Our Divided Political Heart (13 page)

True liberty was “natural liberty restrained in such a manner
, as to render society one great family; where every one must consult his neighbour’s happiness, as well as his own.” In a republic “each individual gives up all private interest that is not consistent with the general good, the interest of the whole body.” For the republican patriots of 1776 the commonweal was all-encompassing—a transcendent object with a unique moral worth that made partial considerations fade into insignificance. “Let regard be had only to the good of the whole” was the constant exhortation by publicists and clergy. Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual. “A Citizen,” said Samuel Adams, “owes everything to the Commonwealth.” “Every man in a republic,” declared Benjamin Rush, “is public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country.” “No man is a true republican,” wrote a Pennsylvanian in 1776, “that will not give up his single voice to that of the public.”

In a line of argument much invoked by republican revivalists in the 1970s and 1980s, Wood wrote that “
ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual
,” and that “
republicanism was essentially anti-capitalistic
, a final attempt to come to terms with the emergent individualistic society that threatened to destroy once and for all the communion and benevolence that civilized men had always considered to be the ideal of human behavior.” This
highly communal view of liberty—“each individual gives up all private interest that is not consistent with the general good”—is about as distant as can be imagined from the contemporary right’s view of the freedom for which the Revolutionary patriots struggled. It is the aspect of our history that has been buried under a mountain of misleading polemics.

Again, republicanism was just one strain, although a central one, in Revolutionary ideology. Wood has been as alive as any historian to the complexity of the Revolution and its sweeping character, and also to how much the country changed after our revolution was over. His most celebrated book,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
, published in 1991, insisted that ours was not a conservative revolution, but was “
as radical and as revolutionary as any in history
.” It overthrew old hierarchies and created a far more egalitarian and democratic society. The Revolution, Wood wrote in a lengthy essay on the rise of American capitalism, led to an “
explosion of entrepreneurial power
,” paving the way for the enterprising republic Wood described in his recent work
Empire of Liberty
, a history covering the period from Washington’s inauguration to the aftermath of the War of 1812.

By the end of that war, Wood writes, “
America’s conception of its national character
was becoming much more indebted to the middling people’s go-getting involvement in commerce and enterprise. These ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs, who were coming into their own by the second decade of the nineteenth century, were the generation that imagined the myth of the American dream.” This take on American history, more to the Tea Party’s liking, is simply one part of the larger story, as Kloppenberg observed. Republican and liberal ideas, communitarian and individualistic inclinations, all interacted with each other to create a national character not easily captured in a sound bite. Significantly, Wood cites the work of Joyce Appleby, the contemporary historian most inclined to emphasize the importance of capitalism and property in the early republic. The post-Revolution generation, Appleby argues, brought forth “
a new character ideal
.” He was “the man who developed inner resources, acted independently, lived virtuously, and bent his behavior to his personal goals.” Appleby argues that “the self-made man” appeared “as a recognizable type for the first time in this era.”

This productive maelstrom of entrepreneurship and energetic striving gave birth to American individualism. And notice, as the philosopher Steven Lukes did, that if the word “individualism” carried terribly negative meanings among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French philosophers, it came to be viewed as a triumphant concept on the other side of the Atlantic. “
In France
,” Lukes wrote, the word “usually carried, and indeed still carries, a pejorative connotation, a strong suggestion that to concentrate on the individual is to harm the superior interests of society.” It was a word associated with “social dissolution,” “egoism,” and “social or economic anarchy.” In America, by contrast, individualism was associated with the “
realization of the final stage of human progress
in a spontaneously cohesive society of equal individual rights, limited government,
laissezfaire
, natural justice and equal opportunity, and individual freedom, moral development and dignity.” Tocqueville, of course, was the partial exception among French writers who proved the rule. He used “individualism” less harshly than did most of his countrymen because he was referring to a tempered
American
individualism, which he saw as “
a calm and considered feeling which disposes each
citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends.”

The historian Yehoshua Arieli observed that American individualism “
supplied the nation with a rationalization of its characteristic attitudes
, behavior patterns and aspirations” and “expressed the universalism and idealism most characteristic of the national consciousness.” In the 1880s, James Bryce anticipated Louis Hartz in privileging the idea. “
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom
,” Bryce wrote, “have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but [their] peculiar and exclusive possession.”

It thus makes a mockery of the American story to deny the power of individualism in our history. But it is just as misleading to ignore our yearnings for a strong common life and our republican quest for civic virtue. Our skepticism of excessive state power arose from religious sources and classical traditions, and so did our doubts about pure individualism. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thus began our Founding
document. Yet its signers also forged a full-hearted communal bond in defense of those freedoms. “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” they declared, “
we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor
.” Individual liberty and shared sacrifice are the bookends of our Declaration of Independence.

Because writers such as Bryce and Arieli were right in understanding individualism’s hold on the American imagination, alternative traditions stressing community have often been cast as eccentric dissents from predominant currents of thought. The idea that Americans cherish individualism is so deeply embedded in the national consciousness that historians’ rediscovery of our republican roots from the late 1960s forward came as something of a surprise. And the republican revival coincided with—and helped encourage—a flowering of communitarian thought on both the left and the right. The interplay between the rediscovery of American republicanism in our past and the reemergence of communitarian thinking in the 1980s and 1990s is an especially powerful example of how historical understandings shape and interact with our present.

Yet these ideas played quite differently on the left and on the right. Over time, communitarians gained substantial ground, politically and intellectually, among American liberals—and also among European labor and social democratic parties. But where communally oriented ideas had once exercised a powerful hold on the conservative mind, they receded in importance as individualism became steadily more important in the Reagan-Thatcher years. And in the United States (though not in Britain) the movement toward individualism accelerated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, culminating in the rise of the Tea Party. This further aggravated ideological and partisan polarization. Where once communitarians could make at least occasional common cause across ideological and partisan lines, the communitarian-individualist divide became, during the Obama years, yet another source of political discord and misunderstanding.

The republican revival and the rise of communitarian thinking came in the nick of time for American liberals and the left. As New Dealism receded into history, progressives needed some new ideas, or at least a new gloss on old ones. A communitarianism rooted in republicanism provided an alternative framework to a socialism inflected by Marxist thinking and a progressive faith in centralized power at precisely the moment when the left was searching for new arguments. In more immediate political terms, it also offered a supplement to a rights-oriented liberalism that was popular in the upper middle class but aroused suspicion among working-class voters, who began straying from the old New Deal coalition in the late 1960s.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, rigid forms of state socialism were thoroughly discredited—and, in truth, Soviet practice had long before destroyed confidence in command economies that created oppressive states claiming to govern in the name of the proletariat. Communitarianism upheld traditional objectives of the left—on behalf of the environment, social justice, and an economy rooted in solidarity as well as competition—but in language that was less doctrinaire and more widely appealing. Some conservatives suspected that “community” was being used in a game of bait and switch, a way of disguising the same old goals of the left behind a lovely word. “Community” is, indeed, more attractive (in the United States especially) than “collective,” and “building community” is a more broadly shared purpose than “expanding the state.”

But the emergence of a communitarian disposition among American liberals and European social democrats also reflected their own second thoughts and self-criticisms. In
The Communitarian Persuasion
, Philip Selznick noted that communitarianism involved “
the quest for a public philosophy that could take account
of what liberalism failed to appreciate as well as what it could clearly see and rightly teach.” He cited Rudolf Scharping, a leading German Social Democrat who lamented in the mid-1990s that his party had “
created an overly regulated, overly bureaucratic and overly professionalized welfare state
.” Taking his own movement to task, Scharping observed acidly (and in positively Tocquevillian terms): “
We did not believe in people’s capacity for spontaneously helping
and caring for others in the neighborhoods; we did not dare to hope that parents of schoolchildren would take care of the upkeep of classrooms; we did not believe that we could leave the running of a kindergarten to the parents.” He and his allies had “succumbed to a blind faith in science and experts.”

Amitai Etzioni
(who can fairly be seen as the founder of Communitarianism as a political movement with a capital
C
) issued a manifesto in 1993,
The Spirit of Community
, stressing the need to accent the responsibilities of democratic citizens as well as their rights. This grew out of a broader interest among liberals in talk of “virtue,” a concern more typically associated with contemporary conservatives. At stake were the civic and public-regarding virtues dear to the Revolutionary-era republicans, but also traditional virtues, including the importance of the family. The philosopher William Galston was both a founder of the Communitarian movement and an intellectual campaigner on behalf of the family as “
the critical arena in which independence and a host of other virtues
must be engendered.” He wrote:

The weakening of families is thus fraught with danger
for liberal societies. In turn, strong families rest on specific virtues. Without fidelity, stable families cannot be maintained. Without a concern for children that extends well beyond the boundaries of adult self-regard, parents cannot effectively discharge their responsibility to help form secure, self-reliant young people. In short, the independence required for liberal social life rests on self-restraint and self-transcendence—the virtues of family solidarity.

For many conservatives, liberal communitarians were engaging in an urgent rescue job. “
Communitarians do not seek to found a new school of thought on the ruins of liberalism
,” wrote Bruce Frohnen, a conservative scholar. “They seek to save liberalism from its own excessive hostility toward authority, to save liberalism from itself.”

Liberals were, indeed, responding to peculiar cross-currents within their creed—and to substantial electoral problems, since the Democrats lost every presidential election but one between 1968 and 1992. Liberals came to be identified with the sweeping cultural changes of the 1960s, to both their benefit and their detriment. On one hand, Democrats could point to their battle for civil rights with pride, even if it came at the cost of electoral losses among whites in the South. And in political terms, the JFK and LBJ years helped turn African Americans into the party’s most reliable electoral bloc. The party’s support of equal rights for women created a new gender alignment, particularly among the middle and upper middle classes. In the past, women had been slightly more conservative in their voting patterns than men. This pattern was reversed beginning with the 1980 election as a coalition of younger and single women, poorer women, and upper-middle-class feminists came together behind liberal objectives and liberal candidates.

But the 1960s counterculture produced a decidedly mixed legacy. It was absurd, of course, to identify most actual liberal and Democratic politicians directly with countercultural norms. It was hard to find politicians who led more temperate and restrained family lives than Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, or Michael Dukakis. Yet beginning with the 1972 campaign and Richard Nixon’s successful association of Democrat George McGovern with “acid, amnesty, and abortion”—the first referring to the drug culture, the second to amnesty for draft resisters—Democrats and liberals had to answer for forms of cultural liberation that were looked upon skeptically or with outright hostility by more traditionalist voters, particularly in the white working class. The great party of New Deal communalism seemed to have become the champion of individualism, Walt Whitman style.