Who Cares?

How to Reshape a Democratic Politics

Joan C. Tronto

• Publisher: Cornell Selects
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501702754
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2015 winner of the Brown Democracy Medal, Joan C. Tronto, argues in Who Cares? that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our own fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. Asserting that Americans are facing a "caring deficit"—that there are simply too many demands on our time to care adequately for children, elderly people, and ourselves—she asks us to reconsider how we allocate care responsibilities.At the same time, while democratic politics should help citizens to care better, most people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as too remote from their lives to make a difference in this sphere. Tronto traces the reasons for this disconnect and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life.

Making the Caring-With Revolution Happen

Just as the Reagan Revolution required a change in the nature of democratic life and in the nature of democratic citizens, a caring revolution will require similar changes. As citizens in a caring democracy, we would need to change not only the discourse about care, not only our own daily concerns with care, but political and social institutions to make them more caring as well.

Rethinking Responsibilities by Caring about Care

As I showed earlier, democratic caring means, in part, assuring that everyone has an equal voice in deciding how care duties are allocated. This is not as easy as it sounds. We have become adept at understanding ourselves as workers and as consumers. Everyday economic life absorbs much of our energy. Although we are also caring all the time, we don’t usually think of caring as a central concern.

So our first change in moving toward a caring democracy is to start caring about care. We have to think differently about how we value the time we spend caring, and that means first noticing it as time we’re spending doing worthwhile activities. As we move in this direction, those who haven’t done their fair share of caring will erect a number of defenses to keep things the way they are.

Suppose we could get everyone to sit down around a table and discuss what caring responsibilities everyone should take. At first, we might think that the outcome would be a discussion resulting in some allocations for equal caring responsibilities, averaged out over a lifetime. In fact, we might instead hear a number of strident arguments that are made, explicitly or implicitly, that constitute excuses for why some people are already doing their fair share of caring—even when they really aren’t. For one reason or another, they believe that they are privileged in their social standing and should therefore be free from caring responsibilities. Spiderman’s Uncle Ben famously told him, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But that’s what uncles say to superheroes in the movies. In real life, with great power comes privileged irresponsibility.

Let’s investigate some of these “passes” out of caring responsibilities so that we can preempt them and suggest more democratic ways to care. And let’s notice ourselves using these passes, and stop giving ourselves excuses from meeting our own broad caring responsibilities.

“I’m No Good at Caring”

One way to get out of caring is to claim incompetence. We have heard these arguments before: “Women are naturally better at caring.” “Some people are just better at care, and I’m not good at it.” Indeed, the current framing of how we care now still rests upon the presupposition that care mainly occurs in the family, and that within the family, women are “naturally” better caregivers than men. Never mind that more and more men are doing caring work, especially for elder relatives. Even these men, though, still believe that women are better at the job.²⁰

There is an obvious answer to this objection. Women and servants seem to be “naturals” at caregiving because those are the roles they have been expected to play. But the truth is, caring requires practice. People who are not good at caring now can become better at it by doing more of it. If we wish to live in a caring democracy, each of us has to become better at caring. And the best way to do that is to care more: being more attentive to others’ needs, more willing to recognize and take on responsibilities, more competent and proud of the good caring that we do, and more willing to responsively adjust our caring depending upon how well its recipients receive it.

“I’m Busy Working”

Because care takes time, and people are often busy at work, it seems legitimate to claim that one’s economic contribution is too important to delay by spending time on care. Similarly, up to the mid-nineteenth century, men who were drafted were able to send another body to do their military service.²¹ The problem with this solution, though, is that it stigmatizes caring as an inferior sort of duty.

A “caring-with” alternative would require everyone to work less or spend a certain amount of time every day caring.²² Of course, to really effect this change would require us to revolutionize how we think about our time, the place of work in our lives, and how we are compensated for our labor. Many workers now feel a 24/7 obligation to their jobs and end up answering emails from home and checking on the status of projects halfway around the world in the middle of the night. It would make considerably more sense for us to decide as a society that no one should put such work so completely above needs for care.

“I’m Taking Care of My Own Family”

I have already discussed how vicious circles of unequal care result from this attitude. There is a lot to be said for maintaining for one’s own domestic world, but the culture of care that incites competitive parenting is not, in the end, very caring.

In a “caring-with” democracy, we would not be so desperate to seize every advantage over everyone else. Being greedy and defensive is exhausting. Being able to slow down a bit will allow us to realize that we can also be concerned about others without its taking a toll on care duties within our own family.

“Bootstraps Worked for Me—and Will for You”

The problem with this argument is that it’s often untrue. Though we’ve all heard stories about self-made millionaires, most Americans end up in the same economic situation as their parents; and despite what we like to think, America provides less mobility than European countries.²³

There are other dangers in taking the bootstraps argument too far. Many successful people got where they are more through good luck than hard work. To what extent do we want people to become risk-takers? There is some advantage in risk-taking, but if we perpetuate a conventional wisdom that says gambling is the only way to get ahead, people will engage in the kind of actions that led to the housing bubble in the late 2000s.

Bootstraps aside, is wealth what we want? Many people who engage in caring activities already know that caring, not money, lends meaning to life. Living as we do, constantly anxious about our status in an unforgiving economic order, makes us less capable of caring well. We think of wealth as another way to care. But suppose we could adjust our political institutions to support a different culture. Suppose we could live in a culture of care where we can reliably expect to be cared for when we find ourselves—and our loved ones—in need. Thinking about reallocating caring responsibilities is a start: but we need to go from thinking about changing care to actually changing the Politics and politics of care.

The Care-Foremost Citizen

After reflecting on the meaning and distribution of care responsibilities, we then need to devote ourselves to caring in democratic ways. Practice, practice, practice. We need to change both institutions and ourselves, but we can begin with changing our own lives.

Let’s start close to home. What changes are necessary to live our daily lives in a more caring way? We may not be able to...