THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIZENS: Pursuing the Promise of American Life - Review

Washington Monthly, April, 1999 by Timothy Noah

THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIZENS: Pursuing the Promise of American Life by Thomas Geoghegan Pantheon, $25

THOMAS GEOGHEGAN HAS written a book urging the rehabilitation of the civic idea in America that isn't the slightest bit boring, or pious, or given to bland generalization. That Geoghegan has achieved this won't surprise readers of his previous book, Which Side Are You On?, about his experiences as a labor lawyer during a decade (the 1980s) when the labor movement was all but extinguished. Like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens is a book that delivers its political and economic arguments with lyricism and a certain amount of humorous whining. If the monologist Spalding Gray were a Washington policy wonk, this is what he would sound like.

Readers are liable to take initial offense at the casual way Geoghegan drifts from discussing his dating life to discussing wage inequality, or low-income housing policy, or Chicago's inner-city tuberculosis epidemic. As The Secret Lives of Citizens progresses, however, one becomes increasingly aware that Geoghegan's life as a self-absorbed, trattoria-hopping baby boomer is entwined with his life as a political activist committed to improving the lives of the poor and lower middle class. Geoghegan may sound like a narcissist, but he is sincerely angry about his country's weak commitment to social justice, and deadly serious about finding a way to revive the spirit of the Progressive movement and the New Deal. (His book's subtitle is an allusion to The Promise of American Life, a famous Progressive tract written by New Republic founder Herbert Croly.) As a labor lawyer in Chicago, Geoghegan spends his days actually putting his ideals into practice--a point about which he simply refuses to be self-righteous. For Geoghegan, social justice is as much a personal quality-of-life issue as finding a good latte.

For the most part, The Secret Lives of Citizens is a series of anecdotes and pithy observations about what Geoghegan has observed in his lifelong quest to be a responsible citizen. But the book does follow a loose autobiographical structure, moving from Geoghegan's time as a young staff writer at The New Republic and then an aide in Jimmy Carter's Energy department, to his decision to move to Chicago and practice labor law, to his volunteer work for Mayor Harold Washington (whose death, Geoghegan argues, ended a glorious renaissance of the civic idea in Chicago), to his ruminations about getting married and moving to the suburbs (which--I don't think it will mar enjoying Geoghegan's sketchy narrative to reveal--he doesn't do). Geoghegan presents himself as an Everyman striving to find a role that connects him to the fate of his fellow citizens. The process probably isn't as muddled as his self-effacing prose makes it sound, but Geoghegan certainly can't be accused of flinching from the embarrassing details. When he brings suit, for example, against the Clinton Labor department to stop minors from working past midnight, his youthful plaintiffs prove impossible to keep corralled as they drop out of school and move on without a forwarding address. "I was in a panic," Geoghegan writes. "What if the government lawyers found out?" He loses the case.

It's immensely refreshing to read a book that overflows with new and unashamedly liberal ideas for strengthening the bonds of citizenship. Geoghegan spews them out like machine-gun fire: Here's a smart one, here's a screwy one, here's one that sounds like it may work, but maybe it won't. Mostly the ideas have the effect (and, presumably, the intention) of Swiftian modest proposals: They wake up the reader's sleeping conscience. Some really sting. For example, in the course of contemplating whether to adopt a child from Chicago's inner city, Geoghegan discovers that Cook County has increased terminations of parental rights from 958 in 1993 to 3,743 in 1997. Who is going to take care of all these kids? Perhaps we should "open up America (like China) to foreign adoption ... We can leave the kids on the doorsteps of foreign hotels. Some countries in Europe have so much equality, or so little poverty, you could give the kids to people at random" Sure, Geoghegan says, "the U.S. is still the best for being Milken-like rich, or even the top third. But otherwise simply for `moving up,' from the bottom to halfway up, Europe is better than America now" Geoghegan cites a 1994 Business Week story: "What are the chances for a Dane at the very bottom to move up? Nine out of ten. What are the chances for an American? One out of two. In which country would you drop your kid at random?"

The best thing in The Secret Life of Citizens is Geoghegan's critique of the U.S. Senate, where representation is so out of proportion to population as to be, in Geoghegan's mind, almost criminal. The problem is exaggerated by the filibuster, which, Geoghegan points out, was unknown to the Founding Fathers. Although its use even in the Jim Crow era was relatively infrequent, a Senate attempt in 1976 to "reform" it only made it easier to abuse. Where previously it had taken 66 senators to cut off debate, now it took only 40; but in exchange, the filibuster acquired a new respectability, and senators started using it routinely on bills that came to the Senate floor--and without having to engage in the round-the-clock rhetorical marathons familiar to anyone who's ever seen "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" Geoghegan describes staying up, one hot and sticky Chicago night, and working out some numbers in front of a fan about how few people a filibustering Senate faction can represent. He tots up the states with the smallest population--Alabama, Alaska, and so forth--and calculates that if the 40 senators from these smallest states band together to block a Senate bill, in effect they can make 10 percent of the U.S. population call the shots for the other 90 percent. Moreover, "[e]ven without a filibuster, the 50 Senators from the 25 smallest states represent 16 percent of the population." That is, even under normal circumstances, 16 percent of the population can block a law--and just a bit more can pass one. "[S]ixty senators, and that's a landslide, from the thirty smallest states, represent a population, still, of only 24 percent" Although Geoghegan clearly would like to scrap the Senate altogether, he's willing to propose a few (slightly) less radical measures. One is to break up California and some other large existing states--at least for Senate-representation purposes--into two or three. Another (which I'm ready to sign onto right now) is to abolish the filibuster.