policymaking in Congress [2]" and how postmaterialism has "fared there." A citizen is by definition a political subject in a functional political process that by covenant translates that subjecthood into a functional policy apparatus. It is therefore debatable whether or not the strictly defined "citizen" is operative in her citizenship capacity outside of her function as an input in a clearly delineated apparatus, an apparatus which in Berry's context can be broadly referred to as elected government.

In focusing on congress, the policy superset of elected government, the author urges the reader not to confuse his conclusions on postmaterialism with phenomena such as "state-level politics [or] public opinion." Yet congress is only renderable in relation to its political citizen-subjects within a delineated political apparatus. If input-individuals are political subjects of elected government beyond a judicially delineated electoral process, the author ought to define an extra-judicial political apparatus and assert that this, rather than the judicially delineated apparatus of elected government, has shaped the policy priorities of elected government and constituted an extra-judicial citizenship input.

A problem arises in that Berry seeks to have his cake and eat it, too. In order to imbue his research with credibility across the widest intellectual readership, Berry takes a neutral stance on the mythos and ethos of American government. One such salient myth, on which much scholarship is founded and on which the author takes no stance, is that the judicially delineated political apparatus of elected government is the prevailing mode of policy agency for its citizen-subjects. In other words, the author refrains from critiquing and perhaps de-legitimizing the very domain of his thesis; American government.

The author romanticizes as citizens individuals who are not clearly acting in a capacity as political subject-inputs within a delineated apparatus of government. While members of lobbying organizations may be citizen-subjects in other capacities, in the capacity by which these organizations affect policy their members are not citizen-inputs or political subjects in judicially delineated elected government.

Berry's thesis is that the policy adopted by elected government is increasingly determined through agency outside of elected government, and most certainly outside of elected government as the apparatus would be rendered by canonical Political Science. Almost as if to apologize to conservative scholars in his own field, the author assures us that even if the policy of elected government is now determined outside of elected government, the agency of this determination incidentally falls on some citizen-subjects of elected government.

This is how the "lobbying organization" magically becomes the "citizen group." Agency which de-legitimizes elected government is couched in a rhetoric that upholds it. What would be truly novel is if the author modeled a radical resituating of citizenship consistent with the implicit extra-electoral apparatus that supercedes the citizen's agency in elected government.

The author's slippery slope suggests that he would like to make the argument that postmaterialism was somehow a grass-roots initiative. This is despite his tightly proscribed subject of congressional policy. It is as though because his thesis has a massive potential to undermine popular renditions of rational choice theory and liberal individualism, he resorts to fantastic contortion to make his theory intelligible within them. One wonders if the author himself has been compromised by the new left and the post-materialist trends he purports to study.

Berry goes to inordinate lengths to emphasize lobbying organizations as citizen-constituted, as though citizenship within the delivered promise of the American electoral apparatus is inert and to be taken for granted. The outcome is that Berry engages citizenship and government as anesthetizing catchall platitudes rather than glaring and unconfronted problematics in his scholarship. The liberal individual is out of luck in the author's non-rendition government. She is operatively both the political subject of an ill-defined apparatus involving lobbying organizations that dictates the prevailing policies which juxtapose the covenant of her citizenship, and the alleged political subject of a judicially delineated electoral process and its resulting government. Rather than reconcile the fundamental question of ambiguous sovereignty, the author's head is resolutely beneath the sand, rightly confident that the enthymematic juggernaut of prevailing truth aesthetics will bail him out of the lonely cell of critical inquiry amidst the cacophonous salutation of more reputable and jingoistic locales.