Our Divided Political Heart (3 page)

He added: “That’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”

Who are we? That is now the central issue in American politics.

What follows is inspired in part by the promise of Barack Obama, his
successes, and the severe difficulties he has confronted since 2009. But even more, it is inspired by the Tea Party, its reaction to Obama, and its insistence on placing American history at the center of our contemporary political argument.

And so, in a book that is critical of the very core of the Tea Party project, I begin with a few words of thanks. The Tea Party deserves the gratitude of its critics because it pushed the logic of a certain kind of American conservatism to its very limits. It said—plainly, candidly, forcefully, amid much commotion and publicity—what a significant part of the conservative movement believes. It has thus opened a debate about who we are that needs to be settled.

I will speak throughout the book about the ways in which the Tea Party’s perspective on our past distorts the American story. Nonetheless, I salute the Tea Party’s great interest in our Founding and in the broader American narrative. I hope the movement’s passions will encourage those who disagree with its views to reengage the American story ourselves. The Tea Party is not wrong to seek inspiration from our political tradition. It is not mistaken in its fervor for connecting our present with our past.

Yes, we should look toward an authentic past, not an invented one, and we should see our struggles to overcome imperfections and injustices as no less important to our greatness—and our exceptionalism—than our moments of triumph and unity. But there has been a default on the progressive side of politics in embracing an American past that is, at heart, a progressive story about liberty, equality, and community and our efforts to advance all three while struggling to keep them in balance.

A significant part of this book is thus devoted to reclaiming our history from one-sided accounts that cast individualism as the driving American preoccupation and opposition to government as the nation’s overriding passion. Such an approach not only does a disservice to the facts, but also offers a stunted view of the meaning of liberty and a flawed understanding of the Constitution. It misreads traditional American attitudes toward government and downplays our struggles over slavery, racism, and nativism.

Too many accounts of the American story—and, these days, far too many talk show rants—emphasize our devotion to individualism to the exclusion of our communitarian impulses. Yet if our history records the many
ways in which Americans have struggled to preserve and expand our freedoms, it also shows that our quest for community has taken many forms: conservative and radical, moderate and liberal. It has led some Americans to create small utopian communities, sometimes socialist in inspiration, that promised to model a new world. It has pushed others to yearn for a return to a conservative past. In their 1930s manifesto, the Southern Agrarians preached that traditional ways of living rooted in the soil and in the small town were far superior to the “
brutal and hurried lives
” of industrialized modernity that led inevitably to “
the poverty of the contemporary spirit
.”

Nor has this hunger for community been confined to the utopian left or the traditionalist right. It has also thrived in the great center of the American discourse, reflected in the community building of Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, the Community Action Program of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Even conservative politicians whose central commitments were to free-market individualism have understood the yearning for human ties that transcend the colder calculations of free exchange; thus Herbert Hoover’s invocation of community bonds during the Depression, Ronald Reagan’s call to defend “
family, work, neighborhood
,” George H. W. Bush’s promotion of “
a thousand points of light
,” and his son’s effort to “
rally the armies of compassion
.”

Of course, no one (or practically no one) opposes community outright. In principle, everyone praises vibrant neighborhoods, Little Leagues, YMCAs, active faith institutions, service clubs, veterans groups, and all the other building blocks of civil society. Reagan’s “
family, work, neighborhood
” slogan was effective precisely because virtually everyone has warm feelings about all three. Before he became president, Obama spoke of our fears of “
chronic loneliness
,” drawing on a theme that has inspired hundreds of advice columns and scores of conversations on television’s afternoon chat shows.

It’s also true that conservatives and progressives offer competing and sometimes clashing visions of how community is created. Their arguments over the role the national government plays in fostering (or weakening) community are especially fierce.

Yet if community is, in principle, uncontroversial—and no doubt
many Tea Party members are deeply engaged in PTAs, service clubs, churches, veterans groups, and other builders of local community—asserting community’s centrality to the American creed challenges an assumption deeply embedded both in contemporary politics and in a significant (and by no means eccentric) body of historical analysis: that from the very beginning of our republic, the core political values of United States were narrowly defined by individualistic conceptions of liberty. References to “community” or a “common good” or, especially, “collective action” are cast as alien to America’s gut commitment to the “
rugged individualism
” first described by Herbert Hoover. As a result, criticisms of individualism are written off as imports from Europe, as reflecting the unrealistic aspirations of progressive preachers, as speculations of academics far removed from the heart of American life—or, most succinctly these days, as “socialism.”

What’s forgotten is that challenges to individualism are as American as individualism itself. Robert Bellah and his colleagues were right in their seminal book
Habits of the Heart
to argue that “
there is a profound ambivalence
about individualism in America among its most articulate defenders.” In our literature and popular culture, they argued, “we find the fear that society may overwhelm the individual and destroy any chance of autonomy unless he stands against it, but also recognition that it is only in relation to society that the individual can fulfill himself.”

This dualism is a dominant theme of our national narrative, and American politics has always used our democratic system to manage periodic corrections in the ebb and flow between individualism and community. When the country leans too far toward a radical form of individualism, as it did during the Gilded Age after the Civil War, our politics typically produces a communitarian correction. And when the community seems to demand too much, our persistent streak of individualism reasserts itself—as it did in 1933, when the nation ended Prohibition, perhaps the most farreaching and least successful communitarian experiment in our history.

The unusual American balance between individualism and community helps explain why the United States never gave rise to an enduring socialist or social democratic movement, as did every other industrialized democracy. A relatively strong and popular Socialist Party did win a substantial
following during the Progressive Era, and socialist trade unionists and intellectuals influenced the American mainstream for generations after. But over time, left-wing movements came to do most of their work inside the two major parties—within both during the Populist and Progressive years, and primarily within the Democratic Party during and since the New Deal.

Nor have we had an explicitly religious party, akin to European or Latin American Christian Democratic parties. Christian nationalist parties failed in the United States. The Social Gospel movement that inspired so many progressive Christians was influential, but it never sought to form a party of its own. Socially oriented Catholicism was hugely influential in the labor movement and on the New Deal, but it did not inspire the creation of a separate party, as it did in Chile, Italy, Germany, and so many other Latin American and European nations. In recent years, conservative Christians have played an important role among Republicans, but they have not formed a party of their own.

The fact that the United States has neither a feudal past (except, to some degree, in the old slave South) nor a well-developed anti-clerical tradition helps to explain why socialist and Christian parties never gained a foothold: a response to feudalism was critical to the rise of socialism, and a reaction to anti-clericalism often bred religious parties. But it’s also true that American politics consistently produced its own brand of tempered communitarianism that filled the space occupied in other countries by socialist and religious parties. The American synthesis was not explicitly Christian, yet Christianity and prophetic Judaism are embedded in our national ethos, and the Old Testament prophets have been a staple of American reformist rhetoric from the beginning. And as the historians
James Kloppenberg
and
Daniel Rodgers
have shown, American-style communitarianism often made use of European ideas—from socialists, social democrats, and the British New Liberals—even as European progressives borrowed from our intellectual arsenal. Our politics have never been as indifferent or resistant to ideas from abroad as either critics of an alleged American parochialism or celebrators of our uniqueness would suggest, and Europe, in turn, has long been open to our intellectual innovations.

In these transatlantic dialogues, Americans brought a distinctive set
of ideas forged in our own notions of republican government, in Hamiltonian ideas about the role of public authorities in fostering prosperity, in Jeffersonian ideas about democratic responsibility, and in Puritan notions of local autonomy and community. American arguments for individual liberty are always tempered by arguments for personal responsibility, celebrations of community, the idea of fraternity, and the need in self-governing republics for virtuous citizens. The idea that human beings are born to be free is an American instinct. So, too, as Wilson Carey McWilliams argued, is the idea “
that fraternity is a need because
, at a level no less true because ultimately beyond human imagining, all men are kinsmen and brothers.”

This book is thus a plea to restore and refresh the traditional American balance. Doing so is central to reviving our confidence in the future and an approach to politics that brings our country together by speaking to both sides of our political heart.

Those who make the assertions that I have already offered about government and the need for a less lopsided distribution of wealth and income are usually seen, in our current climate, as championing a “liberal” or “progressive” view. And my own political commitments are, in fact, liberal, in the American sense of that word. It is a label I have embraced in recent years in part because too many liberals, after looking at the opinion polls, have fled from any association with the honorable history that word embodies. My views can also be fairly described as progressive, center-left, or social democratic. But I most identify with the description of my politics offered by my conservative friends and polemical adversaries at
National Review
magazine. In an exceptionally kind review of my first book,
Why Americans Hate Politics
,
NR
referred to me as a “
communitarian liberal
.”

That was quite accurate, and it helps explain my preoccupations here. It also underscores the extent to which the political shorthand we use typically needs qualifiers. Not every political argument should be seen as a point-counterpoint confrontation between red and blue, left and right, liberal and conservative.

In particular, it is possible to believe passionately that our yearning for community has not received the attention it deserves in our current telling of the American story while still celebrating our enduring devotion to individual freedom. Our nation will never be purely communitarian any more than it will be purely individualistic. Almost everything I have written about politics over the years has seen the essential questions before our country as involving a search for the right equilibrium between these commitments. It is the reason my book
Why Americans Hate Politics
so emphasized how debilitating it is to allow our political life to be defined by false choices. False choices are the enemy of balance.

Conservative readers who know of my commitment to the center-left may be surprised by my affection for the brands of conservatism that emphasize the importance of the social bonds created by tradition, religion, family, and a devotion to place and locality—affections that also help explain my unease with the Tea Party. One conservative writer who has greatly influenced my thinking is Robert A. Nisbet, the sociologist whose classic work
The Quest for Community
found a wide audience across ideological lines.

“The quest for community will not be denied,” Nisbet once wrote, “for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.” What terrified Nisbet were the efforts of the twentieth century’s centralizing ideologies, Communism and Nazism, to create artificial forms of community built on “
force and terror
” in response to the corrosive effects of modernity on traditional social bonds. “
Freedom cannot be maintained in a monolithic society
,” he wrote. “Pluralism and diversity of experience are the essence of true freedom . . . Neither moral values, nor fellowship, nor freedom can easily flourish apart from the existence of diverse communities each capable of enlisting the loyalties of its members.” Freedom and a healthy brand of individualism
depend
upon a strong sense of community.

Because of my respect for conservative thought, I try to be careful in distinguishing between brands of contemporary conservatism that have embraced radical individualism and the broader conservative tradition. (I say this knowing that many of my conservative friends will argue
that I have not been careful enough.) I readily acknowledge that conservatives going back to Edmund Burke have revered community and what Burke called society’s “
little platoons
.” I have always found this sort of conservatism attractive, which explains my affection for Nisbet.