[Vision2020] Party of Strivers

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 30, 2012
Party of Strivers By DAVID
BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html>

America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It
was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age
conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by
immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they
thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big
lives.

America has always been defined by this ferocious commercial energy, this
zealotry for self-transformation, which leads its citizens to vacation
less, work longer, consume more and invent more.

Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or
offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.” Read
D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.

But today’s Republican Party unabashedly celebrates this ambition and
definition of success. Speaker after speaker at the convention in Tampa,
Fla., celebrated the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked
within and became wealthy. Speaker after speaker argued that this ideal of
success is under assault by Democrats who look down on strivers, who
undermine self-reliance with government dependency, who smother ambition
under regulations.

Republicans promised to get government out of the way. Reduce the burden of
debt. Offer Americans an open field and a fair chance to let their ambition
run.

If you believe, as I do, that American institutions are hitting a creaky
middle age, then you have a lot of time for this argument. If you believe
that there has been a hardening of the national arteries caused by a
labyrinthine tax code, an unsustainable Medicare program and a suicidal
addiction to deficits, then you appreciate this streamlining agenda, even
if you don’t buy into the whole Ayn Rand-influenced gospel of wealth.

On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering
rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic
Party, which says: We don’t have an agenda, but we really don’t like
theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.

But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is
contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker
celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of
community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no
conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are
embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Today’s Republicans strongly believe that individuals determine their own
fates. In a Pew Research Center
poll<http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/partisan-polarization-surges-in-bush-obama-years/>,
for example, 57 percent of Republicans believe people are poor because they
don’t work hard. Only 28 percent believe people are poor because of
circumstances beyond their control. These Republicans believe that if only
government gets out of the way, then people’s innate qualities will enable
them to flourish.

But there’s a problem. I see what the G.O.P. is offering the engineering
major from Purdue or the business major from Arizona State. The party is
offering skilled people the freedom to run their race. I don’t see what the
party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose
wages have stagnated for a decade, or the factory worker whose skills are
now obsolete.

The fact is our destinies are shaped by social forces much more than the
current G.O.P. is willing to admit. The skills that enable people to
flourish are not innate but constructed by circumstances.

Government does not always undermine initiative. Some government programs,
like the G.I. Bill, inflame ambition. Others depress it. What matters is
not whether a program is public or private but its effect on character.
Today’s Republicans, who see every government program as a step on the road
to serfdom, are often blind to that. They celebrate the race to success but
don’t know how to give everyone access to that race.

The wisest speech departed from the prevailing story line. It was delivered
by Condoleezza Rice. It echoed an older, less libertarian conservatism,
which harkens back to Washington, Tocqueville and Lincoln. The powerful
words in her speech were not “I” and “me” — the heroic individual. They
were “we” and “us” — citizens who emerge out of and exist as participants
in a great national project.

Rice celebrated material striving but also larger national goals — the long
national struggle to extend benefits and mobilize all human potential. She
subtly emphasized how our individual destinies are dependent upon the
social fabric and upon public institutions like schools, just laws and our
mission in the world. She put less emphasis on commerce and more on
citizenship.

Today’s Republican Party may be able to perform useful tasks with its
current hyperindividualistic mentality. But its commercial soul is too
narrow. It won’t be a worthy governing party until it treads the course
Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger
vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and
nurtures success.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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