When I launched a virtual candidacy to challenge Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination, it made an appeal based on “debt, decency, and diplomacy.” As the parts handling debt and diplomacy, along with some serious swamp-draining, have now been outlined, it’s time to expand on the campaign’s “decency” initiative.
After the divisive rhetoric and horrific atrocities of the past several weeks, the “decency” part is more important than ever. It’s long past time to put civility back into civil society.
Before going any further, let’s make clear that this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky appeal to an idealized but fictional past. The American public square always has been a bit rough-and-tumble, and the old saying is true that “politics ain’t beanbag.”
Equally true, though, is that certain customary guardrails have always been necessary to keep even hardball politics from going foul. There are norms of behavior, not legal, but cultural, that enable civil society to operate without deteriorating into raw hatred, anarchy, or oppression. (Here, I use a broad definition of “civil society” that includes both the political sphere and the nongovernmental institutions to which some uses of the term often exclusively refer.) Our founders recognized as much: Quotation books and websites feature verified quotes from Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton all declaiming that republics of free men cannot survive without public virtue.
This isn’t just about being polite, or about some namby-pamby odes to kumbaya. It’s about maintaining a realm within which the constitutional procedures of representative democracy safely can occur. Without maintaining at least some cultural norms, all the formal law in the world can’t save a polity from becoming a nasty, poor, brutish dystopia. If civil order fails, eventually the civic order will fail as well.
All of which is predicate for needing a president who by words, tone, and action helps reinvigorate the intermediary institutions of civil society. Those intermediary institutions don’t merely perform social services that help improve our communities. They also usually bring people of differing political faiths or cultural outlooks together in ways creating better understanding, along with the conditions for constructive compromise. These ties that bind us in the nongovernmental realm also train us to, and help us find elected officials who will, make governmental institutions work.
Others have written with insight and incisiveness on this topic, broadly speaking, including my editor Tim Carney, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, and former American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks. Read them for far more eloquent expositions of these ideas. What’s relevant here is what a president can do to help, not hurt, this crucial cultural enterprise.
First, let us posit that whatever else Trump does, it obviously isn’t this. If you think Trump is a builder of civil society, you’re talking such a different language and inhabiting such a different moral universe that this short column alone won’t suffice to create understanding. (Not to say that understanding is impossible, but just not in 750 words.)
Setting Trump aside, what should a president do? George H. W. Bush tried valiantly with his promotion of a “thousand points of light,” (and with more effectiveness, still ongoing, than is remembered, despite being mocked by Trump), but that sort of thing forms only part of the civil society firmament. What is needed is a concerted effort both tonal and governmental to encourage society’s “little platoons” to thrive the way they once did more abundantly.
What government should do, though, isn’t to take over, but to step back. All too often, government insists that social institutions must meet every standard a government social service agency must. If a volunteer organization serves one community, say the bureaucrats, then it must serve all, and do so while jumping through multitudinous regulatory hoops dictating how, when, and even with what width of doorway.
This is counterproductive. While it certainly makes sense for government to demand that a church day care center or a Boys & Girls Club operates safely, it should otherwise butt out. The president should direct his administration to deregulate intermediary institutions to the greatest extent consonant with public safety and existing law, and should push Congress for legislation expanding such deregulatory ability.
Meanwhile, by using presidential rhetoric more to praise cooperators than to slay perceived enemies, the next Oval Office inhabitant should re-inspire a sense of shared identity and common purpose.
As with the debt discussion several weeks back, much more must be said on this subject. For now, though, the imperative should be clear: Fumigate and brighten the public square, in every way possible. We’re a better people than recent years have shown, and we need a president who promotes our better angels.
