Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Who We Are
Liberty, Community, and the American
Character
we have forgotten that the tension at the heart of our national experiment
is a healthy one, we have pretended that we can resolve our problems by
becoming all one thing or all another.
Sometimes all-or-nothing choices must be made. This was certainly
the case with slavery, and that “all one thing” phrase alludes to a speech by
Abraham Lincoln about human bondage. But when we are confronting not
good against evil but one good set against another, we face not a choice but
a quest for balance. We are not very skilled at balance anymore. That is
why we have lost our gift for reasoning together.
It is with a sense of urgency that I offer an argument here about our
politics, our history, and the need to reweave a national consensus. The
United States rose to global preeminence because in accepting our com-
mitments to both individualism and community, we were able to see demo-
cratic government as a constructive force in our national life and to use it
in creative ways. This approach to government, I will argue, is far more
consistent with the Founders’ intentions and the broad trajectory of our
history than are alternatives promoted by the Tea Party and its allies that
cast government as inherently oppressive, necessarily wasteful, and nearly
always damaging to our nation’s growth and prosperity.
We must recover our respect for balance and remember its central
role in our history. We are a nation of individualists who care passionately
about community. We are also a nation of communitarians who care pas-
sionately about individual freedom. We believe in limited government, but
also in active and innovative government. Our Founders did not devote so
much time and intellectual energy to creating a strong federal government
only for it to do nothing.
In the course of this story, I often link our responses to community
and individualism with our attitudes toward government and its limits. It’s
thus important to make clear that I don’t believe that “government” is the
same thing as “community.” But contemporary politics has been shaped by
two forces that link our responses to both.
First, our country has witnessed the rise of a radical form of individu-
alism that simultaneously denigrates the role of government and the im-
portance most Americans attach to the quest for community. Critics see
both as antithetical to the strivings of free individuals who ought to be as
II
Our current political struggles make sense only if we understand them in
light of the debate over whether we should nurture and refashion the Long
Consensus or choose instead to cast it away. This struggle has created a
fundamental divide over the most basic questions: Is democratic govern-
ment primarily constructive or destructive? Does it protect and expand
our freedoms, or does it undermine them? Can public action make the pri-
vate economy work better, or are all attempts to alter the market’s course
doomed to failure? Do government’s efforts to widen opportunities and
lessen inequality enhance individual achievement or promote dependency?
Those who disagree on such core questions come to believe that their
opponents are bent on pursuing policies that would undermine all they
cherish. In such circumstances, compromise becomes not a desirable ex-
pedient but “almost treasonous,” to use the phrase made briefly famous by
Texas governor Rick Perry in remarks about the Federal Reserve. If every-
thing that matters is at stake, then taking enormous risks with the coun-
try’s well-being, as House Republicans did in the debt ceiling battle, is no
longer out of bounds. Rather, pushing the system to its limits—and
beyond—becomes a form of patriotism. When your adversary’s goals are