Our Divided Political Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

enclaves. We have, in theory, challenged old political institutions and mass culture. But by retreating into ourselves, we have in fact empowered those remaining forces that
do
enjoy national and international reach. We can only pretend to escape the national and international, which ought to be the lesson of an economic downturn that began on Wall Street but spread quickly to the rest of the world and reached deeply into our communities of choice.
    The broad American narrative is well suited to our circumstances precisely because it is a history of balancing the local and the national, the individual and the communal, the economic and the civic. The American approach understands the vibrancy of the communities that Bishop has discovered, but insists that those communities are embedded in a nation whose story they share, whose laws they depend on, whose prosperity is essential to their own, and whose standing in the world will have a powerful effect on their fate. It is why the desire to prevent American decline is a yearning that unites American communities across nearly all the barriers we have erected against each other.
    In the end, we should not be surprised that history seems so important in the politics of our time. Battles over history are always fierce in times of crisis because such moments necessarily involve struggles over self-definition. We had comparable arguments before the Civil War, when partisans on both sides of the slavery question sought to conscript the nation’s Founders as allies. That is why what follows is organized around the interaction between our current political impasse and how we read (and sometimes misread) our history.
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    The first chapter explores the rise of the Tea Party and its focus on retelling (and, I argue, rewriting) our nation’s story. The Tea Party understood instinctively that Barack Obama could be seen more as a communitarianthan as a liberal—although the movement’s preferred term for Obama’s worldview was “socialist.” This made Obama a particular threat to the kind of individualism the movement championed, even if many in the movement would likely have opposed him anyway as too liberal and cosmopolitan a figure. I also note that if the Tea Party was organizationally imaginative, it was not ideologically innovative. On the contrary, many of its ideas depend either on standard varieties of conservative individualism or on old notions popularized by the far right of the 1950s and 1960s. I ask why it is that where mainstream conservatives of a half century ago, notably William F. Buckley Jr., challenged such far-right ideas as cranky, foolish, and extremist, today’s conservative leaders have held their tongues or even offered encouragement to notions discredited long ago.
    In Chapter 2 , I explore the politics of history. Politics has always influenced how we tell our story to ourselves, and this chapter is aimed at putting today’s politically tinged arguments in perspective. I pay particular attention to how the rising civil rights movement and historical reassessments of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War influenced each other. The successes of the battle for racial equality encouraged a more accurate view of Reconstruction (a perspective freed from the tinge of racism), even as a more honest accounting of African American achievements in the post–Civil War South encouraged the forces battling segregation.
    The next three chapters trace the arguments over individualism and communitarianism through our history and our current politics. Chapter 3 argues that the tension between these tendencies goes back to the Puritan settlements and the early republic. I look at how biblical and republican ideas and individualism in a variety of forms all left their mark on the American character. Chapter 4 describes why progressives in recent years—most prominently Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—concluded that present-day liberalism needed to be tempered by a