Our Divided Political Heart Read Online Free Page A

as speculations of academics far removed from the heart of American life—or, most succinctly these days, as “socialism.”
    What’s forgotten is that challenges to individualism are as American as individualism itself. Robert Bellah and his colleagues were right in their seminal book
Habits of the Heart
to argue that “ there is a profound ambivalence about individualism in America among its most articulate defenders.” In our literature and popular culture, they argued, “we find the fear that society may overwhelm the individual and destroy any chance of autonomy unless he stands against it, but also recognition that it is only in relation to society that the individual can fulfill himself.”
    This dualism is a dominant theme of our national narrative, and American politics has always used our democratic system to manage periodic corrections in the ebb and flow between individualism and community. When the country leans too far toward a radical form of individualism, as it did during the Gilded Age after the Civil War, our politics typically produces a communitarian correction. And when the community seems to demand too much, our persistent streak of individualism reasserts itself—as it did in 1933, when the nation ended Prohibition, perhaps the most farreaching and least successful communitarian experiment in our history.
    The unusual American balance between individualism and community helps explain why the United States never gave rise to an enduring socialist or social democratic movement, as did every other industrialized democracy. A relatively strong and popular Socialist Party did win a substantialfollowing during the Progressive Era, and socialist trade unionists and intellectuals influenced the American mainstream for generations after. But over time, left-wing movements came to do most of their work inside the two major parties—within both during the Populist and Progressive years, and primarily within the Democratic Party during and since the New Deal.
    Nor have we had an explicitly religious party, akin to European or Latin American Christian Democratic parties. Christian nationalist parties failed in the United States. The Social Gospel movement that inspired so many progressive Christians was influential, but it never sought to form a party of its own. Socially oriented Catholicism was hugely influential in the labor movement and on the New Deal, but it did not inspire the creation of a separate party, as it did in Chile, Italy, Germany, and so many other Latin American and European nations. In recent years, conservative Christians have played an important role among Republicans, but they have not formed a party of their own.
    The fact that the United States has neither a feudal past (except, to some degree, in the old slave South) nor a well-developed anti-clerical tradition helps to explain why socialist and Christian parties never gained a foothold: a response to feudalism was critical to the rise of socialism, and a reaction to anti-clericalism often bred religious parties. But it’s also true that American politics consistently produced its own brand of tempered communitarianism that filled the space occupied in other countries by socialist and religious parties. The American synthesis was not explicitly Christian, yet Christianity and prophetic Judaism are embedded in our national ethos, and the Old Testament prophets have been a staple of American reformist rhetoric from the beginning. And as the historians James Kloppenberg and Daniel Rodgers have shown, American-style communitarianism often made use of European ideas—from socialists, social democrats, and the British New Liberals—even as European progressives borrowed from our intellectual arsenal. Our politics have never been as indifferent or resistant to ideas from abroad as either critics of an alleged American parochialism or celebrators of our uniqueness would suggest, and Europe, in turn, has long been open to our intellectual