From time to time, from left and right, there come pleas for a “National Greatness” agenda. Most are wistful—slouching toward a time when Americans were actually proud to be Americans. I remember an issue of The Weekly Standard—a magazine I truly miss—devoted to the subject (although I was disappointed by the result). Some efforts, like this latest from The Liberal Patriot, are thinly veiled partisanship; in this case an attempt to “move past” cultural issues and find grandeur by spending a lot of money on industrial policy and green infrastructure. I’m all for a careful and judicious green scheme—but “National Greatness” implies something bigger and more spiritual, a program of unification and transcendence. And I’m absolutely certain we won’t “move past” cultural issues until left and right find agreement on the big ones—race, crime, sexuality, guns, abortion and immigration. Those who’ve followed Sanity Clause know that I’ve written a lot about how we might achieve those compromises.
Actually, I suspect “national greatness” is a bit overblown as a concept. This is a pretty great nation already. It used to be a proud nation, too, but not so much anymore. We have lost track of our phenomenal successes: we don’t have to worry, on a daily basis, about the plagues—war, starvation, disease—that crushed civilizations in the past. We have assimilated people from all over the world and built the world’s most creative and exciting (and imitated) culture. Given those achievements, the national loss of pride is something of a mystery, a delusion, an indulgence. We spend our concern on trivial pursuits, silly worries. World-weary cynicism has been a long-standing elitist pose of the ultra-cultured left—flag-waving is scorned, American exceptionalism derided; we are just too cool to be enthusiastic about anything. On the more traditional left, our flaws carry more weight than our strengths; the world-historic triumph of regulated free enterprise over poverty is ignored. Pessimism, meanwhile, has become a right-wing populist cult, a nativist illness with a thick racist patina induced by Donald Trump, Fox News and right-wing talk radio: everything is falling apart, white people are losing control, etc etc.
This fashionable gloom has consequences; it limits our ability to act as a unique, self-governing people. Being an American is not mandatory the way, say, being Jewish is. Our country is a voluntary proposition. It doesn’t require much effort, just pay your taxes and abide the law. It probably should require more. It should involve the active recognition that we are part of something larger than ourselves—an experiment in democracy that is not anchored by a prevailing ethnicity, race or religion—and that an active ethic of citizenship is a necessary part of the bargain. This should be a matter of the American heart, not government imposition; but I do wonder if some sacrifice should be required.
That was certainly the case for my parents and their generation during World War II. The national unity and pride that blossomed from their all-out effort to defeat evil defined our optimistic, open society in the decades thereafter. For us, and especially our children, the threat is more abstract—a loss of purpose—and we don’t deal well with abstractions as a society. So I’ve come to believe that the best way to restore our self-respect and sense of national unity is through a robust program of national service. I mean real service—as teachers, cops, hospital workers and a host of other apprentice-level jobs, especially for our professional elites—a two-year commitment, at least.
National service, Joe? Really? Excuse me while I fall asleep. National service is just too…nice to be very interesting or important or effective. It doesn’t fit with our independent frontier ethic. But the frontier closed in the 1890s and America’s sense of unity and purpose has gone wobbly over the past 70 years. The only cataclysms we face now are prospective—climate change—or spiritual, the nihilist sinkhole indulged by left and right. We float along on a tide of leisure, thumbing our devices. Nothing is asked of us. We share little, especially not the civic pleasure and adhesion that come from working together for a common goal, no matter how small. That is what service is really about. It is about inconvenience. It is about leaving the couch. It is about taking responsibility. And, to be effective, it most definitely should not be nice. An ethic of service needs to crash against the current state of comfort. It need not be mandatory, but there should be penalties for those who choose not to serve: What if a period of service—real, full-time work—became a requirement for our professional classes? Some fields already do it: my son is a licensed social worker, but he can’t become an independent clinical social worker without 3000 hours of supervised service. (Teddy, I hope I got that right.) What if you couldn’t become a doctor or a lawyer, an architect or engineer if you haven’t served a national service apprenticeship? Another thing: What if service was embedded in the most routine ceremonies of elementary and secondary education?
Let me tell you a story:
Back at the turn of the 1990s, I was infuriated to learn that janitors in the New York public schools were extremely well paid but were only required, by contract, to mop the cafeteria floor once a week. So I wrote a column: why not have the students help clean the cafeterias? (Under adult supervision, of course). And for that matter, why not have them sweep the halls and classrooms; empty the trash, police the parking lot. The chores would have to be age-appropriate; you wouldn’t ask kindergartners to wield a mop. But this would be about values as much as hygiene. It would foster a notion of mutual responsibility and community: you’d be less likely to toss gum wrappers or scrawl graffiti if you had to clean it up. It might even bring down the cost of exorbitant contracts for janitors.
It was an idea that was roundly ignored until Newt Gingrich—more about him some other time—offered it in his benighted 2012 campaign for president, and then it was roundly mocked. Part of the problem was the messenger, of course. Newt made it sound like punishment. There were inchoate howls from the left: why impose this on poor kids? What about the kids in the suburbs? Easy answer: They should do it, too. (In fact, more than a few ritzy private schools require student chores as a character-building exercise.)
But that, in a nutshell, is why everybody loves national service and it never goes anywhere: The left doesn’t want to jeopardize government (union) jobs. The right doesn’t want to promote government programs. At this point in our national evolution, both sides need a comeuppance.
I am not under the illusion that we can remake the culture of American governance overnight, or create a revamped form of citizenship to counteract the seductions of an affluent society. I just want to move the needle a little. If you had to spend several years as a police officer before you became a criminal lawyer, we’d probably have a better crop of both cops and lawyers. There are other specific ideas about how to insinuate service into the national ethic, how it can actually improve governance while lowering costs, and diminish the current chasm of the political extremes by bringing us together the way military service did during World War II. I’ll save those ideas for another time—if you’re interested, let me know.
But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I wonder: Does the presence of Donald Trump in our lives make us more aware that something is missing? Could the absence of Donald Trump usher in a new period of mutual respect and achievement that transcends the ideological absurdities of the moment? I wouldn’t be doodling here if I didn’t think that was possible. It is my fondest hope for the Sanity Caucus.
Well said Joe. Gratitude is the inoculation to entitlement. Real service offers a perspective of that for which we should be grateful. The Surgeon General declared an epidemic of lonliness for which the companionship of service is an antidote. We're a sick nation and a cure is in reach should we choose it.
Goes along with my theory that everyone should wait tables in their life.