Coming Together

In his latest New York Times column David Brooks proposes a model for unifying a United States that centrifugal force seems to be driving apart:

Last week I went to Houston to see the rodeo. That rodeo is not like other rodeos. It’s gigantic. It goes for 20 days. There can be up to 185,000 people on the grounds in a single day and they are of all human types — rural ranchers, Latino families, African immigrants, drunken suburban housewives out for a night on the town.

When you are lost in that sea of varied humanity, you think: What on earth holds this nation together? The answer can be only this: Despite our differences, we devote our lives to the same experiment, the American experiment to draw people from around the world and to create the best society ever, to serve as a model for all humankind.

Unity can come only from a common dedication to this experiment. The American consciousness can be formed only by the lab reports we give one another about that experiment — the jeremiads, speeches, songs and conversations that describe what the experiment is for, where it has failed and how it should proceed now.

One of my favorites of these lab reports is Walt Whitman’s essay “Democratic Vistas,” published in 1871. The purpose of democracy, Whitman wrote, is not wealth, or even equality; it is the full flowering of individuals. By dispersing responsibility to all adults, democracy “supplies a training school for making first class men.” It is “life’s gymnasium.” It forges “freedom’s athletes” — strong and equal women, courageous men, deep-souled people capable of governing themselves.

I honestly do not see how you can read “Democratic Vistas” and take from it the message Mr. Brooks is trying to beat into it. Here’s its kernel, not the fragments quoted by Mr. Brooks:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy.* I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help’d, though often harm’d, by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp’d than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv’d, the fervid, the absolute faith.

or, in other words, Whitman is calling for a flourishing of high culture. Note, too, that Whitman sees “the basket of deplorables” as the seed from which the America he envisions will grow rather than the bustling urban culture. When you look around you is that what you see? Or do you see a fervid overgrown jungle of popular and commercial culture, ephemeral, soon to be forgotten? That’s a basis for fragmentation into physical or virtual tribes not for national unity.

Returning to a common theme here, the only possible basis for national unity is a common commitment to the themes of our national holy scriptures—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and a few others. In them you may search but will fail to find a call for self-realization, freedom from having your beliefs challenged, or the provision for every want but those are today’s rallying cries.