Our Divided Political Heart (39 page)

It can fairly be said that I have placed more emphasis in these pages on community than on individualism. I have done so to underscore the extent to which the American conversation has veered away from an understanding of our communal impulses. But nothing here is intended to deny the fierce independence that Americans so value. We have always held up as heroes inventors and adventurers, cowboys and private eyes, entrepreneurs and free spirits. “
Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably
into a community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind,” wrote the historian Robert Wiebe. “There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there ever will be.”

Wiebe is entirely right. But it is also calling into the wind to pretend that Americans have lived by individualism alone. We are the nation of both
High Noon
and
It’s a Wonderful Life
. Our current discontent has many roots. But we will not resolve our problems or restore our greatness by fleeing from either of our twin commitments, from either side of our character.

For Obama in the short run, and for moderates and progressives in the long run, there is no point in seeking compromise at the midway point between the Long Consensus and the radical individualists. The Long Consensus
itself
embodies moderation, balance, and compromise, a view Obama himself finally embraced in a series of speeches in the fall of 2011 and early 2012. There is much room for argument within that consensus over when and whether to tilt more toward the public or the private, the individual or the community. What the country neither needs nor wants is an endless series of campaigns and political battles revolving around competing fears—of excessive government on one side and of an end to core programs such as Medicaid and Social Security on the other.

This need not be our future. The rising generation that rallied to Obama in 2008 did not do so simply because of their fascination with an unusual and compelling human being—“the biggest celebrity in the
world,” as John McCain’s campaign correctly called him. They also mobilized because as a generation, they espouse even more than their elders the values and commitments of the Long Consensus. Obama ended his first term by embracing the imperative of defending the Long Consensus—belatedly, perhaps, but also forcefully. But it will be the task of the new generation to make it vital in the unfolding century.

Balance and moderation typically are seen as traits of older people—or so older people like to think. But it is the Millennial generation that appreciates what the American balance promises, and demands.

Young Americans are, at once, more passionately individualistic
and
more passionately communitarian than any other age group in the country. The Millennials (generally defined as Americans born in 1981 or later) are the most socially tolerant of the generations. They are also the generation most comfortable with racial and ethnic diversity, most open on matters such as gay marriage, and most welcoming to new immigrants. The fact that they are such a racially and ethnically diverse generation explains and undergirds many of their attitudes. Latinos, who combine a determination to succeed with a strong commitment to community and the idea of a common good, are an important component of the millennial generation. It is a generation whose members have faith in their own capacity, collectively and as individuals, to effect change.

Their sense of communal obligation is made manifest in their exceptional devotion to service—as volunteers in tutoring programs, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, environmental initiatives, and community organizing. They are also the generation that bore the largest burden of fighting the nation’s two longest wars. Surveys have consistently found that helping those in need is a high personal priority for members of this generation.

They have more faith than their elders do in government’s constructive capacities, even as they also wish for a government that is less bureaucratic and more nimble. They combine the idealism of the sixties generation with the more worldly concerns of the generation that came of age in the 1980s and the 1990s. One might say that they are more practical than
the 1960s generation and more idealistic than younger Americans were in the 1980s. They want to do good, but they want the good they do to last. They are willing to take risks, but they are not foolhardy. They have doubts about politics, but they have shown a willingness to give politics a chance. They have few illusions, but they do have hope.

No one harnessed those hopes more effectively than Obama. In the 2008 election, two-thirds of voters twenty-nine and younger supported him; by contrast, Obama won only 45 percent among voters who were sixty-five and older. As the Pew Research Center pointed out, this was “
the largest disparity between younger and older voters
recorded in four decades of modern Election Day exit polling.”

Moreover, Pew observed, “
after decades of low voter participation by the young
, the turnout gap in 2008 between voters under and over the age of 30 was the smallest it had been since 18-to 20-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1972.” The members of this generation are more engaged in politics at this point in the life cycle than any generation in four decades. Their attitudes and their activism are not simply or even primarily the product of an Obama effect. Turnout among the young rose steadily beginning in 2000, as has support for Democrats. In 2008, Obama built on something that was already happening even as he mobilized the young in unprecedented ways.

If the new generation resembles any generation that came before it, it is the Greatest Generation of the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. Pew, which in 2010 conducted one of the best studies of the Millennials, found that Americans under thirty—like those largely departed New Dealers and World War II vets—were not affected by the allergy to the word “liberal” to which every other American age group is now susceptible. Americans under thirty included the largest proportion of self-described liberals and the smallest proportion of self-described conservatives of any age group in the country. Not only are the younger generation more socially tolerant; they are also far more sympathetic than their elders to activist government. The Pew researchers asked respondents to choose between two statements: “
Government should do more to solve problems
” and “Government is doing too many things better left to business and individuals.” Fifty-three percent of Millennials wanted government to do more. In every
other age group, pluralities said that government was doing too much. Skepticism about government was highest among the oldest respondents, who are the political base of the Tea Party—and, ironically, benefit the most from government social insurance programs. Among those over sixty-five, only 39 percent thought government should do more.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Millennials are also far more likely than older cohorts to believe that government can be efficient. Pew asked those surveyed to respond to the statement “
When something is run by government
, it is usually inefficient and wasteful.” In every other age group, significant majorities agreed; only 42 percent of the Millennials did.

Members of the new generation believe in voluntary action
and
in government action. They are more skeptical of traditional norms than older Americans are, yet their goals in life might have found approval from old-line Whigs. When asked by Pew’s researchers to list their most important goals in life, “
being a good parent
” ranked first at 52 percent, followed by “having a successful marriage” at 30 percent and “helping those in need” at 21 percent. Interestingly, this last came in ahead of “having a high-paying career,” which came in at 15 percent. This generation is pioneering a blend of progressive politics and back-to-basics values.

With unemployment running stubbornly high through Obama’s term, young Americans—particularly blacks and Latinos—started their work lives with constrained opportunities. Their failure to turn out in large numbers in 2010 and some movement away from Obama in the polls afterward suggested the millennials’ 2008 passions had cooled.

This posed an important political challenge for Obama. But the larger and long-term challenge for the members of this rising generation is whether they will maintain their level of public engagement and their confidence in their power to transform the nation through political action. In our nation’s history, the great reforming generations have successfully married their aspirations to service with the possibilities of politics. They have harnessed the good work done one-on-one in local communities to larger movements for change in the nation and the world. They have always remembered, as Michael Sandel has written, that “
when politics goes well, we can know a good in common
that we cannot know alone.” That is still the Millennial generation’s aspiration.

But it is precisely because the fate of the next consensus is in the hands of younger Americans that the Long Consensus of old cannot be restored in exactly the same form it took in the twentieth century. As we’ve seen, the Progressivism and New Deal liberalism that did so much to shape the Long Consensus took root within a very different economy, even as it shaped the way that economy worked. For the new generation, the model company is Apple, not General Motors. The model entrepreneurs are Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs, not Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Confidence in both government and collective action was higher in the New Deal and postwar years than it is likely to be for some time.

Yet the citizens of this new economic and technological world have lost neither their desire for social justice nor their inclination to protest conditions that narrow their opportunities. The anti–Wall Street demonstrations and the support they won are evidence of this. Consider that we are a nation that celebrates the liberating possibility of new technologies, and then we quickly form social networks. We disparage the federal government, and then we heap praise and honor on our men and women in uniform, who represent the most self-sacrificing part of that government. More prosaically, we demand that government do less and spend less, even as we demand that it do more: for the elderly, for the unemployed, for the education of our children, for the eradication of disease, for safeguarding our natural environment, for protecting consumers, for preventing financial fraud and abuse. We are libertarians when things go well for us, but we want to socialize the risks that threaten us, notably those arising from old age, natural disasters, unsafe products, and ineffective drugs. “
Government is the enemy
,” former Republican Senator Bill Cohen once said, “until you need a friend.”

It was one of the great strengths of the Long Consensus that it was neither static nor backward-looking. It fostered, absorbed, and managed change. Paradoxically, by building a sense of social and economic security, the consensus encouraged risk taking and innovation by making risk less frightening. Government underwrote the infrastructure—social as well as physical—within which innovation could occur. By promoting mass education, research, and scientific breakthroughs, government increased the capacity of individuals to prosper and society’s capacity to advance technologically. The GI Bill and subsequent federal college scholarship and student
loan programs were classics in the genre: they expanded individual opportunities while increasing the community’s economic resources (and its level of knowledge and expertise). Hamilton and Clay might be shocked at the speed with which American society democratized itself; they would not be surprised by government’s capacity to foster growth or promote mass education.

At the very beginning of this book, I noted that “government” is not the same thing as “community.” That is certainly true. But the fact that many readers no doubt nodded in vigorous assent to this proposition, wanting to disentangle the two, is also a problem for democratic government. This speaks to how distant many Americans feel government is from their own communities.

It is not just that government is so often seen as creaky and backward-looking when its operations are compared to the bold new technological world in which we live. We also typically see government as running behind both the private and not-for-profit sectors in the ways it recruits and hires people, responds to new data, and makes decisions. We imagine it, not without reason, as enveloped in thickets of rules that are designed to promote accountability but often produce the opposite.

Those who propose to use government to achieve large ends cannot ignore these criticisms, particularly in a technological age when citizens and consumers demand responsiveness and a rapid resolution of their problems. Advocates of active government must also be supporters of innovative government.

At the same time, those who devote their lives to public service through government too often find themselves demonized, their significant contributions disparaged, their sometimes heroic efforts to innovate and reform dismissed. This creates a vicious cycle that further erodes government’s capacities. Broad assaults on government tarnish its image, which in turn discourages the innovators and the reformers from joining the public sector in the first place. Paul Light, a close student of the bureaucracy, has observed that young people interested in public service have gravitated more to the not-for-profit sector than to government. This is certainly good for the third sector; it is not good for the future of government.

We must thus create a new virtuous cycle in which government’s need
to attract new talent leads it to create dynamic work environments. Public sector work should again provoke pride. Those who work for government should experience the same sense of efficacy that their peers in the private and nonprofit sectors do. It was, after all, only a half century ago that John F. Kennedy created a genuine excitement over the prospect of government work. “
When my brother John and I were growing up
,” Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg declared in a speech in 2000, “hardly a day went by when someone didn’t come up to us and say, ‘Your father changed my life. I went into public service because he asked me.’” The devotees of the New Frontier who descended upon Washington in 1960 were not saints, but neither were they mere opportunists. “
The mood
,” wrote the journalist Godfrey Hodgson, “was strangely blended from ambition and idealism, aggressive social climbing and a sense of youthful adventure.” We could do, and have done, much worse.