RealClearPolicy Newsletters: Original Articles
Our American Project
Dear Reader —
What if loneliness is what ails our political life?
Our economy continues to pick up steam, unemployment is at historically low levels, and technology is connecting us to others like never before, making life more comfortable by delivering information, goods, and services almost instantaneously. And yet, we are unhappier — and lonelier — than ever.
Cigna has recently categorized loneliness a “public health issue” of “epidemic” proportions. According to the American Psychological Association, it poses a greater public health threat than obesity. Researchers at the University of Chicago have linked it to numerous health risks, including high blood pressure, stroke, and even premature death. Our economy is not perfect, of course: Wage growth, the labor force participation rate, and productivity all remains sluggish, befuddling economists, and we are only a decade or so out from the worst recession in almost a century. But economic factors simply fail to explain this crisis of loneliness. It seems to be a psychological — even spiritual — problem, not an economic one.
But it is also a political problem, according to Pete Peterson, Dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. We are coming apart as a society — fracturing, as Yuval Levin has put it. We no longer exhibit that spirit Tocqueville praised on his famous visit to the United States: the propensity to form and join associations in the intermediary space between the State and individual. The middle layers of society have been “hollowed out.” This has left us alienated from one another — lonely — an aggregate of atomized individuals.
Tocqueville prophesied that this hollowing out would lead citizens to look to a centralized authority to protect them, as a child looks to a parent. The danger of liberalism was that its individualism would undermine liberty by soliciting the State to fill the void left by a weakened civil society. The result? A more and more powerful federal government, polarization, dysfunction, and an inclination to look to strong leaders to save us.
Such is the starting point of Peterson’s new initiative, the American Project, co-directed by Rich Tafel, a pastor at Church of the Holy City in Washington, D.C., and managing director of Raffa Social Capital Advisors. It is named for the project of constitutional self-government that is our American political heritage. Its aim is to get back to first political principles and reconnect them to the present.
Peterson and Tafel do not purport to solve the crisis of loneliness. Rather, what they offer is a political vision that speaks to our fractured reality — what they call a “conservatism of connection” — by trying to repair the civic bonds that Tocqueville saw as holding our republic together. The vision is communitarian in orientation and American in essence, holding up the ideal of democratic republicanism as open to all. It is conservative insofar as it seeks to conserve our distinctive political heritage as well as the civic virtues needed to sustain it.
But it also cuts across our partisan divides. At a recent salon dinner hosted by RealClearPolitics here in Washington, Peterson described his project as offering something distinct from both Left and Right. The former, given over to “intersectionality,” divides us up along identitarian lines; the latter, long associated with economic liberalism and libertarianism, treats us as solitary individuals not dependent on the cultural, historical, and natural circumstances that both transcend and shape us.
What’s more, this vision is resonating with young people on campuses. This was a “surprise,” said Peterson. He reports that college students he and Tafel have spoken to have found the message both unfamiliar and attractive. This defies the stereotype of right-leaning students, in particular, as reflexively libertarian. Rather than more and more autonomy, these students seem to be searching for community.
This was not the direction Peterson thought this project would take. When he and Tafel first started talking about it, prior to November 2016, everyone expected that “Hillary Clinton would be president and the conservative movement would be totally fractured,” he said. “What happened instead was that Donald Trump became president and the conservative movement is still totally fractured.”
In fact, our populist era has made his message look all the more prescient. What President Trump and others have shown is the power of nationalism to offer a sense of belonging to citizens who feel forgotten and left out. In so doing, they have made clear that any successful politics, Left or Right, will have to speak to our need for community. What Peterson and Tafel propose is a nationalism “rightly understood” — one rooted in republican values, which are neither racial, ethnic, nor religious and which seek to limit power by dispersing it among the federal, state, and local levels.
At a moment when a debate is raging about the fate of liberalism, the American Project looks back to, rather than beyond, our American project — that extended experiment in constitutional self-government — for the moral resources needed to fill the breach left by both parties and their ideologies.
These are some of the many issues lately taken up at RealClearPolicy. Below you will find just a few highlights.
— M. Anthony Mills, editor | RealClearPolicy
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5 Facts You Need to Know About the Speaker of the House. The bipartisan group No Labels offers this overview in our pages.
Anti-Bias Training Won’t Help Starbucks. Patrice Onwuka contends that the company's effort to prevent another racially charged incident misses the mark.
Misguided “Public Nuisance” Lawsuits Threaten Manufacturing Success. Lindsey de la Torre takes a dim view of legal action tied to environmental effects, such as climate change.
It’s Not About Facebook; It’s About the Next Facebook. Brent Skorup and Jennifer Huddleston Skees call on lawmakers to consider the harmful consequences internet regulation could have on future innovation.
“Smart Cities” Would Be Wise to Turn to Private Sector. Johnny Kampis urges municipalities looking to spur growth of “the Internet of Things” to partner with private enterprise and ease regulations.
A Moral Revival to Help the Poor? In RealClearReligion, James Abro asserts that “top-down forays into social and economic justice” don’t do much to help those in need.
How Individuals and Communities Can Help Combat the Opioid Crisis. In RealClearHealth, Natalie Goodnow outlines actions that can be taken while lawmakers work toward legislative solutions.
Vulnerable Patients Shouldn’t Be Forced Into Government Health Programs. Also in RealClearHealth, Brandon Arnold argues that pushing individuals suffering from end-stage renal disease onto Medicare and Medicaid is the wrong solution.
Can Liquefied Natural Gas Solve the Trade Deficit? In RealClearEnergy, Thomas J. Duesterberg and Alex Entz contend that while LNG exports can make only a small dent in the deficit, increasing production would be well worth the effort.
Buckley Was Right About the Decline of Higher Education. Also in RealClearEducation, Garland S. Tucker III argues that today’s universities would do well to heed the advice from William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale.”
