On the same day, in the same newspaper, one page apart, two serious commentators see two different ideas of world order deteriorating. Gerard Baker cites broad global pushback against a progressive agenda of environmental, cultural and social measures, while Walter Russell Mead notes the failings of the liberal institutional order. In a sense, the columns document a clash between two worldviews, perhaps more contest than evolution. But whatever the reason, two widely felt views of order, or normality, or proper world workings, are losing their hold, and any other image will also face a mix of opposition, apathy and isolation. Any “world as we know it” is gone and no new “world as it should be” has traction.
Meanwhile today’s living world harbors grievances and suffering in millions of settings, and spawns greed, ambition, enterprise and creativity in swirling, intertwining dynamics of people, nature and ideas. If markets, politics domestic and international, entertainment and culture, work and strife all seem to sit in an inertial routine, the apparent stasis is nowhere near stable. Evenly matched arm wrestlers locked at the midpoint are not inert.
History reminds that something will usually give, and offers horrific evidence of what can happen when it does. And, as so often is the case, we have recent cases – their counterparts in history are considered forerunners – that could be warnings, premonitions, or possibilities. Is the ISIS ”state” Fascist Italy to some lurking Nazi Germany? Is 2008 a dress rehearsal for a Great Depression? Was January 6 a version of the Bastille, or Hitler’s “beer hall putsch” – or Louis Farrakhan’s “million man march?” Does the U.S. government’s fiscal incompetence put us in the shoes of the French monarchy in 1788? Even positive developments will be disorienting, even if we have already imagined some version of them – what if we really do meet benevolent alien life forms?
For all the possibilities, we haven’t tried to agree on what we value or what we would change in the world. We haven’t shared aspirations to name what we might hope for. If some dam breaks, we will not be ready to save what we value most. Since so many, in so many fields of activity, can already imagine how the dams in their worlds may break, it seems high time to start taking stock of what’s most precious.
Agreement requires some base for consensus. It may be that America does have a silent majority, so that whatever matters most to “all of us” (in an expression of early 20th Century publisher S. S. McClure) will survive and prevail. But even if so, we will untangle the chaos of current public discourse all the sooner if we see that implicit base explicitly, and now. If we lack that base, then the sooner we can set one, the more likely we are to keep what we need.
America has a natural national bedrock. The nation conceived itself as a “People” who hold certain truths, that all persons are equally endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments exist to secure those rights. This is the creed of the Declaration of Independence, the first expression of the nation, and the only definition of our national identity. Americans generally do not dispute its role in our history or its tenets (though many cite hypocrisy among us around them). But few pay it much heed as we pursue our wants and argue our politics.
If we continue to ignore our common creed, we could end up effectively renouncing it, dividing ourselves over partisan allegiances and narrow self interests rather than agreeing that this is the family silver to be secured if the house catches fire. As it happens, too, if Americans were to start looking through this common lens of rights and society oriented to them, we could go far to fixing some of the dysfunctions. There would be a basis for political consensus so that, as one possibility, government spending could fit a sustainable budget – we might actually see coherent discussion of how much we want to pay for which government services.
Simply reciting a venerated text will not set our founding creed as national mental bedrock. But knowing that it is there, and bending some effort to understanding its terms, its logical nuances and implications, and the possibilities it offers us as a nation, would at least provide a starting point for some sort of ordering of common priorities. Right now partisan polarizers and dissipative entertainment shaping our discourse. If all the ideas of world order are dead, if those who shape discourse are more interested in debunking each others’ order than offering any to the rest of us, maybe a review of America’s first premise will allow this nation to navigate any chaos that may come.
Common Conviction 