Lawrence M. Giroux; David Brady and Dan Schubert. As the authors show, the distinctively individualist ideology of American politics and culture shapes attitudes toward poverty and economic inequality in profound ways, fostering social policies that de-emphasize structural remedies.
Drawing on a variety of unique methodologies, the book synthesizes data from large-scale surveys of the American population, and it features both conversations with academic experts and interviews with American citizens intimately familiar with the consequences of economic disadvantage. Eppard is assistant professor of sociology at Shippensburg University. Mark Robert Rank is the Herbert S. Heather E. The Republican Party [in the years after the war] resolutely turned its face away from these ideas and war practices When the Republican Party came into full power it went at once resolutely back to our fundamental conception of the state and the rights and responsibility of the individual.
Thereby it restored confidence and hope in the American people, it freed and stimulated enterprise, it restored the government to a position as an umpire instead of a player in the economic game.
For these reasons the American people have gone forward in progress There is [in this election] That is: shall we depart from the principles of our American political and economic system, upon which we have advanced beyond all the rest of the world I would like to state to you the effect that That effect would reach to the daily life of every man and woman.
It would impair the very basis of liberty and freedom Let us first see the effect on self-government. When the Federal Government undertakes to go into commercial business it must at once set up the organization and administration of that business, and it immediately finds itself in a labyrinth Commercial business requires a concentration of responsibility. Our government to succeed in business would need to become in effect a despotism. There at once begins the destruction of self-government It is a false liberalism that interprets itself into the government operation of commercial business.
It is not the road to more liberty, but to less liberty. Liberalism should not be striving to spread bureaucracy but striving to set bounds to it Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit, a force proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved. It would extinguish equality and opportunity. As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living, and each generation must work out its own understanding of things.
We should neither have a blind veneration for the past Federalist No. As mentioned earlier, efforts to regulate the size of soda beverages was one such moment when people recognized that the government was going too far.
But the real problem was the invasion of individual liberty—after all, who should be deciding what size beverage cup people buy?
Surely not the government. Another such missed opportunity came when the government declared millions of individual health insurance policies to be illegal because they did not contain all the protections government thought should be there.
It turns out that many of those missing provisions had nothing to do with the health of the individual purchasing the policy—maternity care for young men, for example—but were one more super-sized government regulation to try to make the economics of federalized health care work. Once again, this was a liberty moment and, in addition to denouncing the misleading government promise that if you liked your health care you should keep it, critics should have gone deeper to identify the attack on individual liberty.
These efforts could help make individual liberty less of an abstraction and more of a priority for a younger generation so accustomed to big government. Then, in the words of the Scripture, we must strengthen and protect what remains. The Founders thought that the several checks and balances and separations of power in the Constitution were important to protect individual rights, especially against the passions of the moment and the power of government.
So rugged individualism, even today, relies on that very constitutional system for protection. Calls to break down the federalism structure—whether by strengthening executive power, or turning to some kind of parliamentary system, or allowing the courts to take over our social and economic decisions—are a kind of declaration of war against individual rights.
They are packaged more seductively, of course, as evolutionary steps in the development of a complex republic or as ways of breaking down barriers to government action. But now, as then, we need our federalist structure to protect American individualism.
On every issue we should continue to ask a vital set of questions: Is this something the government should do? If so, which branch: executive, legislative, or judicial? And which level: federal, state or local? These are the protections our constitutional system affords to individualism and liberty.
In other words, the individual should again be the starting point of analysis, not the government. As one example, governments lined up to ban hand-held phones in cars, even though there was evidence that the real problem was not the physical distraction of holding a phone, but the driver inattention caused by talking on the phone.
Government reaction to the economic crisis, despite evidence that government policy frequently worsens the economy, is a larger example. In the case of Obamacare there were policy options that would have helped the uninsured that did not inhibit the liberty of individuals to buy their own policies. The economic argument—that the funding only worked if everyone was in it together—has certainly not played out to be accurate, with a huge uninsured population despite massive investment in a misguided program.
In an effort to do something, government often ends up doing the wrong thing. We must halt this notion that government is responsible for everything and must, in every case, do something. Putting the public back into public policy would mean exploring what individuals, nonprofits, communities, businesses, and other nongovernmental entities might do, as well as government action. And even within the realm of government solutions, these schools focus primarily on national and international solutions to problems, not local approaches that may be more effective.
In effect, schools of public policy are institutionalizing the mistaken approach of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and other Progressives that if only we had the right national experts or enlightened administrators able to run the federal system, things would be better, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Improving civic education in America would also strengthen the spirit of rugged individualism.
Polls consistently show that young people cannot name one of their home state US senators, nor do they understand basic elements of the Constitution.
Without an understanding of the American system—or worse, with a kind of distaste for American history from misguided high school textbooks—young Americans will be hard-pressed to champion constitutional governance or protect individual rights.
With federal funding for civic education eliminated in , and only resumed in , and with the major emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math STEM , civic education has taken a back seat. Civic engagement has become a battle cry in education, which is fine—but it needs to be preceded by civic education.
The states need to get busy requiring courses in civic education and schools of education should make sure their graduates understand enough of the content of the American system to teach it effectively.
Finally, we need to be open to new formulations and partnerships for rugged individualism. As Tocqueville pointed out, American individualism was never a purely selfish, inwardly focused kind of individualism.
Americans combined their individualism with a volunteer spirit, a tendency toward forming associations, and other practical qualities. Hoover, who coined the term rugged individualism, said that in America it was always combined with equality of opportunity. So what new associations or qualities might make rugged individualism stronger and more a part of American life without losing its essential character?
For young people, especially, rugged individualism combined with a strong sense of community may seem attractive. Their commitment to community service and civic engagement reinforces this modern combination. Even the pioneers of the West often banded together to help one another build houses and communities, so this notion of rugged individualism combined with community could increasingly become what American individualism looks like. Should it continue to be part of the formula?
Dictionaries use words like toughness, determination, durability, and strength to define rugged. Are Americans still rugged today? Do we need to be? Recent books suggest that it is still an important part of American character and success. Indeed, young people today will need to be resourceful to have the kind of future that they want.
In a rapidly changing world, with difficult economic and national security challenges, resourcefulness, even ruggedness, will be needed to survive and prosper. One would hope that there would at least be room for this understanding in the ongoing description of American character.
Our book does not primarily concern the psychology or sociology of individualism, but rather how government policy affects rugged individualism. Back to our core questions about federalism is an issue a matter for government at all and, if so, which branch and which level we are seeing government consolidation in an era of individual and societal fragmentation. The federal government is taking over more and more matters and is consolidating its power, especially executive power, at a time when nearly everything else in society—business, social life—is returning to smaller, more individualized and localized approaches.
This continuing growth of the administrative state is a special concern to rugged individualism because it removes the crucial element of consent. One way to describe the problem is to say that the federal government is still, after eighty years, building on the paradigm of the New Deal.
Federal consolidation that took place in the midst of the Great Depression is still the way government operates today. The federal government taking over K education and health care is the wrong direction to go.
Continuing to build out a federal welfare state, as Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton propose, is a misguided effort to ramp up the federal system of an earlier time. Even expanded welfare states such as Denmark are learning that, in the worldwide economic downturn, government cannot afford to continue everything it has been doing, much less add more. A classic example of the problem created by the old systems is the pension crisis now confronting state and local governments.
In a day when government jobs did not pay as well as those in the private sector, governments offered attractive retirement pensions as an extra incentive. Now, however, many government staff positions pay as well as any job and, while the private sector has moved to defined contribution plans, government still has those attractive guaranteed pensions.
These deficits, caused by unrealistic investment and coverage policies, have already bankrupted some governments and are threatening many others. The generosity of the administrative state, living off borrowed money and not facing new realities as the private sector has done, turns out to be costly indeed. One approach to addressing excessive federalization is proposed by Yuval Levin in his recent book The Fractured Republic. Levin argues that what is needed is neither excessive federal regulation from above, nor too much selfish individualism from below, but instead increased attention to the several community-based and localized actors in the middle such as family, work, religious communities, etc.
0コメント