Renewing American Civilization: Class Ten Citizenship And Community In 21st Century America

Reinhardt College

March 11, 1995

The following is a special program produced by RCTV, Reinhardt College television, in Waleska, Georgia. From Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, this is "Renewing American civilization." In this, the final of 10 class presentations, congressman Newt Gingrich, an adjunct professor at Reinhardt College, will continue his course, which presents the foundational principles necessary to the renewal of American civilization. This week's lesson, Citizenship in America, focuses on civic leadership, communities, and the voluntary community sector as a third part of the American public-private society.

Welcome to Reinhardt College for the last session. I want to welcome the students of Mind Extension University all over America. And I understand, also, parts of Canada and Mexico. And, of course, we give permission to videotape it and keep it and share with your friends and neighbors.

Now, let me just say -- remind everyone that the five pillars of American civilization are, first, the Historic Lessons Of American Civilization. Second, Personal Strength. Third, Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise. Fourth, the Spirit of Invention and Discovery. And, Fifth, Quality as Defined by Deming. And that these are the five core things. We spent two hours on each one looking at how they apply to America. And then we have been applying them to four areas to look at how the pillars apply. And that the four areas we've been applying them to are, first, the third wave and American civilization. Second, creating American jobs in the world market. Third, replacing the culture of violence and poverty with a culture of productivity and safety. And, fourth, citizenship and community in the 21st century.

And, of course, this is the fourth of these areas and the last class. And today's class is going to be on citizenship and community in the 21st century. And I think this is, in a sense, the capstone class. Because community and citizenship, I believe, are the keystones to the entire course. Without commitment to community and citizenship, nothing works.

And I think one of the things that Dr. Kathleen Minnix and I have concluded is that we have to drive very hard at the cultural framework and at getting across the idea, these are not things your government can necessarily pass a law about. They're a part of your culture. They're part of the background framework. They're the way you wake up and how you think about things in the morning. They're not what the IRS does to you or what the FBI does to you.

Now, this entire two hours is going to emphasize a level of activism people are not used to. And part of our core discussion is going to be that you can't solve our problems within the framework of a government-dominated, bureaucratically delivered system. That in a free society, you have to rely on the culture, on individuals, on values in a way that is different than, what does the government do? And a lot of people will say, "well, gee I'm too busy," or, "I really can't afford it."

And I want to take you back to something we used very early in the course which we thought was so powerful emotionally, and we frankly liked so much, we want to use it again. And I want you all the way through, this -- we're going to show you once again Chamberlain talking to the main mutineers.

Remember, it's on the way to Gettysburg. The regiment had mutinied because they thought they had signed up for two years, and the government had now decided it was for three years, and so they were -- they thought they were legitimately standing on their rights, that they could not be coerced into serving. They'd volunteered, they'd fought for two years, but they didn't want to be coerced into serving.

And so the army on the edge of Gettysburg has said to Chamberlain, who is himself from Maine, that these folks are now in your charge. Do with them whatever you want to. And the officer who comes by says, "you can shoot them if you want to because they're mutinied, they're refusing to keep doing things." I want you just to remember what we're going to talk about for the next two hours is to ask a few hours of time, to ask a little bit of commitment.

And as you listen to what Chamberlain is talking about and you think about what he was asking them to do as citizenship, I just want you to put in context the person who says, "well, I'm really too busy. "I really don't have the time." Or, "that would really be awkward," and consider how tiny the request we're making for people to be citizens compared to what Chamberlain had to ask. So let's take a minute or two and let's look at Chamberlain just before Gettysburg.

>>I've been talking with Private Bucklin.  He's told me about your problem.
>>There's nothing I can do today.  We're moving out in a few minutes.
>>We'll be moving all day.  I've been ordered to take you men with me.  I'm
>>told that -- that if you don't come, I can shoot you.  Well, you know I
>>won't do that.  Maybe somebody else will, but I won't, so that here's the
>>situation.  The whole Reb army is up that road a ways waiting for us, so
>>this is no time for an argument like this, I tell you.  We could surely
>>use you fellows.  We're now well below half strength.  Whether you fight
>>or not, that's -- that's up to you.  Whether you come along is -- is,
>>well, you're coming.

You know who we are, that we're doing here, but if you're going to fight along side us, there's a few things I want you to know. This regiment was formed last summer, in Maine. There were 1,000 of us then. There are less than 300 of us now. All of us volunteered to fight for the union, just as you did. Some came mainly because we were bored at home, thought this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die.

This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history, you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them, or just because they like killing. But we are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, all of it. Not divided by a line between slave states and free. All the way from here to the pacific ocean. No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me. What we're fighting for in the end, we're fighting for each other.

Sorry. I didn't mean to preach. You go ahead, you talk for a while. If you -- if you choose to join us, you want your muskets back, you can have them. Nothing more will be said by anybody anywhere. If you choose not to join us, well, you can come along under guard, and when this is all over, I will do what I can to see you get a fair treatment, but for now, we're moving out. Gentlemen, I think if we lose this fight, we lose the war. So if you choose to join us, I'll be personally very grateful.

>>Now, we used that to try to drive home the point that, you know, it's not
>>just enough to say, "we want to honor our veterans," or, "we sure are
>>proud that they're willing to die for freedom." But the question is, in a
>>sense, from Valley Forge through the war between the states, to San Juan
>>hill, to the troops at Chateau-Thierry in World War I, to Guadal Canal at
>>Normandy all the way up, what are you prepared to do to now to live out
>>what they sacrificed for?

And so in a context, in a sense -- and I think this is ultimately a moral argument. You cannot have a free society which lacks courage. And the courage isn't just, well, if it was a real battle and I was there and I had to stand, you know, of course I'd get up and fight. Nonsense. The question is, are you prepared to spend some time every month, some time every day or every week, are you willing to be a citizen in peacetime to actually use the freedom that your parents or grandparents bought for you in wartime? And we want to drive this home.

I should also say I want to correct something. The last time we used this, I misspoke myself. Chamberlain was not at the -- did not meet with Lee. Grant and Lee met alone in a private home in the county seat of Appomattox. However, two days later, when the Confederate army -- the army of Northern Virginia surrendered, quote, the road leading into town was lined by federal soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain."

Chamberlain had been picked for this duty. He had won the medal of honor, he'd been severely wounded, they thought he would die. He had consistently been courageous. And at, "the impressive sight of the approaching soldiers, Chamberlain was so moved that he recorded, quote, I thought it imminently fitting to show some token of our feeling. And he instructed his officers to bring their troops to the position of the marching salute as each body of the confederates passed. When General Gordon rode opposite him, Chamberlain had the bugle blown to bring the line to attention preparatory to executing the marching salute movement successfully by regiment."

And so you had Chamberlain, who is an American, sees himself as an American, who understands the tragedy of the Civil War, which is that it's between Americans, consciously, much as grant had two days earlier trying to communicate this sense of mutual respect, of rebonding the country.

And Chamberlain's quite a remarkable person. He goes back to Maine, becomes governor, becomes President of Bowdon college, and dies, I think, at 84 still suffering from the wound which had never quite healed from the war. But I'm not asking anybody to be Chamberlain. I mean, very -- you get one or two Chamberlains in a generation. What I am suggesting is that we have to bring into peacetime civilian life a sense of responsibility for our society.

Now, because we're going to talk about our society, we're going to try out something some of you may have seen before. This is an old consultant's gimmick. This is the nine dot problem, called because there are nine dots. With me so far? I don't want to get too far ahead of you. I think we can -- can we put the nine dots up as Chyron there? Okay, here we go. You're going to see the nine dot problem on TV. See, somebody else did these because they wanted them to be square, and when I do the nine dots, they don't necessarily come out square.

Okay, now, what I want all of you to do is draw nine dots, three rows of three. Very important psychological gimmick. And I want you -- making sure they're all lined up just like they were in the Chyron. I want you now draw four lines, and the pencil can't come up, though, because you can cover them in three lines. You're going to cover all nine dots in four lines. And you can cross the lines if you want to, but they've got to be straight lines. All of you, you look frozen. It's okay. If it doesn't work the first time, do another set of nine dots. I mean, the trick is to try it.

>>Can you solve it? At the rate you're going, I'm not sure you're-- who
>>knows how to do it? That's because you two took the course.  Tell us how
>>you do it.

>>you go outside the lines.

>>you've got to go outside the lines.

>>go outside what?

>>got to go outside the --

>>all of you listen very carefully.  You have to go outside --

>>you have to work outside the structure that you've created.

>>It's not a line.  What happens is people psychologically create a box.
>>There are no -- there's no box.  The people -- you can go back -- this is
>>really a very powerful -- it's from a book by Watslovic, et al., Called
>>"Change Problem Perception/Problem Resolution."  It's a brilliant opening
>>up to your own mind.  This is why we have trouble talking about balancing
>>the budget or we have trouble talking about replacing the culture of
>>poverty or we have trouble dealing with all sorts of questions, is that
>>people start out, they mentally impose the boundary.

The solution is actually, you have to go outside twice, but there is no outside. See, watch, they're going to show it right there. This is one of Bob Head's fancy Chyrons. Now, notice how what you create here is two elbows that are totally legitimate given the definition of the problem, but that you have psychologically --

>>I know.  They said, also a map to the alien's home from that.

>>got to go outside the lines.

>>To understand, so that people who are not in this room can understand
>>this, one of the cameras, pick up his shirt.  Pick up his shirt for a
>>second.  Come on.  Stand there and get him on camera.  The guys here have
>>made t-shirts of the newspaper story about me meeting with an alien, and
>>so that's why they're off - this is alien week at Reinhardt College.  But
>>if I can bring you back to this more normal thing here, okay.

>>yeah, right.

>>This last week is getting a little punchy, I can tell.  What people do is
>>people artificially create a framework.  Now -- and I'll tell you, it
>>took me two years of teaching this class to figure this out.  And one of
>>the break points was, I knew we were doing this last section wrong.  And
>>I couldn't get out of it.  I mean, I kept coming in, it was too
>>political, political in the sense of talking about politics, talking
>>about government, talking about citizenship written narrowly.

And then three things -actually, three things happened. One was I went and talked to an Amway group of about 15,000 people, and when we left, my wife Marianne said to me, "that speech was wrong." She said, "you reduced their citizenship to voting." She said, "these folks are citizens when they work all day. "they're citizens when they take care of their children. "they're citizens when they're involved in Boy Scouts." She said, "they're putting in hours of citizenship every week, and you didn't talk to them about what they were doing right." And a light went on in my head, and I said, I think I'm beginning to understand how I'd gotten trapped inside my own nine dots here, because I didn't have a good enough definition.

The second thing, which I'll show you in a second, is that Gordon Woods developed -- helped me understand the model that the Founding Fathers used and that Jefferson, in particular, used for thinking about America.

And the third thing that happened was I read Olasky's book on "the tragedy of American compassion," and Olasky says that in the 19th century, there was so much volunteerism that there was one volunteer for every two poor people.

Now, you think about the scale of involvement, the number of people who thought, I better put in part of Saturday -- remember, these folks did not have an easier life than we do. They did not work shorter hours. They didn't have more labor-saving devices at home. They didn't have fewer malls to go to. And, you know, I mean, these people put in very long hours in a fairly hard life and still found time to be volunteers and citizens, because they thought it was how they defined being an American.

And so I began to realize that we have been trying to solve some problems by being trapped inside the dots in a way that doesn't work. And that you've got to have the moral courage to break out and rethink it.

Now, what compounded that, frankly, was sitting down and having dinner one night with Dr. Gordon woods, who's written two brilliant works. One, "the Origins of the American Revolution." And the other on "the Radicalism of the American Revolution." And as we talked, he was trying to explain to me why Jefferson so passionately believed in limited government. That it wasn't that he was just anti-government, it was that he was pro-freedom.

And as we talked about it, it seemed to me you could represent it in a box that had four quadrants. That the first and most important one was culture and society. That is, when you get up in the morning, who are you? What expectations do you have of yourself? What expectations do you have of others? Do you expect to get up and go to work? Do you expect to obey the law? Do you expect to participate fully in your community? What -- and what do you teach your children and your neighbors and your friends? How do you begin every day all day? What are you modeling as a way to behave?

The second was civic responsibility. That you had to have a sense of your church or your synagogue, your volunteer association, your involvement in your community, your help in creating new opportunities, new philanthropies. You know, if you don't have a public library, voluntarily getting together to create one. Benjamin Franklin is sort of the greatest of the founding fathers at this, because he found -- he creates the American philosophical association, the first fire department, the first, I think, fire insurance company, the first public library in north America. Helps found the post office. And it goes through a whole range of these things where he just -- whenever he'd see a need, he'd get a group together. And so he left behind him in Philadelphia this trail of things where people got together because of Franklin and did something good.

And again, you see it, for example, in American volunteer fire departments, which are a huge network of people who get together to do good things.

The third box is free markets and the pursuit of happiness. Remember that Jefferson almost wrote "the Pursuit of Property," and that the Founding Fathers had -- in the Declaration of Independence, that the Founding Fathers had a very deep belief that you had to be able to own property, you had to be able to pursue better economic future.

And, now, it's within this framework that you get limited effective government. This is not weak government. People misinterpreted Jefferson. He is, after all, a man who bought half a continent in the Louisiana purchase, sent Lewis and Clark across the continent on a scientific expedition, and sent the marines to Tripoli. But the point is, when governm ent gets bigger, it crowds out the other three. When government takes over the job of acculturating, so we say, "well, I'm not really going to teach my children anything. "that's the teacher's job. "I pay taxes. "let a bureaucrat do it." When government starts trying to create jobs, which it's inherently bad at, when government starts to take over what historically -- and this is Olasky's whole point about welfare. That government, when it becomes unlimited, becomes ineffective, and in the process, it crowds out the free society.

So what today's session is about is, how do we reestablish, in particular, the core values of our culture and society, and then how do we reassert for every American civic responsibility? And we wanted to start with Chamberlain to just say, you know, how can you with any sense of moral good faith tell us you're too busy? It's too hard? It's too much? If you're going to be free, you have to be willing to bear some of the responsibility of freedom.

Now, we're also not going to talk about government. We're talking about community, which is a much broader idea. Community is the broad system within which we live, which nourishes us and upon which we depend. So we're really concerned about the entire community.

And if you'll notice, by the way, the very language of the constitution is a community language. The preamble to the Constitution says, "we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." But notice the broad goals, the broad interest. The Founding Fathers did not intend, therefore, to automatically do all that through a bureaucracy. But they wanted a government which reinforced the general direction of society.

Another way to look at it is that citizenship is the duties, obligations, rights, and responsibilities necessary to maintain community. Not necessary to maintain government. Notice the difference. This is not about paying taxes. It's about doing what you need. And I would suggest to you that people have struggled with the concepts of community and citizenship for all of recorded time.

If you go back and look at Hammurabi the Lawgiver or at Moses, if you read Leviticus and the 10 commandments in that whole process as the rise of an effort to come to grips with an urban community. If you look at Confucius' work in China around 400 BC. , The rise of Athenian democracy with Aristotle and Plato and the effort to figure out, how do people live together? The Roman Republic and the effort to create an orderly world for the entire Mediterranean.

And then if you come to the capitol, you can see a reproduction of the Magna Carta written in 1215 in which the English barons say to King John that if you will concede that you can only get money from us with our consent -- this was a very small group, now. This was not average people, this was not even knights. This was only the great barons. But they wrote what was called the Magna Carta, or great charter, and it's the beginning of the change. It's a process by which you begin to have the government recognizing that the consent of the governed matters. And that taxes have to be given because people are willing to be taxed, as opposed to the divine right of kings.

The English Civil War, which was a terrible period in British history in the mid 16th century -- 17th century in which you begin again to wrestle with this, what's the power of the king? What's the power of the House of Commons? How do people defend their rights? And many of our laws, much of our constitution, defending you, for example, against being tortured -you can't be forced to testify against yourself -- comes directly out of the English Civil War, and in the sense of the king using what was called a star chamber, where you could be taken in and held without Habeas Corpus and tortured to force you to confess.

And so a lot of the lessons of that period get embedded in the American system. And then, of course, the American revolution and the Founding Fathers and the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution become our codification of the lessons of freedom.

And you have to -- again, I want to come back to the notion that America is a unique civilization, and that part of our uniqueness is the radical statement of where our power comes from. Because, remember, you start with the divine right of kings. Then the barons sort of fight and say, "you've got to give us power." Then you have the English self war, and there's a tension between commoners and king. But the American system breaks loose and goes to something very different. The American system says, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

So the assertion is made at the beginning of the American political experience that power comes from God to you, and then you loan power to the government. Which is why you go back to the constitution, we the people decide to form the government. This was not, God gives the king the power, the king then tells you what to do. This is, God gave you the power, you then decided to loan it back to form a common government. It's the most radical statement of human rights, I think, ever written in terms of where power comes from.

Now, the challenge, however, and what we have not been teaching, I think, since the mid 1960s, is that freedom requires personal strength. You have to have integrity, courage, hard work, perseverance, discipline, respect for yourself and for others, and responsibility. And here you get into one of those great test questions about how the world works.

If you try to design a government which does not have those values, and I want -- see if they can put that back up just for one second real quick, John. Because I want everybody who's watching this on tape and television to also get a sense of this. What we've tried to do is we've tried for the last 30 years to design a government for people who don't have courage, won't work hard, lack perseverance, have no discipline, have no self- respect, and are not willing to be responsible.

So we say, how can we define a welfare state for an irresponsible victim without any hope of a better future? And surely you can't actually challenge them to have self-respect and discipline. The whole core of this entire course is, that's hopeless. You cannot have a free society in which you have no integrity, no courage, you don't have a work ethic, you're not willing to persevere, you have no discipline, and you lack respect for yourself and for others and you're not willing to be responsible for your actions.

It is impossible. You can't build the formula. And this is at the core of everything we've tried to say for 20 hours here. That if you start over and you say, okay, I'm going to stipulate that's what America has to be like, now how do I design a government that works, then you can get there.

And when I talk about big words like "transformation," this is an example. Designing a government for victims who are irresponsible and unable to take care of themselves is so different from designing government for people with self-respect, hard work, and perseverance, that they're two different worlds and they're not compatible.

Now, let me give you, again, an example of somebody who personified this commitment and who understood this, and let's look for a second at citizenship as defined by Max Cleland, the secretary of state of Georgia.

>>but ultimately, you've got to have a passion for it.  You've got to
>>really believe that this system is yours, that it's truly yours.  That
>>seems to be the toughest thing to sell.  That's what makes people so
>>cynical today, is they really don't believe that.  They think, likeJack
>>Parr said, the comedian, he said, "I don't vote."  He said, "it only
>>encourages them."  The Greek word for "citizen" is "politicos."  And the
>>word "apathy" comes from the Greek word meaning "idiot."  So the Greeks
>>felt that if you didn't participate, you were an idiot.  And that if you
>>did participate, you had a high standard, you were a politicos, you were
>>a citizen.  And that was to be respected.  I think that's what we're
>>after.

The Founding Fathers really felt that democracy itself was inherently fully demanding of participation. The story goes that Ben Franklin was rushed after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and they said, "Mr.. . Franklin, what kind of government do we have? " And he said, "you have a republic, if you can keep it." Democracy is built on the little person. God knows it's not built on corporate and labor interests and special interests and lobbyists. We have all of those players, but that's not what gives me hope. What gives me hope is that individual citizen who has nothing to gain and still finds his or her way to the polls and makes the -- and takes their best shot. Wow! You lose that, and you've lost a country.

>>Now, I think we came in, frankly, pretty good danger of losing that.  And
>>again, we want to emphasize this notion that when you come back over here
>>to culture and society, it starts here.  Do you teach your children to be
>>responsible?  Do you teach them to work hard?  Do you teach them to tell
>>the truth?  This is why Washington and the cherry tree wasn't -- whether
>>it was factually true or not, it was morally true.  It was useful to say
>>to young kids, "don't lie."  And compare that to a lot of the situation
>>ethics nonsense that goes -- that passes for wisdom today.

Similarly, here, is it your expectation that as you get more successful, that means you can leave for the lake on the weekend and skip all your civic responsibilities, and as long as you're selfishly fine, you're okay? Or does that mean we need to build a little sense of guilt in that says, hey, what have you done for your country lately? What have you done for your neighbors? If God's been good to you, what are you doing to help somebody who's had a tougher time? These two things are at the core of this.

When we talk about citizenship, we get to hear a fourth. You design this after you've designed the first three. In that framework, citizenship and community are far broader than government and politics. And we've got to start with the notion of looking at how broad it is. You know, if you think about it, community life, working, raising a family, participating in religious activities, volunteerism, these are at the core of what de Tocqueville described as America, and these are at the core of what we have to be willing to reassert is at the essence of this country.

So I'm more interested in, how much time are you willing to put in to rejuvenating America, not how much can I raise your taxes to rejuvenate America. Because I don't think hiring another bureaucrat to replace a free citizen gets the job done. Just as in education, if we don't convince the parents to care for their children and we don't convince the parents to carry that their kids learn, it's very hard to substitute for that kind of psychological commitment, which leads to, I think, some key questions, are you a citizen? What do you do? How do you live out your citizenship? What is your community? And how do you help renew it?

And, of course, one of the points I made last week is our community ultimately should be every citizen in this country. Every child is an American child. Every neighborhood is an American neighborhood. And so we have to somehow draw people together.

Now, Woodrow Wilson described this in a way that I thought was just tremendous, and talked about the notion of the refugees who come to America having an obligation to live out their new Americanism, and he talked about the idea that people who came to America were seeking freedom. And that in that process of seeking freedom, they had an opportunity to continue to expand. So he actually said, in a way, your love of freedom as an immigrant increases our love of freedom, because sometimes we've inherited it and we lose some of the spirit of freedom.

Similarly, in "American Civilization," in the newspaper this month on the front page, they have a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald which is just interesting. Fitzgerald, who's often a cynic, said the following and wrote the following in his diaries. He said, "America is a willingness of the heart." I want you to just think psychologically about that concept. That it's -- that America is about a heart. It's about a sense that's romantic. In fact, I would argue that citizenship and community are the historic lessons of American Civilization. That you can't understand what America's like unless you look at the wagon train, you look at the pilgrims coming over together in a ship, you look at the barn-raising.

If you saw the movie "Witness," a wonderful scene of the Amish raising the barn, and realized that was a standard 17th, 18th, 19th century scene in America. That in many ways, America's more about the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, Big Brother/Big Sister. It's about people working together more than about the lone individual living in an isolated kind of environment.

Ultimately, the essence of community is spiritual, and the essence of citizenship is moral. And I think because for a long period of time we went through sort of a secular fetish where people didn't want to delve in and explore this, it's been very hard to communicate.

I think I mentioned in here one time that I was reading Gary wills' description of George Washington in his book on inventing America, which is his study of the Declaration of Independence, and he says that modern academics find it very hard to understand Washington because he was a spiritual, psychological force, because it was his character that shaped everything. It wasn't his writings, it wasn't his rationality. It was the fact that he was Washington.

And I realized all of a sudden there was a profound insight into all of modern academics, that as it drives out the romantic, as it drives out the poetry that makes America so remarkable, as it shrink -- as it tries desperately to shrink the Founding Fathers, and in Flexner's new edition of his one- volume biography of Washington, he has an almost bitter section where he talks about the way in which in the modern era, there's an effort to reduce Washington to wooden teeth and a stiff personality, and that it's a -- in Flexner's mind, it's an assault on the concept of America, because, in fact, Washington was a very powerful central organizing figure for 200 years.

People said, "what is the spirit of freedom? " It's Washington giving up the army to go back to Valley Forge -- I mean, to go back to Mt. Vernon. It's Washington saying his farewell address, when he could have won a third term. It's Washington literally dedicating his life to the cause of freedom. Spending seven years away from home fighting the war.

And that people used to know that and they used to teach it from first grade on, and there was a sense of, this is what it takes to be free.

And, of course, none of us are going to be Washington. But every child can try to be honest. Every child can try to have courage. Every child can learn perseverance. Every child can learn the work ethic.

And so you have this sense of, how do you rebuild and reestablish the spiritual and moral framework? In fact, if you'll look at two recent books, "the Demoralization of Society" by Getrude Himmelfarb, and "Building a Community of Citizens" by Don Eberly, which as you know, we use here in the course, both of them begin to make this point that our core problem is not government. Our core problem -- so it's not down here in this box four. Our core problem is culture and society. That until we're prepared to have leadership that hammers away at the need to rebuild the spiritual and moral fabric of citizenship, we can't solve it over here with government.

Bureaucracy cannot replace culture as a way of organizing a society. And, in fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. That the genius of America lies in liberating each citizen to seek community and to define citizenship in the broadest possible way. So take church, synagogue, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Rotary, Kiwanis, business and professional women, the Audubon society, the Friends of Zoo Atlanta, the Appalachian Trail Club, the Atlanta Lawn Tennis, the Hash House Harriers, they're all ways of organizing. Anybody here know anything about the Hash House Harriers?

>>no.

>>some of you have taken the class.  Do you belong?

>>no.  I've read about it.  I'm not up to that kind of running.

>>My younger daughter and her husband have run marathons, and there's a
>>group founded in the 1920s in Malaya by British soldiers who would go out
>>on Fridays, and they'd carry a bag of flour and they'd send a guy out
>>running, and he would drop it along the -he'd drop a little flour along
>>through the jungle, and they would chase about it, and after three to
>>five miles, which was their standard route, they'd end up at a bar.  And
>>they described themselves as drinkers with a running problem.  And, I
>>think there are four clubs in the Atlanta area.

This is an example of the information age and of Toffler's Third Wave. They have an 800 number. You pay $3. 00 a year. It is a worldwide system of runners. When my daughter and her husband went to London and he ran in the marathon, the Hash House Harriers had a relief station part of the way through so you could stop and get a drink as you were running in the marathon, and then later they found a whole group who were, I think, from the isle of Wight, and they went out with them in the evening. And they had this common bond. And it is just all sorts of unusual people who like to run and who get together, and they go do it.

Now, my point is, America is about the right of a free people. And we have led the planet in this sense. That government gets out of your face so you can organize your life to do whatever neat thing you like. You like to go spot whales? Go join a club that goes and spots whales. You like to hang glide? Go hang glide. You want to go help people in hospitals? Form a group that goes -- you know, that the genius of the system is to liberate the energy to allow you.

And again, let me go back to what the pathology of Hollywood doesn't get today if you see the Hollywood movies, which are in many ways just -- would be -- would I think literally, in many ways, be seen as sick by any kind of reasonable -- you know, "Pulp Fiction" and "Natural Born Killers" and this kind of thing. Because they are describing a society which is ignomic, in which people are so isolated from each other that they don't have a clue how to live in a common human decent system.

And so the elite culture of Hollywood doesn't get America. It doesn't understand how America works. In fact, and this is one of the great paradoxes, the freedom to be alone becomes the freedom to join. We don't have to have the government force people together. If you allow people -- because people are natural social animals -- if you get out of their way, don't raise their taxes, give them enough take-home pay, let them have a chance to go do it, the natural bias of people is to work with each other.

And so you see in America, and it was the point de Tocqueville drove at hardest, was that he was stunned as a Frenchman at the way in which all of this freedom didn't become, sit around, don't do anything, get drunk, and be indigent. It became, be energetic, be excited, pursue your dreams, have a wonderful life. Go do something that's fun. And fun could be becoming a millionaire. Fun can be being the best golfer. I mean, fun is how you define it. The pursuit of happiness. Which is a very broad statement.

Now, it led to an extraordinary explosion of energy and creativity. And yet joining and citizenship in America have been built on a sense of duty. Again and again for 200 years, you had people saying, of course you're going to be active. Of course you're going to do something. That's what citizenship requires. And you didn't have a sense of dignity if you weren't involved as a civic leader. You wanted to be involved.

And if you go back and look at the movies of the '30s and '40s, you see all sorts of examples where people would go out and they would organize a better future and they would do things that were positive, and they had a sense of, how do we come together in order to improve our collective future?

Marvin Olasky picks it up when he points out that the word "compassion" means "to suffer with." And his whole concern is that in the 19th century, it wasn't enough just to pay taxes. In the 19th century, you also had an obligation to give of yourself. That you had to be involved. And that true compassion didn't mean just writing the check or giving the homeless person five bucks. True compassion meant stopping and saying, why are you on the street? What can I do to help you?

And, in fact, deliberately not giving the five bucks until you found out how you could help them and begin the process of moving them into a better future on the premise that if you gave them the five bucks without knowing, you could actually be buying the alcohol that killed them or buying the drugs that killed them. You could actually be worsening their life by a phony compassion that really was designed to make you feel good.

Morris Schechtman describes it brilliantly when he says the difference between caring and caretaking. If I truly care, I have to stop and find out what's wrong. If I'm just caretaking, I do something for you that makes me feel good about myself. It may ruin you, but that's not my fault. There's a huge difference between caring and caretaking, and in our lifetime, caretaking has driven out a lot of caring.

Much of this goes back, frankly, to the very nature of the religious underpinnings and the moral underpinnings. I mean, think about, first of all, the religious origins of the English Civil War, which was a war over the nature of man's relationship to God. Think about the notion of and Methodism and the great awakening. Look at the spiritual and religious underpinnings of the abolitionist movement, the sense of the progressives that they were carrying out a doctrine of Christian concern. That what they saw as their effort was bringing religion into civic life. The Civil Rights movement, the profound reason that it is reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. That there was a moral force, a moral basis for what he was doing.

Eisenhower's description of what happened in Europe. His book is called "Crusade in Europe." His statement to the troops at Normandy, "we have embarked upon a crusade," a religious phrase, a sense of moral superiority. The way in which we tried to do the war on poverty and the war against drugs implies that these are bad enough things to wage war on. That there's a decisive moral difference.

And, in fact, I would argue that there has always been a deep moralistic force in American society. And that as over the last 30 years an anti-religious bias built into both the elite culture and to elite institutions, it undermined and it misunderstood the core nature of the moral force. This is not about morality in the small sense of, do you drink or do you dance? This is about a deeper sense, are your commitments ultimately coming from a spiritual sense of God, or is it just secular? Is that person -- and again, think about it in terms of shooting or raping somebody. If you truly believe that other person has been endowed by God and is equally legitimately authentically a creature of God, now to attack them is a dramatically higher threshold.

Whereas, if you think they're just randomly gathered protoplasm, and why not, I mean, blow them away? What the heck? And if you watch a lot of the sicker parts of the Hollywood elite in terms of the movies they make and the things they describe, it's clearly man as protoplasm, human beings as protoplasm.

Whereas, the core belief system that made America unique was, in fact, moral and spiritual, and I would suggest it is that moral commitment which has sustained citizenship and a commitment to community. That as de Tocqueville said, America is to be found in its churches and in its volunteer activities, not in its government.

Now, let's take just a minute and look at Jimmy Carter, who really, I think, in a speech he gave during the Atlanta Project process, gave us a sense of how this all weaves together into a basic framework.

>>I was in a middle school not long ago, bright kids asking me questions
>>that were very hard to answer.  Stimulating questions, questions I didn't
>>hear anywhere else and wouldn't.  Afterwards, I asked the principal,
>>"what are their main problems here? " She said, "Mr. President, the boys
>>believe that their future success, their status in life, is dependent
>>upon their ownership of a semi-automatic weapon."  And I said, "what
>>about the girls? " She said, "pregnancy is a growing problem.  "what you
>>don't know is that the worst problem is among the sixth graders."  I was
>>shocked.  "the drug pushers and pimps prefer sex with the little girls,"
>>she said.

That's not Bangladesh, and that's not Addis Ababa, and that's not Lusaka. That's Atlanta, Georgia. And the problem is that we don't really know how to relate to people whose 12-year-old daughters get pregnant, who are living just a few hundred yards from where we live a sequestered life. It's no reflection on us except that we need to reach out now in a genuine way individually with our stimulating capability of analyzing complicated problems and say, "let me participate in bringing about a change."

But, you know, what gives me most hope is what I saw yesterday, with homeless people building each other a little tar paper shack, and the 30 formerly homeless mostly alcoholics who are now every day preparing about 350 meals for other homeless people. That's the kind of spirit that can bind us together and bridge the chasm between the rich like us and the poor who are still waiting for a better life. So I'm convinced that the situation is not hopeless. I'm convinced that it's not an impossible dream. The only real failure is not to try.

>>Now, if I could just come back and summarize this first hour for -- very
>>briefly, because I think it is the heart of the course.  America is a
>>romantic, moral, spiritual fantasy.  It's what makes us different.  Take
>>every one of us, drop us off in another country, same body, same mind,
>>and say, "okay, you're not endowed by your creator, you don't have a
>>right to pursue happiness," and we would learn how to change differently.
>>We'd behave differently.

But people come from all over the world here, and they become different. They somehow cross into a magic land where everybody thinks their kids can be president. Everybody thinks their kids can be an NFL quarterback or a ballet star or could do whatever they want to do.

And somehow, what we have to do is come back here as we start to solve problems. What's killed us for 30 years is trying to solve the problems down in this one box, government. And government, by definition, cannot effectively be cultural, because you would have to be a police state.

I mean, you would go nuts if government tried to do the things Olasky wants to do. You'd say, "by what right does some paid bureaucrat tell me about these things? " And yet what Olasky is saying is, you've got to have people involved in civic responsibility so they can then teach the right cultural values, because this is the heart of America, not government.

The heart of America is a mystical belief that each of us is endowed by God, that each of us is unique, and then the living out of that belief to the best of our abilities. And that's what makes us remarkable. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how this fits into the structure of government and politics. (break)

>>Let me pick up -- somebody brought me this little note, I think, from a
>>magazine that sort of starts us back on the same theme.  It's a quote from
>>John Adams, who once explained how the framers of the U.S.  Constitution
>>presupposed the necessity of God's grace for the survival of the new form
>>of government.  He said the following, quote, "our constitution was
>>designed only for a moral and religious people.  "it is wholly inadequate
>>for the government of any other."

Because, again, it goes back to the notion that these three sides have to be working. You've got to have culture and society working, you've got to have civic responsibility, you've got to have free markets and the pursuit of happiness in order to have limited effective government. And as these three decay, the natural pressure of government will be to reach out and take over more and more.

Now, it's going to lead us to some very interesting implications as we go through looking at the structure of government which grows out of this cultural sense of a spiritual and moral society and a free society.

First of all, remember, the Founding Fathers start with the notion that no human is perfect, and none can be fully trusted with power. It's very important. Because again, the modern cynicism expresses itself by saying, either we stipulate that everybody is so sinful that there's no point to worry about it, or if you're not that, then you must be a saint, so the minute we can find out that you're not, we can prove you're -- that you're even worse than somebody who's sinful because you're a hypocrite and sinful, and therefore, nobody has any moral standing to say anything.

Who are you to say that using drugs is bad? Or who are you to say that whatever the next? And you can find case after case of this argument for the inappropriateness of moral assertion. And yet the Founding Fathers knew that if everybody involved in a free society was human, that you had this really core problem. And they said it well in the Federalist Papers. The Founding Fathers understood the dilemma, and they said, quote, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary." And yet since men aren't angels, you need government in order to restrain the passions of men. But by definition, since the government's going to be made up of men, you're now giving the power to restrain to the people who you're trying to restrain.

Lord Acton captured this in the middle of the 19th century. He said, quote, "all power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Notice the drop of the word "tends." Now, this means that people say, well, you're now Speaker of the House. You're talking about yourself. Of course. You think if I had power, forever surrounded by people who wanted me to feel good, and so whatever I did they said, "oh, that's wonderful." "mud looks good on you" is the right response of a sycophant when you fall on your face on a rainy day. And, of course, all power tends to corrupt, and therefore, everybody is susceptible to it. Every person in this room is susceptible to it.

Now, the Founding Fathers faced with that said -- and this is one of the great works of genius in human history. They said, all right, if in order to be free we have to give power to the very people we fear, ourselves, how do we structure it so we don't just create a new tyranny? And this was their answer. The American Constitution, to avoid tyranny, they designed a machine so inefficient that no dictator could force it to work.

This is a very conscious design. And you're going to see it happen with the Contract, because it's going to leave the House, which is designed to be fast. Somebody once said -- there was a quote I saw this week that I thought was a reminder. One of the Founding Fathers had described, he said the House is like a cup of hot coffee, and the Senate is designed to be the cooling saucer that you pour the coffee in.

So when you see the Senate go slower, every one of the Founding Fathers would have said, "yes." And then when you see the bills go down to the president, who may veto them, and that is his right, the Founding Fathers would have said, "yes." And then when the bill's finally passed, it can be taken to the Supreme Court to see whether or not it's constitutional, and the Founding Fathers would have said, "yes." And everybody gripes about it until you get to something like health reform, where a year ago people didn't want it to pass. And guess what? The American Constitution worked.

If we had been a European parliamentary system, we would have passed health reform like that. But in the American system, where an idea gets beaten up at every stage, and you better have a really powerful idea and you better have a lot of people prepared to spend a long time to get it through. And that's not bad if your greatest value's freedom. It's terrible if your greatest value's efficiency. For efficiency's sake, get a good dictator.

For freedom's sake, you've got to start with two notions. One is -- let me walk one more step. Because the corollary of stopping the dictator is that the American system disperses power so thoroughly, we can barely make it work when we want to. Now, you'd better approach all this with a good sense of humor. You'd better say, "well, I guess we're going to get messed up today again." And instead of seeing that as cynical, it's the price of freedom. And you've got to respect that you may have a good idea, but somebody else does, too. And the price of freedom is frustration.

I have two phrases I try to teach people: life is hard. Freedom is frustrating. So when you get up and you say to me, "boy, life is really hard," the answer is, "yes. "next question? " That's the thing we don't teach the poor. Life is hard. You want to succeed? You've got to work. If you're poor, you've got to work harder than people who aren't poor, by definition. And by the way, when you start to succeed, you're still going to be frustrated as long as you're free.

I mean, Ross Perot is a billionaire, and he's frustrated, too. Because there are 260 million of us, and each one of us is endowed by God with certain unalienable rights. So every time you think you've got the right answer, you've now got to convince everybody else. And we don't teach -- I don't believe we teach correctly just how hard and how frustrating and how difficult a free society is. And so it's a little bit like thinking you can play pro football without exercising. We tell people, well, you're a citizen, you have all these rights. Sure, but first you have all these responsibilities. You have to work hard to be a citizen of a free society. And if you're not prepared to work hard, you're not going to keep your rights very long.

And I believe that this frustration is at the heart of the permanent tension between direct democracy and republican representation. It's a very important issue and one you'll see come up in the term limits debate where I favor term limits, but there's still this very real tension. On the one hand, direct democracy says, "okay, how do we feel this week? " We all raise our hand. Let's rush off and do it. The concept of republican representation, which is very clear in the Founding Fathers, is you hire somebody who you send to a central place. They study the issues. They, by definition, learn things you don't learn, because you don't want to -- I mean, you sent them. You didn't send you. You want to be able to go live your life.

They are then supposed to use their judgment to represent you in a republic, which is very different than a direct democracy, and the Founding Fathers are very clear about this. They feared the passion of the moment. They feared the idea that you could establish a dictatorship with a good demagogue and the right six weeks of campaigning, and they wanted to create very hard problems of getting through.

Now, in that context, let me just say that I think Daniel Yankelovich, who really developed this, talks about the difference between public opinion versus coming to public judgment. I found this to be one of the most helpful explanations of what I experience. Public opinion is that you got a call this morning and say, "what do you think about 'x'? " Public judgment is six or eight weeks from now, when you've read about it for a while, you've talked to your neighbors, you've had a discussion at Sunday school, you've chatted about it over lunch, you've listened to somebody talk about it on the radio, and now you've formed an opinion.

There is a huge -- I mean, a judgment. There is an enormous difference between public opinion, what's the snapshot this morning, and public judgment, what do people think after they've talked about it for a while? And fairly consistently, the judgment is more cautious and remarkably smart. I mean, if you look over time at the wisdom of the American people, the system works, but it takes time. Takes six weeks to three months, as a General principle, for the country to talk to itself.

So when you get a poll that says, "well, this morning, 82% said 'x,'" the next question is, "yeah, and what are they going to say after they think about it, after they put it in context, after they talk it out? " Because then they're going to begin to have public judgment.

I believe that the sense of frustration is at the heart of the permanent tension between reform and reality. What you get is people who jump up and they say, "I have a new idea," and they're on fire and they're ready and they're excited. But the fact is that it's going to be slow. It's going to take awhile. It's going to be hard. And it's easy, I think, at that point to break down and to start getting cynical, when, in fact, very often the system's working. It is doing what the Founding Fathers designed it to do. It's making you prove that your reform is strong enough and good enough to really be worth changing and having people have to obey a difference.

One of the things about entrepreneurial free enterprise is that it tries to solve the frustration by applying common sense. That if you think about this model, what the Founding Fathers wanted to do was have as few things as possible in limited effective government. Because they expected it to be slow and frustrating.

So they wanted to decentralize away from the government creating wealth, owning property, what you do with your money. They wanted to decentralize away from the government your right to organize any civic group you want to go and do the things you believe in. They wanted to decentralize away from the government establishing the cultural values of the society. Because here you can allow people to do things very quickly, because they're not government.

But then they wanted to say, now, wait a second. When you start using the power of the state -- and there's a great phrase from Washington where he talks about the danger of the state, and that the power of the state is like fire, that it can burn you and it's very dangerous. And in that framework, they wanted to make sure that this was deliberately limited and deliberately difficult, because they thought it was the power to destroy. And they were very cautious about giving the government power. So tremendous opportunities in the society at large, very hard in the government itself.

Somebody who I think did describe -- and I mentioned this last hour -- somebody who I thought really described the emotion and the spirit and the sense of being an American is Woodrow Wilson. And this is from a speech he gave to a group of brand new citizens who had just become Americans, people who were first- generation immigrants. I think you'll find it very interesting.

>>this is the only country in the world which experiences constant and
>>repeated rebirth.  Other countries depend upon the multiplication of
>>their own native people.  This country is constantly drinking strength
>>out of new sources.  It is as if humanity had determined to see to it
>>that this great nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not
>>lack for the allegiance of the people of the world.

You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States, of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one unless it be to God, certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race. You cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans.

You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American, and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the stars and stripes. My urgent advice to you would be not only always to think first of America, but always also to think first of humanity.

You do not love humanity if you seek to define humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred. It is a very interesting circumstance to me, in thinking of those of you who have just sworn allegiance to this great government, that you were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some expectation of a better kind of life.

No doubt, you have been disappointed in some of us. Some of us are very disappointing. But remember this, if we had grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in. And if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. You are enriching us if you came expecting us to be better than we are.

You have come into this great nation voluntarily seeking something that we have to give, and all that we have to give is this, we cannot exempt you from work. No man is exempt from work anywhere in the world. We cannot exempt you from the strife and the heart-breaking burden of the struggle of the day. That is common to mankind everywhere. We cannot exempt you from the loads that you must carry. We can only make them light by the spirit in which they are carried. That is the spirit of hope. It is the spirit of liberty. It is the spirit of justice.

>>Now, that's Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, talking at a
>>time when we had massive immigration.  I mean, there was an effort to
>>figure out, how do you define this thing we call America?  And, in fact,
>>he is one of the people who defined the modern American tradition of
>>liberty.

But I want to now walk you through what I -- I spent a lot of time thinking about what's gone wrong, and I believe one of the things that's gone wrong is in the core values of the elite. And in particular, in the way in which the elite, whether it's in the academic world or in Hollywood or in the news media, has misunderstood how a free society operates.

And it seems to me that there are two traditions that are in conflict, and I want to walk you through these two. I do it building around two particular individuals who happened to be at the "Baltimore Sun." But I think you can make a pretty strong case that these two traditions are remarkably different.

And the two people I want to use are H. L, Mencken and Frank R. Kent. Now, now, Frank Kent is not well known today, because his tradition was defeated intellectually. Mencken represented the sort of cynical, contemptive humanity kind of view that assumes that everybody is somehow a crook, everybody somehow has failings, everybody somehow is doing something that is contemptible.

Frank Kent was the political reporter in the same period, where Mencken was sort of a social critic, and literary types love him. Frank Kent loved politics. He wrote a book called "the great game of politics."

I was introduced to Frank Kent by reporter-turned-editor named Paul walker who'd been a reporter in the '30s and '40s and then had opened up a paper called the "Harrisburg Home Star," whichwas a weekly give-away paper. And I'd gotten to know him as almost in the William Allen White -- "the Andy Griffith show" model of the local newspaper editor who's a wise man and who's very nice.

And he took me under his arm and he had me read Kent's works, because he said Kent understood how politics really works. We actually have a -- I guess we don't have Kent's book here. But it's out of print now, but it's worth -- it's in libraries. And Kent went out and really looked at and lived with and enjoyed politics. And he was honest about it.

Now, the difference is that the cultural elites despise politics. I believe they despise politics, first of all, because most of the modern cultural elite starts with the Whig reaction to Andrew Jackson. And the Whigs disliked the way in which Jacksonian democracy took over Washington.

In fact, you don't get a really good biography of Jackson for about a century and -- about 140 years, 130 years after he's President. It's only when Schlesinger writes his book which reestablishes Jackson as a precursor to FDR, but for a long period, the Whig historians didn't like Jackson because he represented the rise of populist sheer numbers, democracy in the masses. Then you get what is largely a Protestant, economic elite in the progressive movement reacting to the Catholics who are taking over the big cities.

And so you get this fury that here are these Catholics who are organizing, particularly the Irish, who are organizing the cities and winning, and you get the rise of the Progressive movement, which is a deliberate effort to replace politics with bureaucracy.

And this tradition goes all the way up to present, as you'll see in a minute, and is involved with people like Nader and Common Cause, and is an anti-politics movement. Politics is bad. Raising money is bad. Campaigning is bad. Advertising is bad. Organizing political power is bad. What you really want is some nice, elite intellectual, preferably a good Protestant, who will then make the decisions outside of politics.

Go back and read the writing of the Progressive Movement. It is remarkably anti-democratic, and it says, "we'll do good things by making sure politicians aren't in charge." And Mencken not only had that tradition, but Mencken personally despised people. I think it's fair to say he was a misanthrope. And as you read his diaries and his letters, I mean, Mencken came at life from a standpoint of extraordinary cynicism, and he became for the journalism schools and for much of the modern media the sort of archetype of the good critical cynic who stands aloof from the game and who is all wise and all knowing and all contemptuous.

Now, the problem with that is that cynicism combined with moralism to produce anti-politics. So now you have these morally superior people who are inherently cynical who dislike the process of politics. And it's utterly -- and let me tell you what the distinction is. And it took -- the person who helped me first begin to break this was Theodore White in "the Making of the President" in 1960, where he says of Adlai Stevenson, that Stevenson was like a man who liked the idea of romantic love, but despised the idea of sex. And that he was perfectly willing to become President, but he did not want to do any of the things politicians did to become President.

It was a wonderful paragraph. When I first read it, I had to stop and think, now, what is he getting at here? Well, let me draw the distinction for you. And you can listen to this tone, and you'll instantly know whether you're dealing with an elitist or not. It's the difference between liking people and liking the people.

I am always suspicious when somebody tells me about "the people." Now, tell me you like people, you're willing to go out and spend time with people, you're willing to sit around a table and listen to people, and it's one by one, because that's how people live. Now you've got the makings of a politician. Tell me that you don't really like people, because after all, they're messy and they're confused and they're strange and they have desires.

I mean, it's just -- and it's frustrating. Takes hours. People are very time-consuming, but as an intellectual elitist, you're prepared to help the people. I mean, read editorial writers who love the people. And are quite willing to dictate to them exactly how they should live. Usually from a morally superior position. But my question to them, there's a great phrase, and Martin Luther King, jr. , had led his crusade north to Chicago and ran into the last great old political system, which still exists today. And Mayor Daley held a press conference, and martin Luther King, jr. , went to the press conference and said, "there are people on the south side who don't have running water." And Mayor Daley, said, "what are their names? "

And Dr. King stopped, because that wasn't the correct answer. And he said, "what do you mean, 'what are their names? '" he said, "if there are people on the South Side who don't have running water, I'm the mayor, I want them to have running water. "give me their names. We'll have somebody down there by this afternoon, they'll get running water." He didn't have any names. He was making a rhetorical statement about the people.

This is the -- and I'd never thought about it until today. This is the essence of the Olasky argument. You can't help the homeless. You can help Sam. So when Sam sits there and says, "give me a dime," if you stop and say, "Sam, would you like to work for a little while? "I'll be glad to pay you 20 bucks, but I have some things that need to be fixed. "would you be willing to come over and help? " If Sam then says, "no, I'm too busy begging," you know you shouldn't give him a dime. But you've got to stop, focus, and take care of Sam.

Now, one of the great books -- and the reformers will go nuts at my reciting this -- but it is a great book, "Plunkitt of Tammany hall." Plunkitt was a genuine machine politician. He knew how the machine worked. And late in his career, he told a young reporter, "this is how we did it." And the truth was, in many ways, if you were an immigrant, if you were Catholic in a Protestant world, if you didn't understand the government, if you had a hard time speaking English, if you were a little scared by the world around you, the big-city machines delivered, and they were a world that was different.

Now, if you want to see what I think is -- and I believe in fiction and in learning things, and if you want to see a great way to learn about it, take a look at Edwin O'connor's "the Last Hurrah." I think we have it on Chyron, also. But it is a great book. This is a novel. It's easy reading. It was a movie with Spencer Tracy. And it's about -- based on James Michael Curley, the Mayor of Boston, who was once reelected while in jail. Because their theory was the Protestant lawyers had put him in jail, but he was a good Catholic, and he was going to take care of them. I mean, part of the reason I'm emphasizing this is, a, it's historically true, and, b, as you now look at the rise of Black politicians and Hispanic politicians and Asian politicians, this is nothing new.

In Benjamin Franklin's time, the fight was between the English, the Quakers, who were English but of a particular religious sect, the Germans, and they had all sorts of ethnic fights in Pennsylvania politics before we were a state, when Pennsylvania was still a colony.

So all of these arguments and all these patterns are not new. In Georgia, the fight between the mountain poor who had their own farm and no slaves and the folks down in the plantation area who were very rich and owned slaves, totally different political styles. In Louisiana, you have the Cajuns, you have New Orleans, and you have the North Country, which is Protestant. And it's okay.

Part of the way the American system works is you're allowed to have your own particular group, to be involved, to be active, and this Edwin O'connor's book is a great novel about the last great mayor of his cycle and what the machine was like and how it worked and what he did and why he did it. And you'll learn a lot about the process of a free society. As I mentioned, in Riordan's "Plunkitt of Tammany hall," you really learn how power in a free society really works, and it gives you a real introduction to thinking about it.

In the modern period, I can say as a practitioner, there may be no single novel better about the U.S. Congress than "Advise and Consent." It's about the Senate, but the essence of its lessons on the legislative body are just fabulous. And I reread it in 1990, and I was stunned at how accurate it is and how much -- if you read this, it's as good as any textbook you're going to get.

But the people who like politics, the people who understand individual people -- remember the difference between individual people and the people -- have certain characteristics. People are human. All humans have weaknesses. Politics will involve humans, politicians will have weaknesses. This is like a geometry set of principles, right? It's important to understand that. So when you have the modern scandal mongering, and again, I mean, I did file charges against the sitting Speaker of the House. I did move to expel the member who is a convicted felon. I do think there are lines you draw.

But the general shock of the news media discovering, once again, that everybody in politics is a human being, unlike the reporters, because, of course, you could have -- we didn't do it, but you could have done the same Chyron, people are human. All humans have weaknesses. Reporting will involve humans. Reporters will have weaknesses, which is fine.

I mean, the glory of the system for a guy like Ernie Pyle, who's the greatest war correspondent in World War II, was he knew that. He covered the soldiers with a sense of fondness because they were humans, and he was himself regarded by the soldiers with a sense of fondness because he was a human, too. And so they had a common bond. They didn't have any sense of either one being morally superior, which didn't mean that they weren't fighting to a moral end. But it was the moral end which transcended them. It was not their personal judgments.

Now, a fun book to really get a view of this is Franz de Waal's "chimpanzee politics." Franz de Waal's a Dutchman who's now actually at Emory. This is a study of the chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo. Chimpanzees are primates, they're social animals. They have hierarchical struggles.

The book actually starts with a story about a male gorilla who is very strong and who intimidates another male and two females till the three of them get so mad at him that they bond together and the three of them almost kill him, and they have to take him out of the cage. And -- which is the nature of politics. And you start saying, "all right, tell me about political organisms. "how do they work? " And what you discover is that there are all sorts of trappings, whether it's "Hail to the Chief" before the President walks in, whether it's the Speaker walking in and banging the gavel and saying, "the house is now in order."

And that you begin to sort of -- and you can see it in a room, you can see it -- if you watch C-Span with the sound off when we're voting and just watch the transactions, Marianne says it's like watching kindergarten at recess and all the little kiddies running around and chatting with each other. But it's good for us to relax about the humanness of what we're doing. It's good for us to accept that we're going to get the best 435 humans in the house and the best hundred humans in the Senate and the best human we can for President and Vice-President, and then they're all going to be humans with all the passions, all the confusion, all the complexities, all the ego problems, all the insecurities that are what being human's about, and then you can relax, and you have a much richer and deeper and more interesting experience.

Two really good books on this are both by Edward T. Hall. One is called "the Silent Language," and the other is called "Hidden Communication." What Hall did is he studied, how do people interact nonverbally? How close do people stand? Greeks stand much closer than Germans. What does being on time mean? It means very different for Germans than Brazilians. And you begin to look at different kinds of body language.

I was given by a Texan who had been assigned by Texaco to be the Vice-President of computing. He'd never been out of the state of Texas, and he arrived in Brussels, and he walked in this room and he said about a month later, he figured out that the body language of a Swede and an Italian is radically different. That a Swede can be furious and give you no body language signals that they're mad. An Italian can just be making a point and you think that they're enraged. And that he literally went to these two books -- as a businessman, he read these two books to begin to get the cross- cultural sense of, what are people saying to each other?

And what I'm driving at here, of course, is that you have to start with all of the nonverbal biological natures of being human as an underpinning of politics. This is why the Founding Fathers were geniuses, because they said, okay, we don't care how much you tell us you're going to be wonderful. You're a person. Sooner or later, you're going to break down. Sooner or later you're going to want to seize power. Sooner or later you're going to forget everybody else. How do I design a machine so when you are at your worst, you can't do too much damage to the country? It is a brilliant design for avoiding dictatorship.

Now, what Frank Kent did in his book "the Great Game of Politics" is he came along and he said, "look" -- and this was written in the 1920s. "here is how the game is played." I was looking at it last year. It's remarkably similar today. Now, we do it with television, not with newspapers nearly as much. We do it with different kinds of advertising. We have more consultants. You know, our political bosses are electronic, they're consultants rather than being geographic, but you still have very similar processes, and it's well worth you studying.

Robert Heinlein wrote a little book just before World War II called "Take Back Your Government," and it's a practical handbook for the private citizen who wants democracy to work. And it's a fun little book. It's been republished recently, and I really recommend it to you just as a way of seeing -actually, I'm sorry, it was written in 1946, and I really recommend it to you. It's in paperback, and it's just an interesting introduction from a guy who was a science fiction writer and a patriot and understood how hard it was to get a free society to work.

Now, the dilemma of Common Cause and Ralph Nader is that they love the concept of helping the people. But they despise the process by which politics operates. Any contribution given must be corrupt. Any appearance of corruption must be evil. Therefore, since -- so in essence, they can end up in a totally socialist system in which all politics would occur within government. And it's a model which is, in fact, I think, in the long run very, very dangerous to a free society.

The dilemma of the newsroom and the editorial boards is a different dilemma. It is, on the one hand, how do they cover as a legitimate skeptic? Difference between a skeptic and a cynic. A skeptic says, I'd like to believe you're sincere, but you've got to convince me. A cynic says, I know you're not sincere, so let me find -- let me figure out how to get the mask to be pulled off. And starting with Watergate, I think, and with Vietnam, we went from a healthy, skeptical news media that loved politics and understood it.

Go back and read the great legislative reporters of the 1950s, their attitude towards the President, their attitudes towards the congress. They loved the business they covered. They thought it was incredibly important. Didn't mean they didn't report scandals. Didn't mean they didn't report human foibles, but they did it within a larger framework of saying,this is this remarkable American romanticism, and then look starting with the mid to late '60s, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate, somebody could do a fascinating study of the change in tone, the change in assumptions, and the change in what was legitimate behavior by the media.

And you now have a devastatingly more cynical, devastatingly more adversarial system, which makes it harder to report the truth. Because the truth isn't always cynical. The truth is often romantic and wonderful. America is a great country with a good people. And if you're not allowed to report that because that would clearly not be cynical enough and you'd be laughed at in the newsroom, you literally distort the whole context of how America operates.

What we have to do is invent honest self-government and politics for the 21st century. We've got to go back -- and notice the term I used, honest self-government. Yes, I think standards matter, and, yes, I think you have to say, we're determined to have an honest system. That means you've got to, I think, invent citizenship and community for the 21st century, and you've got to apply the Spirit of Invention and Discovery.

You've got to go back out and say, how can we get this to work? What are the things, whether it's computerization, whether it is town hall meetings that are electronic, whether it is putting the Congress on-line as we have with Thomas at the Library of Congress, how do we reestablish in the 21st century this sense of citizenship and community? How do we apply quality to create citizenship and community? You know, how would Deming have approached all this? And how could we have continuous improvement and a sense of all of us as a large American team working to create a better way of doing things?

I would suggest to you that as part of that, that there are four roles of a leader, and that we often do this backwards. That the first role of a leader is to set the agenda and communicate goals and standards. That the second role of a leader is to convey symbolic power. That is, when the mayor or the governor or the President shows up, the act of their being there makes the meeting more important. They symbolize their community. The third is to gather resources outside their own system. That is, they say, "let's go and create something," and they get volunteers, they get private-sector money, they focus the attention of the community on doing something. Only the fourth is managing their own bureaucratic system.

Now, what happens to you in Washington and what happens to you at state capitals is running the government narrowly defined, running this part of your society. Remember, the leader is the leader of all of this. But instead, what you've got is overfocus on running the government and an underfocus on leading the culture. So if you look at them all together, notice where we place those, the four roles of a leader. First, the top one is to set the agenda, to communicate goals and standards. The second one is to convey symbolic power. The third is to gather resources. Only fourth comes managing your own system.

Now, let me show you how this works at three major levels. The President of the United States sets the agenda for the nation by leading the American people, symbolizes, symbolizes, the American nation, is the head of the American community, and manages the American government.

But that's his least important job. By contrast, a governor sets the agenda for the state by leading the people of the state, symbolizes the state, is the head of the state community, and manages the state government.

But again, notice the thing we normally report on is the least important of their assignments. At a local level, a mayor sets the agenda for the city by leading the people of the city, symbolizes the city, is the head of the city community, and manages the city government. And we don't train our leaders to understand that their most important jobs are not the government part. It's the leadership part.

Now, what will happen is Toffler's third wave information revolution will lead to new forms of citizenship and community. And everybody, I think, gets to play in this. I mean, just as the Founding Fathers were codifying the second wave transition from agriculture to industry, and in a sense, you can see the rise of the constitution as an effort to figure out how humans live together in that setting, every American can be asked, what is your vision of 21st century citizenship and community?

And you can start thinking about, as you see everything that's changing around you, how are we going to operate? How is the system going to evolve? And then what are the right strategies to implement that vision? Once we start figuring out whether it's town hall meetings or it's computers or it's volunteerism or whatever it is, and I think this takes a lot of discussion, and then finally, what projects and tactics will implement your vision and your strategies?

Now, that's the dialogue, I think, of the next four or five years, and it's a dialogue that the entire nation has to be involved in. Because in essence, what is at stake is doing the hard work of freedom. That we have to say to a generation, to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that we have a rendezvous with destiny, and that we have to be reengaged in rebuilding our understanding of America and creating it.

And it starts, in part, with myths. Remember, every civilization has heroic myths, because that's how people teach themselves. I mean, one of the most famous, Frankly, is David defeating Goliath, a very important part of the Bible, and it's a very important sense of mythology. Here's this young kid, he goes out there, and because he's on the right side, he kills this giant, and therefore as it is described in the bible, the good guys win.

Go back and read that and think about all the different lessons that are inherent in that in terms of why you should have courage. Why as long as you're right, as long as you're standing for the right side, you should take an interest. In the Roman tradition, it was Horatio at the bridge, the idea of the individual who stood there and who stood off the enemy and who saved the society, even at the risk to their life.

That gets modernized in our system with Patrick Henry, the schoolteacher, who said, "give me liberty or give me death." I think he was 23 at the time. And imagine the courage, you get captured by the British, you're a spy, and they say, "do you have any final words" -- I'm not -- I'm sorry, it wasn't Patrick Henry. It was Nathan Hale, which I'll get to in a second. But Patrick Henry, in a sense, sets up Nathan Hale, because Patrick Henry in his speech says, "give me liberty or give me death," and you're going to see this in the series. The next one is John Paul Jones, who says, "I have not yet begun to fight" when the British were sinking his ship, so he had to actually capture their ship in the fight. Then you get to Nathan Hale, who says, "my only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country."

Now, in a sense, look at the pattern, from David who goes down as a young man risking everything for his team, to Horatio at the bridge who risked everything for Rome, to Patrick Henry who says, "give me liberty or give me death," to John Paul Jones, who was a figure of heroic courage.

And again, imagine what schools would be like in the inner city if this kind of heroism were taught again. If young children learned, well, of course -- I mean, tell me how hard your problem is. You think it's as hard as Nathan Hale's? And they hung him. You think the fight you're involved in is dramatically worse than John Paul Jones'? His ship was sinking. But there was a spirit which is at the heart of a free society, a spirit of enormous courage.

In Washington's case, frankly, it's his nobility. That Washington comes to personify the sense of duty, honor, country, which is at the heart of a free society. And then Washington, who is in some ways a very austere figure, particularly because he's an older man bythe time he's President, Washington then is matched in the pantheon of American heroes by Lincoln, and I think it's because of Abraham Lincoln's compassion and martyrdom, the fact that he's killed at the very end of the war at Ford's theater.

But when you look at the Lincoln figure, I mean -- and these, again, are literally -- I mean, I'm using myth here in the best anthropological sense, an organizing story which helps a society tell itself about life. And so you go from the nobility and courage of Washington to Lincoln's dedication and compassion, the sense that Lincoln bled for every person killed in the war on both sides. That he thought it was a terrible -- if you read his second inaugural. If you come to Washington, go to the monument and read the second inaugural. You feel the pain. And so you capture this spirit.

And then with the emergence of America as the leading industrial power in the world, what more perfect mythology than Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan hill? If you ever get to see a fine little movie called "the Wind and the Lion," which has a just brilliant portrait by Brian Keith of Theodore Roosevelt, you get this sense of -- that he was the perfect evocation of an emerging optimistic, buoyant, adventurous America.

Remember I read earlier that he's the first President to ride in a car, and there's newspapers congratulating for his courage in actually riding in a car. Remember that he doesn't shoot the baby bear that they've captured, and so the invention of the teddy bear. You could argue that in some ways, he may have been the most popular person ever to be President just as an individual. And yet he personified this explosion of energy that is America at the turn of the century.

As I've said before, we get into the Depression, the country has deep doubts, there is a tremendous collapse of belief in America, and then on a rainy morning on March 4th, 1933, a man who is in braces gets up and says, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and literally you see just the country begins to relax. And, I mean, one of the great stories of modern times, I was talking to a still photographer the other day who was saying they never showed FDR in a wheelchair, because they had a sense of the dignity of the presidency and they had a sense of his personal dignity.

And here's a man who by sheer will and discipline stood in his braces, and if you watch -- I saw the other day some footage of him walking to the podium that day. He has somebody on each side helping him, because the truth is, he could barely -- he couldn't move his legs. I mean, it's a remarkable effort of sheer will. And yet he comes out of all this, having been through polio, having been told basically -- I mean, his wife strongly wanted him to quit and his family wanted him to quit.

He works his way back, he gets a call from Al Smith, who says, "we have to have you" on the ticket to run for governor in 1928. He believes in his heart he's beginning to learn to walk again, and he's faced with the choice, do I serve my party, run for Governor, and probably never walk the rest of my life, or do I stay out of politics and recover? And they say, "you've got to do it," you know, and so he runs, he wins, when Smith is losing the Presidency, and then four years later, he's not just a man of enormous discipline, but he does something that I don't know of any other American politician who's ever done it. He has an automatic contagious buoyant optimism.

You see it twice. First as the depression. The country's a mess, 25% unemployment, and FDR just picks the country up. It goes back to this. He leads by faith. He leads the country by just creating a mood that is amazing that, "we can do it." And then, of course, it re-creates it in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and no matter how bad things were the first six months of World War II, he was always optimistic, he was always positive. We were going to get there.

And, of course, in a way, his direct psychological descendant, a Reagan Democrat turned Republican, is Ronald Reagan. If you think of, "we have every right to dream heroic dreams." He says it two different places in his first inaugural, "we have every right to dream heroic dreams." After all, we are Americans. And you have this same buoyant, positive sense.

Now, I want to wrap up this part by bringing together two different feelings. One, this is a great country with a good people. Optimism, buoyancy, positivism makes sense. Two, life is hard and freedom's frustrating. That underpinning the optimism is brute hard work. Underpinning the sense that we're a good people is a very tough-minded willingness to stop the ones who don't want to be good people. And it's a - it's complex. It's not obvious or simple or easy, and yet that's the magic that for 300 years has grown the process of freedom.

And to go back to where we started with Chamberlain, we got a section from Burn's fabulous "the Civil War" I want to share with you. This is a letter written by Sullivan Ballou to his wife. And again, I want you to listen to this letter and think about what we're asking. We're saying to you, in peacetime, you have to take responsibility, you have to give some of your time, you have to be willing to be an American, which is an act of being. It means you've got to invest yourself in your community, in your neighbors, in your children, in your parents. You have to do things to be an American. But we're asking you to do it in peacetime of the richest society in the history of the world. Listen for a few minutes to what Sullivan Ballou wrote his wife.

>>a week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Ballou, a Major in the 2nd
>>Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.

>>July the 14th, 1861, Washington, D.C.  Dear Sarah: the indications are
>>very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow, and lest
>>I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few
>>lines that may fall under your eye when I'm no more.  I have no misgiving
>>about or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my
>>courage does not halt or falter.  I know how American Civilization now
>>leans upon the triumph of the government, and how great a debt we owe to
>>those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the
>>revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing, to lay down all my joys
>>in this life to help maintain this government and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but only omnipotence break, and yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield. The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you that I've enjoyed them for so long.

And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us. If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been. But, oh, Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night, always, always. And when the soft breeze pans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead. Think I am gone, and wait for me. For we shall meet again.

>>Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the first battle of bull run.

>>Isn't that great?  One of the things Bill Fortune, who's writing a book
>>with me, is a historian of this period, one of the points he makes is
>>that when you go back and read the letters of the period, that it is
>>astonishing how idealistic they are, and how muchit meant.

>>it seems like we're in this period where we're all motivated by
>>self-interest.

>>One of the -- or that if -- that your self-interest also includes God and
>>it also includes your spiritual being and it also -- I mean,
>>self-interest broadly defined is what they've died for.  If you see the
>>wonderful movie Glory, and I get tearied up, too.  I think it's an
>>amazing thing.  Anyway, the point is you listen to that, and then you get
>>told, "I'm too busy shopping to be a citizen."  And you know that right
>>here is what this is all about.  You're either going to turn this culture
>>around and say to people, grow up.  You want to be free, you've got to be
>>responsible, or it ain't going to work.

Let me just say in closing, this has been an extraordinary 20 hours. This is the close of the cycle of three courses. I want to thank Dr. Minnix, who's right here because -- (applause) and President Floyd Falany, who I think is in the next room, but without him, we would not have been able to do this (applause). I want to thank Bob Head and all the crew both here at Reinhardt and the crew from VTA that made this possible, and there are most of them downstairs, although we have several folks around here, but they've done a wonderful job.

Jeff Eisenach, who brought us Sullivan Ballou, and who ran the whole thing for three years. Nancy Desmond, who did the original story. Steve Hanser, who's been our chief intellectual advisor in all. John McDowell sitting back there, who's put all this together this time and who stayed on top of all of it. Pattie Stechschulte, who is, I think, in the other room. Maury Kennedy, who produces the newspaper. And I want to thank my wife, Marianne, because this has all been tough. And we want to thank you.

Renewing American Civilization Table of Contents

[HTML revised 2004-03-28 by Terrence Berres]