It isn’t just scientists and those regarded as experts who suffer from a lack of credibility. People in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past. In the landscape of American education it is generally acknowledged that the country’s colleges and universities stand out, continuing to lead the world. Yet even at this level teachers suffer from a shortage of authority, which makes it hard for them to do their jobs.
Commenting on a book on deficiencies in student learning on American college campuses in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton, the pen name of a professor of English, wrote:
It has become difficult to give students honest feedback. The slightest criticisms have to be cushioned by a warm blanket of praise and encouragement to avoid provoking oppositional defiance or complete breakdowns … Increasingly, time-pressured college teachers ask themselves, “What grade will ensure no complaint from the student, or worse, a quasi-legal battle over whether the instructions for an assignment were clear enough?”
Indeed, Americans have little confidence in virtually every institution, a poll sponsored by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center reported in September 2010. The scientific community, for example, commanded the confidence of only 30 percent of the respondents and organized religion of only 18 percent, and they outranked all but two of the total of eighteen institutions listed—those two being the military and small business. This augurs badly for the task of meeting the major challenges our country faces because our institutions, including but not limited to the federal government, are crucial for the collective action that is required in each case. If the public doesn’t trust these institutions, they can’t be effective. Where the nation’s institutions are concerned—especially government—a healthy, necessary skepticism has given way to corrosive cynicism. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet more and more, especially in American public life, rumors, allegations, and assertions that are simply untrue pass as facts.
On November, 4, 2010, Tom got a taste of how all of this can filter down and affect the way real people see the world. After giving a lecture that day at Indiana University, he turned on the television in the evening and saw Anderson Cooper on CNN discussing a report that President Obama’s ongoing trip to India and Asia was costing U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day—about $2 billion for the entire trip—and would involve redeploying thirty-four navy ships. Cooper was impelled to check out the story because the evening before on his program, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, asked where she thought deep cuts in the federal budget would take place now that the Republicans had won Congress on a budget-cutting platform, had said this: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending. It’s a very small example.”
The next night on his program, drawing on research by the website Factcheck.org and on his own CNN team’s reporting, Cooper reconstructed the origins of the story. It had started with a comment by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our AP or Reuters. I say ‘alleged’ provincial official,” Cooper went on, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given … It was an anonymous quote … Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done … The Indian article was picked up by the Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.” Well-known talkshow hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage—all with sizable listening audiences—repeated and elaborated on it, seemingly without making any independent efforts to check its veracity with the White House.
While for security reasons the White House ordinarily does not comment on the logistics of presidential trips, in this case it made a partial exception. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said, “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the navy and some thirty-four ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.” Cooper noted that President Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa—with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration—cost, according to the Government Accounting Office and adjusted for inflation, “about $5.2 million a day.”
The next morning Tom held a breakfast discussion with Indiana University honors students—their best and brightest. “I came in, grabbed a bagel, sat down at a table, and several students joined me,” Tom recalled. “The first thing—I mean the first thing—the first student asked me was: ‘Did you hear that Obama’s trip to India is costing $200 million a day?’ It was depressing. I explained to him that Anderson Cooper had debunked the whole thing on his show the night before—that it all started with an unnamed provincial official in India. The student listened politely, but did not really seem convinced.”
As for Bachmann, she announced that she was running for president in 2012.
While the false report about a presidential trip is a graphic but not terribly important example of robust misinformation, other mistaken beliefs have the potential to do serious harm to the country. A poll taken by the centrist Democratic group Third Way in the summer of 2010 revealed that “three quarters of those polled said they believed that the budget could be balanced without raising taxes,” Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus reported (November 13, 2010). “The same number said the budget could be balanced without touching Social Security and Medicare.” If most Americans continue to believe these things, it will be impossible even to start a serious public conversation about reducing the federal deficits, much less actually reduce them.
As the old saying goes, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Service Envy
The third imperiled value is the sense that America is one nation, a single community to which all of us belong and in whose fate we all share. Such a sentiment is what motivates the kind of voluntary, short-term sacrifices necessary to bring the budget into balance, take out insurance against climate change on behalf of the next generation, and pay for the investments needed to renew the American formula for economic growth.
Today, where public policy is concerned, more and more we are encouraged to think of ourselves as partisans—liberals or conservatives, or members of groups into which the census divides us that are entitled to special consideration, or as individuals with specific economic interests to advance. Of course, we are all of those things, but in the past we also thought of ourselves as, first and foremost, citizens of the United States. Americans: That used to be us.
The new information technology has helped to erode this particular value. With hundreds of television channels in every cable package and millions of websites that anyone with an Internet connection can visit, our national attention is far more fragmented than it once was. In today’s media world we have far more choices than ever before, but also much less common information. And with the new electronic technology that we all use, while communication is much easier, we spend more time alone—texting while walking down the street, eyes down, and listening to an iPod all the while.
During the Cold War era, especially in its early years when memories of World War II were fresh, national unity and the readiness to make sacrifices when and where necessar
y seemed to most everyone to be matters of national survival. As the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers put it in his book Age of Fracture, “Of all the dangers against which presidents spoke after 1945, none called out stronger rhetorical effort than a weakening of public resolve. In the standing tension between ‘our common labor as a nation’ (as Eisenhower put it) and the temptations of a purely private life, Cold War presidents spoke for the imperatives of public life.”
As we moved from a nation of citizens to a nation of shareholders and “netizens,” the willingness of presidents to speak about and uphold the imperatives and responsibilities of public life became rare. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—when the whole country was ready to address those responsibilities—President Bush vowed to go after the terrorists, and essentially left it at that. He never rallied Americans to even the most simple, necessary, and obvious collective action—to free ourselves from our bondage to imported oil, for example, by using less gasoline and paying more for it through a gasoline “patriot tax.”
We occasionally attend Washington Wizards basketball games together. There often comes a point in the game when a spotlight shines on an upper-deck box at center court, where wounded Iraq and Afghan war veterans from Bethesda Naval Hospital and other institutions are seated, some in wheelchairs, some visibly wounded or missing limbs. Everyone in the crowd invariably stands and applauds them. That is commendable. But we suspect there is more behind that applause than the wish to show support for wounded warriors. We believe it also derives from the fact that the U.S. military has become the carrier of the traditional values that have become diluted in much of the rest of America—and people miss that. What are those values? They include not only the military’s unabashed love of country and a sense of duty to serve it—and if necessary make the ultimate sacrifice. They include as well the fact that in the military, authority and expertise are still respected, although they have to be earned (and are occasionally flouted). The military at its best still takes the long view and can act collectively in pursuit of big goals.
The armed forces have become, in Michael J. Sandel’s words, “the last repository of civic idealism and sacrifice for the sake of the common good. We have outsourced and confined to the military a concentrated expression of the civic ideals and patriotism that should be shared by all American citizens.”
In a sense, the military has become disconnected from mainstream America and is instead a kind of museum of the values that made America a great country. We like to visit this museum and express our appreciation for what is exhibited there, but then we return to our own lives, which have nothing to do with what we’ve just seen.
We have also outsourced sacrifice. If World War II was “the good war,” and the Korean War “the forgotten war,” and Vietnam “the controversial war,” the conflict that began with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and has sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Iraq for nearly a decade can be called “the 1 percent war.” The troops deployed to these combat zones and their immediate families make up less than 1 percent of the population of the United States. The rest of us contribute nothing. We won’t even increase our taxes, even through a surcharge on gasoline, to pay for these wars. So we end up asking 1 percent of the country to make the ultimate sacrifice and the other 99 percent to make no sacrifice at all.
Consider what Dana Perino, then the Bush White House’s press secretary, said when she was asked (in October 2007) about a proposal by some congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war. “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything,” she answered. And if taxes were raised to pay for the war, Perino added, “does anyone seriously believe that the Democrats are going to end these new taxes that they’re asking the American people to pay at a time when it’s not necessary to pay them? I just think it’s completely fiscally irresponsible.”
Asking Americans to pay for a war with a tax hike used to be us. Now it is considered a fiscally irresponsible act of partisanship. Robert Hormats, formerly an investment banker and currently the undersecretary of state for economic affairs, is the author of The Price of Liberty, a book about how America has paid for its wars since 1776. He explains: “In every major war we have fought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans have been asked to pay higher taxes—and nonessential programs have been cut—to support the military effort.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the first time this has not happened. Remarkably, we actually lowered taxes.
“It is sad to see how difficult it is for politicians today to ask people to do anything other than enhance their economic well-being,” remarked Timothy Shriver, the chairman of the Special Olympics. “I still see this enormous hunger for public purpose—people wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, people volunteering to help others, looking for ways to join in solving big problems. But our political leaders won’t channel all this goodwill into national purpose and I don’t understand why.” Too often, what has filled this political vacuum is anger. “People have fallen into blaming each other,” Shriver added. We are hungry, and instead of going out and finding fresh food—finding big hard things to do together, like nation-building our own country—“we are eating ourselves.”
That did not used to be us. Indeed, when we talked to Tim, his father, Sargent Shriver—who helped President Kennedy create the Peace Corps in 1961 and became its first director—had just died, and Tim had been reflecting a lot about his father’s life and that of his generation.
“The other day,” Tim mused, “I came across something my dad wrote. He said, ‘When we started the Peace Corps, we realized that we were risking everything.’ I thought, Why was the Peace Corps a risk? But that is how they saw it. They felt that they were risking their professional reputations and careers, risking the credibility of the president of the United States, risking young people’s lives and the country’s reputation in the middle of the Cold War, on an idea that to many seemed foolish. The idea of risk is so tied to the idea of greatness—you cannot be great without risking yourself.”
That idea of taking big risks for big gains, to do big things that would be truly sustainable, for us and for others, said Shriver, “is gone from our public life now. Now, it is all about split the difference, triangulate, and just get me 51 percent.”
His father’s generation, said Shriver, had a lofty view of the power of political leaders—not that they should run your life, or just build huge bureaucracies, or just cut your taxes, either. The leader’s role was to enlist and enable and inspire Americans—average citizens, businesses, churches, universities, artists, and more—to do big things in the world to help others. “My dad actually thought that if we created a program like the Peace Corps that would offer young Americans the chance to work for nothing, live in adverse conditions, help others, and build relationships, everyone would want to do that. They actually thought everyone would want to work for nothing to help poor people and, in the process, help themselves.”
They actually thought, Shriver added, “that Americans all didn’t just want to file their taxes—that people wanted to give to their country, they didn’t just want to get from it. They want to be part of something larger—to believe in ideas that can change the course of their lives and even history itself.”
These were our parents, concluded Shriver; surely we are not that different from them. Surely we have it in us to be their heirs in values as well as material things. And surely it is well past time we started proving it.
PART V
REDISCOVERING AMERICA
FOURTEEN
They Just Didn’t Get the Word
Of thee I sing, baby,
Summer, autumn, winter, spring, baby!
Shining star and inspiration,
Worthy of a mighty nation—
Of thee I sing!
—George and Ira Gershwin
We began this book with th
e declaration that we are optimists about America, but frustrated optimists. Readers who have come this far can be forgiven for asking, “We understand now why you’re frustrated, but how can you still be optimistic?” The short answer is that we stand on our heads a lot.
It is easy to be an optimist about America if you stand on your head, because the country looks so much better, and is so much more inspiring, when viewed from the bottom up rather than from the top down. When you look at the country that way you see that the spirit of the Greatest Generation has not died. It is true, as Timothy Shriver suggested, that our politicians are now guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to summoning the American people to do big hard things together. But what is inspiring, and what is the basis for our optimism, is the number of people and small groups who are summoning themselves with their own trumpets.
That is why, although much of this book has dwelled on our weaknesses, this chapter will dwell on our strengths, which in fact have much deeper roots and are more relevant than ever to the world in which we’re living. America’s greatest strength is the fact that wave after wave of people still either come to this country or come of age in this country eager to try something new, or spark something extra, undeterred by obstacles, hard times, money shortages, or weak-kneed politicians. Indeed, what keeps us optimistic about America is the seemingly endless number of people who come here or live here who just didn’t get the word.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back Page 35
