Is the Common Good, Good?

One of my favorite pieces from the Onion, the satirical newspaper, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, "Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday." True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media exhaustion. It ends, though, with a middle-American version of the "Yes" at the end of Ulysses as Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:

"I baked a cake," said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. "I made it into a flag."

Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson.

"It's beautiful," Cassie said. "The cake is beautiful."

I've been thinking about Michael Tomasky's essay since I first read it two months ago. I think it's insightful and important. And every time I think of it, my mind runs to the Onion piece, which felt emotionally truer to me in those weeks than all the soaring and (justifiably) belligerent responses of politicians.

When Tomasky writes about the common good, he means an idea about America that people identify with, that they feel is part of who they are. Tomasky isn't interested in just any community -- the Catholic Church, black people, northern Californians -- but in an idea of the national community. He wants that idea of America to have the power to make demands on us: to reveal duties and make us proud of fulfilling them or ashamed of failing them. And he wants Democratic politicians to call this idea of the common good into being.

He points to the mid-1960s as the last time politicians -- Democrats, anyway -- talked convincingly about the common good, and points especially to President Johnson. LBJ is a good choice: less obvious than the Kennedys, and arrestingly eloquent in his best speeches.

Two strands of common-good language were strong in American politics in this period. One, which LBJ shared with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., is the one Tomasky wants the Democrats to re-take. It invited Americans to identify with the country as an unfinished project, full of promise but also burdened by moral failures and in danger of never becoming the nation it ought to be. This language was full of intense images of brotherhood, insisting, in the phrase now relegated to lefty bumper stickers, that no one was free while others were oppressed. King in his "I have a dream" speech praised whites who "have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." Johnson, in the same civil-rights address that Tomasky aptly quotes, asked "How many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we wasted energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?" The impulse in this language was moral connection to the national community: if America is unjust, every American is diminished. If America rights itself, every American is greater for that.

This strand also called on government to help make life richer and more meaningful. With the pen of speechwriter Robert Goodwin, the rough Texan LBJ spun images that far outdid poor Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning." Defining the aims of "the Great Society," he spoke of the need to move past "soulless wealth" to "enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization." He defined the Great Society as a humanist paradise, "where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. ...where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." He evoked a country without poverty or racial injustice, but also one "where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

The second strand found its voice in Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Even before the New Left and the national meltdown over Vietnam, leaders of the New Right were calling on citizens to identify with their version of national greatness. The difference was that they treated American greatness as something already achieved, threatened only by the self-doubt of wussy liberals. Goldwater announced confidently, "Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it." For Reagan, the defect in American society was liberal reluctance to fight communism: "Should Christ have refused the cross?" he asked a national television audience in 1964, insisting that the country's freedom must be worth dying to defend. Both men invoked foreign peoples' struggle for freedom abroad, particularly in communist countries. But at home they found no room for what Johnson called, in praising the struggle for civil rights, "man's unending search for freedom." The language of Reagan and Goldwater offered national greatness as a source of personal dignity and a cause for self-sacrifice, just as King's and Johnson's did; but you can boil down its essence to Toby Keith's post-9/11 boast, "We'll stick a boot in your ass, it's the American way."

What's remarkable today is that both strands are more alive in the language of the Right than in progressive rhetoric. I doubt I need to persuade anyone that, even with his job-approval rating hovering in the batting-average range, George W. Bush does a better Toby Keith than anyone in the Democratic Party. But he also does a better LBJ than any Democrat but, maybe, Barack Obama in one of his now-and-again soaring moments. Accepting the Republican nomination in 2000, Bush sounded like LBJ tilting at "soulless wealth": "Prosperity can be a tool in our hands used to build and better our country, or it can be a drug in our system dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty." He accused the Clinton administration of squandering the wealth and peace of the 1990s, and used President Clinton himself as an emblem of a feckless culture: "Our current president embodied the potential of a generation -- so many talents, so much charm, such great skill. But in the end, to what end? So much promise to no great purpose."

Like LBJ and King, Bush is able to define national greatness in cultural, moral, and spiritual terms -- the terms in which so many people understand their own lives as either rich or poor. Unlike them, he gives this call to greatness an entirely apolitical turn. "We discovered," he declared in his 2000 acceptance speech, "that who we are is more than important than what we have. And we know we must renew our values to restore our country. This is the vision of America's founders. They never saw our nation's greatness in rising wealth or in advancing armies, but in small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial." LBJ named the same goals, although he did not write government out of the story: the Great Society was to be a place "where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods." This is the everyday language of the good life. Our current president may be inarticulate when left to his own words, but he can deliver his speechwriters' renderings of that language with conviction and credibility. I am waiting for the progressive politician who can do the same, and tell the country what government has to do with the good life.

Let me give a few thoughts about why that is so hard to do, and what it might look like if it happened. First, appeals for progressive versions of economic fairness are harder to fit into the familiar story of American moral greatness than appeals for racial justice. There is a deep-seated and widespread belief that the American market economy is basically a natural and fair system, and that interference with it deserves suspicion. The famous statistic from the estate-tax debate, which almost 40 percent of Americans believe they are or soon will be among the wealthiest one percent of the country, is a testament not to bad actuarial skills but to the power of that belief: this economy will give me what I deserve. Princeton political scientist Jennifer Hochschild reports that more than 80 percent of the country agrees with the statement that people get their just desserts in American economic life. Hostility to taxes and open redistribution reflects a moral belief about what makes the country great, one that may fit awkwardly with Bush's language of compassion and opportunity, but which is openly hostile to a progressive picture of shared economic sacrifice.

Second, part of the reason progressive common-good language is so hard to find is that the last forty years of progress in diversity and personal autonomy didn't just distract progressives from solidarity: they eroded our ability to invoke it convincingly. The inconvenient fact is that Americans are more willing to spend money to support people they see as like themselves than to support strangers -- or worse. As Tomasky points out, the New Deal worked its wonders for a national community with white-supremacist struts. The part of the Great Society that we remember -- the War on Poverty -- had its genuine flaws, but it was broken in good part on racial resentment. Decades of real progress in tolerance and openness have made the country a much better one, but have also made us more nearly a country of strangers. I will take that combination in a heartbeat over a country of racial oppression, sexual inequality, and cultural conformity. But taking it means taking its costs. The equality of tolerance is not that far from indifference, and very far from the equality of opportunity that LBJ envisioned. Whether we can have both is, at the very best, an open question.

Third, the search for a richer life that LBJ identified with the Great Society is underway everywhere but in government: in yoga and Pilates studios, churches and living rooms, pharmaceutical labs and psychotherapy clinics, Rick Warren's church and the editorial offices of Saveur, and all sorts of consumer technology labs -- the hundreds of thousands of places where billions of dollars and hours go into the unending search for meaning and satisfaction. In the last decade, parts of my social, professional, and emotional life have been changed by yoga, my laptop, the iPod shuffle function, and the American discovery of good food, to name only the less personal instances. I'd imagine I'm typical of Prospect readers, and lots of other Americans, in this experience. (Except for listing yoga instead of church, I'm not even sure I've distinguished myself from suburban conservatives.) Around the middle of April, as usual, I recalled Oliver Wendell Holmes's remark that he liked paying taxes because it felt like purchasing civilization. This year, it summoned nothing warmer than bitter irony as I thought about Iraq, Halliburton, earmarking, and cuts in Medicaid and student loans.

These are some of the reasons that I like to think about Michael Tomasky's essay and the Onion's cake story at the same time. The Onion is written for people who sometimes feel the way I sometimes feel: cynical, a little too easily disappointed, attuned to the private satisfactions of self-cultivation, institutions and publications and neighborhoods that suit us, and, above all -- if sometimes a little warily -- friendship and love. The American Prospect also is written for people who sometimes feel the way I sometimes feel: partisan, hopeful, civic-minded, looking for a way to shape those feelings into commitments more definite than a "Kerry sucks less" sticker.

A progressive language of the common good will have to speak to people where they live. My guess is that will have less to do with historical wrong and destiny than LBJ and King's rhetoric, more to do with finding ways to make the workplace more compatible with family life, mobility more compatible with security, and the (literal, not figurative) places where we live more compatible with living well. My guess is that, like the Progressivism that helped shape the New Deal, it will involve not just rhetoric, but also appeals to institutional imagination and innovation, a search for new ways that education and public spending can make equality of opportunity a goal rather than a slogan. A Democratic party that did this would reclaim for politics some of what we now instinctively ascribe to technology and private institutions: not so much the power to ennoble as the knack of improving our lives. But if we created a government that turned improving people's lives back into a credible political aim, that would ennoble us enough.

And it would help if the language were funny -- funnier than this essay. Lincoln was funny. Reagan was funny, although with creepy flashes of sadism. Barack Obama seems to be funny. ("They say Democrats don't stand for anything. That's just not true. Democrats do stand for anything!") Wit doesn't muddy his gift for evoking the common good. I look forward to a progressive language that skewers right-wing pieties and lies with the withering, wry, plaintive exasperation of Jon Stewart, then gets down to explaining why we need a government that works if we're going to have the best lives we -- all of us -- can have. That will be a confection I can salute.