The dangers we confront are unprecedented. Two existential threats are upon us and are inescapable. The more comprehensive is climate destruction. The fate of the planet is in our hands. The biosphere of which we are an inextricable part is being disastrously altered and with it the human condition. The devastation we will confront, the remedial responses required, can be only partially foreseen. Much of the human future wrought by climate destruction from this standpoint is unknowable, but we do know that it will be ominous. Heading off the worst catastrophes is still possible. But it will require political will on a global scale, something that humanity is not adept at mustering.
The second danger is more immediate. Our democracy is at a precipice. With the coming of the 2024 elections, we may experience the end of the American experiment. This dark phenomenon takes place within the context of a worldwide assault on democracy coming from authoritarian parties and their leaders. One senses that many people have grown weary of democracy.
In the United States, the threat to democracy has moved from the far horizon and is now at our gate. Trump's operatives have learned from their mistakes in 2020. They are attacking the weak points, and the weakest is the process by which the states choose their electors. The process is not mandated in a detailed way by law and is malleable. In Republican states with Republican governors and legislatures, schemes are being devised to choose electors other than those who follow the popular vote, which has long been the norm. Election officials who oversee the process are being replaced by Trump loyalists. Every effort is also being made to suppress voting, a practice with an ignominious racist history. The next election may be technically legal, but there is a good chance it won't be democratic.
Trump did not alone create the environment which lays the groundwork for authoritarianism, but he has evoked it and fanned the flame in a manner unprecedented in presidential history. His disparagement of any and all outside his base continues to stoke acrimonious divisions in American society. Those who hold to different political views are not mere adversaries. Often they are construed as enemies.
America has long experienced divisions among racial and ethnic lines. These persist, but now tribalism is characterized by political viewpoints and ideologies. At the extremes are burgeoning hate groups. What was once the lunatic fringe is increasingly becoming normative. In a different context, Abraham Lincoln opined that a “house divided cannot stand.” Now, not so much the literally unity of the nation is at stake. The United States will not go the way of the Ottoman Empire. What very well may transpire is that we will become an illiberal democracy. More power will be concentrated in the executive, with the legislature and judiciary rendered impotent and under the control of the executive. The free press will no longer be free and individual rights and liberties will be suppressed. The surveillance state will become sovereign.
In an extraordinary recent move, the Republican party proclaimed that Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat and the deadly attack on the US Capitol were “legitimate political discourse.” With that declaration it is now official: The Republican Party is no longer a recognizable political party. It is a mass authoritarian movement in the thrall to a narcissistic, power-hungry demagogue.
It is extraordinary how quickly we have come to this place. With Barack Obama's victory just 14 years ago, it looked as if America at long last was turning a corner. While the achievement of a “post-racial society” was a pipe dream, it could be argued that America was trying hard to overcome its ugly history of racism. On the popular level, the employment of racist or derogatory language to describe people who have been historically marginalized was construed as in very bad taste and no longer permissible. In the words of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, with political correctness came a diminishing of sadism in American life.
No doubt, resentment and hatred lurked beneath the surface. It was a dynamic Trump was sensitive to and able to exploit to unprecedented effect. He gave permission to the expression of people's worst instincts. With it has also come the flourishing of irrationality and bizarre conspiracy theories that have gripped the minds of millions, conspiracies that in many instances are the conveyor belts of hatred and resentment.
But I contend that the root of the divisions we now confront lies deeper and are sewn into the American fabric. American society since its founding has experienced tension between building social institutions and prioritizing individualism and self-reliance. Alexis de Tocqueville, who chronicled American democracy in the 1830s, noted how Americans had a penchant for organizing themselves into voluntary associations. By contrast, individualism has been a vaunted hallmark of American identity, from the eloquent essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the ethos of the cowboy who rides alone. American individualism underlies libertarianism as a political position and philosophy now so much in evidence.
It appears that the individualistic dynamic has won out over the longstanding commitment to living lives in and through vibrant institutions and associations that serve wider social purposes. Individualism in our times has morphed into hyper-individualism in the minds of many Americans, and with it is the fading of responsibility to any and all beyond one's narrow interest group.
A personal moment. I politically came of age in the 1960s and forged my identity via the activism of the New Left. An expression of my politics was a strong, indeed militant, commitment to the defense of rights, and in time, I became active with the American Civil Liberties Union. Rights are vested in the individual, and my embrace of individualism was at the forefront of my identity.
Time and life's experiences change things, and my political understanding and views have changed also. I remain a man of the Left. I have not sold out as many did. But if truth be told, I am less ideological than I once was. I have become more pragmatic. I want to weigh policies by the effects they have in rendering people's lives for the better.
I have also softened my individualism. I remain a militant defender of individual rights, a commitment I have broadened with a deep-reaching embrace of human rights both as an activist and an academic. I retain a strong commitment to individual rights in the political sphere, but in my understanding of the person within society, I have become a communitarian. I have become increasingly appreciative of our social nature. It was Karl Marx who stated that the human being is “an ensemble of social relations.” I would not go quite that far, but I do affirm that we are in greatest measure the product of the values that we have inherited and did not ourselves create. I conclude that the individual alone is a veritable fiction and intellectually an abstraction.
This recognition introduces a weighty appreciation for obligations, responsibilities, and duties as constitutive of our situation in society, which the political philosopher Michael Sandel refers to as "the encumbered self.”
It is this situation that Americans at this moment ostensibly reject, but we must embrace it if we are going to ensure our national survival as a democracy.
There is an American communitarian movement that calls for the crimping of some individual rights in the service of social interests. I am not sure that we need to go that far. What I am calling for is a solid revival of a commitment to the common good.
This commitment has a long history and can be identified in the vision of America's founders. The preamble of the Constitution states that its purpose is to “promote the general Welfare.” Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 states, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...” James Madison had written in the Federalist Papers:
“the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”
Madison herein reflected the value of “civic republicanism” which can be defined as the tradition of political thought that stresses the interconnection of individual freedom and civic participation with the promotion of the common good. The founders felt a strong commitment to civic virtue which signified the understanding that personal virtue is dependent on the general welfare and that people could be expected to act accordingly. This understanding, they believed, was necessary for the solidity and endurance of a democracy.
It was this value system factored into the Constitution that enabled the expansion of the government into the domain of economic entitlements such as the New Deal, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, and underlies President Biden's Build Back Better plan.
My thesis is that a commitment to the common good needs to be restored to how we envision our commitment to political policy and our understanding of social relations more broadly. It is a vision, needless to say, that is stridently absent in the halls of Congress and in the minds of broad swaths of the American public.
In my view, people will not yield their loyalties to the smaller, more parochial identities and the groups that foster them, whether they be racial, ethnic, religious, or political. The social bonding of group identity is just too powerful. People want to feel “at home” with people who in many ways are like themselves and this propensity is not going to fade away. This propensity, though it may alter its contents, is as lasting as the Rocky Mountains.
But I do believe that people can hold two ideas at the same time, and given the threat to our democracy and its future, they must. People will always advocate for their own interests and the interests of the groups in which they identify themselves. But this is not sufficient. Our democracy cannot survive as merely a battleground for adversarial interests. Our political morality needs to be thickened. There needs to be a sensibility that reaches beyond narrow personal and private interests to embrace a common vision that bespeaks the interdependence of a society in which people are becoming more mutually dependent than ever. My assessment is that Americans need to envision their interests within the larger, more encompassing framework of how their interests promote the common welfare, the common good. The philosopher John Dewey said it well: “the clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.”
This philosophy needs to push against the rampant privatization of society that viciously divides and separates us along class lines and that allows the wealthy and super-wealthy to live lives set off from the rest us, walling off cooperation from people on the other side of the divide. We need to get beyond obsession with markets and the accumulation of things to embrace a wider, morally richer institutions that speak to a more just society for all. By way of example, these values were illustrated in a speech given by Robert Kennedy in 1968. Kennedy said:
“Our Gross National Product is now over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear the highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our national wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts...the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their or education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty in our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.”
In short, Kennedy was addressing the need for a larger public purpose that resonated with moral values and that spoke to a commitment to the common good.
I concur. We need an invigorated public discourse imbued with fidelity to public virtue and a vision committed to the well-being of all.
At the present moment, such an aspiration may seem far-fetched and chimerical. But if we can somehow get beyond the crisis of the moment and survive on the other side with our constitutional system intact, then I contend that we will need to dedicate ourselves to a rebirth of democracy.
We will need political leaders who are sufficiently courageous to articulate a lofty moral vision. It will be an inspiration that addresses not merely individual interests and individual wealth but enfolds these interests into a larger discourse of moral engagement. It will be a vision that speaks to a more just society, a society committed to the moral fulfillment and flourishing of all. It will call upon us to develop new “habits of the heart.” What will be needed is a renewed vision that raises us to see beyond ourselves and to a higher devotion: to the welfare of others, to society, and to the common good.
Advocating for our own self interest without consideration of the common good will fail to fulfill either a just society or a sense of fulfillment. One of your best writings yet.
A battle well worth undertaking