Our Divided Political Heart (12 page)

Yet as Sandel made clear in his seminal book
Democracy’s Discontent
, this liberal version of our public philosophy—“liberal” here used in its oldest philosophical sense—is perhaps only a half century old. It contrasts sharply with our republican tradition (again, a reference to a broader and older set of ideas, not the political party) that sees liberty as depending on “
sharing in self-government
” and “deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.” Taking on the responsibilities of republican citizenship, Sandel writes, requires “
a knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging
, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.”

Breaking with Hartz’s view, many historians have concluded that the best way to understand the core American philosophy at the time of the Revolution and the Founding is to see it as both liberal
and
republican—in our terms, both individualistic
and
communitarian. The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, one of the pioneers in the republican revival that took hold among intellectuals in the 1980s, argued rightly that “
one of the largest accomplishments of modern historical scholarship
has been the illumination of the role of republican thought in the period before, during, and after the ratification of the American Constitution.” Because of this new perspective
on the old, it “
is no longer possible to see a Lockean consensus
in the founding period, or to treat the framers as modern pluralists believing that self-interest is the inevitable motivating force behind political behavior.” Yet Sunstein does not deny that the American Founding’s version of republicanism is inflected with liberal ideas. On the contrary, he says, “
it incorporates central features of the liberal tradition
.” A proper understanding of our political trajectory, argues Kloppenberg, thus requires “
a balanced view that sees the continuous presence of rights talk and the continuous presence
of competing ideals of the common good.” It is a story in which “
arguments for freedom and arguments for community
have jostled against each other.” Precisely right.

I fold the republican idea, with its emphasis on civic virtue and the quest for a common good, under the rubric of “community,” partly because this word is more familiar to us, and also because the idea of community encompasses contemporary concerns in ways that the old and honorable word “republicanism” does not. In his underappreciated book
The Dance with Community
, the political theorist Robert Booth Fowler sees the rediscovery of republicanism as “
providing a language of restrained and chastened communitarianism
,” and he links the republican revival to the larger engagement with the idea of community that has blossomed over the last quarter century.

As Fowler notes, the new emphasis on the importance of republican ideas in our Founding has been contested by historians who continue to see brands of liberal individualism as predominant. (This, too, is part of the politics of history.) What cannot be contested is that the republican scholars have been sufficiently persuasive to allow us to conclude that the United States was born with a divided political heart. The Founders, as we’ll see in more detail in
Chapter 6
, were seeking a balance between liberty and community (between liberalism and republicanism) because they understood that preserving the liberty they so prized depended upon virtues and forms of solidarity that an individualistic conception of freedom could not sustain on its own. As the philosopher William M. Sullivan, a key figure in the republican revival, put it: “
The preservation of liberty, which is the preservation of individualism
in its positive meaning of personal dignity, thus turns on the preservation of public life, and that is necessarily a cooperative work.”

The Founders understood that self-interest is a fact of human nature, and
also that it is not the only fact
. They tried to build protections against the excesses of self-regarding behavior into their framework for our government. But they also sought to build a community that fostered the virtues self-government required. They wanted to promote prosperity but contain “luxury,” which they saw as leading to corruption. (Today’s anti–Wall Street demonstrators can draw inspiration from the importance many of the Founders ascribed to checking luxury’s influence.) The revolutionaries of the 1770s and 1780s understood that the experiment in self-government on which they were embarking required a noble balancing act. So it was, and so it remains.

The quest for community that is always present in American life, if sometimes submerged, arose from what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart,” and those familiar with the 1985 book inspired by that phrase will immediately see connections between my argument and that of Robert Bellah and his colleagues. (I also owe a debt to them for the title of this book, although the initial inspiration was more subconscious than conscious—a reflection, perhaps, that I had long ago internalized their observations.) In
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
, Bellah and his coauthors—Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton—argued that American individualism was sustained by non-individualistic inclinations that allowed a free society to cohere. The
Habits of the Heart
authors feared (a quarter century before the rise of the Tea Party movement) that individualism “may have grown cancerous” and threatened to destroy the social connections Tocqueville saw as moderating individualism’s “
more destructive potentialities
.”

In tracing three formative strands in the American character—“biblical,” “republican,” and “modern individualist”—they did not deny the centrality of the individualistic inclination. Indeed, individualism came in two distinct varieties, one they associated with Benjamin Franklin, the other with Walt Whitman. Franklin, “
the archetypal poor boy who made good
,” emphasized “
what many felt in the eighteenth century—and many have felt ever since
—
to be the most important thing about America: the chance for the individual to get ahead on his own initiative.” Franklin described the classic American path to upward mobility, long before the term became popular: “
If they are poor, they begin first as Servants or Journeymen
; and if they are sober, industrious and frugal, they soon become Masters, establish themselves in Business, marry, raise Families, and become respectable Citizens.” Bellah and his colleagues call Franklin’s approach “
utilitarian individualism
.”

This classic, one might say bourgeois, approach provoked the rise of an entirely different form of individualism. Bellah and his coauthors refer to it as “
expressive
” and identify it with Walt Whitman, for whom “success had little to do with material acquisition.” Whitman, they write, believed that “a successful life” was “rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling.” It is, of course, a mistake to offer a one-dimensional view of Whitman. He was not a hedonist, if hedonism is defined as putting personal pleasure above all other things. He was also highly political, active in the Democratic Party in the 1840s and 1850s and then an ardent anti-slavery Republican well known for his poetry saluting Abraham Lincoln. Bellah and his colleagues acknowledge that Whitman was inspired by the nation’s republican tradition, noting that the “
self-sufficient farmer or artisan capable of participation
in the common life was Whitman’s ideal as well as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s.” Still, they are right to identify Whitman with a very particular strand of American individualism. For him, they argue, “
the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate
and express the self and to explore its vast social and cosmic identities.”

Tracing these two forms of individualism is especially instructive in understanding the 1960s and that era’s contradictions. It produced, simultaneously, a counterculture that was seen as part of the left, and a New Right that celebrated capitalist individualism and gathered strength in the Goldwater movement and in organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom. The counterculture was heir to the romantic, Whitmanesque strain of individualism (even if parts of it occasionally and sometimes erratically celebrated small community, typified in the form of the commune or the ashram). The new conservatives stood up for the untrammeled freedom
of entrepreneurs to rise and prosper, defending their efforts against the meddling of state bureaucrats and all who would redistribute their income and wealth. Both movements were as American as Whitman and Franklin.

It is common enough for historians and social critics to cite our republican tradition by way of contrast to our individualism. But the
Habits of the Heart
authors were right to place a particular emphasis on another communitarian strand in our story that they label as “biblical” and trace back to the first Puritan settlements in Massachusetts. It is ironic, perhaps, that while it was Ronald Reagan who repopularized John Winthrop’s declaration that settlers in the New World would create “
a city set upon a hill
,” the sermon in which the phrase appeared was, in its attitude toward individualism, anything but Reaganesque. Entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop’s address gave us what Bellah and coauthors identify as one “
archetypal . . . understanding of what life in America was to be
.” Winthrop declared: “
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 community as members of the same body.” (Rush Limbaugh would certainly see Winthrop’s words as “socialistic.”) Winthrop also offered a classic—and counterintuitive—account of how our
differences
bind us together in community. God created differences, Winthrop argued, so that “
every man might have need of other, and from hence they might all be knit more nearly
together in the Bond of brotherly affection.” (The philosopher Wilson Carey McWilliams nicely brought Winthrop’s observation down to earth for our time: “
A quarterback who begins to act as though he is better than the linemen
who protect him is likely to receive a forceful reminder of the equality of teammates, despite the inequality of command.”) The
Habits of the Heart
writers note that the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements “
can be seen as the first of many efforts to create utopian communities
in America. They gave the American experiment as a whole a utopian touch that it has never lost, despite all our failings.” It is another side of American “exceptionalism.”

There are tensions in this biblical inheritance that can be seen to this day in arguments between the Christian right and the Christian left. If the Christian left would emphasize a community that shares material gifts and
burdens and makes “others’ conditions our own,” the Christian right stresses shared moral commitments that require each member of the community to live up to a strict personal moral code—what we now usually think of when we hear the word “Puritanism.” For Winthrop, true freedom, which he called “
moral freedom
,” was rooted in “the covenant between God and man” and involved giving liberty “to that only which is good, just and honest.” Thus is our biblical inheritance itself torn between a stress on communal action and an emphasis on individual behavior—or, perhaps more precisely, between a belief in communal action aimed at transforming
personal
norms, and a faith in communal efforts to transform social and economic
structures
. One could argue that in contemporary times, Catholic social thought, with its emphasis on both individual behavior and social responsibility, most closely resembles this old biblical strain in American life. This would certainly surprise Winthrop’s Puritans, given their rather dismal view of the Church of Rome.

The third strain identified by Bellah and his coauthors, the “republican” tradition, has, as we’ve already seen, enjoyed a broad intellectual revival over the past two decades, of which their book was part. The re-discovery of the republican tradition was crucial to the study of history because it challenged the widely held view that individualistic liberalism was the one and only American tradition. This also had powerful political implications.

The renewed interest in republicanism as an alternative to liberalism in explaining the origins of American politics was not initially part of some strategy to ransack the nation’s story to find old justifications for current political positions. On the contrary, the two scholars first associated with the renewed emphasis on our republican past, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, were both resolutely committed to preserving a healthy distance between the historical enterprise and the politics of the present. Wood has been especially emphatic about separating the writing of history from the work of political agitation. “
I suppose the most flagrant examples of present-mindedness
in history writing come from trying to inject politics
into history books,” Wood has written. “
I am reminded of Rebecca West’s wise observation
that when politics comes in the door, truth flies out the window.” This only makes Wood’s insistence on the centrality of republicanism to the American Founding all the more persuasive.

Wood transformed our understandings of our revolution in his path-breaking 1969 book,
The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787
. Wood certainly did
not
claim that the idea of liberty was anything but foundational for the American rebels. But he argued that early American republicans believed that “
liberty had been misunderstood and falsely equated
with licentiousness.”
True
liberty was something else entirely. As Wood wrote: