Our Divided Political Heart (40 page)

But restoring this enthusiasm for public service will require us to create a government that is much less distant from our aspirations to a sense of community. Government is not just a bureaucracy. It is also a town square. It is not simply a place that issues licenses and permits but also the institution that builds the schools, colleges, libraries, parks, and neighborhood centers that foster community life. In a democracy, government should be seen less as an entity that issues commands than as a forum where citizens debate the future of their community and their nation. Government is not just the FBI and the IRS, as important as those two institutions are to our security and our solvency. It is also the TVA, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the National Science Foundation.

Liberals and progressives have sometimes forgotten that their purpose is not and never has been to defend government as such. Big government is not an end. Government’s most successful ventures have involved empowering individuals and communities, often by increasing the bargaining power of those who previously had been at an unfair disadvantage. The New Deal’s most successful venture in redistributing wealth and income to the less affluent was not any particular tax-spend-and-transfer program but the National Labor Relations Act, which enabled employees to form unions and bargain on their own behalf. Requiring manufacturers and lenders to provide consumers with adequate information on the products
they buy and the loans they receive costs government little, but it can shift the balance in market transactions decisively in the consumer’s direction. Government’s massive commitment to education at all levels is not—or certainly should not be—about the employment of educators and administrators. It is (and has been through most of our history) an effort to provide citizens with the capacity for self-government, prosperity, self-reliance, and personal growth. At a moment of skepticism about all institutions, reforms that promote public and private transparency, accountability, and responsiveness will speak to all of the disparate villages and neighborhoods that make up the
world of Bill Bishop’s Big Sort
.

Democratic self-government, if it is functioning properly, is simply the expression of the will of the community. The republican conception of government to which our Founders subscribed stoutly opposed the idea of a government captured by factions or for sale to particular interests. This is why the
Citizens United
decision opening the electoral system to the intrusion of large sums of money is antithetical to the Founders’ intentions. Republicanism insisted that citizens should participate in public life not simply to serve their legitimate personal or group interests but also, and primarily, because self-rule is essential to liberty. “Unless citizens have reason to believe that sharing in self-government is intrinsically important,” Michael Sandel has written, “
their willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good
may be eroded by instrumental calculations about the costs and benefits of political participation.” Paradoxically, restoring republican idealism is the only
practical
remedy for our democratic distemper. All other solutions are likely to fall short. One senses it was this intuition that inspired tens of thousands to knock on doors in 2008 in pursuit of nothing more, or less, than “change we can believe in.”

In analyzing our tendency to sort ourselves into communities organized by attitudes, lifestyles, and political inclination, Bill Bishop notes our increasing propensity to refer to political opponents as “
those people
.” In a competitive democratic system, there will always be a certain amount of such talk. In tough political campaigns, being nice is rarely a top priority.

But in a democratic republic, “those people” are also fellow citizens and self-government ultimately requires us to work with them, too.

In the course of these pages, I have been unapologetically critical of the ideas of some of my fellow citizens, who subscribe to the doctrines of what I have referred to in shorthand as radical individualism. In particular, I have been critical of the Tea Party, its approach to both politics and history, and the eagerness of some in its ranks to recycle old extremist ideas. Supporters of such views who have come this far might well feel that I have dealt with them in a way that turns them into “those people.”

Yet I am as frustrated as anyone else with a politics organized around battles between a supposedly enlightened (or patriotic, or freedom-loving) “us” and “those people” who are presumed to be less thoughtful (or less tolerant, or less devoted to their country and its traditional freedoms). I have emphasized the two sides of the American character to make it clear that I see even those with whom I passionately disagree as speaking for something that is authentic in the American story. My plea to them is to acknowledge that the American idea is built from materials that include the individualism they so treasure, but also republican and communitarian commitments that have been essential to our country’s prosperity, endurance, and, yes, its freedom.

Even those whom I have taken to task for ignoring our communitarian past, after all, have their own yearnings for community.
Adele Stan, a thoughtful left-of-center journalist
who disagrees with the Tea Party, nonetheless argued that a desire for community was a central element in bringing its partisans together. It is a paradox that the cause of individualism provided a venue for forging common bonds among those who had once been strangers. A large proportion of Tea Party supporters, moreover, are also members of the Christian conservative movement, which has obvious connections to America’s biblical communitarian tradition.

On the other side, many liberals are also uneasy with a more communitarian disposition. They are fearful that the demands of community might supersede the individual rights they treasure. Has it not been the American rights tradition that produced such large social gains for African Americans, for women, and for gays and lesbians?

How might the opposing forces in our currently fierce political wars
acknowledge both sides of our political heart—and both sides of our nation’s history—in ways they now sometimes resist?

To at least some degree, as I argued in
Chapter 5
, liberals—especially the politicians among them—have embraced the need to temper a creed oriented toward rights with commitments to community and responsibility. But there is still a great deal of liberal ambivalence about community, and about populism. Any time a liberal uses words such as “flyover country” or “Jesusland,” he or she is breaking faith with a broad democratic tradition that included Bryan no less than Roosevelt. This tradition acknowledges the wisdom that exists in small towns and the countryside no less than the genius of our sophisticated metropolitan areas. It honors the rights and dignity of religious believers and secular people alike. It respects the loyalties of old tightly knit working-class neighborhoods no less than the cosmopolitanism on the more affluent side of town.

Franklin Roosevelt added an urbane gloss to the Populist-Progressive tradition, as Hofstadter observed, and the bifurcation between expert opinion and popular instincts still presents problems for liberals. Yet Roosevelt never lost sight of the Populist roots of his coalition, or of the moral underpinnings of Progressive policies in the republicanism of the past. The most powerful criticisms of the Wall Street behaviors that led to the calamities of 1929 and 2008 arose from moral concerns. They focused not simply on greed but also on the failures of the privileged to live up to their obligations of stewardship toward the economic system. The absence of such stewardship was disastrous for the financial system and the larger economy. Populist anger against Wall Street, whether in 1935 or 2011, arose not from envy or jealousy but from a belief in the public obligations imposed by a republican conception of citizenship. Sometimes in inchoate ways and sometimes explicitly, the Occupy Wall Street protesters were speaking from this great republican tradition. As we saw earlier, the Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Populist arguments for greater economic equality rest, finally, on republican ideas: that citizens in a free republic need a degree of economic security, independence, and self-sufficiency to carry out their civic duties and to participate fully in self-government. Plutocracy is antithetical to both democracy and republicanism. Our Founders were sensitive to this in a way that recent Supreme Court decisions were not.

Liberals would also do well to acknowledge that recent advances in individual rights were secured not simply by an appeal to our tradition of individual freedom but also by powerful demands for remaking and perfecting the American community—and for extending the obligations (and not just the rights) of democratic citizenship. The preaching of Martin Luther King Jr. made sense to millions of Americans because King rooted what he said in the nation’s Founding documents and also in Scripture. The civil rights movement was always more than just a quest for individual rights. It was also a demand for civic inclusion. The movement did not simply defend Americans who had been deprived of justice for more than three centuries; it made a case for transforming the entire nation. “
The end is redemption and reconciliation
,” King declared at the beginning of his ministry in 1957. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” King painted a picture of African Americans enjoying the rights they deserved, but also of a country that had decided to live differently, a republic that would fulfill its destiny of full equality. His goal, he declared most famously in 1963, was “
to speed up that day when all of God’s children
, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” For King, freedom and community were inseparable.

And so it has been in the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Consider its core demands of recent years: for equal treatment within the United States military, and for equal rights to marriage. Could there be anything more civic, more republican in the oldest sense of the term, and more communally minded than a demand for equal opportunity to
sacrifice
for the nation? This was a demand not for equal employment opportunities on Wall Street or in corporate management but for an equal opportunity to serve and to defend the liberty of the whole country. There was a wise intuition here: if gays and lesbians were willing to risk their lives for the nation, how could the nation then deny them equal treatment? It was exactly what African Americans said after World War II, after so many in their communities had sacrificed and died. But more than shrewdness was involved. Gays and lesbians understood that full civic equality, an equal opportunity to serve the common good, was an essential component of equality in all other respects.

Similarly, the demand for marriage equality was neither an obvious next step for the gay rights movement nor universally popular among supporters of homosexual equality when it first arose, as Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest advocates of gay marriage, learned in the sometimes bitter polemics among gays and lesbians. Jonathan Rauch, another early supporter, observed that “
Egalitarians of a more radical stripe initially took a dim view
of gay marriage, regarding it as capitulating to bourgeois norms, which gay people were supposed to be challenging.” Same-sex marriage, he added, “is particularly hard to pin down. You can see it as incremental or radical, as communitarian or egalitarian; you have four permutations to choose from. I see it as incremental and communitarian.”

As Rauch argued, demands for gay marriage arose from a 1960s-inspired “liberationist” ethic of equality. But the cause drew strength from another tributary within the gay rights movement. “The new century brought to the fore a generation of younger gay people who, like their straight peers, had all too often learned the importance of marriage from the mistakes of their parents,” he wrote. “The result was an intense grassroots demand for the institutional protections and tools that go with marital
responsibilities
.” Rauch then offered this telling observation:

Note how different these two streams are
: one is fundamentally egalitarian and liberation-minded; the other fundamentally communitarian and family-minded. One emphasizes civil rights; the other civic responsibilities. They are not at war with each other, by any stretch, but they also are not entirely at ease with one another. Many of the liberationist activists who cut their teeth in the 1970s disdained the domesticating implications of marriage, and many of the younger gay people who came of age in the 1990s disdained the libertine ethos of gay-liberation. Gay marriage thus came on the scene with two constituencies, one more socially conservative than the other, allied, but with somewhat different destinations in mind.

In light of the broader argument I am offering here, the campaign for gay marriage might be seen as a classically American reform movement. It harnesses libertarian individualism to a communitarian emphasis on
responsibility. Like the effort to allow gays and lesbians to serve equally and without harassment in the armed forces, the gay marriage movement links rights with duties, self-fulfillment with social obligation. For liberals who value equal rights, it is an instructive story.

Recovering their communal bearings is even more vital for conservatives, if only because the communitarian side of conservatism has been in full retreat from the beginning of the Obama administration—and arguably from early in the Bush years, when the war on terror replaced compassionate conservatism as the administration’s driving idea. And as I argued in
Chapter 5
, the Tea Party has only driven compassionate conservatism further to the margins.

But a conservatism without a strong communal and compassionate side will be untrue to its intellectual roots, unfaithful to the Christian allegiances of so many of its supporters, and disconnected from some of the most vital streams of conservative thought and feeling in American history. Similarly, a Republican Party that cuts itself off from the tradition of republican nationalism embodied by Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt will not only be abandoning the ideas that gave it life and purpose. It will also squander the opportunity to help infuse the next American consensus with the particular blend of entrepreneurialism and public purpose that the past’s best Republican leaders always advanced. My concern is that instead of seeking a consensual balance between our libertarian and communal sides, Republicans will continue to push for a one-sided settlement in which government recedes, the nurturing of community is relegated to a purely private endeavor, and the market is allowed to operate with little oversight or public accountability. Such an approach may command occasional majorities. But it will never produce the larger consensus required to save us from many years of polarization and angry discontent.