George H. W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination in 1988 in a country vastly different from the one he had sought to preside over two terms earlier, when he lost the nomination from Ronald Reagan.
Bush and Reagan had never been particularly simpatico. They had come from very different backgrounds. The world from which Bush came — WASP New England, with all its noblesse oblige — was fading.
In his acceptance speech in New Orleans, though, Bush hit on the most important theme in American politics.
The pragmatic, centrist Yankee said, “An election that’s about ideas and values is also about philosophy, and I have one.”
“At the bright center is the individual,” Bush said, sounding a tried and true conservative note of individualism. “And radiating out from him or her is the family, the essential unit of closeness and of love.”
Then, in a speech otherwise about the Cold War, inflation, and federal tax rates, Bush went granular.
“From the individual to the family to the community, and then on out to the town, to the church and the school,” he said, slowly expanding a picture of America centered not on Washington, but on the hometown. He listed counties, states, and the nation as a whole. And then, perhaps through the wisdom of his Catholic speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, he articulated concisely the crucial notion of subsidiarity, which prescribes that each level of government do “only what it does well and no more. And I believe that power must always be kept close to the individual, close to the hands that raise the family and run the home.”
The communities, families, and institutions close to the individual were what Bush called the “thousand points of light.”
“We’re a nation of community,” Bush said, “of thousands and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary and unique.”
It was an ode to diversity and localism, but with a very different flavor than what you’d get from today’s practitioners of identity politics on the Left and the Right. A man who dedicated his life to serving the federal government in Congress, at the U.N., and in the CIA, was placing the highest importance on the most local.
“This is America,” Vice President Bush said: “the Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of Ahepa, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens), Holy Name.”
Bush was channeling Alexis de Tocqueville. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” Tocqueville had written in Democracy in America. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small. … There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America.”
Upon Bush’s death over the weekend, countless commentators lamented how Bush is an extinct species and how his brand of politics is no more. But most importantly, the America he described in that speech is rapidly disappearing. Since the 1980s, civic involvement has dropped precipitously, as Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone. This dropoff, which really began in the late 1960s, is most acute in the working class. The highly educated are still mostly enmeshed in dense networks that convey immense social capital.
The secularization of America has left much of the working class alienated and adrift, without a point of light near at hand, and thus looking for a bright shining sun at the center of it all.
So, if commentators want to tell a story of the fall from Bush’s time to our current time, they should tell the story of secularization, of centralization, and of the collapse of local community among the working class.
These forces created a large voting bloc that turned first to Barack Obama and then to Donald Trump, seeking from a powerful agent of change in Washington the sense of agency and the access to the good life that was absent in crumbled communities.
Bush’s notion of dispersed power and of people finding meaning at the human or local level, was not an idea that made sense to Trump. He explicitly mocked Bush’s words a few months ago.
“‘Make America Great Again,’ we understand,” Donald Trump said in a May 2018 rally in Montana. “Putting America first we understand. ‘Thousand points of light,’ I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out?”
Yes, for a long time, America had it figured out. College-educated couples living in elite enclaves have figured it out, as do the Mormons of Salt Lake City and the Dutch Reformed of Western Michigan. It would be good for the country if our media and our president figured out what Bush knew — that what makes America great isn’t one big thing, but a thousand small things.
