In many ways, what happened in Dallas is a culmination of what many of us have worked for since late 2008, and it is hard to put into words the optimism I feel for the party at this point—even as I hear that the financial condition Steve Munisteri found when he took over the party was worse than anyone outside the organization had known. He has a big job ahead of him, and we all need to help.
I’ve decided to leave it to others to someday tell the story of how Steve engineered his victory. It is a story that needs to be told, and those closest to his effort deserve the credit and the opportunity to tell that story when they are ready. However, I can say this—driving home from work one night shortly after the convention, I heard a certain State Senator who hosts a radio show (and who gave a raucous, divisive speech just before the floor vote at the convention) spin how and why Steve was elected, and he was wrong about almost everything he said.
In fact, much of the challenge we face as a party, and will face as we move together into the future, is to stop taking the word of such self-anointed “ringmasters” as gospel, and to start thinking for ourselves. And these “ringmasters” need to be careful about over-use of circus analogies, because some in our party are tired of such clowns and midway acts anointing themselves to be the “ringmasters” of our party’s future.
Now, rather than get further side-tracked by circus metaphors and divisiveness, I want to follow the lead of Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, whose truly Reaganesque convention speech (which followed and eclipsed that State Senator’s speech) called on us to unite against the Democrats and to lead our country away from what the Democrats have done. Therefore, I want to continue to address a topic that I started to talk about in a post at the end of May—how will we lead if Republicans are again given control of government nationally, and are kept in office at the state and local levels? To answer this question, I want to return to that concept I discussed in that previous post: “Renewing the American Community”.
At the heart of this concept is a word that we don’t often use anymore: Neighborhood. We often talk of families, of churches, of organizations, of communities, of villages, of cities, etc.; but rarely do we talk about neighborhoods. If you’re like me, the word conjures up memories of friends and families that lived on the same block, who went to school with us, who played on the same teams with us, who served in the same scout troops with us, or who attended church with us. It brings back memories of our friend’s mothers and fathers, who looked out for us as we walked to school, or to the school bus; who kept an eye on us as we played in the street, or down at the park; who took us in when our parents had to go on a trip or out for an evening, or just gave us a safe “home away from home”; and who told our parents if anything went awry, but who could also give us a safe and confidential ear when we most needed it. More than a place, it was a shared experience, in which the members took responsibility for the other members—a civil congregation.
If we have lost anything over the last generation, we’ve lost this sense of neighborhood—this civil congregation that has been the heart of American Exceptionalism from its beginning. I believe the mission of American Conservatism and the GOP is not just to unravel Obamaism, but to re-establish this sense of neighborhood applicable to the 21st Century. To do that we must first remember how we got those neighborhoods in the first place.
It was the enterprise of spreading neighborhoods across a continent to which prior generations committed their hopes and dreams. When those dissident European Protestants first arrived and settled the Eastern seaboard, they started the process and created colonial and state governments to protect their settlements. Then, from the earliest actions of the first Congresses under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government promoted the creation and spread of neighborhoods. If you look at the Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the founding generation was intent on devising a scheme for establishing the physical blueprint for future neighborhoods—surveys of townships to include schools and churches and post offices.
As new settlers migrated westward during the 19th Century, they often moved as whole communities or congregations; for example, settlers, and their offspring, who left Salem, Massachusetts together and started west eventually (over one or more generations) reached Salem, Oregon, and left Salems in many states along their journeys. As immigrants came to the cities, they created neighborhoods in city sections—“Little Italy”, “Chinatown”, “Brighton Beach”, “Hyde Park”, and many others. Neighborhoods were home to factory workers and bankers, to every social and economic strata of the community.
Neighborhoods furnished the primary support for those who needed help. In his ground-breaking book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, which helped lead to the welfare reform legislation in 1996, Marvin Olasky, a professor at the University of Texas, outlines the history of neighborhood-based efforts to provide help to those in need. The combination of local religious and private organizations, and of ad hoc volunteers, created a safety net of people who knew who needed help, who knew who they were helping, who knew the specific needs of those they were helping, and who could properly assess the type and amount of help needed. This familiarity with the person needing the help also provided an incentive for both people to succeed—to get the person to a state whereby they could help themselves; government help was reserved for those who truly could not help themselves. The volunteers were not professionals—they were neighbors. It was this volunteer spirit is one of the attributes that de Tocqueville found so exceptional in America.
Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous University of Wisconsin and Harvard University History Professor, gave a keynote speech at the Columbia Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, in which he noted that the frontier was gone. Almost thirty years later, Turner would note
Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. The conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.
Between 1893 and 1920, when Turner wrote those words, the country began to cope with the problems created by the Industrial Revolution that Europe had been dealing with since the mid-19th Century. European movements had tried to change the social dynamic through laws designed to give the common man more direct say in their monarchical governments, while giving those governments more responsibility over the welfare of the common man. What Turner noted was that America already had created a system whereby citizens’ liberties were protected and they could participate in government—it didn’t need to legislate it into existence, but it did need to preserve it. Part of that American system was the neighborhood.
Throughout the 20th Century, we failed to heed Turner, and we followed Europe’s model for the “democratic welfare state”, and helped to slowly destroy our neighborhoods. First in the cities, and then in outlying suburbs and towns, the places remained but the sense of neighborhood disappeared. Some of the changes to the social dynamic were well-intentioned—even necessary, at least in the short-term. For instance,
- arguably, the Great Depression required some infusion of federal action to organize resources to get the country back to work, because the problem was national (even international) in its scale; and
- the extension of the recognition and protection of real liberty to minorities and women was long overdue.
However, each of these changes created consequences that destroyed neighborhoods:
- the change in the relationship of the individual with the national government; the national, programmatic approach to public welfare; and the professionalization of social work became a permanent fixture of American life, which the welfare reform legislation of 1996 did not fundamentally change;
- the extension of real liberty to minorities led to greater social mobility for middle-class minorities, which led to the separation of those persons from their traditional communities and led to a permanent underclass left to be cared for by the national and state governments; and
- the extension of real liberty to women took them out of their roles as the permanent sentinels of the neighborhoods—the mothers on watch for the care of the children, the volunteers to help those in need, the teachers and volunteers in the local schools—and placed them in the permanent workforce.
While each of these steps created positive benefits for individuals or groups, they left a fundamental void in our unique, American society.
We never have addressed the void that these actions left in our society—the loss of our neighborhoods—and the consequences of that void on our liberties. Today we live in gated “communities”, subdivisions with fancy names, fenced-in yards, large houses or high-rise flats with so many built-in conveniences that we never have to leave them except to go to work (that is–if you don’t work from home), and many of us now home-school our children. We have all these material benefits, but many people don’t know the people who live in the next house or apartment, or on the next street–let alone, know of their needs. Obamaism is a further extension of this model, that would limit our liberties and redistribute our wealth to bestow material benefits and safety directly to each of us, without calling on any of us to be good neighbors.
If we don’t begin to accept the responsibility that liberty expects of us, I fear we will ultimately become a “Place” where taxes are compelled from some to bestow benefits to others, rather than continue to be a “Nation” where we share an interdependence and a love of liberty.
How can the GOP begin to address these issues? The answers are at once simple and familiar—we need to promote those activities that build strong neighborhoods. Here are some examples:
- Promote policies that encourage small-business creation—small business creation is the easiest way to help people balance their need to make a living with our country’s need to rebuild neighborhoods. Businesses employ people, and employing people effects their lives. Every paycheck sets aside a retirement fund, pays for health care, provides for the sustenance of a family and (indirectly) for the support of the neighborhoods where employees live. Products or services generated by a business effects its customers, and those people touched by its customers. Wealth created by businesses increases the tax base and tax rolls, which in turn fund our schools—more wealth, creates better-funded schools. Programs that a business supports can enrich the lives of residents in the community where the business is located, as well as the lives of its employees. Each of us spends more time every day with our co-workers than with our family: the positive bonds you formed through this activity ripple out in every direction.
- Promote involvement in a traditional community-based service organization—between 1870 and 1920 many of the organizations that we remember as the backbones of our neighborhoods were created, and most still exist: Rotary, Kiwanis, the PTA, and many more. These organizations were designed to help serve the needs of their communities, and provide the social networks that build and maintain neighborhoods. Most of these organizations are crying for new members, but time and other commitments keep people from joining. The GOP at every level should be promoting policies that shorten commutes to work, offer tax breaks to companies who give employees paid time to work for schools and volunteer organizations, and offer tax breaks to individuals to donate time to charities (and faith-based organizations) as well as money or assets.
- Promote assimilation programs—To be a nation we must assimilate. Schools, churches, and childhood activities in the neighborhood were designed to assimilate children into our society as adults. Newcomers need the same help. Let’s not just argue about it, let’s act. Like the local GOP is now doing with its new Eastside Office, lets promote policies that give incentives to private organizations to create community centers and teach adults English and citizenship; that give children a safe place to meet, do their homework, and play; and that give families a safe place to interact and get to know and care for each other.
- Promote policies that keep families and neighborhoods intact and building wealth—Locally, our GOP Juvenile Court Judges worked to create a model program, funded with private dollars and partnered with neighborhood churches, that is keeping first-time, non-violent juvenile offenders in school and out of jail. These types of programs will fight the long-term problems of under-education, under-employment, and chronic poverty that fester in communities where too many young people drop out of school and get a criminal record. We need more of these innovative programs that help rebuild strong schools, strong families, and strong neighborhoods.
Some of you may think this agenda is too simple and too short—it is, but I must stop this post at some point. What I really want to do is to start you thinking about how we can build a positive agenda for running the government based on our ideals—based on that sense of Neighborhood that focused our liberty and built this country—and to re-build the nation we believe in. Give me your thoughts.