Can't talk the talk

The more US politicians speak about community and responsibility, the more Americans are coming to hate each other.

by Jedediah Purdy - Oct 25, 2007

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons and Bushes, and it's a basic problem for anyone who wants to be the next president: they share an exhausted political language, with no way of talking about the dignity of citizenship or the common good. The hatred is partly a substitute for lack of more important things to fight over.

If a political scientist from Alpha Centauri dropped in to observe us, he might conclude that Americans share a broad moral consensus and have no idea what to do with their government. Exhibit one would be the major speeches of Bill Clinton and George Bush. Their central passages might have spoken by the same person. Who called on his listeners "to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing, from our government or from each other," and time to "all take more responsibility, not only for ourselves and our families but for our communities and our country"? It was Clinton, in his first inaugural address. Seven years later Bush promised a "responsibility era." Both presidents built their speeches on a catalog of personal virtues: service, character, commitment, responsibility. Both called on Americans to recognize that we are all in this together. Clinton's "simple but powerful truth [that] we need each other [a]nd we must care for one another" found its answer in Bush's "liberty for all does not mean independence from one another." Both pronounced "community" like a sacred word.

We are all in this together. The problem is that, if you're president - or choosing a president - that isn't the question you're trying to answer. The question is how government can respond to the fact that we need one another, and what citizenship has to do with our duties and rights. The Clinton-Bush language is all about personal and social virtue, the qualities that make a good neighbour or parent. It stops at the gates of government and power, which is where the president's responsibility begins.

This way of talking about politics is fairly new. Richard Nixon introduced "responsibility" as a major presidential theme while taking swipes at Great Society ambition and largesse. A lot of this language is an elaboration on George HW Bush's calls for a "kinder" American lit up by a "thousand points of light," each marking some act of service. The senior Bush was trying to recover what you might call a sense of decency from Ronald Reagan's praise of standing tall and getting rich.

Before all that, presidential language was political language. "Service" and "responsibility" referred to the duties of the office. "Community" was not a moral term. "Virtue," that old word which recent presidents mean although they don't say it, meant civic virtue, not personal goodness.

That doesn't mean that American politics has spent much time in a golden era. Lots of political visions have been shoddy, like Grover Cleveland's defence of laissez-faire capitalism as the heart of liberty, or disastrous, like Teddy Roosevelt's praise of a bloody American nation-building project conducted in the teeth of a tribal and Muslim insurgency. (No, that was the Philippines.) It does mean, though, that our political language is a new kind of cop-out. Bush's one major effort, his wish to be a "war president," says nothing about the lives of most citizens except that, when political questions arise, they should defer to their leaders and not ask hard questions.

Political language tells people what, if anything, government has to do with the things that palpably matter in their lives: safety, opportunity, personal freedom, duty. It connects citizenship with dignity. It ties personal existence to a national story and suggests how each can contribute to the other. Major reforms, important projects, re-aligning partisan divides are all that much harder without a language that can make these connections.

When political vision is basically personal, it's no surprise that people love and hate presidents - and other partisans - in personalized ways. That's what marked the politics of the 1990s and the Bush years except for the war: triviality veined with hatred, futility inflated by platitudes. Yes, Hillary will remind us of this. So will any candidate who can't do better. It is, unfortunately, what we are now in together.