By John D. Fairfield
Our public life is so infused with anger that our elected representatives hesitate to meet with their own constituents. But how can we get the American people to use their collective power for good?
The dominant values in American life have always been private ones - self-reliance and personal responsibility, individual property and privacy rights, the domestic joys of hearth and home. But there is also a civic strand in our history, a rich legacy of public experience and political aspiration.
The United States came to life in a revolution to protect political liberty and prepare, as Thomas Paine put it, "an asylum for mankind." It underwent a painful rebirth in a bloody Civil War that Abraham Lincoln described as an effort to preserve the "last, best hope of earth" and ensure that "government by the people, for the people, of the people, shall not perish from the earth." Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to protect a Constitution that gives "we the people" the power to "form a more perfect Union."
For the past 30 years, however, we have embraced the belief that government is the problem. Public initiative has taken a backseat to market fundamentalism and privatization. Occasionally a candidate has won office with a campaign focused on public initiatives and civic aspirations. Sadly, though, little has come of such campaigns - even in victory - due to their leaders' personal and political failures and our own apathy. A pervasive cynicism about government always returns, leaving us to shun public responsibilities.
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Core contradictions
The election of President Obama in 2008 once again suggested that leaders willing to ask Americans to participate in something larger than themselves could succeed. "What is required of us now," Obama said in his inaugural address, "is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly."
The Obama administration, like others before it, has had to contend with its own mistakes and a pervasive frustration with politics. But there appears to be an inconsistency in our angry condemnations of incompetent, improvident government.
Get the government out of health care, we say, but protect Medicare. Avoid bailouts and stimulus packages, but ensure economic security and prosperity. Deregulate the economy, but protect the purity of our air, water, and food.
Both the anger and the inconsistencies are a visceral reaction to an unwelcome truth revealed by our recent troubles: We are unavoidably dependent on the institutions we mistrust and revile.
We think of ourselves as a nation of self-reliant, personally responsible individuals. But the near-collapse of the credit system, the escalating costs of health care, and the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico painfully reminded us of our reliance not only on government, but on financial and industrial corporations over which we have little control.
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Beyond self-reliance
As a new election approaches, the civic strand of our history has something useful to tell us. Self-reliance and personal responsibility are indelible values in American life - worthy of our respect and ignored at our peril. But we must recognize that self-reliance and personal responsibility are not merely personal, private matters.
No one is born self-reliant and personally responsible. We acquire those traits, if we do, through a host of social and civic relationships, starting with the family and extending outward into public life. Self-reliance and personal responsibility are also the product of the institutions, public and private, in which we spend much of our lives, and which shape our ambitions and opportunities.
In other words, one has to be given a chance to be responsible. The great glory of democracy - and its great burden - is to create a society, economy, and culture that encourage and enable each of us to become self-reliant and responsible. This is a task beyond our capacities as isolated individuals, one that requires us to work together. Self-reliance does not preclude cooperation, and responsibility implies obligations to others.
To realize these values, we must rebuild a civic realm not of privileges and entitlements, but of common opportunities and obligations in education and service. Our institutions must be reorganized to promote political and economic responsibility. This means combining our commitment to self-reliance and personal responsibility with our civic aspirations. That might be a program the parties could unite behind.