A Nation Like No Other

by Newt Gingrich

  Civil society’s broad reach makes it uniquely qualified to cater to people’s needs. However, even in Tocqueville’s time, there were individuals and interests who tried to replace responsive private associations with government. Some of these people were well-intentioned, believing that a one-size-fits-all government bureaucracy could actually serve citizens better than local, custom-designed, voluntary associations could; others knew that an expanded government bureaucracy would serve their interests at other citizens’ expense. Despite the vibrancy of American civil society, Tocqueville presciently predicted that government would eventually usurp many of the duties that private associations performed so effectively:But what political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association? It is easy to foresee that the time is drawing near when man will be less and less able to produce, by himself alone, the commonest necessaries of life. The task of the governing power will therefore perpetually increase, and its very efforts will extend it every day. The more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects that unceasingly create each other.… The morals and the intelligence of a democratic people would be as much endangered as its business and manufactures if the government ever wholly usurped the place of private companies. Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another.9

  Both Tocqueville and the Founders realized that government could not and should not replace civil society, because the static and singular nature of government cannot accommodate the manifold needs of American citizens. When government intervenes in any field served by civil society, it shrinks the size and scope of civic life, taking more of the money that would otherwise be available for private associations. Furthermore, when the government intervenes, it often lassoes private associations with new and cumbersome rules and regulations that discourage new membership and sap further initiative by private citizens. As civic society diminishes, those in need are forced to turn to the bureaucratic institutions that have assumed a dominant position. This creates greater and greater dependence on ineffectual and stultifying government action, and individuals become less free, less virtuous, and less well-served.

  The more government centralizes social programs, the more it tends to depersonalize and alienate the individuals it is meant to protect and serve. It reduces the individual, to paraphrase Karl Marx, to an “appendage of the bureaucratic state,” which tries to assume control of more and more of our personal responsibilities. This bureaucratization of American life erodes people’s dignity and alienates them from one another, as they depend on government to solve problems instead of working together. As the bureaucratic state grows, the citizen becomes smaller, more lonely, and more vulnerable to arbitrary government actions. Transforming from independent citizens into dependent subjects, we lose our ability to organize spontaneously and creatively, instead merely following the rules laid out by a distant, impersonal, and unknowing bureaucracy. Tocqueville described this debilitating process:For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry … what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.10

  To maximize freedom, power should be vested as close to the individual as possible. This principle of localism, or what is described in Christian social teaching as subsidiarity, acknowledges that the smaller and more decentralized the decision-maker, the better the decision-maker can personalize the decision to the individuals affected and protect their dignity and freedom. Centralization alienates the decision-maker from its object and robs the individual of his right and responsibility to self-govern.

  Government’s activities should be limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and to functions that individuals and local groups cannot do themselves. The Founders enshrined this principle in the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” As the Founders intended, power must reside, wherever possible, in individuals and in the free institutions that they voluntarily create, join, build, and dissolve.

  PHILANTHROPY: FREEDOM’S WAY OF SPREADING THE WEALTH AROUND

  Americans have proved to be the most selfless people in the world, voluntarily giving more of their time and money to their fellow countrymen and to people across the globe than any civilization in history.

  Compared to other democracies, America stands out for its philanthropy and its thriving private institutions of learning, advocacy, and mutual interest. The U.S. non-profit sector is much larger than any other nation in the world, with our closest competitor, the United Kingdom, only reaching 14 percent of the U.S. total. As Arthur Brooks notes, “Even more exceptional is the fact that so much of the support of the [non-profit] sector is purely voluntary.” Charitable contributions in the United States amount to $300 billion dollars a year, with three-quarters donated from private individuals. The average family gives over $1,800 annually, and more than half of Americans also volunteer their time.11

  Burke noted in his time that this generosity extended far beyond our shores, inextricably linking us with the rest of the world—and this remains true today. After the devastating Indonesian tsunami, President Bush pledged military and humanitarian aid to the people and nations affected, including $350 million from U.S. coffers in direct assistance. But the governments of Japan, Germany, and Australia each pledged more, provoking a UN bureaucrat to label the United States “stingy.” This illustrates a common misunderstanding of the American system of charity.

  Americans are not stingy, we just prefer to engage in charity directly instead of leaving it to the government—a consequence of our civic traditions. After the Indonesian tsunami, individual Americans donated more than $1.5 billion in aid through private organizations, including $400 million to the Red Cross alone. Doctors without Borders was so inundated with American checks that it stopped accepting donations after two weeks.12

  The story of American industrialist and Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie also illustrates our long-standing attachment to private charity and philanthropy. When Carnegie was a boy, a local military veteran, Colonel James Anderson, opened his personal library to working boys of Pittsburgh every Saturday night. Carnegie leapt at the opportunity, later attributing his spectacular entrepreneurial success to his self-education. Decades later, by then one of the world’s wealthiest men, Carnegie decided to build 2,500 libraries to provide others with the opportunity for education and self-improvement that he had enjoyed.13

  Civil society institutions were often designed to inculcate this love of education and knowledge. As Moses Mather, an American preacher and Founding Father, stated, “The strength and spring of every free government is the virtue of the people; virtue grows on knowledge, and knowledge on education.”14

  CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL SOCIETY

  Civil society has served as an engine of social change throughout American history, and the civil rights movement is one of its greatest triumphs. After nearly a century of state-sanctioned discrimination and violence, justice-seeking individuals united to right the wrongs of Jim Crow laws. They formed diverse political, religious, and humanitarian associations and built networks to share information, communicate with the public and government officials, and initiate a peaceful campaign to integrate the South. Martin Luther King Jr. described how civil society underp
inned his actions in Birmingham:I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.15

  The civil rights movement’s marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives were directed against the power of government. Individuals ranging from northern university students to southern ministers organized themselves into hundreds of associations that kept up continual pressure on political leaders and officials to reconsider the immoral policies of segregation. These groups, as King noted, shared resources and coordinated their message and efforts through free institutions. They worked diligently, against great odds and under great duress, to protect the dignity and freedom of the individual against unjust laws.

  OPENING DOORS TO NEW AMERICANS

  In contrast to their prominent role in the civil rights movement, civic groups often operate less visibly, though just as effectively. Families and local community groups quietly provide community aid and serve countless needs on a daily basis.

  One example can be seen in the resettlement of Jewish refugees in the United States. In 1975, following grass-roots pressure from U.S.-based Jewish organizations and religious-freedom groups, the United States successfully pressured the Soviet Union to allow the emigration of Russian Jews and other persecuted religious minorities. Over 600,000 such refugees ultimately settled in the United States.16

  Their reception in their new homeland was another triumph of American civil society. A network of local Jewish agencies and families helped pay for the refugees’ travel expenses, met them at the airport, hosted and helped resettle them, and assisted them in finding English classes and job counseling. A family matching program was also created to give practical and emotional support to the new arrivals.17 The director of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles that coordinated the assimilation and resettlement program, a Jewish refugee herself, noted the program’s success: “[O]ppressed Jews from all over the world [came] here to live in freedom. And now we’ve got such a thriving immigrant community, with people connecting with their Jewish identity and contributing to society.”18

  A similar example is evident in the southeast Asian refugee crisis of 1975. With the fall of south Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the Communists, thousands—and eventually millions—of those nations’ citizens fled their new dictatorships. Rising to the occasion, President Gerald Ford organized an emergency military effort to evacuate refugees to the United States. American civil society also answered the call, assisting the refugees’ resettlement in countless ways. Churches, synagogues, military families, and civic groups petitioned to sponsor evacuees, while the non-profit International Rescue Committee coordinated the effort. Within days of their arrival on American shores, refugees were placed with sponsors throughout the nation. Less than a year after his arrival, refugee Dang Nguyen lauded the informal support network that had aided him: “I have a steady job, regular raises, a nice place to live, the children work hard, my wife and I are well, we have grandchildren, and next month there will be a big event in our family: We will all get our citizenship papers!”19

  Generous and capable, American civil society helped to cultivate new and proud Americans. One of these refugees, Joseph Cao, recently represented New Orleans in the U.S. Congress. Having left Vietnam as a boy, Cao and his family were taken in “by a Lutheran family, the Shrocks family in Goshen, Indiana,” with whom they lived for four years.20 Although Cao’s story is not unique, it is emblematic of the vital—and often invisible—role civil society plays in American lives.

  WELFARE REFORM: ANOTHER SUCCESS FOR CIVIL SOCIETY

  The U.S. government adopted comprehensive welfare reform in 1996, with bipartisan support from a Republican Congress and a Democratic president. As a leader of this effort, I can attest that the long road to this vital reform originated with grassroots civic groups and philanthropists who recognized that the Great Society welfare state was destructive to the efficacy of government, to civil society’s free institutions, and to the lives of the people it was designed to help.

  The campaign began decades earlier in California, where an independent network of 120 citizens’ welfare reform committees and local chambers of commerce organized initiatives to educate voters and politicians on the need for government to return power to civil society and individuals. The groups found success when California governor Ronald Reagan overhauled the state’s welfare system, providing a model for reform in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Soon, a national movement gained steam to encourage all states—the “laboratories of democracies”—to undertake their own reform experiments, and to urge the federal government to follow suit.

  Think tanks and other advocacy groups pressured government officials for more than two decades until the dam broke in the 1994 congressional election. Acting on ideas shaped by grassroots reform activists, the new, Republican-led Congress returned power to local authorities and private institutions over major social welfare programs. Although welfare reform is far from complete, citizen activists reclaimed some substantial ground for civil society that had been lost to government expansion.21

  THREATS TO CIVIL SOCIETY

  The biggest threat to civil society today is the growth of Big Government.

  Beginning in the Progressive and the New Deal eras, and especially since the time of the Great Society, liberal politicians and social thinkers have viewed the unpredictable and dynamic nature of organic society as a problem that needs to be solved. They believe that, unlike the great men and women who came before them, they can resolve major social problems and transform America into a better, fairer, more prosperous country. The instrument used to bring about this ideal society, of course, is government, which is meant to instill virtue, knowledge, prosperity, and dignity in the people and bind them together in pursuit of common national goals and ideals. Yuval Levin summarizes their beliefs:From birth to death, citizens should be ensconced in a series of protections and benefits intended to shield them from the harsh edges of the market and allow them to pursue dignified, fulfilling lives: universal child care, universal health care, universal public schooling and higher education, welfare benefits for the poor, generous labor protections for workers, dexterous management of the levers of the economy to ease the cycles of boom and bust, skillful direction of public funds to spur private productivity and efficiency, and, finally, pensions for the elderly. Each component would be overseen by a competent and rational bureaucracy, and the whole would make for a system that is not only beneficent but unifying and dignifying, and that enables the pursuit of common national goals and ideals.22

  In order to organize society according to this kind of predetermined blueprint, Americans would have to be like-minded and complacent, willing to fall in line with the government plan—or else the government has to resort to coercion. The problem is that Americans are a diverse, entrepreneurial, and independent bunch who often disagree with government blueprints. In fact, as Levin notes, no nation anywhere seems uniform enough for successful central planning: Human societies do not work by obeying orderly commands from central managers, however well meaning; they work through the erratic interplay of individual and, even more, of familial and communal decisions answering locally felt desires and needs. Designed to offer professional expert management, our bureaucratic institutions assume a society defined by its material needs and living more or less in stasis, and so they are often at a loss to contend wi
th a people in constant motion and possessed of a seemingly infinite imagination for cultural and commercial innovation. The result is gross inefficiency—precisely the opposite of what the administrative state is intended to yield.23

  Far from increasing freedom and prosperity, government welfare programs, especially under the Great Society initiated by President Johnson, had the perverse effect of entrenching poverty and ignorance. In the “beneficiary” communities, education, the family, prosperity, the work ethic, charity, and civil society institutions all disintegrated, crowded out by the government’s expanding role. Instead of making recipients more independent, welfare programs accomplished the opposite, encouraging dependency on the government’s largesse.

  A government-directed society, facing no competition or need for innovation, is ineffective, wasteful, and worse, it drains the vitality out of people’s lives. When government tries to fulfill our every want and need, and tries to make easier the difficult things in life—working, loving, learning, living, and dying—it robs our lives of the meaning we get from independently carrying out our own duties and responsibilities. As Charles Murray notes, “Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.”24 He continues,Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met—family and community really do have the action—then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.25