Our Divided Political Heart (15 page)

If communitarian talk was taking hold in politics and even in TV sitcoms, it was also exerting a growing presence in academic philosophy. The philosophers associated with communitarianism were, like their counterparts in politics, responding simultaneously to currents on the left and the right—though, again, they were typically thinkers whose broad sympathies ran leftward. For example, Michael Walzer, a giant among the philosophers with communitarian leanings, has often found himself engaged in two-front arguments. He offered a powerful egalitarian case against the
libertarianism of
his Harvard colleague Robert Nozick
, whose book
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
was his generation’s most sweeping and thoughtful defense of libertarian individualism. But Walzer also questioned the form of egalitarian liberalism put forward by John Rawls, a fellow philosophical giant of the period, whose book
A Theory of Justice
was described by one philosopher as “
the closest thing to a book that people
are ashamed to admit that they have not read.”

Rawls asked what principle of justice an individual would agree to if he operated behind a “
veil of ignorance
,” not knowing whether he would find himself at the top of a society’s class structure, at the bottom, or somewhere in between. Rawls argued that the only inequalities to which such a person would assent would be those that rendered
everyone
better off. Beyond that, Rawls’s impartial observer behind the veil would lean toward egalitarianism, with the aim of protecting himself from the worst outcomes. It was a brilliant case for a generous welfare state within the framework of a capitalist economy. The rich could get richer as long as the activities that brought them wealth made everyone else richer, too. Beyond that, society would generously redistribute benefits to protect those who fell behind in the race for achievement.

Rawls’s general defense of a more egalitarian society fit well with Walzer’s social democratic leanings, and Walzer shared many of Rawls’s liberal commitments. But in a direct response to Rawls, Walzer expressed skepticism of a philosophy of justice rooted in what “
ideally rational men and women
would choose if they were forced to choose impartially, knowing nothing of their own situation, barred from making particularist claims, confronting an abstract set of goods.” The problem, Walzer argued, is that human beings are shaped by—and cannot escape—“
the particularism of history, culture and membership
.” In his book
Spheres of Justice
, Walzer thus posed the core communitarian and pluralist challenge to Rawls:

Even if they are committed to impartiality
, the question most likely to arise in the minds of the members of a political community is not, What would rational individuals choose under universalizing conditions of such-and-such a sort? But rather, What would individuals like us choose, who are situated as we are, who share a
culture and are determined to go on sharing it? And this is a question that is readily transformed into, What choices have we already made in the course of our common life? What understandings do we (really) share?

Walzer concluded that “
every substantive account of distributive justice is a local account
.” Following former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous quip, one might ask: if all politics is local, is all philosophy local, too? Not exactly, but then Tip wasn’t entirely right about politics, either. But rootedness does matter, in philosophy no less than in politics.

The broadest critique of Rawls’s view from a communitarian perspective came from Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher whose work we encountered earlier. Sandel has recently reached a wide audience through the PBS broadcast of his popular lecture course
Justice
and the publication of a best-selling companion book. But he made his initial mark in philosophy by asserting that there is no such thing as a free-floating self, “
barren of essential aims and attachments
,” whose “values and relations” are simply “the products of choice.” Sandel insisted that “
we cannot regard ourselves as independent in this way
without great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are.” All of us, after all, are “
members of this family or community or nation or people
, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic.”

The republican revival was central both to Sandel’s understanding of the American story and to his critique of the American present. His 1996 book,
Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
, was a comprehensive compendium that married republican-inflected history with communitarian politics (even though
Sandel himself has been wary of being labeled “communitarian”
). He argued that our discontents flowed from our devotion to a very narrow view of freedom that had produced a “procedural republic” neutral on the question of what constitutes the “good life.” The republican idea, by contrast, insists that “liberty depends on sharing in self-government,” which in turn requires “
a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole
, a moral bond with the community
whose fate is at stake.” Sandel’s critique of the procedural liberal state is fundamental: “
The public philosophy by which we live
cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire
the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires
.”

A good portion of Sandel’s book is an examination of moments in American history in which the republican strand of our tradition was at the forefront, and also an account of republicanism’s steady decline. In the day-to-day political parlance of our time, Sandel is clearly a liberal or progressive because of the priority he places on civic concerns over those of mere market calculation. He thus highlights the struggles for the eight-hour day, the empowerment of labor, anti-trust laws, anti-chain-store legislation, and the early planning efforts of the New Deal. Yet in philosophical terms, he is a republican, not a liberal.

Writing about more recent times, Sandel finds inspiration in the “civic stirrings” of Robert F. Kennedy’s rhetoric and RFK’s emphasis on the importance of local community. “Nations or great cities are too huge to provide the values of community,” Kennedy declared, offering a sentiment Sandel cites approvingly. “
Community demands a place where people can see
and know each other, where children can play and adults can work together and join in the pleasures and responsibilities of the place where they live.” One senses an invitation to stop by Cheers. In a classic complaint against modernity’s tendency to break down social bonds, Kennedy spoke of how “the world beyond the neighborhoods has become more impersonal and abstract,” of housing developments that provided “
no place for people to walk, for women and their children
to meet, for common activities.” The home “is a place to sleep and eat and watch television; but the community is not where we live. We live in many places, and so we live nowhere.”

Communitarianism’s critics point to such rhetoric as embodying a certain nostalgia and to a tendency to overlook modernity’s liberating aspects. Were not the forms of community constructed in small towns and closely knit neighborhoods often experienced by those who lived in such places as sources of intimidation and informal but effective coercion? Not for nothing is the liberating flight to the most cosmopolitan parts of the big city a popular motif of American film and fiction. Moreover, capitalist critics of communitarians pointed to the rise of the “new urbanism” and other
community-friendly forms of development. Thanks to the market’s responsiveness, they argued, Americans who yearned for older forms of community in new places could now find them—and in homes that also featured granite countertops, vast and well-equipped kitchens, Jacuzzis, instant boiling water, and other amenities unknown in the old neighborhoods. This is a building block of Bill Bishop’s “Big Sort.”

The rise of communitarianism did not go unchallenged among liberals and on the left, either. Many of communitarianism’s progressive critics agreed with the philosopher Richard Rorty in seeing in it a “
terminal wist-fulness
.” Liberals insistently asked
which
rights associated with liberalism communitarians would actually give up. They noted (correctly) that communitarians themselves were often divided on issues such as abortion or on exactly how to balance the rights of those accused of crime with the rights of those who are its victims. And given the sympathy of many liberals during the 1960s to more-relaxed attitudes about sexuality and divorce (and the rising importance of abortion rights as a core commitment of American liberalism and feminism), communitarianism seemed to some liberals a stealthy effort to reimpose more restrictive personal norms—a kind of creeping Puritanism. Thus the philosopher Amy Gutmann’s quip that communitarians “
want us to live in Salem but not believe in witches
.”

Stephen Holmes, a staunch philosophical defender of liberalism, argued that communitarians vacillated between claiming they were offering an “alternative” to liberal society and insisting they were suggesting only a “supplement.” Holmes observed that “
the first claim is unconvincing while the second claim is unexciting
.” His critique of communitarianism was biting:

Liberalism is dissatisfying, these critics contend
, because it fails to provide what we yearn for most: fraternity, solidarity, harmony, and most magically,
community
. Communitarians invest this word with redemptive significance. When we hear it, all our critical faculties are meant to fall asleep. In the vocabulary of these antiliberals, “community” is used as an anesthetic, an amnesiac, an aphrodisiac.

Jeffrey Stout, the Princeton professor of religion, saw communitarian thinking as having “
an implicitly utopian character
,” and he criticized its
partisans for rarely offering “any clear sense of what to do about our misgivings aside from yearning pensively for conditions we are either unwilling or unable to bring about.” He added: “When you unwrap the utopia, the batteries aren’t included.”

Certainly there was utopianism among the communitarians, as well as a bit of nostalgia—even if it’s fair to ask how many political philosophies
ever
come with batteries included. And Holmes from the left noticed the same quality in communitarian thinking that Bruce Frohnen had noticed from the right: that it was indeed designed more as a corrective or “supplement” to liberalism than as a full-scale alternative.

Yet that was precisely its power. Communitarians enjoyed a growing influence on liberalism and the left because they were identifying problems that liberals and social democrats needed to solve. Even Sandel’s critics had to acknowledge that liberalism has always struggled with the task of creating “the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires.” A purely individualistic society cannot maintain the solidarity and social cohesion that are a prerequisite for preserving freedom. Free men and women have to feel some sense of obligation to defend
each other’s
rights—the very requirement the founders embraced in the last line of the Declaration. It has been the American struggle from the outset.

The new quest for community could not be dismissed as mere nostalgia. It was also a rational response to social change, a protest against the gaps people were experiencing in sociability, communal solidarity, and civic formation. It was not so much a rebellion against the modern world as an attempt to deal with modernity’s dislocations. If individuals managed to create new forms of attachment—from the rise of megachurches to the spread of youth sports leagues to the organization of mothers’ circles and fathers’ groups—they were doing so in response to a sense that our stock of “
social capital
” was diminishing, the central theme of Robert Putnam’s brilliant, data-driven portrait of national disconnection,
Bowling Alone
.

All this helps explain why communitarian ideas played a growing role in the rhetoric and thinking of Democratic politicians. Bill Clinton’s espousal of the idea of community was not a one-off. It was important both to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and, as we have seen, to Barack Obama. Obama, who had attended
many of the Harvard seminars Putnam organized around the theme of social capital, returned to the idea in one of his most important pre-campaign speeches in which he addressed the role of religion in American life, long a vexing issue for liberals. His 2006 address at the “Call to Renewal” conference coordinated by the progressive religious leader Jim Wallis even carried some faint echoes of a John Winthrop sermon:

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings
of the nation is not just rhetorical. . . . After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness—in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby—but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in that young man’s heart—a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

Like most liberals who are religious, Obama found a powerful demand for social justice embedded in the great faith traditions. He took a swipe at those who would repeal the estate tax, saying this entailed “
a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs
to go to a handful of folks who don’t need and weren’t even asking for it.”