In the United States, “there is hardly any talk of the beauty of virtue,” Tocqueville noted. “American moralists do not pretend that one must sacrifice himself for his fellows because it is a fine thing to do so.” They are ” forever forming” associations “of a thousand different types” all by themselves, unprompted. They “found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries.” Their “hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way.” And all the while, Americans modestly “prefer to give credit to their philosophy rather than to themselves.”
Tocqueville admired us for this. But that was in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson was president. His contemporary successor, William Jefferson Clinton, is a man to whom consistent philosophy is an irritating “false choice,” a man who prefers instead that credit for the beauty of civic virtue be conferred individually. On him, whenever possible. Such as next week in Philadelphia, when the “Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future” convenes.
The summit is billed as the “historic” inauguration of a mass, communal effort to care for, protect, and “mentor” children — a great awakening of adult obligation President Clinton says “every American should embrace.” To infuse the rest of us with such selflessness, all the nation’s biggest selves will be on hand. Colin Powell is “general chairman.” Bill Bradley was originally tapped to be vice chairman, but Al Gore reportedly threw a fit when he heard the plan — Bradley may run against him in 2000 — and Bradley got dumped. White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles swears this story is false. The White House simply “wanted a high-profile Hispanic in that position,” he explains, so they got former housing secretary Henry Cisneros.
Joining them as mistress of ceremonies will be Oprah Winfrey: “producer, philanthropist, businesswoman, and child advocate.” There’s talk that Travolta and Cosby and Barbra and Arnold may make the scene. Floating somewhere in the soup will be delegates who “look like the community,” so long as you understand “community” primarily to comprise multi-million-dollar mega-charities, large corporations, unions, “educators,” national church associations, and former presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford. Those few of these delegates who have real-world volunteer experience will feel lonely among the celebrities and the thousand-plus credentialed media.
And what will they all do? Not much. They will share the latest scientific discoveries about how to be an attentive, non-abusive grownup. They will discuss post-summit “follow-through” — which appears mostly to involve cloning the event in each of the 50 states. And they will bask in an aura of turbo-charged piety. In the creation of which no expense has been spared.
Sunday, Philadelphians will be bribed with free food to serve as stage extras for Bill, Hillary, Tipper, and Al, who will be cleaning up graffiti on Germantown Avenue. It has nothing to do with “children,” of course, but it makes for a terrific photo. Monday and Tuesday’s public events are two ceremonies on the steps of Independence Hall. “It’s such an important site and such a spectacular visual,” one summit insider points out. “If it rains and you take it inside, you lose all the special qualities.” Can’t have that; altruism must be televised. So they may put up a lighted tent over the entire two-story building, including the spire. Supervising such details is legendary image-meister Michael Deaver, who has hired consultants to design the summit’s logo, and “focus groups that mall-test key words to see which ones grab people’s attention.” Not to worry: Deaver’s firm is billing its services at a 20 percent discount.
Mind, you are not allowed to be cynical about all this vulgarity. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter celebrates the summit by invoking the idealism that “lurks, somewhere, in all good journalists.” Skepticism is well and good, he avers. But this time we must write “better stories, in a better country.” On the other side of the ideological divide, conservative pundit Arianna Huffington scores the media for thus far ignoring an event “predicated on waking up the better angels of our nature.” Blindness to the urgency of the Philadelphia summit, she says, reflects an “insulated middleclass indifference so blatant that it borders on the obscene.”
There’s something weird about the press disarming itself this way and fashioning a cult of sincerity around an event that hasn’t yet occurred. Especially one this incoherent.
The summit’s organizers cannot even agree among themselves about their purpose. Philadelphia is meant to “crack the atom of civic indifference” in America, announces Harris Wofford of Clinton’s Corporation for National Service. But there is no such indifference, suggests the summit’s official propaganda; the delegates will build on a “current wave of community and neighborhood-based innovation.” What do we call this innovation? Voluntarism ” is the right word for it,” says Bob Goodwin of the Points of Light Foundation. No, it’s not, replies Wofford; voluntarism is “people doing good things but not actually solving problems.” And who must solve these problems? Depends on whom you talk to. “Much of the work of America cannot be done by government,” says President Clinton of the summit. But that work cannot be done without government, says General Powell, and his project “is no replacement.”
Despite the confusion, there’s an idea underlying the coming spectacle in Philadelphia: the idea implied by Hillary Clinton’s famous remark that “there is no such thing as other people’s children.” It is the idea that private and public responsibilities are inseparable, that we can’t distinguish appropriate roles for government and the rest of society, that everyone must do everything for everyone else. And that politics, as commonly understood, is therefore impossible. This is the one thing about which the Philadelphia summiteers are unanimous. It is not a “bipartisan” event. It is not even ” nonpartisan.” It has — General Powell, again — “nothing to do with politics.”
Too bad. When public men deprecate their public duties they throw away the one real and practical means they have to inspire precisely the community spirit they all vow to seek in Philadelphia. In free political debate, Tocqueville observed, “men combine for great ends,” which gives them a ” lesson in the value of helping one another even in lesser affairs.” Once drawn out of their own lives by politics, “they always know how to meet again. ” And they “carry these assumptions with them into the affairs of civil life and put them to a thousand uses.”
In short, the best way for government to encourage voluntarism is to butt out of civil life and get on with its own distinct, important, and (indirectly) voluntarism-inspiring business. The nation will get something close to an opposite message from next week’s glitzy pageant in Philadelphia. But since it’s primarily glitz, it probably won’t do too much damage.
David Tell, for the Editors
