Watching the "Capitol Fourth" concert and ensuing fireworks on TV the other evening, four-year-old granddaughter in my arms, I grew as misty, sentimental, and patriotic as I usually do on America's birthday (which happens also be be little Emma's "half-birthday"). The next morning, however, I awoke with my ever-more-frequent sense of foreboding about the nation's future.
Temperamentally, I'm no pessimist and civically I've never been a "declinist." But I do begin to see parallels between America's present condition and Rome circa 350 A.D.
Terrorists bent on killing us is part of the problem, of course, and a faltering economy doesn't help. While I know the business cycle will eventually turn upward again, I can't but worry about the core strength of an economy in which Starbucks is now worth twice as much as General Motors. Frappuccinos aren't very powerful weapons against Al Qaeda.
Starbucks, in a way, symbolizes both the best of American ingenuity and entrepreneurialism and the hedonistic, live-for-today, save-not-for-tomorrow, bread-and-circuses "life-style" that gives me pause about the future. So does the near-total inability of our government to tackle in any serious way the major challenges facing the country. (I've hung around Washington for the better part of four decades and have never seen so total a breakdown of competence, will and common purpose. Consider, just for starters: immigration, Medicare, Darfur, national debt, NCLB, climate change, Tibet, infrastructure.) So does the substitution of trashy celebrity "news" for hard news in one paper after another. (That's what sells, say publishers, as they lay off reporters.) So does the fact that nobody I know under 30 much bothers either with newspapers or radio/TV news. The oddments of current affairs that they pick up arrive via internet and, increasingly, the "blogosphere," which is more about feelings and opinions than basic information or sustained analysis. But the oddments grow fewer as the iPod ear-buds never leave their ears and the self-absorption mounts.
And then there's the profound question of whether we're one nation or many. When you fixate long enough on oneself, on "diversity" and on "sensitivity," what makes us different from each another eventually trumps what makes us similar. Political correctness and partisanship eventually trump functional politics--the kind by which hard decisions actually get made by voting, compromising, then voting again, usually with the help of what we once called "leadership." Advancing the interests of groups eventually trumps the common weal. (Washington now contains some 35,000 registered lobbyists--that's 65 per member of Congress--and most of them have plenty of bread and enjoy lots of circuses.)
The Bradley Project on America's National Identity released its sobering but insightful E Pluribus Unum report last month. You can find it here; press coverage here (including a semi-contentious column by David Broder and terrific blog posts by Pete Wehner in Commentary and Ross Douthat in The Atlantic Monthly); and several background essays (see the beauty by John McWhorter) here.
I wish the current presidential race had more discussion of national identity and fewer volleys about the candidates' "patriotism." Douthat is right in saying that the Bradley report is one McCain should read--and so should Obama. It goes to the core of what sort of country America is and ought to be.
Gadfly readers and educationists ought to acquaint themselves in particular with its chapter on "A Shared History" and how to teach this (pp. 23-30) and with the discussion of "overcoming separatism" in our educational institutions (pp. 35-6). The latter also holds a particularly perplexing (if unstated) challenge for school-choice devotees, forcing them (okay, us) to ponder the e pluribus unum tension of enabling schools to be different and families to select among them, yet expecting all of them to forge Americans with shared civic values, history, culture and more.
This problem is not to be avoided. We're all for schools that differ in curricular focus ("science and math" vs. "art and music," etc.); in pedagogical style (constructivist vs. instructivist, etc.); in educational mission ("dropout recovery" vs., say, college-bound); even in religious affiliation (Catholic or Jewish, Lutheran or, I guess, Muslim). We want families to be free, indeed aided, to choose among them on any number of grounds (escaping from failed schools, a better fit between kid and school, a quest for character or religious formation, maximizing a child's prospects of college admission, etc.) We're developing scads of mechanisms for accomplishing this--charters, vouchers, tax credits, virtual schools, magnets, hybrids, and on and on.
But what, then, do the schools have in common and how confident can we be that they'll contribute at least as much to unum as to pluribus? What if parents seeking out schools attended by kids who resemble their own children leads to further division of Americans by race, ethnicity or religion? Will we in time boast Democratic and Republican schools? Red and blue schools? "Right to life" and "right to choose" schools?
The Bradley report is thoughtful about curriculum--an unum curriculum, particularly in history and civics--and well-wrought, statewide academic standards joined to well-wrought and forceful state testing-and-accountability mechanisms can go far to ensure that the curricular core is similar if not identical in all schools. (How that may apply to private schools and voucher-carrying kids is a tough question in its own right that we've begun to wrestle with in a future Fordham report.) A similar academic curriculum does not, however, ensure that kids will acquire similar civic values or take the unum seriously. Much of that needs to come from home and the broader culture or it may not come at all.
The Bradley report is wise about this, too, but far from cheery. Which, alas, returns me to my larger angst about America's current condition and prospects. Will our leaders lead--or simply score political points? Will we look at each other and see fellow citizens or alien populations? Will Starbucks become our most important company? Will baristas replace aerospace engineers? Will anybody save for tomorrow or will we spend all our bread on today's circuses? Who is focusing on the future?
