What Do You Mean,
“Us,” Mr. President?
“My fellow Americans, the test of this plan cannot be what is in it for me. It has got to be what is in it for us.”
- Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1993
“Us” is a treacherous pronoun. Sometimes it means you and me; sometimes it means me and my friends, but not you. Politicians like to use the word both ways at the same time.
When Jefferson wrote, “We hold these Truths to be self evident,” he meant you and me: “All men are created equal.” He held equal rights and justice as universal concepts that must include all of us. The difference between “all of us” and “some of us” is the key idea.
How often is our loyalty fooled by this ambivalent “us”? In foreign affairs, we can’t avoid it. The world is divided between them and us. “We” are at war in Iraq, although I am not there and I oppose the Bush foreign policy.
Not just U.S. diplomacy, but even our trade deficit is cited. “Our imports” consist of many things you and I never buy. Only some Americans ever sell their products to foreigners, yet those are “our exports.” The government promotes our exports with subsidies paid from our taxes. Our exporters might one day even share some of our profits with you and me, but don’t count on our government to help.
Political Inequality
We may be all created equal, but some of us are always “more equal” politically. This is a natural, necessary thing. Society and government can only make choices and pursue various alternatives by delegating authority and picking leaders who can produce results.
Results are specific, so the equivocal “us” cloaks an unequal sharing of costs and benefits. People who benefit the most usually don’t bear the heaviest costs. Even when our whole society gains, as from a strong national defense, some specific communities with military bases, career military officers, and defense contractors profit in particular ways. The rest of us pay our taxes, but we get only the indirect benefits of their service, while they get good jobs.
Successful politicians depend on our belief their work can make us all better off, as they persuade us to allow special groups unequal advantages. Sometimes they appeal to “need.” But the concept of social need, with new things for a helpful government to do, is just an example of confounding “us” with some of us. Everyone is needy in different ways - there is no you and me there.
Jefferson or Hobbes
In Hobbes’ state of nature, the meek never have equal rights since the bold can take whatever they want. When everyone’s status depends on surviving a Hobbesian war of all against all, a Jeffersonian community, based on equal rights, is undermined. Our basic values are put at risk by using politics to help some of us at the expense of everyone else.
The concept “us” would thus seem to be the fulcrum of political philosophy, the balancing point that separates our shared values from some group’s own private ends. Every political issue can be located on a range, from equivocation to equal rights, by the simple question:
