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Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Trustee of the National Humanities Center and Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, delivered this
keynote address at the Center's third annual American Issues Forum on "Deliberative
Democracy in the Information Age." The American Issues Forum, made possible by the support
of the Ford Foundation, is exploring ideas of national consequence that have figured in the work
of historian John Hope Franklin, a former Fellow and Trustee Emeritus of the Center. |
Democracy is on trial in America. Expert and popular opinion converges on a sober recognition: We live in an age of political resentment and withdrawal from civic life. What can be done to revivify our democracy? Some propose electronic solutions--technological means to register instantly the popular will--but others, myself included, see in that recommendation a deepening of our current troubles. Why? Because democracy is not and has never been primarily a means whereby popular will is tabulated and carried out but, rather, a political world within which citizens negotiate, compromise, engage and hold themselves and those they choose to represent them accountable for actions taken. Have we lost this deliberative dimension to democracy? Democracy's enduring promise is that citizens can come to know a good in common that they cannot know alone.
By any objective standard, those who point to the rise of civically depleting forms of isolation, boredom and cynicism; those who point to declining levels of involvement in politics and community, from simple acts such as voting to more demanding participation in political parties and local associations; those who point to the overall weakening of democratic civil society, have a compelling case. Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic, Democracy in America, contended that one reason the republic he surveyed was so sturdy was that citizens took an active part in public affairs, with the important consequence that they moved from exclusive private interests to look at matters that concern others. "As soon as common affairs are treated in common," Tocqueville observed, "each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he must offer his aid to them." In this way civic engagement underscored what Tocqueville called self-interest rightly understood, an interest never narrowly focused on the self. If Tocqueville were among us today, he would no doubt share the consternation of social scientists who have researched the sharp decline in participation. They find nothing less than a crisis in "social capital formation," in the forging of bonds of social and political trust. The debilitating effects of rising mistrust, privatization, and anomie are many. Where neighborhoods are intact, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, teenage childbearing, and truancy among the young diminish. But because neighborhoods are less and less likely to be intact, all forms of socially and self-destructive behavior among the young are on the rise. Americans at the end of the twentieth century suffer from a dramatic decline in the formation of social bonds.
Children, in particular, have born the brunt of these negative trends. Widespread family breakdown generates unparented children who attend schools that increasingly resemble detention centers rather than spaces of enduring training and discipline in a safe environment. Family breakdown contributes to out-of-wedlock births and juvenile violence at unprecedented levels. The family cannot deal with all of these things alone. Its troubles reflect a disintegration of the social ecology within which families are nested.
The deterioration of the web of America's mediating institutions is deeply troubling. Democracy requires laws, constitutions, and authoritative institutions, but it also depends on informal and formal civic associations that help to forge a relationship between government and the everyday actions and spirit of a people as well as on democratic dispositions, on what Tocqueville called "the mores," including a preparedness to work with others for shared ends. Here trust is key; it derives from acceptance that strong convictions may be coupled with a readiness to compromise in the recognition that one cannot always get everything one wants; from combining individuality with a commitment to civic goods that are not the possession of one person or one small group alone. The world that nourished and sustained such democratic dispositions was a thickly interwoven social fabric. Tocqueville noted that "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations," and other visitors to our shores spoke of the "active beneficence" that characterized the American people. From this associational enthusiasm, currents of social trust and stewardship flowed, and these bonds of social trust further encouraged the penchant for joining and for helping.
Today this public-spiritedness is in jeopardy. Our social fabric is frayed. Our trust in our neighbors is low. We do not join as much. We give less money, as an overall percentage of our gross national product, to charity. Our once rough and tumble yet civil politics has given way to "in your face." Listen to this question: "Do you believe most people can be trusted, or can't you be too careful?" First posed in 1960, it has been repeated since, yearly from 1971 on. In 1960 in America, trust stood at nearly 60 percent. It waned, though with some fluctuations, throughout the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, bounced up a bit in the mid-nineteen-eighties, but now stands at an all-time low--37.5 percent and falling. When even mainstream social scientists devoted to models of functional equilibrium grow alarmed, we should pay attention. The wide-shared conclusion now is that social trust is far too low to sustain consensual norms, to generate robust communal action, and to build workable coalitions.
Tocqueville had offered his own foreboding thoughts along these lines. He warned of a world different from the vibrant democracy he surveyed. He urged Americans to take to heart a possible corruption of their way of life. In his worst-case scenario, narrowly self-involved individualists, disarticulated from the saving constraints and nurture of overlapping associations, would move to an isolating egoism. Once that happened, they would require more controls from above in order to muffle the disintegrative effects of that egoism. To forestall this moment of democratic despotism, civic spaces between citizens and the state needed to be nourished. Only the generation of many small-scale civic bodies would enable citizens to cultivate the democratic virtues. These civic bodies were not governmentally-derived, not creatures of the state. Tocqueville feared, remember, not that anarchy would result should the world of associational life weaken, but, rather, that new forms of domination would arise. All social webs having disintegrated, the individual would find himself or herself isolated, exposed, and unprotected. Into this power vacuum would move an administrative state. (Alternatively, in our own time, we might contemplate the menace of an ideology of consumerism.)
We have abundant evidence today of the dissociation Tocqueville dreaded. In the aftermath of
the 1994 campaign, the New York Times reported: "U.S. Voters Focus on Selves, Poll Says."
The Times noted a "turn inward" and a lack of any "clear direction in the public's political
thinking other than frustration with the current system and an eager responsiveness to
alternative political solutions and appeals." Manifestations of voter frustration included
growing alienation from both of the major parties and massive political rootlessness among
the young tethered to historically high rates of pessimism about the future. Most striking was
a significant decline in "public support for social welfare programs," although the level of
social tolerance for minorities and homosexuals was high, so long as one did not have to bear
the burden of financial support or direct involvement.
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Among the political trends that are traceable to the collapse of America's social ecology, or that helped to bring it about, is a tendency that became routine over the past three decades to remove disputation from the political arena into the courts. Juridical fiat displaces democratic debate and compromise where things can be worked out over time. The political scientist James Q. Wilson argues that one reason Americans are more cynical and less trusting than they used to be is that government has taken on more and more subjects that it is ill-equipped to handle well--volatile moral questions like abortion and family values or aspects of race relations that treat white and black Americans as if they were homogeneous groups, rather than individuals divided by regional, religious, class, education, and other lines. These "wedge issues," as political strategists call them, were generated in part by courts that made decisions in the 1960s and 1970s on a whole range of cultural questions without considering how public support for juridically-mandated outcomes might be created and sustained. This juridical model of politics, first pushed by liberal activists, then embraced by their conservative counterparts, is adversarial in nature and has had baneful effects. It spurs direct mail, mass membership organizations who give no quarter in the matter that is of direct interest to them. By guaranteeing that forces on either side of hotly-disputed issues need never debate directly with each other through deliberative processes, juridical preemption has deepened citizen frustration and fueled a politics of resentment, which, in turn, tends to demote legislators to agents of single issue lobbies and mass mail overkill, thereby deepening the social mistrust that helped to give rise to such efforts in the first place.
A second trend, to which I alluded at the outset, is the emergence of calls for a techno-utopia--an electronic plebiscitary democracy--a development that would reduce office holders to
instruments articulating the unadorned "people's will," thereby presenting as a cure more of
what ails us. Numbers of aggrieved citizens have been saying, in effect, "Let's take things back
through direct rather than representative democracy." The Times study concluded that the
Perot phenomenon, one that speaks to widespread voter resentment, goes deeper and is more
persistent than analysts initially believed. Meantime, the Democratic Party is "depleted and
dispirited" and the Republican Party is fragmented on social and cultural issues. The
proclaimed solution to our woes--plebiscitary or direct democracy--promotes the illusion that
the unmediated will of the people must have final say on all issues. In truth, plebiscitarianism
is entirely compatible with, indeed often a mainstay of, antidemocratic regimes. And sour
populism only feeds the conviction that Americans of different perspectives cannot talk to
one another. If to this one adds the terrible paradox that, all too often, in the name of
multiculturalism we are promoting competing monoculturalisms, as each group plays a zero
sum game, you have a society starting to come apart.
Recent studies show that Americans without regard to race "cite the same social problems: crime, poor education, stagnating wages, the imperiled sanctity of home and family." Not only do these studies challenge the insistence that black and white Americans are entirely separate entities with competing interests, they demonstrate that African Americans are more insistent than any other group that their society faces a crisis in values beginning with the family. There is, to be sure, less agreement on what can be done to put things right. Moreover, sadly, neither white nor black Americans express confidence in democratic institutions. Both groups seem ripe for direct democracy efforts, and both seem susceptible to the distortions of scandalmongers and demagogues.
This is a situation begging for the rebuilding of a civil society and a culture of democratic
argument. The sociologist Robert Bellah reports that Americans today brighten to tales of
community, especially if the talk is soothing and does not appear to demand very much from
them. But when the discussion turns to the need to buttress authoritative civic institutions,
attention withers and a certain bitterness arises. This bodes ill for liberal democratic society, a
political order that requires institutions that embody yet mediate and shape the urgencies of
popular passions and interests. As our mediating institutions disappear or are stripped of
legitimacy, a political wilderness spreads. People roam the prairie, fixing on objects or policies
or persons to excoriate or to celebrate until some other enthusiasm or scandal sweeps over
them. If we have lost the patience necessary to foster civil society over the long haul, our
democracy--as a political system, a social world and a culture--is in trouble: Its trials will
continue.
In part this unhappy impasse derives from my own generation, the generation that came of age in the 1960s. Many important issues got raised in that tumultuous decade, and long overdue problems were dealt with, most especially the end of de jure segregation. But a tendency manifested itself in the sixties that now affects our entire culture and makes it difficult to sustain institutional life: the demand that one go beyond criticizing the exercise of authority to insisting that authority must be smashed altogether. To equate authority with coercion and violence is to make a terrible mistake. Authority is not tyranny; indeed, authentic politics begins when the power to coerce arbitrarily is rejected. A very common error, then, was to presume that one could have community, happiness, and freedom without authority, for authority and community go together. Without institutions, community is an empty word--a sentimental greeting, a vague aching of the heart.
That is why there was always something suspect about the rush to create community without
asking how communities are to be sustained: by whom? to what ends? Community requires
people prepared to shoulder responsibility, to be accountable; otherwise, you have lots of
feelings about wanting to do good that evaporate like the early morning's dew at the first sign
of difficulty. To have community you must have people prepared to accept that the world
does not begin and end at the perimeter of "me, myself, and I," as my mother was fond of
saying. This discipline consists in acknowledging that, even as I restrain myself and expect
others to restrain themselves, we are all of us beholden to something bigger, to purposes not
reducible to the concatenation of our private passions. Why should we do this? So that we
can come to know a good in common that we cannot know alone.
There is an old Celtic saying: "We all warm ourselves on fires we did not build, we all drink from wells we did not dig." We are nourished by that recognition and by what our democratic foremothers and fore-fathers would tell us: By all means, be brutally honest about the troubles we face, but be not afraid. Democracy is an unpredictable enterprise. Its debates and compromises may try our patience because we would like life to be simpler. But it is not.
Do we care enough about our world to stay thus engaged? The challenge we face now is to urge upon our fellow citizens every day in every way that we can that freedom and responsibility go together. The freer you are, the more responsible you must be and become, ready to enact projects of the democratic political imagination from deep seriousness of purpose yet in a mood of often playful experimentation. That is the American way at its best. For even when equality and justice seem far off ideals, freedom preserves the human discourse necessary to work toward the realization of both.
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Copyright © 1996 by the National Humanities Center.
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Revised: January 1997
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