Our Divided Political Heart Read Online Free

thus devoted to reclaiming our history from one-sided accounts that cast individualism as the driving American preoccupation and opposition to government as the nation’s overriding passion. Such an approach not only does a disservice to the facts, but also offers a stunted view of the meaning of liberty and a flawed understanding of the Constitution. It misreads traditional American attitudes toward government and downplays our struggles over slavery, racism, and nativism.
    Too many accounts of the American story—and, these days, far too many talk show rants—emphasize our devotion to individualism to the exclusion of our communitarian impulses. Yet if our history records the manyways in which Americans have struggled to preserve and expand our freedoms, it also shows that our quest for community has taken many forms: conservative and radical, moderate and liberal. It has led some Americans to create small utopian communities, sometimes socialist in inspiration, that promised to model a new world. It has pushed others to yearn for a return to a conservative past. In their 1930s manifesto, the Southern Agrarians preached that traditional ways of living rooted in the soil and in the small town were far superior to the “ brutal and hurried lives ” of industrialized modernity that led inevitably to “ the poverty of the contemporary spirit .”
    Nor has this hunger for community been confined to the utopian left or the traditionalist right. It has also thrived in the great center of the American discourse, reflected in the community building of Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, the Community Action Program of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Even conservative politicians whose central commitments were to free-market individualism have understood the yearning for human ties that transcend the colder calculations of free exchange; thus Herbert Hoover’s invocation of community bonds during the Depression, Ronald Reagan’s call to defend “ family, work, neighborhood ,” George H. W. Bush’s promotion of “ a thousand points of light ,” and his son’s effort to “ rally the armies of compassion .”
    Of course, no one (or practically no one) opposes community outright. In principle, everyone praises vibrant neighborhoods, Little Leagues, YMCAs, active faith institutions, service clubs, veterans groups, and all the other building blocks of civil society. Reagan’s “ family, work, neighborhood ” slogan was effective precisely because virtually everyone has warm feelings about all three. Before he became president, Obama spoke of our fears of “ chronic loneliness ,” drawing on a theme that has inspired hundreds of advice columns and scores of conversations on television’s afternoon chat shows.
    It’s also true that conservatives and progressives offer competing and sometimes clashing visions of how community is created. Their arguments over the role the national government plays in fostering (or weakening) community are especially fierce.
    Yet if community is, in principle, uncontroversial—and no doubtmany Tea Party members are deeply engaged in PTAs, service clubs, churches, veterans groups, and other builders of local community—asserting community’s centrality to the American creed challenges an assumption deeply embedded both in contemporary politics and in a significant (and by no means eccentric) body of historical analysis: that from the very beginning of our republic, the core political values of United States were narrowly defined by individualistic conceptions of liberty. References to “community” or a “common good” or, especially, “collective action” are cast as alien to America’s gut commitment to the “ rugged individualism ” first described by Herbert Hoover. As a result, criticisms of individualism are written off as imports from Europe, as reflecting the unrealistic aspirations of progressive preachers,