POLITICS FEBRUARY 25, 2012
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While neither political party has a monopoly on “community,” in recent years Democrats have been more inclined than Republicans to invoke it—none more conspicuously than Barack Obama. In the peroration of the 2012 State of the Union address, he declared that “No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team.” A month earlier, in the city where Theodore Roosevelt delivered his landmark “New Nationalism” speech, Obama argued that “Our success has never just been about the survival of the fittest. It’s been about building a nation where we’re all better off. We pull together, we pitch in, and we do our part.”
On one level, Obama was offering what he takes to be a cool statement of fact: America works well when it works together. But for the duration of his presidency, Obama has also been saying more than that. Indeed, undergirding many of Obama’s pronouncements about the country’s economic life has been a distinctly ethical claim: that Americans are deeply connected to their fellow citizens, and that we must act on the basis of those bonds. Even as we compete, we must cooperate.
It’s important to note that this is only a new variation on an old theme in American political thought (one might say, the oldest of them all). Although some versions of this theme resonated with the American people, many others fell flat. So while the President (and his speechwriters) can fairly be credited with reviving an honorable tradition, the question remains: How effective will Obama’s version be?
SPEAKING ON BOARD the Arbella in 1630, Governor John Winthrop said that “we must be knit together in this work as one man. … We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities.” More than that, he continued, “We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”
Winthrop had no doubt about the basis of the community he urged. The men and women on the Arbella had jointly entered into a covenant with God. They were members of the same body because “all true Christians are of one body in Christ,” and “the ligaments of this body which knit together are love.” Although this was a theological statement, it was also intensely practical. Winthrop understood that unless the people he was addressing felt connected to one another, they would not be willing to sacrifice for one another. But a successful community requires just such sacrifice. Why else would those with more than enough—“superfluities”—be willing to transfer their surplus to those in need?
Still, contemporary Americans cannot invoke these Christian sentiments as the basis of a community encompassing the nation as a whole. Our religious diversity makes that impossible. If our community is to be a living and active faith, it must draw upon a different source.
New York Governor Mario Cuomo tried to offer such a source in his keynote address to the 1984 Democratic convention, in which he depicted the American community as a family writ large: “We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings. ... We believe that we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound to one another.”
As family members sacrifice for one another, Cuomo suggested, so must Americans for their fellow citizens. And they must do so in the knowledge that those who sacrifice today may be in need of others’ sacrifice tomorrow. First parents sacrifice for their children, and then children for their parents. Like a family, a political community is a zone of reciprocity over the cycle of life.
There’s a problem with this: As political theorists from Aristotle on have shown, a political community is not a family writ large. It differs from the family, not just quantitatively, but also qualitatively—especially in the nature of the relations and ties among its members. While our language sometime suggests the contrary (George Washington is called the “father of his country”; our Constitution posits a connection between “ourselves and our posterity”), experience gives us no reason to believe that emotions akin to parental and filial sentiments normally characterize our political life.
Indeed, we have found ingenious new ways of bringing benefits into the present while pushing burdens into the future. While parents typically sacrifice in the hope of providing their children more opportunity and better lives, our society as a whole is doing just the reverse. Expecting citizens to behave as members of one family is wishful thinking. And the relatively short life of Cuomo’s metaphor offers proof of that.
War has been the other classic metaphor on which Americans have tried to base their ideas of political community. Countless World War II MGM productions depicted Americans from different regions, ethnicities, and religions brought together by the exigencies of mortal conflict. William James famously advocated national service—the “moral equivalent of war”—as a way of producing “healthier sympathies,” especially in the hearts of “gilded youths” whose privileged upbringing separated them from those who live harder, harsher lives. Theodore Roosevelt began and ended his New Nationalism speech by invoking the valor and sacrifice of Civil War veterans as the model for civic life. More than a decade earlier, in his book American Ideals, he insisted that “No amount of commercial prosperity can supply the lack of the heroic virtues, or can in itself solve the terrible social problems which all the civilized world is now facing.”
A day after taking office at the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, TR’s distant cousin and heir to the Progressive tradition, continued developing this trope. He told America’s veterans that “It is a mistake to assume that the virtues of war differ essentially from the virtues of peace. All life is a battle against the forces of nature, against the mistakes and human limitations of man, against the forces of selfishness and inertia, of laziness and fear.” He invoked the “great ideals of sacrifice and service,” insisting that “the essential things of life are related intimately to those to great words.”
Obama is now drawing consciously on this tradition. Indeed, his most recent State of the Union address begins and ends by invoking it. This is how he starts:
These achievements [honorably ending the war in Iraq, blunting the Taliban’s momentum, and hunting down bin Laden] are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.
And here’s his conclusion:
Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.
Alas, war works little better than family as a template for political community. In war, there are clear goals and a chain of command. The entire force has undergone similar training designed not only to impart necessary skills but also to weld the group into a tight-knit unit. And it is literally the case that the ineptitude or cowardice of a single member can lead to the death of others.
But it’s not only that democratic communities happen to lack officers and hierarchies of command—it’s that they are founded on a notion of liberty that inexorably produces a society with a diversity of interests and views. In the entire sweep of American history, only one peacetime episode—the Great Depression—comes close to James’s moral equivalent of war. If Obama’s moral appeals have fallen flat, it’s in part because we know that the instances of solidarity he evokes lie well outside the experience of most Americans today.
THERE ARE TWO other accounts of community—neither metaphorical, but both of which have recurred in our political discourse—that Obama has the option of drawing on. Some thoughtful conservatives have argued that the quest for an overarching national community is somewhere between futile and dangerous. Instead, America should be understood as a community of communities, in which neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and faith communities define and enact their various visions of the good life.
As a matter of sociological description, there is much to be said for this thesis. But it does not resolve the problem of mutual obligation among citizens. Indeed, it may intensify that problem. The kinds of social ties that exist within groups and fortify relations of mutual support among its members can weaken the sense of responsibility they feel for those outside the group. Unless we assume that a civic invisible hand solves broad social problems through the sum of intra-group activities, the consequence of an exclusive focus on sub-communities may be the neglect of those with the greatest needs. Even if, as it is written in Deuteronomy, “There will always be poor people in the land,” they may not be in our group, or anybody else’s. It’s hard to feel confident that there are enough good Samaritans to do what needs to be done.
And finally, there is the idea of America as a creedal community, dedicated to a common body of fundamental principles and institutions. This account accurately describes who we are as a people and what we are as a nation. But it does not resolve the problem of mutual responsibility. There’s a gap between the beginning of the Declaration of Independence—in which the nascent American people jointly affirm certain truths as self-evident—and its end, where its signatories “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” The simple fact that you agree with others—even about something important—doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re willing to die for them, or for the ideas that you all espouse. Even if Obama were to speak movingly about the fact that all human beings are created equal and endowed with the same rights, that doesn’t mean that he’ll have convinced anyone that they ought to care about one another. For that to happen, some deeper connection would have to be forged, one visceral enough to inspire action, even sacrifice.
AMERICA IS CLOSEST to being a national community, with common joys and sorrows, when it is sharing a symbolic experience—John F. Kennedy’s assassination, John Glenn’s flight, the Challenger disaster, the 9/11 attack. We pull together for a while, and we can set aside our differences. But these moments always prove evanescent, and all too quickly our quarrels resume. We cannot hope to build stable ties of community on fleeting peak experiences.
Yet grand metaphors aren’t what we need either. President Obama insists that we’re all in the same boat, and in the long-run he’s right. Those claims, however, are contradicted by the everyday experience of most Americans. Businesses can boost profits even as they shed workers. By and large, the children of professionals live in stable families, get good educations, and succeed in life, while the others stagger along without fathers (and sometimes mothers as well), drop out of high school, and lack all hope. Thanks to our all-volunteer Armed Forces, one percent of Americans do the fighting and dying for the rest of us. And we find it more and more difficult to take account of the long-run to which the president appeals. We are still warming ourselves with the cooling embers of the Interstate Highway System without investing in its 21st century equivalent. Postpone current consumption to build a better future? Maybe next year.
It is societies such as ours, badly divided and obsessed with the present, that most need communal ties. But they are the least likely to produce them. Obama’s speeches have gestured at this problem but haven’t solved it. Indeed, in these circumstances, only a steady appeal to common sense and common decency has any hope of sustainably convincing American citizens to act in what Tocqueville called their self-interest, rightly understood. But it’s still an open question whether our leaders have the fortitude to make, and our citizens the disposition to hear, such an appeal.
William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor at The New Republic.
16 comments
Good article, though it makes me think of the warning, "Be careful what you ask for, you might get it." Too little community leads to the rampant economic selfishness and intolerant religiousity so visible in the current reactionary right and GOP Presidential candidates. Too much community is like flipping a coin into mob rule and contempt for diversity and individuality. Finding the right balance is like navigating a river of rapids and rocks, where you are likely to crash on my excessive mixed metaphors.
- skahn
February 25, 2012 at 1:04am
Actually, I don't think there is a such thing as too much community. Unlike, say, Japan or South Korea, the United States has a very diverse population. When we emphasize what we have in common, it won't be to the complete exclusion of other cultures. It's not a Gingrichian "English-only because Spanish is the language of the ghetto". It's an "English, plus we can also understand Spanish and Chinese and Tagalog and Twi". Where else in the world do we celebrate the diversity and unity of humanity? (In reality, it's happening in a vastly increasing number of locales but the US provides the melting pot template.) Also, you can't stress enough the line "the consequence of an exclusive focus on sub-communities may be the neglect of those with the greatest needs". Indeed, it is the reason we have public institutions and don't just relegate the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and the weak to charity. We believe they should have a guarantee that we will help them and that they won't have to suffer the shame of begging the more fortunate (and often unfeeling) for crumbs. Private support simply doesn't scale up.
- chaitless
February 25, 2012 at 10:16am
He's failed badly, in my view. I don't put the major blame on him, however, because of the polarizing forces he's up against. It's pretty tough to talk about community when a sizable portion of the citizenry (is that a dated word too?) doesn't think you're legitimately the president. We're not facing crises of the dramatic sort that can galvanize a real consensus against the challenge. Sure, the challenges are serious, perhaps even existential, but not of the immediately climactic sort that compel collective action. We're still looking for someone to blame and for a quick fix -- just watch the howling that will accompany $4 a gallon gas. Part of the problem, as Galston recognizes, is that our vocabulary of community has grown thinner with time. This was the theme, of course, of Bellah's Habits of the Heart book from 1985. However much it may have deserved criticism, it broached a real problem that has not improved since then. I'm not sure what the answer is, even though I teach courses on this subject. When an eastern Orthodox but native-born American/Marine veteran/college instructor I know can say he wants to privatize Social Security because he can't see why he should be compelled to buy into national retirement insurance, I am left puzzled where to look for the commonality that elicits consensus. Describing ourselves in principally economic terms seems totally self-defeating, since an economy like ours is necessarily global in its ties and co-exists uneasily with sovereignty.
- mjhollerich@stthomas.edu
February 25, 2012 at 7:46pm
Of course, we are no longer "in the same boat". The stratification of America has consequences. And it's not just in measures such as income or wealth: my "community" is no longer your "community". Conservatives say "America should be understood as a community of communities, in which neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and faith communities define and enact their various visions of the good life". Problem is, the communities could not be more different: "The kinds of social ties that exist within groups and fortify relations of mutual support among its members can weaken the sense of responsibility they feel for those outside the group". Galston says that "a steady appeal to common sense and common decency" is our only hope for bridging the divide. I would point out that independent, evangelical, Protestant churches are the fastest growing, that a leading presidential candidate is promoting home-schooling, that even our military academies have been divided between those who are pious and those who are not. And as Cohn points out in his most recent blog post, Romney believes sacrifices for the sake of "community" are only for the poor. But here's the paradox: despite what culture warriors may say, regional differences (east, west, north, and south) are becoming less so, as the population has become much more mobile; my home, the south, is rapidly losing its distinctive southern character, as northerners and easterners make the great migration south. The differences within regions, however, are growing: in my small, southern "community", many suffer abject poverty, with no skills, jobs, or even electricity and plumbing, while those who reside in the extremely wealthy island enclave only a few miles away commute to work in private jets. How can the wealthy ignore the third world conditions of the poor in our "community": it's out of sight, out of mind, as they don't even have to leave the island to get to their private jets.
- rayward
February 26, 2012 at 8:53am
A separate comment about "community" and the role of the armed forces and the church, for as Galston points out, both have served to reinforce ties to the "community". Looking at my own family's history, I am struck by the willingness to serve in the military. My great, great, great, great grandfather served as a captain in the Revolutionary War, my great, great uncle served in the Union Army during the Civil War, my grandfather served in the Phillipines as a surgeon during the Spanish-American War (and later died from a staph infection he contracted while serving), my only uncle served as a captain in the infantry during WWII (and was killed in battle in France, which exempted my father, the only survivng son, from service), my father in law served as a Navy pilot in the Pacific during WWII, my brother in law served in the Marines in Vietnam, my brother served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. Many in my family were in the 1%, but they were no less committed to serving in the military as part of their obligation to "community". And my family is not what I would call a "military family". I suspect that my family's history is much like that of most other Americans. Today, as Galston points out, it is rare indeed for the 1% to serve. In my community, the independent "community" church is by far the largest church, having gained hundreds (maybe thousands) of members in a few years, mostly at the expense of the traditional Protestant denominations and even the local Catholic Church. It's an evangelical Protestant church, in which the members adhere to a form of prosperity gospel. My "community" is also the home of many professional golfers, many of whom earn enormous incomes, and most of whom belong to the "community" church. Of course, it's not surprising that a professional golfer would be drawn to a church that preaches the prosperity gospel, not only because the professional golfer can earn such an enormous income but also because the golfer has only himself to depend on (or blame) for his success (or failure). I mention this about professional golfers not to focus on golfers per se, but the dynamic that is involved in the growth of independent "community" churches, most of which adhere to some form of prosperity gospel: it seems that in our new Christian "community", we are not our brother's keeper. Another interesting phenomenon with the "community" church is that the "community" of those who join becomes much smaller (some refer to the church as a cult), the effect of which is to reinforce what like-minded people believe. In other words, church, which used to reinforce the ties of the larger "community", now has the opposite effect.
- rayward
February 26, 2012 at 10:07am
Interesting reflection on the specific failure of churches, some of them anyway, to foster community beyond the walls of their own building(s). My church (I'm Catholic) once prided itself on being "the church of nations in the nation of nations" (i.e. the U.S.), a mostly admirable effort to present Catholicism as well-suited to the American pluria (ex pluribus, unum). Nowadays we seem more interested in saying who's not fit to belong rather than who is, though Catholicism, referring specifically to the bishops, still has, I believe, an admirable record on immigration, one area where we've not gotten into bed (so to speak) with the revanchist right.
- mjhollerich@stthomas.edu
February 26, 2012 at 10:21am
I should have added, with reference to rayward's post, that my own father (and his brothers) served proudly in WWII, and my dad saw extensive and fierce combat in Sicily, Italy (Anzio), and southern France. But my generation had military service sullied by Vietnam. Andrew Bacevich, whom I'm pleased to claim as a high school classmate and who did serve in Vietnam (as did others of our classmates, including his late brother-in-law George Blough), has spoken eloquently for our generation on the misuse of the military in foreign policy. I mention this because ambivalent attitudes to military service have played a role, both as cause and effect, in a weakened sense of national commonality. The professional army (aka All-Volunteer) and the apparent end of a citizen army (no draft for Iraq!), haven't helped (another theme of Bacevich's).
- mjhollerich@stthomas.edu
February 26, 2012 at 10:28am
The prosperity gospel is one of the most interesting things about modern Evangelical Christianity. It seems to fly in the face of traditional Christian values and may explain part of why we seem to be flying apart. Rayward's right, we live in different economic and social worlds; although if you take the view from the space shuttle or the moon, clearly we are in the same boat. However this isn't a boat (or planet) folks want to look at let alone try to save. Also, there is real hatred rampant in America. I just read a ridiculous screed claiming that Obama can't be president since is a "mulatto," and black people and mixed race people obtain civil rights from the 14th Amendment, stuff like that. Ergo it is difficult to create a community among people who detest each other on sight. In fact, Obama is frequently excoriated for being a "community organizer," as though there's something wrong with the comment. And now we're confronted with another political theory one had thought too absurd to ever become mainstream and that's Randian "libertarianism." I think mjhollerich@stthomas.edu might have a point about military service as a unifying element in the American experience. WWII did show people that Chinese-Americans, black Americans, Native Americans, ie, "the other," were indeed real humans, real Americans. Young people seem to have fewer barriers in my experience and many I know openly embrace anything different or unusual and take various genders for granted - but then I don't know a lot of "conservatives," ie I simply don't exist in their world and wouldn't be welcome in it anyway. My work, play, world is in the arts and in the big city, we occasionally venture to The Land West of O'Hare to visit like-minded people and come right back the city asap. Here, communities may not interact to the degree we idealize in the "melting pot" vision of America, but we see each other all the time: people of all faiths, creeds, colors, nationalities, and often we eat at the same places, perform each other's music and dances, pitch in at fundraisers, be it for the poor, for the arts, for political issues; for the public schools. These values transcend religion, color, economic status, social status, occasionally. Love of music, of art, of dance - sometimes the whole city comes together and dances in the shadow of the towers.
- Sophia
February 26, 2012 at 2:26pm
Still waiting for Obama to convince Americans about the importance of watching "Community".
- chaitless
February 26, 2012 at 4:11pm
There's a fine book on this subject I recommend to TNR readers: Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah et al. (1985). It illumines the challenges of talking about any issue involving joint effort, when so much of American vocabulary and archetypes are individualistic. "The individual and society are not in a zero-sum situation."
- bjones
February 26, 2012 at 6:08pm
Good one chaitless
- Pnaut
February 26, 2012 at 7:32pm
Conservatism is all about community, the voluntary association of free individuals. "Liberalism" is about the power of the centralized state over the individual and the community. Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and every other totalitarian dictator has yammered about the how he was promoting "community" over the atomistic individualism of liberal democratic capitalism. Obama's program of centralizing political power at the expense of states, communities and individuals, if not checked, can lead only to the destruction of the "last best hope of mankind".
- bulbman1066
February 27, 2012 at 1:46am
"Community is the voluntary association of free individuals." In fact, individuals are only free within a decently well organized government that can guarantee their freedom. Otherwise, there is the Hobbesian state of nature and individuals are subject to shifting caprices and the appetites of the strong and the despotic. But I'm sure bulbman would be perfectly fine embracing that conservative vision. An environment with hundreds of competing tribes can be quite fractious. This, of course, is why hunter-gatherer communities did not make the scientific and artistic innovations of more organized communities. Ones with, dare bulbman say it, civilizing governance institutions. The notion of liberal governance that ensures people can live freely as some sort of destructive tyrannical force is the sort of crackpottery that people who have never lived in developing nations write about comfortably from their air conditioned, consistently electrified private homes.
- chaitless
February 27, 2012 at 3:08am
Chaitless, I don't deny the importance of government. We need government to enforce the rights outlined in the Constitution and to defend the country against all enemies foreign and domestic. What I object to is government overstepping its bounds and usurping roles that properly belong to individuals, families, and communities. Government's role should be to protect individual liberty, not to expand at the expense of liberty. Contemporary liberalism pretends to respect liberty, but its central theme has become fear of any human action that is not vetted by government bureaucrats to make certain that it accords with the ever expanding rules of political correctness.
- bulbman1066
February 27, 2012 at 11:54am
"Conservatism is all about community, the voluntary association of free individuals"
No, that's libertarianism. Unless you're complaining about being born to American parents on American soil, the last time I checked you were free to GTFO. Of course, this is simply a rhetorical veneer for your dissatisfaction with having a Democrat in the White House. So why weren't you raising this kind of storm when the Republican controlled Congress revoked their own rule on PayGo, and allowed their Crony Capitalism to shine brightly?
"Contemporary liberalism pretends to respect liberty, but its central theme has become fear of any human action that is not vetted by government bureaucrats to make certain that it accords with the ever expanding rules of political correctness."
That's an interesting way of describing it. I suppose you've personally written a letter of apology to Bernie Madoff, and are saddened that he will be forced to spend his last few years of life in jail instead of with his family because of government overreach. Right?
- GSpinks
February 27, 2012 at 5:55pm
Gspinks, maybe if government would do its proper job, which includes spotting and trying to prevent securities fraud, Bernie Madoff would have been caught earlier. Instead, surprise,surprise, our government occupies itself with passing out favors to those who support the support the politicians in power. The Republicans are far from innocent, but the Democrats have taken rent seeking to perfection. The public employee unions have the taxpayer by the throat. They have bankrupted many municipalities and several states, including California. Let's make a deal. Let's tighten securities and banking regulations, and bring back something along the lines of Glass-Steagall. Let's make public employee unions illegal. The latter is already happening, and the good guys are winning against the union thugs. It's not a matter of Republican versus Democrat. It's a matter of using government to enforce free market policies rather than to subvert them.
- bulbman1066
March 1, 2012 at 11:34pm