Afterword: American Origins of Puritan Selves

Summary

Few bodies or parties have served the world so well as the Puritans.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (January 1824)

The virtue of citizenship appears to be in retreat these days. In the wake of the Republican “revolution” of November 1994, the frequencies of American politics are now dominated by the theme of “less government,” a euphemism, one suspects, for a decrease in federal income taxes. While Americans still sentimentalize such communitarian dramas as the rescue workers who sifted through the rubble of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, American politicians risk their necks in calling for the people's selfless virtue. The unbridled individualism unleashed by Reagan's presidency was supposed to have found its humane equipoise in George Bush's proclamation of a “kinder, gentler nation” and a “thousand points of light.” However, such calls upon citizens to divest themselves of selfish interests tend to fall upon deaf (or even resentful) ears. Look where it got George Bush. Bill Clinton's attempt to reinvoke a sense of civic responsibility by coupling it with the promise of the “New Covenant” for smaller, more efficient government inadequately checked a Republican political discourse that managed to translate citizenship from civic to personal responsibility. Bob Dole is only one of many misinterpreters of Emersonian “self-reliance.” If anything, it is the extreme Right that has co-opted the discourse of Revolutionary republicanism, championing the “rights of the people,” and the memory of April 19 on Lexington Green, as the ideological foundation for a stand against government.