Boy, oh boy. The apologies are coming in
fast and furious these days. Aware that things have gone
woefully awry on the Left, thinkers and activists everywhere
are stumbling over themselves to be the first to acknowledge
the failure of progressives to inspire renewal and generate
new political vision after the Cold War.
In his new book, The Twilight of Common
Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars,
journalist and sociologist Todd Gitlin joins the club,
arguing that the current failure of Americans to dream common
dreams rests on the shoulders of the splintered and
misdirected New Left which, after the civil rights movement
of the ’60s, took a road less traveled until
then—the “aggrandizement of difference.”
According to Gitlin, such a path has made all the difference,
bringing an originally unified vision to a dead end in the
myriad and mired footpaths of “identity politics,”
with none leading back to the center.
While the New Left spent its time in the
woods perfecting identities and mistrusting majorities,
Gitlin argues, the Right marched down the yellow brick road
to the White House. In the process, the latter succeeded in
hijacking the banner of universal values that until then had
flown over the progressive camp.
In large part, he blames universities for
becoming increasingly cynical toward democratic structures
while channeling great amounts of energy into the
“micro-politics” of the campus, deconstructing
reason, and reducing questions of political and communal good
to group membership. (He writes, “University culture in
particular encourages this sort of rivalry for the crown of
thorns.”) This gave a new shot at the belt to the Right,
which historically had represented the real special interest
groups: aristocracy and the business class. “The idea of
a common America,” he writes, “if there was to be
one at all, was ceded, by default, to the Right.”
Far from assuring the victory of the
market, Gitlin claims that the collapse of communism actually
escalated a cultural arms race in the West. He describes the
results in terms of “centrifugal forces.” But
unlike the twister cutting a swath through movie-going
audiences this summer, this storm blew in from behind the
Iron Curtain. After the Cold War, Gitlin writes,
“America the centrifugal was left to itself (or its
selves). We fell, and what we fell into were culture
wars.” You’re in Bob Dole’s Kansas now, Toto.
Gitlin possesses many fine insights into
the crisis confronting progressive forces, and offers up a
dazzling historical landscape behind his analysis. His
writing is accessible and, at times, even gorgeous. He
writes:
If there is to be any transcendence of
our present broken condition, it is going to have to be a
creation, not a recovery. We know too much to rest on the
premise that once, before we were lost, we were found; that
once, before we were uprooted, we were firmly planted. In
many ways, a centrifuge has taken the place of the whole
because the whole had already failed, and the news keeps
arriving late, like the light from a dead star.
WHAT THE TWILIGHT of Common Dreams
displays in historical aptitude and literary ability, Michael
Sandel’s recent work possesses in clarity and integrity
of thought. His book, Democracy’s Discontent: America
in Search of a Public Philosophy, is a rewarding, if
demanding, read. While Gitlin preoccupies himself with the
resuscitation of the Enlightenment ideals that gave rise to
the Left, Sandel’s approach is to search out the deeper
malaise afflicting the body politic. In doing so, he points
to flaws and inconsistencies in the undergirding structure
that both Left and Right currently assume—the
“procedural republic”—and questions its
ability to sustain a vibrant democratic culture.
Sandel argues that underneath all the
heated debate about welfare reform and the size of government
are two central fears of our time, which these debates can
approach only in limited ways: the loss of self-government
and the erosion of community.
Because we don’t all agree about God
and the ethical life, we have given up on the idea that
government should cultivate virtue in its citizens, but
rather leave individuals free to choose their vision of the
good. This triumph of a neutral framework of rights Sandel
describes as the procedural republic.
Fine. No one wants the Inquisition back,
and freedom’s a good thing, right? But Sandel
persuasively argues that when we displace all discussion of
the good from the public to the private sphere, we not only
encourage people to pursue their ends outside of politics,
but we ultimately produce a political culture incapable of
generating support for the kind of freedom it purports to
provide. “The procedural republic cannot secure the
liberty it promises, because it cannot sustain the kind of
political community and civic engagement that liberty
requires.”
In contrast to the arid wasteland of the
procedural republic, Sandel offers us the wisdom of the
“republican” tradition, which enjoyed a rich
history in an earlier America. Participation in self-
government, so it goes, isn’t just a good commensurate
with other goods but is necessary for full freedom, defined
by one’s ability to participate in democratic and civic
structures rather than by open-ended license. If
self-government is a good that we can agree on, then there is
a contradiction in affirming that the state must be neutral
toward it; rather, it is obliged to cultivate dispositions
and attitudes in its citizens conducive to the preservation
of self-government and full freedom.
Sandel may well be guilty of “polis
envy,” a condition afflicting philosophers who idealize
the ancient Greek model of direct democratic rule. No doubt
such a model of government is improper if not impossible for
the diversified economy of a modern nation-state.
But Sandel’s insight into the dangers
of unquestioned neutrality drive us to ask whether perhaps we
cannot do better than we have to engender genuine
participation in our political and democratic life. Part of
the problem is surely that we have allowed ourselves to
become spectators of a political process that seems to be
stuck in a high-speed chase we regard with both fascination
and disgust. As Todd Gitlin writes:
When Americans think of the res publica,
the public sector, they tend to think of unsafe streets and
bad schools....Observing the state’s incapacity,
resentful of those worse off than themselves, people blame
the government, refuse to vote, hate taxes, doubt democratic
institutions. Political parties are hollow shells for the
convenience of contributors. People withdraw from public life
altogether.
The challenge to democratic institutions in
the 21st century will be to convince people to put down the
remote and renew our membership in the civic arena.
Review of The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why
America is Wracked by Culture Wars. By Todd Gitlin
(Metropolitan Books, 1995); and Democracy's Discontent:
America in Search of a Public Policy. By Michael J. Sandel
(Harvard Universtiy Press, 1996).
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