The contemporary tendency in politics to refer to individuals as taxpayers, customers or clients instead of citizens is part of a worrisome drift toward the marketization of public affairs.
Individuals have many relationships with the state. In some, they are taxpayers; in others, they are clients. Occasionally they are criminals or candidates. But those who hold citizenship are, first and foremost, citizens.
The abandonment of the word and notion of citizen isn’t just about being precise in characterizing specific relationships between the person and the state. In the legislature and in the press room, politicians choose their words carefully, and those words do more than describe reality. Words signal priorities and sway people. They create possibilities or limit them.
Using market-specific words in political discourse constrains the political world and shrinks its population. Politicians aim to save taxpayers money.
They work to be efficient for their clients. They serve their customers. Admittedly, some taxpayers, clients and customers of the state aren’t citizens. But most are. And that’s not the point.
Many citizens aren’t taxpayers, clients or customers — at least at some point in their lives — but may nonetheless be affected by decisions relevant to those other categories. Citizen is the one title that unites these roles in a political context.
Curtailing the use of the word citizen (permanent resident and undocumented immigrant could be used alongside it) goes bun-in-basket with the drive to technocracy and ever-purer economic liberalism. More freedom! Less government! Be efficient. Think cost-effective. Streamline. Generate upward revenue stream dynamics. Let the experts decide.
These mantras frame politics as a business relationship of individual economies to the state. Individuals, in this paradigm, aren’t asked to help govern; they’re told to expect good service. Again, titles matter because they signal possibilities and create opportunities (or don’t).
To paraphrase, perhaps slightly abuse, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: the limits of our titles are the limits of our world. Focusing less on a political public realm while shifting our concentration to market relations constrains the role that individuals should be filling in the common direction of our common affairs.
Gutting our notion of citizenship is insidious. By reducing those relationships to market exchanges and making political problems technical problems, we imply that political arrangements and the challenges related to them are about proper engineering, not moral or ethical concerns. There’s a fixed right and wrong. There’s a proper, correct arrangement, if only we can work out the formula.
Admittedly, some issues are best dealt with by technocrats. Some problems require more engineering and less ethical deliberation. But many are properly political: they require deliberation among those affected by the outcome. They require that citizens, permanent residents and undocumented immigrants deliberate — not that taxpayers, clients or customers be served.
I would be content with politicians who chose precision in their word choice, defining titles narrowly when called for, for the sake of clarity. But this isn’t what’s happening. Instead, language is being used as a political tool for carving and chiselling a world based on the model of an ideological interpretation of what is right, good and proper for a political community.
The marketization of politics is a shameful, cynical trend, but it can be reversed. The first step is for citizens to reclaim their rightful title.
David Moscrop is a PhD student in political science at the University of B.C.
