Sunday, September 04, 2005

About Time for a Change

David Brooks arguing, quite well, that the hurricane is going to change the way we think about the government, along with everything else. Certainly, this could well be the Republican Party's Iran Hostage Crisis- driving the party out of office the same way that Carter's various blunders drove liberalism underground for a generation.

But, it also seems possible that the idea of the "common good" is going to come back. Certainly, the barroom attacks on "the common good" and "the safety net" have become so unthinking and commonplace that they may be hard to abandon. Quite a good number of 18 year olds show up at our university already complaining about how "liberals" and "welfare recipients" are taking all of their money. (Not many are willing to give up their Pell grants however.)

But, few people really expect the government to leave citizens to die either. This widespread distrust of public institutions that seems to be going around carries with it the suspicion that those institutions should exist to protect the public good. That perhaps we have a moral duty to protect one another, and that American life needn't be Hobbsian after all. That perhaps the pain we feel when we see others suffer and die isn't weakness, but that acting upon it is strength. Finally, that Tocqueville may have been right when he said that what makes Americans great is that we are good, and if we cease to be good, we will have ceased to be great.

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