Our Divided Political Heart (14 page)

That Whitmanesque individualism left over from the 1960s and 1970s came together with the more sober Ben Franklin individualism in the 1980s to produce what came to be known as the “Me Decade,” the popular
designator for the 1980s offered by the novelist Tom Wolfe. His best-selling novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
brilliantly introduced and satirized the self-centered Wall Street “
master of the universe
” as a new social type. Critics on the left saw a crass “era of greed,” and it certainly was a time of growing economic inequality in which power and wealth shifted toward the world of finance. Acronyms such as “M&A” and words such as “arbitrage” entered the popular lexicon. The loosening of sexual mores that began in the 1960s reached full flower. One of the most important sociological works on the era—even if its author poked fun at himself as a practitioner of “
comic sociology
”—was David Brooks’s
Bobos in Paradise.
It described the rise of a new dominant class, “bourgeois bohemians,” and it is hard to imagine a more individualistic pairing of words. Brooks’s caffeinated epigram for the era made his point. “It was now impossible,” he wrote, “to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.”

Yet as Brooks’s odd-couple marriage of the bourgeois and the bohemian also suggested, the politics of the 1980s and 1990s were the product of tensions and contradictions. Yes, there was Reagan in 1980 and the “Republican Revolution” of 1994. But there were also Bill Clinton’s two victories and a sense, even after 1994, that conservatism was now short on ideas and reliant on anti-government nostrums that seemed stale after three decades of use. Reagan himself was always careful to show the side of himself that, rhetorically at least, embraced neighborhood, family, religion, and tradition. The country portrayed in Reagan’s “Morning in America” advertising campaign in 1984 was warm, communitarian, and resolutely local. The words the announcer intoned were largely about improvements in the economy. The pictures were of fathers and sons working together, of warm and tidy neighborhoods, of weddings and family togetherness, of young campers earnestly saluting the flag. In a single minute, the ad captured the double-barreled message of Reagan-style conservatism: individualistic at its core, but communitarian in its affect. Reagan’s political success owed a great deal to this brilliantly mixed message. His core supporters saw him as a resolute believer in conservative doctrine, and his harshest critics regarded him as an inflexible ideologue. But Reagan himself and those around him understood the dual yearnings of the rest of the country for an individualism tempered by a spirit of community.

Bill Clinton was paying attention to all this, and while his old dealings with his draft board and the sex scandal that shook his administration reignited some of the old 1960s culture wars, his political approach stressed community as an explicit part of his political appeal. He tried to integrate it into his program of government, as the story of the penny in the last chapter suggested.

Clinton, of course, is widely seen as the master of split-the-differences politics. The word “triangulation” was invented on his watch to describe his strategy of standing tall between parties and ideologies. His enemies saw only tactical cleverness and manipulation, calling him “Slick Willie.” But Clinton, like Reagan, understood both sides of the American political character. And Clinton was far more explicit than Reagan was in seeking a new political synthesis that took the country’s communitarian yearnings seriously. The “third way” that Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair proclaimed was much derided. It was certainly part of a political strategy to find the electoral middle. But it was also a serious enterprise, aimed at combining the individualism of the free market with a defense of a common-good politics that stressed government’s obligations to the excluded and to those threatened by economic change.

In many ways, both Clinton and Tony Blair were harking back to the politics of the New Liberals—T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse were two of the movement’s most important voices—who were writing in Britain at the time Populism and Progressivism were taking hold in the United States. The philosophy of the New Liberals, as Avital Simhony and David Weinstein have written, took “
community and common good seriously without abnegating
liberalism’s devotion to the cultivation of individuality.”

This captured the direction in which Clinton sought to move. The words that described his own personal goals, “
opportunity, responsibility, community
,” served as the chapter headings in
Between Hope and History
, the book Clinton wrote while he was president. The first was individualistic, even if Clinton favored public measures to distribute opportunities more widely. The second had its individualistic and communitarian sides—Clinton stressed both “personal” and “mutual” responsibility. And Clinton’s specific emphasis on community reflected his sense that the “
Me Decade
”
had produced a counter-yearning for what the journalist Paul Taylor would label a “We Decade.”

Clinton faced, as all politicians do, limits on government’s capacity to create community. He pushed for an expansion of opportunities for voluntary service through his AmeriCorps program, a signature of his administration and one of his proudest achievements. He paid far more attention to communities of faith than had been customary for Democrats. He created alliances between government and faith-based charities and social action groups that predated those pursued more visibly by George W. Bush. And when Clinton spoke of his Christian faith, his language reflected his Southern Baptist roots and its inflections were those of the African American churches where he preached so often. It was far more the language of the “beloved community” inspired by civil rights Christianity than the individualistic stress found in so many white evangelical churches whose core promise emphasized individual conversation and salvation. The text he chose when he spoke at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington in 1997, from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, was characteristic of his approach to Christianity: “
We are all part of one another
.” It is one of the purest communitarian declarations in the New Testament.

Communitarianism was thus both a reaction to the weaknesses liberals perceived in their own doctrines and a response to the steady rise of individualism as the defining characteristic of conservatism, particularly in the United States and Britain. While conservatives continued to express their public fealty to Edmund Burke’s “
little platoons
” of society as “the first principle . . . of public affections,” contemporary conservatism was moving elsewhere. It was more and more inclined to defend large private economic organizations, the marketplace as the central instrument of (and metaphor for) social life, and investment and the acquisition of wealth as the most honored and socially productive activities. It was a brand of conservatism that swept aside other forms in both the United States and Britain. The very idea of the social, as against the individual, came in for increasing conservative disapproval. Margaret Thatcher captured this spirit when she declared: “
There is no such thing as society
. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” In his successful effort to become the first Conservative prime minister since Thatcher, David
Cameron felt obligated to distance himself from some of the harsher aspects of Thatcherism, and her famous quotation provided him with an almost ideal foil. “
There
is
such a thing as society
,” he declared after winning the Conservative Party leadership in 2005. “It’s just not the same thing as the state.” It has fallen to Cameron to reengage conservative communitarianism. Cameron made the idea of a “Big Society” based on voluntary action and local institutions a signature of his tenure after he assumed office in 2010, even if translating the slogan into policy proved difficult.

Cameron was responding to the long communitarian comeback, as was George W. Bush when he promoted “
compassionate conservatism
” and its “armies of compassion” as companions to Burke’s little platoons. Both were reacting to the successes of Clinton and Blair, for whom “community” became a master word in their joint campaign to create their third way between the old left and the New Right. It enabled both to distance themselves from a right seen as excessively individualistic and socially indifferent, and from those aspects of the left criticized by Scharping as too statist, too critical of localism, and too beholden to social rights shorn of responsibilities.

For Blair’s New Labour Party, community was a ready-made concept that provided an alternative to Thatcher’s no-such-thing-as-society Conservatism
and
to the older forms of socialism that stressed state power and the “
common ownership of the means of production
, distribution and exchange.” These were the words of Clause 4 of the old Labour Party constitution that Blair successfully fought to change. Adopted in 1918 and drafted by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, the original Clause 4 was regarded by Labour modernizers as a relic of doctrinaire thinking inappropriate to a dynamic market economy. It pledged the party

to secure for the workers by hand or by brain
the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

The revision for which Blair successfully campaigned made one concession to the left, explicitly declaring Labour a “democratic socialist party.” But the specific socialist commitment to common ownership dissolved into gauzier language highlighting community and solidarity. The new Clause 4 read:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party
. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

Blair’s own rhetoric constantly emphasized the effort of the new communitarian left to bring together traditionalists and modernizers:

It allows us to unite old and new
. The traditionalist is right to worry about the breakdown of family life. The moderniser is right to say that shouldn’t prejudice us against single parent families, the majority of whom do not choose to be single parent families. The moderniser is right to say global markets are good not bad. The traditionalist is right to worry about the inequity that can arise from them. The moderniser needs values. The traditionalist needs modern reality.

Strong language about responsibility—familiar from the American communitarian movement, Etzioni’s writings, and Bill Clinton’s rhetoric—was always central to Blairism. “You can’t build a community on opportunity or rights alone,” Blair declared. “
They need to be matched by responsibility and duty
. That is the bargain or covenant at the heart of modern civil society. Frankly, I don’t think you can make the case for Government, for spending taxpayers’ money on public services or social exclusion—in other words for acting as a community—without this covenant of opportunities and responsibilities together.”

This truly was a transatlantic movement, for so much of what Blair had to say, Clinton had said, too, sometimes—especially in the early years of their respective ascendancies—a year or two ahead of Blair. Consider Clinton’s 1991 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in Cleveland, Ohio, the address Clinton saw as his breakthrough moment. It was the speech that gave his trinity of values—“opportunity, responsibility, community”—its first test run:

Our burden [Clinton declared] is to give the people a new choice, rooted in old values, a new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsive government—all because we recognize that we are a community, we are all in this together, and we are going up or down together . . . we believe in community, in repairing a torn fabric of our country at its most fragile point, the millions and millions of children who are being robbed of their childhoods, because we really are all in this together. This is a new choice Democrats can ride to victory on: opportunity, responsibility, choice, a government that works, a belief in community.

And ride to victory they did.

There was a problem with “third way” communitarianism that would become obvious only with the economic implosion of 2008. Both Clinton and Blair championed a permissive view of the financial markets—Clinton signed the repeal of the New Deal–era restrictions separating investment banking from commercial banking—that was consistent with their effort to link progressive politics to a warm endorsement of modern capitalism. It turned out, as an earlier generation of progressives, New Dealers, and Labour Party social democrats understood, that there were good reasons for those of a communitarian temper to insist on a more socially minded and rule-bound marketplace. This had certainly been a lesson of the 1930s. But in the time of Clinton and Blair, the experience of the Great Depression was buried far in the past. The prospect of marrying a booming, globalizing, and loosely regulated capitalism with a decent level of public provision and public investment seemed dazzling.

The means of Communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe also contributed to the communitarian turn by renewing interest in civil society, the institutions of social life that were independent of the state but also different from those of the marketplace. Living under dictatorships, the anti-Communist rebels of Eastern Europe discovered that even the most efficient and brutal police forces and intelligence services could not stamp out all vestiges of social life that survived in cafes, churches, workplaces, and families. The Eastern European dissidents used the enclaves of civil society to incubate free institutions that ultimately triumphed. The idea of “civil society” gained currency throughout the West, and it was, as the sociologist Adam Seligman observed, “
used as a slogan to advance the cause of community
” and to challenge radical individualism.
In
Whose Keeper?
, one of the most important books advancing the civil society idea, Alan Wolfe criticized the conventional political debate for casting the state and the market as the main mechanisms of social organization. Doing so, he argued, ignored some of the most important institutions in the lives of most individuals. They included family, church, neighborhood, workplace, and a variety of voluntary associations ranging from sports clubs and youth groups to privately organized day care centers. They might even be seen to encompass the loose fellowships created in taverns such as Cheers, the fictional setting for what eventually became the most highly rated television show in the United States. The program’s popularity—it ran eleven seasons, from 1982 to 1993—may have owed absolutely nothing either to politics or to academic philosophy and sociology. Yet its theme song celebrating a place “
where everybody knows your name
” spoke powerfully to a national mood that included a longing for face-to-face fellowship and a strengthening of community bonds.