I steal this formulation from Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. That book is about copyright protection and the public domain, particularly as it affects the Internet. But in order to make sense of the apparently new problems that the Internet creates, Lessig had to back up and take an abstract look at public property and the public domain.
We all need to do that. Over the past few decades, the Right has taken the word common out of common political usage. We no longer talk about the common good, for example. Society, we are told, is not a real entity; it’s just some kind of artificial construct, an abstraction with no definite meaning. As a result, most Americans have lost their sense of ownership of our common property and our public institutions. Public property doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to nobody. The government isn’t the steward of our common inheritance, it’s some strange kind of usurper that keeps real people from owning property.
In the rhetoric of the Right, the government itself doesn’t belong to us. (Except for the military. The troops are our troops, and it’s patriotic to take pride in having the biggest, baddest team in the Military League.) The word government is used to distance the American people from their property and institutions. The Right talks about our troops, but government schools, government regulations, and government land. To feel the full force of that framing, try the experiment of reversing it: our schools, government troops.
The Left needs to resuscitate the notion of the common good, and even the notion that we form a commonality at all. Americans are united by more than just the fact that we root for the same military team. America, and the communities that make it up, are real entities. We own property, we create institutions, we select a government to represent us, and we protect ourselves with regulations. The air, the water, the parks, the broadcast spectrum, the intellectual property of the public domain – they don’t belong to nobody, they belong to us. They are the Commons. If you want a government that will take good care of all of your property, public as well as private, then you want a liberal government.
Return to 10 Ideas for 2008 by Doug Muder