Our Divided Political Heart (4 page)

Thus, to be clear, my primary argument is not with the entire conservative tradition, but with the form conservatism is currently taking, typified by the Tea Party. Partisans of this view are trying to break the links between the conservative movement and its more communal and compassionate inclinations. Between communitarian liberals and compassionate conservatives, there is ample room for dialogue and even common action.

But I do go further and argue that even my compassionate conservative friends need to acknowledge more than they do that the American quest for community has taken national as well as local forms, and that action by the federal government has often been constructive and even essential to community building on the local level. Intervention by the national government was required to defend African American communities, particularly but not exclusively in the South, whose rights were violated by state and local governments—violations that were often justified through a defense of the “rights” of local communities to their own peculiar (and oppressive) arrangements. We are, finally, a nation and not simply a collection of states. Our Constitution declares, in Article IV, Section 4, that “
the United States shall guarantee to every State
in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” States’ rights do not extend to the “freedom” to create state-based monarchies or despotisms. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments curtailed the rights of states to approve slavery, to deny basic rights to citizens, and to restrict the voting rights of minorities.

Moreover, I argue throughout this account that conservatives face a contradiction in their creed and in their practice. They often find themselves defending state and local rights except where the national economic market is concerned. In this case, they typically choose to deny states the right to regulate national enterprises—and then often turn around and deny the federal government the same ability, sometimes invoking states’ rights. It seems to me that conservatives need to acknowledge far more
than they do that the existence of a national and international market can require national and local rules and regulations—and that free nations may also be required to pool their sovereignty to impose necessary rules on what has become an increasingly integrated global system.

National and international corporations can be as indifferent to the needs and desires of local communities as any distant government. Communally minded conservatives should accept that if centralized state authority poses challenges to community building, so, too, do centralized, though private, economic enterprises.

American history and its implications are central to this account. This should not be taken to imply that if only we could get our history right and agree on its lessons, all would be well. But I do believe that our inability to share at least some common ground on essential historical matters—how our Constitution was written, how our democracy was created, how we built a thriving and prosperous nation, how we nurtured a society that simultaneously values innovation, tradition, and social justice—places severe limits on our capacity to move forward.

Our argument over history is, after all, a symptom of our polarization as well as a cause. It reflects the rise of personal choice as ever more central to the American value system. If we can choose in all other spheres of life, why not choose our own version of history? That is what is happening now, as Daniel Rodgers observed in his seminal book,
Age of Fracture
. “
The terrain of history ha[s] disaggregated
,” he wrote. “The mystic ribbons of time could not hold it together.” Rodgers quotes a colleague who offered a slogan: “
Every group its own historian
.”

While we will always debate how to interpret the American story, we are not free to choose our facts or invent them. Throughout the book, I argue not only that our past holds valuable lessons for the present (a point no less true for being obvious), but also that how we view the development of our democracy powerfully affects how we behave in the present. Especially now, the past is being used as a trump card in our politics. As a
general matter, this is a poor way to invoke history. But if history is to have such a large role in our public argument, we ought to play the historical game with a full and unmarked deck.

As it is, we appear to have abandoned the idea of one national history in favor of a series of partial accounts that suit the needs of our respective political tribes. The value we most seem to worship is choice, and so we choose our version of history. The centrality of choice also means that we are building local community in ways that make it ever more difficult to bring ourselves together in a larger community. This was Bill Bishop’s insight in his brilliant book
The Big Sort
. Bishop found that we are increasingly inclined to live with people who think and act like us, value the same things, have the same consumer habits, worship in the same way, and live similar personal lives.

Americans are “
forming tribes
,” Bishop wrote, “not only in their neighborhoods but also in churches and volunteer groups. That’s not the way people would describe what they were doing, but in every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations.” Of course, people of like mind have always gravitated toward each other. But Bishop is right to sense that this process is unfolding with a dazzling efficiency, and he is shrewd to observe how this affects the way we tell our national story:

A friend asked the other evening
, “Is it possible now to have a national consensus?” Perhaps not. Maybe the logic of the Big Sort is that there’s no longer a national narrative to follow, no longer a communal path to unanimity . . . We have created, and are creating, new institutions distinguished by their isolation and single-mindedness. We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings . . . “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government, too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way.

Indeed it doesn’t. It is hard to make democracy work when we cannot even agree on what kind of democracy we have created, or how it came about.

My argument might thus be seen as a response both to Rodgers’s
sense of “fracture” and to Bishop’s “Big Sort.” In recent decades we have witnessed, as the social thinker Alan Wolfe playfully suggested in a review of Rodgers’s book, “the Big Shrink.” This is not, he wrote, “
a shift from left to right
” but “a transformation from big to small.” We have given up on large narratives and an expansive sense of community beyond our own enclaves. We have, in theory, challenged old political institutions and mass culture. But by retreating into ourselves, we have in fact empowered those remaining forces that
do
enjoy national and international reach. We can only pretend to escape the national and international, which ought to be the lesson of an economic downturn that began on Wall Street but spread quickly to the rest of the world and reached deeply into our communities of choice.

The broad American narrative is well suited to our circumstances precisely because it is a history of balancing the local and the national, the individual and the communal, the economic and the civic. The American approach understands the vibrancy of the communities that Bishop has discovered, but insists that those communities are embedded in a nation whose story they share, whose laws they depend on, whose prosperity is essential to their own, and whose standing in the world will have a powerful effect on their fate. It is why the desire to prevent American decline is a yearning that unites American communities across nearly all the barriers we have erected against each other.

In the end, we should not be surprised that history seems so important in the politics of our time. Battles over history are always fierce in times of crisis because such moments necessarily involve struggles over self-definition. We had comparable arguments before the Civil War, when partisans on both sides of the slavery question sought to conscript the nation’s Founders as allies. That is why what follows is organized around the interaction between our current political impasse and how we read (and sometimes misread) our history.

The first chapter explores the rise of the Tea Party and its focus on retelling (and, I argue, rewriting) our nation’s story. The Tea Party understood instinctively that Barack Obama could be seen more as a communitarian
than as a liberal—although the movement’s preferred term for Obama’s worldview was “socialist.” This made Obama a particular threat to the kind of individualism the movement championed, even if many in the movement would likely have opposed him anyway as too liberal and cosmopolitan a figure. I also note that if the Tea Party was organizationally imaginative, it was not ideologically innovative. On the contrary, many of its ideas depend either on standard varieties of conservative individualism or on old notions popularized by the far right of the 1950s and 1960s. I ask why it is that where mainstream conservatives of a half century ago, notably William F. Buckley Jr., challenged such far-right ideas as cranky, foolish, and extremist, today’s conservative leaders have held their tongues or even offered encouragement to notions discredited long ago.

In
Chapter 2
, I explore the politics of history. Politics has always influenced how we tell our story to ourselves, and this chapter is aimed at putting today’s politically tinged arguments in perspective. I pay particular attention to how the rising civil rights movement and historical reassessments of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War influenced each other. The successes of the battle for racial equality encouraged a more accurate view of Reconstruction (a perspective freed from the tinge of racism), even as a more honest accounting of African American achievements in the post–Civil War South encouraged the forces battling segregation.

The next three chapters trace the arguments over individualism and communitarianism through our history and our current politics.
Chapter 3
argues that the tension between these tendencies goes back to the Puritan settlements and the early republic. I look at how biblical and republican ideas and individualism in a variety of forms all left their mark on the American character.
Chapter 4
describes why progressives in recent years—most prominently Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—concluded that present-day liberalism needed to be tempered by a greater emphasis on community and that rights talk needed to be supplemented by a strong public commitment to civic, social, and personal responsibility. Yet as liberals were becoming more open to community, conservatives were moving the other way. This is the subject of
Chapter 5
. It asks why today’s conservatives have transformed a creed born in skepticism about individualism into a doctrine that now has a radical form of individualism at its very core.

The second half of the book uses four critical moments in our history to shed light on our present controversies.
Chapter 6
focuses on the Founding moment and the Constitution. Those who created the American system of government did
not
believe that they had settled every important question permanently. They knew their final product was based on rough-and-ready compromises, a fact that the historian Gordon Wood has underscored in his extraordinary writing on the Founding period. They were alive to the need for innovation precisely because they were innovators themselves. Using what I see as the bookend Supreme Court cases of the first decade of the new millennium,
Bush v. Gore
and
Citizens United
, I argue that Tea Party constitutionalism and conservative originalism more generally are less interested in the Constitution’s actual words (or the “real” intentions of the Founders) than they are in rolling back democratic advances that have been made since 1787.

Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln are the heroes of
Chapter 7
. Contrary to popular notions that government engagement with the American economy began with the Progressive Era and the New Deal, Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln all acted aggressively on the belief that public enterprise went hand in hand with private initiative. Clay’s appropriately named “American System” for developing the country was prophetic in seeing how visionary federal action could bind and build a nation. I draw on the innovative work of the historian Brian Balogh to show that those who now argue for a highly limited government seek their inspiration not from the main line of American development but from the exceptional period of the Gilded Age—roughly 35 years in our 235-year story.

Populism, the subject of the next chapter, inspires a powerful ambivalence that has been productive for historians, fueling a vast industry of revision, counter-revision, and still further revision. Whatever its shortcomings, Populism was profoundly democratic, egalitarian, and communitarian in its aspirations. As I noted earlier, Progressives typically fail when they lose sight of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation “
March without the people
and you march into the night.”

The original Progressive Era succeeded, I argue in
Chapter 9
, because it created an alliance between the largely rural Populists and urban,
middle-class reformers. The new movement was a revolt against the radical individualism of the Gilded Age and a plea for community at both the national and local levels. It also embodied demands that would be familiar to today’s anti–Wall Street activists. Progressives attacked monopoly, the power of “
high finance
,” and an “unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism” (Theodore Roosevelt’s words) and warned that the United States was nearing “
the time when the combined
power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government” (Woodrow Wilson’s words).

The Progressives were determined to use democratic government to temper the forces of the marketplace and to write new rules for a rapidly transforming economy. The Progressive surge, reinforced by the New Deal, reasserted the longer American tradition that saw the public and private realms as cooperative, and also as checking each other’s power.