A Night with David Price: Thinking Institutionally
U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., seen here in 2019 announcing he won’t run for reelection in 2022. Source for photo: The Daily Tar Heel
As part of the Thomas Willis Lambeth Lectureship series, the UNC School of Public Policy recently recognized the Honorable Representative David Price with the 14th annual Distinguished Lecture in Public Policy, entitled, “Democracy Beyond Elections: Institutions in Crisis.” David Price represented North Carolina’s 4th Congressional district for 34 years before his retirement earlier this year. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and Yale University, Price taught at Duke University and served as the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party before entering Congress in 1987.
In David Price’s lecture, he honed in on the many institutions that construct the modern world, and the ways in which they appear to be under threat and in crisis. He first began his speech by describing the recent vote for the Speaker of the House of Representatives; a moment he argues represents an alarming trend, hinting at the continuing degradation of our democratic institutions. The vote for the Speaker of the 118th Congress was stymied by tensions within the new Republican majority and took a historic 15 ballots before Kevin McCarthy secured the gavel. Price summed up the event as having an explicitly nihilistic quality by quoting former Republican colleague Rep. Andy Biggs’ comments during the contentious debate within the conservative caucus: “We must break the establishment.”
As a student activist in the tenuous period of the 1960’s and 70’s, Price proudly contended that he was no stranger to anti-establishment sentiment and frequently challenged the institutions of his day – “My generation was challenged, and we needed to be challenged, by the dissonance between our perceived values and ideas… and the realities of American life, including the performance of its institutions.” But what had occurred during that vote for a Speaker, and what is occurring to many other democratic institutions, Price suggests, is different from the healthy and often necessary challenge to authority.
For Price, two things coexist together – the belief in the “centrality and indispensability of institutions to a functioning democratic society” and the understanding that at times, those institutions may fall short of their intended purpose requiring acknowledgment and reform. Rep. Price suggests that democracy is not simply an abstract, static institution, but is a verb denoting an ongoing process – proclaiming we must be “practitioners of democracy.” In his speech, he puts forward his central thesis, borrowing from the scholar Hugh Heclo, the urgency to “think institutionally.”
Many Americans express feeling as if the world is crumbling around them. The COVID-19 pandemic, rising economic inequality, growing sectarian conflict, and an impending climate catastrophe can all be viewed as both contributing to and products of institutional crises. For an increasing number of Americans, our institutions are seen as insufficiently aiding in and contributing to the exacerbation of social problems.
Moreover, the past few years have seen some of the most organized and massive social uprisings in a generation. But, given the significance of this period, many feel that nothing of substance has been gained other than performative virtue signaling from our institutions. This, along with compounding crises, becomes a breeding ground for apathy towards institutional capacity. Echoing Rep. Price’s opening remarks, “break the establishment” becomes more and more appealing.
In a time when technological advancements seem to only progress at ever-escalating speeds, the dissemination of information – and disinformation – has become virtually instantaneous, and economic growth has soared to unfathomable heights, with the dysfunction of many of our institutions matched only by the public’s skeptical perceptions about their ability to serve the interests of a majority of citizens. The problem is that, for all of the positive features of this moment in time, many people feel that the gains are not being distributed or felt equitably. As more and more people become disenchanted with the state of affairs, the more that people question whether democracy as an institution is even workable.
However, Rep. Price offers a bit of caution – “No matter how radical our critique may be, we do not conceive of a society without institutions.” While we may try to rightfully reform certain institutions, we must remember that we are still “enmeshed in institutional life and our ideas for change often come from what we assume the core values or missions of those institutions are to be.” What’s more, Price further contends, “We don’t come into this world, or live within it, as unencumbered individuals. The institutions and communities with which we find ourselves, starting with the family, decisively shape [our] identities… including when we try to change the world.” Here, he makes the distinction between the wholesale destruction of our institutions and constructive challenge to them, saying, “many of the fights we’ve engaged in our political lives have taken the form of challenging institutional norms and practices.”
What Rep. Price described throughout his lecture undeniably reflects the modern world. But what is to be made of this predicament in which we collectively find ourselves as a nation and as a global community? It is true that institutions, such as our governing democratic institutions, have the potential to aid in the organization of communal life and can likewise be argued as requirements. However, institutions must work, and more importantly, institutions must be able to work under the guise of real and valued input of the citizenry. People need to internalize a connection between themselves and their institutions. This includes the understanding that these institutions must, at times, be critically challenged. This philosophy, he argued, is thinking institutionally.
However, confronting our institutions cannot simply be a wholesale repudiation of them. Instead, the utility of democratic institutions and their desired aspirational values must match in actual performance, and work towards the union of the two. Both regrettably and justifiably, many on either ends of the political spectrum question the possibility of this union. Rather, as institutional failures mount and traditional avenues of successful influence seem increasingly futile, belief and optimism fades.
But Price’s warning is that no matter how radical our critiques may be, or even how justifiably salient, we must think institutionally. As he continuously alludes, we are bound to our collective roots. Indeed, we must not think of them as chains that shackle the individual, but instead as supportive lifelines creating a more perfect union for us all. We, as a people, require institutions to not only survive, but to thrive.
As Rep. Price also weaved throughout his lecture, we need to understand that, as much as it may not feel as such, we are not so separate from the institutions of the world. We are the institutions. While at times it may feel difficult to see ourselves in those institutions, or we may even feel threatened and opposed by them, they are our birthright. Even though the original inception of some institutions had no intention of including the voices of the marginalized and the oppressed, this does not negate one’s claim of entitlement. They still belong to us all, and us to them. By the words of Hugh Heclo and Rep. Price, if we are to truly see ourselves as the institutions for whom we are beholden, indebted, and in need of, we are going to have to think institutionally.