[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]
Thirteen months ago, I wrote a blog post that provided a retrospective on a body of ideas on the 20th anniversary of the greatest level of influence they ever had in American discourse. A lot of people told me they liked that post, and saw some real potential in it, especially for helping us understand the thinking of someone who was both a partial product of and shaper of that body of ideas--Hillary Clinton. After much re-writing, expanding, and editing, Commonweal has published a polished revision of that post--titled "It Still Takes a Village"--and I'm delighted with it. But since I'm a completist, I'm posting here the fullest version of all those re-writes, for the tiny number of die-hard communitarians out there, as well as its slightly larger number of dedicated opponents. For all who care: enjoy.
*****
Among the many criticisms regularly lobbed at Hillary Clinton, the perception that her life, her career, and now her march to the White House has been focused, scripted, and controlled to a discomforting degree is one of the most common. She lacks the genius and the foolishness, the expansive generosity and the destructive self-indulgence of her husband, many say; in contrast to Bill, Hillary is depicted in a perfectly calibrated, perfectly adaptable, perfectly predictable political gray. There is much truth to this portrait, as Clinton herself has often admitted on the stump. It’s true that Bernie Sanders’s challenge during the primaries obliged her to respond in some unanticipated ways, and with the profoundly unpredictable Donald Trump as Republican opponent in the general election there will surely be more curve balls ahead which this most programmed of candidates will have to face. Still, despite FBI probes and congressional investigations and her continuing deep unpopularity with large parts of the electorate, Clinton apparently sees little need for introspection, little reason for going off script, and she’s probably not wrong to think that way. She’s qualified, she’s experienced, she’s a known quantity–all things which Donald Trump is not. So why should she rethink her technocratic, hawkish, statist, moderately progressive liberalism? Close to 25% of the American voting population basically agree with her on all the major issues, and more than another 35% are moderate enough to find Trump appalling in comparison to her. So she’ll keep appealing to the Democratic base (or at least to the mostly college-educated and mostly government-friendly parts of it), keep assuring moderates that America’s place in the global economic and military order will not be challenged by her presidency, and stay focused on November 2016–the outcome of which, according to most election-watchers anyway, almost certainly won’t be a surprise.
Twenty years ago, when Clinton’s husband ran for re-election against Bob Dole, the outcome didn’t turn out to be much of a surprise either. By the early fall a script had seemed to emerge, one that reflected the general discontent with the political process that typified so much of the 1990s: that Bill Clinton was slick and talented, full of both warmth and ruthlessness, probably not entirely trustworthy but basically committed to some relatively good ideas, and just so much of contemporary political animal that a stiff, old-school career-politician candidate like Dole couldn’t compete. The week before the election, Time magazine all but acknowledged how nearly all observers knew that low-turnout election was going to go: “It’s not much of a contest, but it is a choice.”
For those who lived through that election and can look back on that choice with twenty years of hindsight, the degree to which all the contestation which roiled the American conversation in 1995 and 1996–and there was a huge amount that did: the Oklahoma City bombing, the O.J. Simpson trial, worries over violent Hollywood movies and video games, fights over welfare reform, the Million Man March, the arrest of the Unabomer, government shutdowns and the blame games which accompanied them, and more–had so little explicit, direct impact on the presidential race itself is striking. In the wake of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the rise of talk radio and CNN as political forums (and, quite quickly, as actors in the national discussion themselves), there seemed a broad feeling throughout the United States that what really needed to be argued about, that the real contest of ideas and possibilities, was deeper than what party leaders and politicians and the new crop of talk-radio and cable pundits presented. It was, rather, something abstract, internal, and apolitical. Elections were so much superficial stuff in the face of such concerns (voter turnout was under 50% in the 1996 presidential elections, the lowest it had been in more than 70 years, and the second-lowest ever since accurate vote-tracking began).
In light of the challenges of terrorism, climate change, globalization, and increasing economic inequality, the introspective, cultural, end-of-history-style critiques of the 1990s–something very much absent from Hillary Clinton’s driven, committed, thoroughly practical presidential campaign, an almost perfect antithesis to her husband’s promise more than two decades to ago to feel voters’ pain–perhaps seem naive. But that is an interesting turn of events, since Clinton herself, in 1996, made a major contribution to that language of critique, with her most-remembered book: It Takes a Village, and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The worries and perspectives of the era which produced that book, and the arguments which are featured within it, are mostly absent from the Clinton campaign of 2016. Not that she runs away from the book itself or its general sentiment; on the contrary, she explicitly referenced it in her acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention, summarizing the message of the book as “None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community, or lift a country totally alone.” Which is not an inaccurate description of the basic upshot of the book she wrote (or had written for her). But reducing a set of ideas which once apparently engaged her at length–ones that, in retrospect, have a complicated relationship with their two-decades-old own moment, and what came after–to a simple invocation of the Democratic party as the party of people working together leaves a huge amount unsaid. As Clinton’s march towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue continues, it’s worth revisiting both that book and its milieu, to look deeper at ideas which she and the plurality of voters who will almost certainly put her in the White House for the most part don’t seem to think, in this rigorously partisan moment, are worth arguing over any longer...and yet, just maybe have an implicit place in our national understanding all the same.
*****
Those ideas, worries, concerns, and perspectives actually all share a label, one which Clinton never used in It Takes a Village: “communitarianism.” That term is probably vaguely familiar to many, as well as an opportunity for mockery and invective for a few, but the number of people who could sympathetically connect Clinton’s book and its observations and recommendations to a broad set of identifiably “communitarian” (or, as some preferred, “civic republican” or “Third Way”) concepts is probably tiny. Yet in the mid-1990s both the concepts and the label were riding high, or at least as high as any broadly applicable yet intellectually coherent ideological movement usually ever does in the United States. Running up to his re-election, Bill Clinton regularly presented himself (or encouraged others to present him) as a candidate who embraced a style and perspective that was neither liberal nor conservative, but focused on civic and communal matters which (or so the argument went) had been long ignored by the Republican and Democratic mainstream. Bookstores and the op-ed pages of dead-tree newspapers in 1995 and 1996 were filled with writings that employed explicitly communitarian rhetoric and questions. Probably the single most influential academic article out of the thousands that were publish on communitarian or civic republican themes during the 1990s, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” was published in 1995; and probably the most significant book published by the scholar most thoroughly associated with communitarianism–Democracy’s Discontent, by Harvard professor Michael Sandel–was published in 1996. (The sociologist Amitai Etzioni, an exhaustive cheer-leader for what he and his compatriots referred to as "responsive communitarianism," published no less than three books on the subject during those two years.) Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City, Jean Bethke Elshtain's Democracy on Trial, Daniel Kemmis's The Good City and the Good Life: these books and many more pushed communitarian perspectives which were widely--if not universally--accepted as both distinct from and more important than presidential politics in those brief years. Clinton’s It Takes a Village was right in that mix (not to mention selling ten times as many copies as all of the aforementioned books put together).
The communitarian argument in the U.S., at least in the form I am discussing, had a particular genealogy. It began as a response to the cultural anomie of--and, intellectually, as a challenge to the defense of liberal individualism and neutrality made by thinkers like John Rawls throughout--the 1970s. By the 1980s, its core concepts had been re-appropriated into all number of historical, theological, and other scholarly contexts. But at its heart, communitarianism was essentially a revival and embrace of the centuries-old moral anthropology of classical republicanism, as well as a conviction that the dominant partisan options available in the democracies of the postwar (and then, later, the post-Cold War) world lacked that anthropological awareness. Our full development as social creatures, fellow citizens, and simply human beings, it was claimed, depended upon cultivating civic virtues and an understanding of responsible freedom which individualism (particularly, perhaps, American-style individualism, hearkening here back to Alexis de Tocqueville) often undermines. Thus, the argument continued, forms of economy, government, and personal behavior which give primary (or at least equal) consideration to community identity, integrity, and participation, rather than individual and nonjudgmental liberation, ought to be pursued. In other words, communitarianism began with the res publica (though one could just as easily say--as many Christian writers, particularly Catholic ones like Mary Ann Glendon and David Hollenbach, did--the same thing in a Christian context, and talk of it beginning with St. Paul's description of the unity of the Body of Christ). Some scholars have thought it important to historically distinguish the ideas of republicanism from the category of communitarianism, but standing firm on that point requires too much dedication to some very specific historical reconstructions to be of much use publicly. Very (no doubt too) simply, the popular intellectual argument of the 1990s went like this: if you saw the point of freedom as the achievement of opportunities for independent choice, you were some kind of philosophical liberal; if you saw the point of freedom as the ability to contribute to or deliberate about the common good (or at least common goods), then you must be some kind of communitarian.
Putting it in those terms might suggest a first, rather obvious answer to the question of why whatever traction communitarian arguments seemed to be gaining twenty years ago didn’t appear to last. After all, the 1990s–thanks to the spread of the internet, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the state socialist parties throughout the world which were aligned with its cause, thanks to the simultaneous explosion of both globalization and irredentism (famously diagnosed in Jihad vs. McWorld, also published in 1995 by another sometimes-communitarian, Benjamin Barber)–was all about the celebration of and the empowerment of individuality. Liberal marketplaces were on the march, and the Moral Majority was out of business. (That decade, in fact, occasioned a profound re-orientation of the Christian conservative concerns that had driven most social conservatives since the 1960s, a re-orientation connected to a recognition of how the doctrine of individual rights was likely to continue to unfold in the U.S.; the notorious First Things symposium “The End of Democracy,” which came out at the beginning of 1996, was a prominent but far from solitary example of such.) So obviously the language of communitarianism--collective responsibilities, not individual rights!--was going to be smothered by the dot-com boom and lost in the wreckage of mainline Christianity in America, right?
Well, perhaps. But then again, that celebration of choice itself probably added to the vague discontent so many felt about and throughout the 1990s, despite the rise in (some of) their 401ks. Ehrenhalt, at least, took very seriously the possibility that, while those in the driver's seat of American culture and politics twenty years ago wouldn't figure out where they'd gone wrong or gone too far and change accordingly, their children perhaps would. They would respond, he suspected, to the expanding discontent around them by rediscovering the value of the authority, the structure, the narratives, and most crucially the limits that healthy communities and moral and civic contexts provide. He concluded The Lost City writing:
[The rising generation] will come to adulthood in the early years of the next century with an entirely different set of childhood and adolescent memories from the ones their parents absorbed. They will remember being bombarded with choices, and the ideology of choice as a good in itself; living in transient neighborhoods and broken and recombinant families where no arrangement could be treated as permanent; having parents who feared to impose rules because rules might stifle their freedom and individuality. Will a generation raised that way be tempted to move, in its early adult years, toward a reimposition of order and stability, even at the risk of losing some of the choice and personal freedom its parents worshiped? To dismiss that idea it to show too little respect for the pendulum that operates in the values of any society, and the natural desire of any generation to use it to correct the errors and the excesses of the one before.
It might be easy to look at an American generation supposedly addicted to selfies and mobile apps and dismiss Ehrenhalt’s predictions as obviously incorrect. Still, perhaps allowances should be made. The young adults I have come to know as a college professor over the past 15 years, women and men a decade or two or more my junior--the famous Millennial generation--emerged from their adolescence, journeyed through their universities and apprenticeships and grad programs, married and began their families (or pointedly chose not to), moved from one place to another, and started their adult working lives, all in the midst of two huge developments that couldn't be more different from the drifting, discontented (but often profitable!) years of 1995 and 1996: the War on Terror and the Great Recession.
The social, political, and cultural consequences of those transformative events are many and diverse, but there are areas of overlap. Both privileged statist, nationalist, indeed civilizational narratives (obviously aided here by increasingly omnipresent, globally-interconnected technologies). The constantly implied message conveyed through the angst and arguments which these developments engendered was that the primary community one was part of, the community which most threatened one's choices or preferences, the community one most need to win, was a big one. If the money-making exuberance, the talk-radio squalor, and occasional overall aimlessness of post-Cold War America in the 1990s made it a little easier (for a moment, anyway) for people to hear a message which called for the abandonment of business as usual and for a move towards a different, more communal and civic, way of conceiving the political stakes around them, then perhaps 9/11, the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Wall Street bankruptcies re-imposed--for many, anyway--an encompassing and divisive rhetorical structure in its place. The United States vs. worldwide terror, Bush vs. the UN, Obama vs. the Tea Party, Red America vs. Blue America, Christians vs. Muslims, libertarians vs. socialists, the West vs. the Rest. (The often outright apocalyptic rhetoric which Trump has both personally benefited from as well as inspired in his opponents is a partial continuation of the same tendency.) The fact that too many communitarian thinkers perversely ramped up their discussion of the res publica to world-historical and international levels, perhaps because they felt obligated by this increasingly dominant rhetorical posture to declare sides in the cultural war, didn't do the ideology any favors. If your typical educated American thinker in her 30s today looks back on these communitarian discussions about America’s civic culture from 20 years ago, and finds them all somewhat intellectually strained, somewhat naive in the face of the desperate tone which crises in global security, constitutional breakdown, and economic division have been presented to her over the past two decades, well, perhaps she can't be blamed.
And yet, maybe she and her generation were also somewhat persuaded by it all as well, without realizing it? It's too easy to assume, for example, that the aforementioned unfolding of individual rights in regards to sexual morality has been entirely without any kind of community-centric awareness, without any kind of attention to social responsibility, civic respect, and permanence. The whole story of how it is that America's political and legal culture went from the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 will no doubt be told and re-told many times from many different disciplinary perspectives. But surely there must be at least some significance to the fact that, out of all the assaults upon what was long one of this country's default cultural understandings about sexual behavior, the one which generated the greatest sturm und drang–at least since the end of anti-miscegenation laws during the Civil Rights era--was not divorce or polyamory or pedophilia, but rather a push for marriage: a push that, therefore, ultimately invokes ideas (whether openly acknowledged or not) of sexual commitment and limits, not liberation. The inability of many to see this reflects the difficulty of separating the evolving res publica from the historically specific publics we experience, many of which were and are those established through and around conservative Christian churches. Still, despite the many reasons to be troubled by the sexual world which liberal individualism's apotheosis helped usher in a half-century ago, the reality is that our hypothetical average 30-something American intellectual today does not appear, in fact, to have thrown off the idea of this most intimate kind of belonging, but rather has likely strongly embraced--in an admittedly new way, in principle at least--the cause and the right of marrying and giving in marriage.
*****
It is interesting to note how much Clinton, whose career in government and politics has been so thoroughly entwined with expectations and condemnations particular to matters of marriage and motherhood and sexual roles, presented herself twenty years ago as struggling through this same evolution. Not that she addressed it specifically; the few comments about the lives of gay and lesbian Americans in It Takes a Village are entirely non-political. But ultimately one cannot read Clinton’s book today without connecting the positions she hesitatingly laid out there (without necessarily foreseeing their full development) with transformations of the American community that today are broadly accepted. Which prompts another question: why, then, has Clinton, along with many of her strongest supporters, left this perspective aside?
Party, to be sure, because outside the framework of a larger, ongoing communitarian argument, much of her perspective sounds downright conservative. From the start of It Takes a Village, one can’t help but be struck by Clinton’s traditionalism. Using language clearly borrowed directly from Putnam and other communitarian and civic republican writers (though never with any citation), she framed her arguments around a recognition of the dependency of a democratic community–and, centrally, a healthy environment for child-raising–upon stable moral traditions and civic involvement. To this was joined her own--assuming we are to take the text seriously--obvious sympathy for the more civically-involved and family-ordered world of her youth in the 1940s and 50s. The results are sometimes surprising: in her book Clinton speaks unambiguously against no-fault divorce and the casual glorification of sex and violence in music and mass media (she praises both former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett and Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center on these points), and just as clearly in favor of abstinence-promoting education and mandatory school uniforms. Her expression of these concerns, however, almost always returns to her ideal of policies and requirements that will enable families to manage and even thrive upon the cultural and economic transitions which the transformative power of capitalism and the freedom of individual choice make inevitable. That is, Clinton in It Takes a Village was certain that community and family are essential to a truly rewarding childhood, but as she wasn’t calling for the American economy or society to be radically restructured around prioritizing them. Instead, she seemed committed to the idea of government employing what some contemporary writers call “structured paternalism” to conserve those traditional realities. As far as communitarianism goes, this was a very liberal and definitional form of it; its conservatism was in its stipulation, not its substantive critiques (of which the book contains few of, anyway).
This approach is consist throughout the book. For Clinton, the family and community on which individuals, particularly children, depend–the “village,” in other words–is far more threatened by bad corporate actors than by bad cultural developments, and more in need of trained, organized, expert assistance (for providing resources to parents “scouting out child care” options, for assuring “basic safety requirements [and] the experience and training of child care workers” at day care centers, for checking children for “proof of immunization” in public schools, for fighting the “institutional resistance” to maternity and paternity leave policies, for administrating “formal systems [of home visitation] that have as their primary mission good health for all women and babies”) than almost anything else. Clinton’s faith was, 20 years ago, one that readily accepted the original progressive idea of an activist government which employs incentives and structures to make possible a more equitable distribution of those goods, freedoms, and opportunities which individual parents, teachers, and care-givers should want to cultivate in a changing world. It is revealing, I think, that Clinton was honest enough to confess her own regret and self-consciousness at how her own priorities, and the priorities of her generation, contribute to these changes...but never reveals any feeling that any kind of immanent critique of the value which she takes for granted about those priorities might be in order. (Once, when relating a request by 9-year-old daughter Chelsea and a friend that they be allowed to ride their bikes to the public library ten blocks away, a request Clinton refused for safety reasons, she writes: “My reaction may have been disproportionate to the actual risk involved, but it was symptomatic of the general anxiety about children’s safety that grips every parent I know”–all after having described in loving detail her own and earlier generations’ confident freedom to navigate their communities, and without any sense of doubt about the decision in question.)
Her lack of introspection then might be matched with her scripted determination as a presidential candidate today, as well as matched with the--admittedly, sometimes worried--equanimity with which many of those voters who make up one of her core bases of support have internalized her perspective on such matters, both social and intimate. For example, Clinton’s encouragement of sexual abstinence in It Takes a Village, while betraying ghosts of a religious concern with sexual morality, is actually all but entirely related to how early sexual activity correlates with limited opportunities for young people, girls in particular. Her resulting combination of progressive political preferences with a de facto moral traditionalism characterizes much of the rarely divorcing, highly educated, same-sex marriage supporting, “blue family” upper and upper-middle classes in (in must be said, mostly white) America today. So perhaps Clinton is correctly recognizing that, with this particular kind of social and moral structure in America being acceptable and functional for many, there’s little need to dig deeper–rather, the imperative to is to continue to fight against those who would undermine the government programs (and the sources for funding such) which provide the scales upon which this contemporary balancing act takes place.
Could it be that grafting a limited--even if sincerely felt--amount of cultural concern and respect for tradition onto public policies has been a way to smooth Clinton’s journey away from a potentially distracting focus on apolitical social issues and cultural critique (such as was common in the mid-1990s), in favor of those that can be more easily fought over in terms of individual rights--for example, regarding abortion, LGBT issues, etc.? Whether that was a conscious intention or not, the suspicion that Clinton’s employ of republican concerns was less than whole-hearted was, if not widespread, then at least deeply felt. Elshtain strongly criticized Clinton’s book in The New Republic for what she saw (correctly, in my view) as its implicit bias in favor of the mores of our educational meritocracy, as opposed to embracing the whole of America’s messy, diverse communities. The harshness of Elshtain’s review was perhaps to be expected; in her own sometimes-communitarian manifesto, Democracy on Trial, she emphasized again and again the divided, contentious, multi-layered, and civilizing processes of democratic belonging (as oppose to the definitional fact of belonging itself), which gave rise to her strong rebuke to those who twisted the concerns her erstwhile ideological compatriots–perhaps thinking of Clinton here–into what she saw as a too-casual defense of "community institutions" capable of "eviscerating any public-private distinction" in the name of a "future perfect gemeinschaft." In taking this line, Elshtain was working out a similar intellectual argument as that made by Christopher Lasch (whose final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the The Betrayal of Democracy was published posthumously in...you guessed it, 1996), who warned against a communitarianism that was more powered by a static nostalgia than by a populist drive to empower citizens, families, and neighbors, one that would support them in becoming capable and diverse community-builders, in the face of capitalism’s two-pronged effect of increasing global cultural homogeneity and economic inequality.
Over the months of the Democratic primaries, it was noted again and again that young people, both women and men (and not just white ones), showed strong support for the broad range of policies which Clinton advocated for...and then nonetheless chose to support her opponent. It may be worth noting that, among the college-student-aged Sanders supporters that I know, a determination to challenge the system and push the Democratic party further to the left is often conjoined with what might be recognized as a kind of careful, chastened, decidedly non-grand and quite diverse communitarian or civic republican perspective–one which is possibly rather different from what a student of mine reading It Takes a Village today would likely take to be the basis of Clinton’s stated concerns. There is the reality of the shifting–but not necessarily compromised–attachment to that most grounding of institutions, marriage, which I’ve already mentioned. Similar arguments could be made about how technology is used today (how much contemporary screen addiction reflects complete isolation, and how much reflects new forms of social interaction, connection, and community-building?), or about the work habits of the millennial generation (might the rise of the DIY ethos and the resistance to long-term expectations for corporate work suggest not just resigned economic realism, but also a desire to carve out space for creative opportunities with one's friends and family?), or about their living patterns (is the flight from the suburbs and the return to the city an embrace of individualizing anonymity, or actually a rebuke of exactly that?), and much more. Maybe, despite the upheavals of the past two decades, some of that introspective challenge to American liberal individualism and its corporate economic supports really has shaped the direction of at least one part of the American conversation. And maybe, therefore, Clinton has left behind some of her once impassioned communitarian critique because many of the people who agree with her policies (or most of them, anyway) but nonetheless don’t quite trust her recognize, on some level, that someone like Sanders, with his populist appeals, captured the point of the communitarian challenge in a way which Clinton’s technocratic policy-minded only partially ever did.
Michael Walzer once argued in an insightful article (first published as the 1990s began) that the communitarian attack upon liberal modernity cannot avoid assuming either 1) that individualism had successfully remade the social order, or 2) that it hadn't. If the former, then there is a problem with the many criticisms made against the contemporary prioritization of choice, because if the social infrastructure of attachment, tradition, and civic virtue really had been overthrown, what, exactly, can a defense of community be built out of? Atomistic individualism can't be persuaded to embrace limits and common goods, because it has no place within its philosophical worldview for such. So communitarians might as well admit the game is lost, and think about other options. (Perhaps this is the intellectual ground upon which the Rod Dreher’s much-discussed “Benedict Option” for religious traditionalists stands.) But if the latter--if modernity has not, in fact, defeated humanity's social anthropology, and the ability to perceive and pursue collective and stabilizing ways of life has not been entirely lost--then that must mean functioning communities haven't been lost either. They're still here, somewhere; we just have to learn how to see them where and for what they are. From that perspective, perhaps the rising generation which Ehrenhalt spoke of evinces more than a little communitarian evidence after all–and their ambivalent reaction to Clinton may be part of that.
Is there a possible political articulation of this chastened, localized attachment to community, an It Takes a Village for today? Nothing strictly comparable, I think. But the author Matthew Crawford’s books–first Shop Class as Soulcraft, published in 2009, and now The World Beyond Your Head, published last year–are perhaps emblematic of this new re-appropriation of communitarian concerns in terms that are more diverse, less statist, more participatory, and less structured. Crawford--a trained political philosopher who chose a career in motorcycle repair, and who defends that choice as one which reconnected him with a kind of hands-on cognitive and moral authenticity–works through ideas of tradition, technology, belonging, authority, embodiment, and identity by way of figures as diverse as Aristotle, Burke, Kant, Marx, and Heidegger. While he doesn’t identify his argument as one primarily about recovering the res publica (indeed, his second book is subtitled “On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction”), any close reading makes it clear that his concern is to help people, in their ordinary and everyday working, perceive the communities of practice they are part of, and thus enable them to further see, “from the perspective of communitarianism,” the importance of seeking to grasp in one’s life character-forming opportunities of habit and work. Without such habits–which he recognizes (as much as he doesn’t like it) might in the present moment benefit from a light dash of the kind of nudging, enabling paternalism that many of Clinton’s old policy recommendations would be examples of–we are ultimately structured by social, political, and economic forces which make us, for all our claimed individuality, just consumptive cogs in the mass production, outsourced and outsourcing, late modern capitalist machine. There are rewards in that machine, to be sure: consider all the benefits it has granted to the typical middle and upper-class reader of this essay! And yet, he warns: “genuine community is possible only among people who are willing to put themselves at risk” of being separated from the safe, depersonalizing, bureaucratized, insulating, expert processes that remove responsible, collective choices from our lives. It is that sort of riskiness that I see in young adults who are, despite and even in the midst of an often profound alienation, building connections and businesses, engaging in projects and initiatives, leaping into relationships and commitments. There is flight into a technologically secured privacy amongst these people, yes; but there is also, I think, an emphasis on finding and strengthening one’s places, in conjunction with others.
None of this is to say that liberal individualism and the rampant mobility and often militant nonjudgmentalism of American society today isn't a problem; on the contrary, those of us who care about conserving a humane connection to our own communal nature and history need to constantly watch how we teach, how we live, how we spend--and just as importantly, where we do these things--in order to combat such ideas and practices. But as one form of attachment gives way, our mourning should not prevent us from noting other attachments which take its place. Communitarianism today, were another rash of books to be published proclaiming it, would likely be revealed as more local, less political, more sustainable, less ambitious, and both more and less conservative (in the familial and cultural senses, respectively) than was the case twenty years ago. For all those reasons, it is highly unlikely that our future President Clinton could contribute to such a revival: she has committed herself for too long to a static, governmental perspective on community and family--and, of course, to that small but politically salient portion of the electorate who will vote in support of such things--and those political scripts allow for little adaptation, even assuming she was the self-critical sort (which she isn’t). But the essential focus of a hypothetical, 2010s communitarianism--the imperative of belonging to and bonding with the people and the rituals of a particular place--would be, I think, the same. And as for the refugees from alienating state-centric liberalism (or, in the thankfully unlikely event Trump becomes president, perhaps a corrupting reactionary state-populism, which would likely be much worse)? Those who might hear and respond to such a revival might well look around themselves and find, in comparison to those of us who latched onto these teachings two decades ago, that they are far less alone in feeling inspired by these materials than any of us may have thought. Who knows? If enough hear that call, perhaps such citizens and voters could even influence our likely next president to remember and introspectively reconsider what she once wrote about. She does have a reputation for making time in her strict schedule for regular, expert, efficient listening, after all.
[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]
