It's hard to avoid discussion today about what the columnist David Broder called "the decline of civic life." It seems to be the hot topic for fin de siècle America.
If one reads the daily newspapers, it does look as if civic life has broken down, from crime on the street to Congressional "wilding" with the social safety net. The dominant ethic seems to be "get while the getting is good," and if anyone needs to be blamed, choose the least powerful in the society to bear the burden: immigrants, welfare mothers, children.
An antidote to this social wreckage has been making the rounds since 1990, called "the communitarian movement," led by Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist with long service in government and academia. In the Bible of the movement, The Spirit of Community, Etzioni states that communitarianism's goal is to create "a new moral, social, and public order based on restored communities" so that communities "can again raise their moral voices, families can educate their youngsters, and schools can graduate individuals who will become upstanding members of their communities."
This movement has a lot of influential backers. President Clinton hearkens to it constantly, and Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes A Village, is drenched in it. And, of course, people who call themselves conservatives have been promoting the sanctity of the community against the Visigoths of individual rights for decades now.
On the surface, Etzioni seems to have struck the right chord: in order to preserve what is good about America, people need to restrain their egotistic appetites for rights and instead pay attention to their responsibilities to the greater good. And if people refuse to follow these prescriptions, then Etzioni feels that the community has the mandate to make people toe the line. He's careful to point out that he wants a communitarianism without puritanism, but it's also clear that, in the end, the wishes of the majority carry a heavier moral authority than individual rights.
But Etzioni misses a crucial element: he avoids any criticism of the reigning capitalist economic order, and thus has nothing to say about how the economic "wilding" of the last two decades has contributed to the moral decline he worries so much about. Because he accepts the status quo, Etzioni is what Boston College professor Charles Derber calls, in his book What's Left? Radical Politics in the Postcommunist Era, a "professional middle class communitarian," someone who wants to make sure that the lower orders behave themselves but that his peers do not suffer unduly from any radical notions of redistributing income or pursuing social justice.
But Derber points out that unless we re-think our economic system and move it toward what he calls a "social market," then the moral disintegration everyone condemns will continue because the underlying warfare and greed of the system guarantees it. Derber suggests a "left communitarianism" that generates a "communitarian economics," in which the economic system is re-tooled to serve the social requirements of a society dedicated to equality and justice.
Derber is, of course, right, but it's Etzioni who will get the media play unless ordinary people, tired of the assault on their lives by an economic system dedicated to extracting as much profit as it can out of their hides, band together and demand that power be shared. Until this happens and people stop being distracted by bogus issues such as "Teenage welfare mothers are the cause of Western civilization's decline," Etzioni and his conservative acolytes will get away with their sophisticated but devastating class warfare under the feel-good but do-bad banner of "communitarian ethics."
(July 1996)