Restoring Community through Civic Virtue
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. (Kennedy, 1961)
These words, spoken by President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 Inaugural Address, formed an iconic example of American Rhetoric. Here was not an American President who promised to usher in an era of ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’, or one who vowed to ‘Make America Great Again.’ President Kennedy, firmly anchored in his belief in the fundamental goodness of American citizens, was instead calling for increased participation in the making of ‘a more perfect union’, as stated in the country’s Constitution.
Even though they still inspire generations of American leaders and citizens, the message behind these words has sadly been ignored. The assassination of the young Kennedy, followed by America’s calamitous failures in the Vietnam War, produced rising disillusionment with the American promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Politics in America has become a zero-sum competition, where both the Left and Right engage in vicious demonization of the other side, further alienating what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls ‘the Vital Center’.
This, I argue, is because the generations after Kennedy’s presidency have abandoned the quest for community, achieved through the fostering of civic virtue. America’s greatness has largely been measured by the competence and moral qualities of her successive Presidents, where it should have been measured by the degree to which her citizens engage in the preservation of the common good. Thus, in this essay, I urge Americans of my generation not to forget the wondrous spirit of civic engagement which President Kennedy nobly invoked in his Inaugural speech.
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a community is defined as “a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.” In my generation, much has been said about ‘the LGBT+ community’ and ‘the Black community’. While I applaud efforts to demand justice and equality for racial and sexual minorities, attempts to redefine ‘community’ to describe a political tribe do not help with these efforts. Instead, they posit that the interests of America’s black and LGBT+ citizens are fundamentally distinct from those of the larger American society. As observed by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the respective successes of civil rights movements in America during the 1960s and beyond “presented each marginalized group with a choice: it could demand that society treat its members the same way it treated the members of dominant groups, or it could assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as different from the mainstream society.” (Fukuyama, 2018, 97) Fukuyama contrasts the activism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who demanded that America treats its black citizens the same way she treats white people, with the politics of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, groups which assert that black Americans had their own history, tradition and consciousness, completely separated from the broader American culture. At present, the separatist identity politics exemplified by the latter examples has taken over and coarsened social movements with laudable objectives to demand fair treatment to previous and currently marginalized groups in American society.
One pernicious consequence of this turn towards tribalism is that it prompted a rise in grievance politics among members of my generation on the Right, especially after the election of Donald Trump. Some of the most prominent Right-leaning representatives of my age group, such as Charlie Kirk, practise an intensely adversarial and tribal form of American conservatism. Kirk’s student activist group, Turning Point USA, combines a full-throated defence of freedom and the free market with ‘a sense of urgency to win America’s culture war.’ Groups like Turning Point consider American culture not as a shared inheritance, but a Hobbesian battleground of different cultural elements competing for dominance. The ‘culture war’ waged by Kirk and co. found its origins in a speech delivered in 1992 by Vice President Dan Quayle, where he singled out the popular television series Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” (Quayle, 1992) Titled ‘The Murphy Brown Speech’, Quayle’s mention of the show by name made it fashionable for Republicans to attack popular culture, one of the few treasures of American life that can be appreciated by people of diverse backgrounds. “I know it’s not fashionable to talk about moral values,” said the Vice President. “but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, and the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think most of us in this room know that some things are good and other things are wrong.” (Quayle, 1992) If culture, our escape from the gruelling conflicts of politics, becomes political, then it is small wonder why it is so divisive to hold a political viewpoint in America.
The United States has always prided itself on her emphasis on the individual. The American Dream, as conceptualised by many of the nation’s citizens and immigrants, presents a highly individualistic vision of success. However, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his magisterial book ‘Democracy in America’, warns against this uniquely democratic claim of individualism, defining it as “a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandon society at large to itself.” (Tocqueville, 2000, 482) In contrast, Tocqueville wrote admiringly of the American tendency to form associations in pursuit of political, social and religious goals: “[I]f it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, [Americans] associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.” (Tocqueville, 2000, 489) If Tocqueville wrote a follow-up book to describe the state of democracy in contemporary America, he would likely express profound disappointment at the fracturing of American society, all the while lamenting the blind abandonment of the nation’s spirit of association.
How should we bring back the spirit of community? The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) proposed that instead of thinking of ourselves as part of a social contract, we should perceive our participation in society as being part of a covenant:
“The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power. But a covenant is about neither wealth nor power, but about the bonds of belonging and of collective responsibility. And to put it as simply as I can, the social contract creates a state, but the social covenant creates a society.” (Sacks, 2017)
Understanding ourselves as part of a covenant, as opposed to a contract, takes us a step closer to achieving what Tocqueville describes as ‘self-interest well understood’. Far from the cold Randian concept of self-interest, what Tocqueville observed in his journey to 19th century America was each citizen combining his individual well-being with those of his fellow citizens and that of his society.
In order to attain this level of altruistic self-interest, it is necessary for my generation to resume the practice of civic virtue. Even though America has made significant leaps of social and technological progress since the days of Tocqueville, the lack of attention paid to fostering civic virtue has resulted in an increasingly atomized American society. Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University, suggests that civic education requires an understanding of great works of literature and philosophy:
“[W]e…need to reorient the curriculum of higher education away from technocratic, supposedly ‘value neutral’ social sciences and toward a broader ethical and civic education. I think it’s important that all students be exposed to great works of philosophy and literature. But I also think it’s important that they be challenged to relate the conceptions of justice, civic virtue, and the common good debated and articulated by philosophers in the past to contemporary issues that raise philosophical questions.” (Sandel, 2022, 136)
Additionally, I believe that our generation should reconsider higher education not as a means to future career success, but as an end in itself. At its best, academic learning can prompt a spirit of critical inquiry, interpretive debate, and humility. Immersing ourselves in the Great Books, including religious texts, disabuses us from the superstition that we are self-made human beings, all the while recalling our duty to fulfil the obligations stated in the social covenant.
The allure of tribalism and individualism lies in their false promises to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ The individualist answer posits that I am a self-made and self-sufficient human being, while the tribal answer suggests that I am part of a group which strives to distance itself from the larger society. Refuting both responses is the communitarian answer, which states that I am made whole by the meaningful contributions I make to my community, as well as my diligent participation in communal activities. The spirit of community prioritises concerns for the common good, not just the good of an individual. It fosters a civic-oriented ethical code, whereby participation is rewarded and division is discouraged. Finally, it prompts us to see the fellow man as a person of dignity, instead of an individual fundamentally different from ourselves.
I wish to conclude this essay with another example of timeless American Rhetoric. This is from the 2004 Keynote Address by then-Senator Barack Obama (D - IL) at the Democratic National Convention. As a former community organiser, Obama understands the fundamental need of every human being to belong, as well as the sickness everybody feels about a bitterly divided society. “[T]here is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” the Senator proclaims. “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America…We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.” (Obama, 2004) In the eyes of Obama, the United States has the potential to be a large-scale version of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood - filled with diverse individuals forming a cohesive community. Anchored in the same belief in American goodness as John F. Kennedy, Obama offers our generation a choice: to continue the process of atomizing our society, or to take lessons from our elder generations in renewing the social covenant. I sincerely hope that our generation has the wisdom to select the right option.
Bibliography:
Fukuyama, F. (September/October 2018). Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Foreign Affairs, 97(5), 90 - 114.
Kennedy, J. F. (1961). Inaugural Address [Speech]. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address#:~:text=On%20January%2020%2C%201961%2C%20President,survival%20and%20success%20of%20liberty.%22
Obama, B. (2004). Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention [Speech]. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/keynote-address-the-2004-democratic-national-convention
Quayle, D. (1992). Murphy Brown Speech [Speech].
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/quayle-murphy-brown-speech-text-2/
Sacks, J. (2017). Renew The American Covenant - 2017 Irving Kristol Lecture [Speech]. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/sachs_irving_kristol_award_lecture_2017.pdf
Sandel, M. J. (Summer 2022). The Limits of Meritocracy. Sapir, Vol. 6, 128 - 137.
Tocqueville, A. d. (2000). Democracy in America (H. C. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.