Yale professors Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw provide a beautiful abridgement of the past century's fragmentation of America's national soul:
In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live....
In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become "entitlements," a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.
And they paraphrase the recent work of Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers:
From the 1930s to the 1960s ... American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.
Rodgers' endpoint delineation is of course significant: the fall and rise of Goldwaterism, which, though originally libertarian -- a valid pillar of traditional conservatism -- was in time contaminated with assorted strains of theocratic bullying, fiscal recklessness, and the hubristic hypernationalism of neo-conservatism.
All of which is only to point out, as I have perhaps tediously done in this space, the profoundly -- and authentically -- conservative nature of today's liberalism. It is liberals who more often, more honestly employ the language of a common culture -- the "social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history." And it is today's conservatives (pseudoconservatives, actually) who seek and promote a kind of chaotic, social atomization -- a national stripped of common culture, common institutions and common history (except for that which they invent).
With fewer and fewer exceptions, contemporary conservatives see no "shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations," as did many conservatives of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and a good part of the 1960s. Instead, conservative pols are acting the socially destructive role of what George Washington, in 1786, saw everywhere in pre-Constitutional America: that of petty politicians "of narrow souls and no natural interest in the society"; "Characters too full of Local attachments and Views to permit sufficient attention to the general interest."
As I see it, President Obama's greatest challenge isn't to get the unemployment rate down to 8 percent by 2012's end, or to reset the budget in better balance, or to equitably tax a little more here and a little less there. It is, rather, to recapture G. Washington's and FDR's "attention to the general interest" -- to refill "American public discourse ... with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history."
This is an intensely conservative mission, on which only liberals seem to be.