In 1940 Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, told his countrymen: “I have nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and tears”, as Europe was descending into chaos. He told them the truth they needed to hear. It’s what a leader should do. Treat constituents like adults. Telling the unvarnished truth, leading with hard truths, is often rewarded with social cohesion.
Recently elected leaders have become merchants of opinion. We have become conclusion shoppers. When we bother to vote, we support the candidate that tells us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. This is The New Libertarianism, where all opinions are equal, and belief is greater than truth. This drives people to schoolboard meetings complaining about evolution, critical race theory and sex education, discrediting the imperative that curricula should be based on the best of our knowledge.
We don’t bother with high minded ideas and inconvenient truth. Individual liberty is the paramount concern, at the expense of social cohesion. Communitarianism has become an old fashion idea; quaint and naïve.
Now we build back decks and fence in our yards, our backs to the world, insular. Many of us don’t know our neighbors. Community mostly exists online in social media where ignorance and fear are magnified, confirmed with likeminded souls who hate the same people. In the cyber world we are constantly under siege. It’s an environment where public health issues are no longer the realm of science. Everything is a political cudgel, commercial, transactional and zero sum. Health mandates become a symbol of weakness and capitulation. Vaccinations become tantamount to rape, as this pandemic needlessly lurches into a fourth and fifth wave of sickness and death.
And yet communitarianism is a basis for the Republican theory of government. It was Abraham Lincoln, who wrote: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.” What emerges from this conflict between libertarianism and communitarianism will determine the future of our country.
Francis Caraco