F Y I - WHAT'S HAPPENING?
Elected
leaders should restore a concern for the public good
On Arch Street, near the entrance to the old Quaker Meeting House, is a gray-granite water fountain. It was installed on the sidewalk by the Philadelphia Fountain Society in 1869 and donated by an “anonymous” lady.
I’ve walked past this piece of Victoriana dozens of times without noticing it. But on a day when the temperature flirted with 100 degrees, this fountain caught my attention. It was more than its Victorian design, the quaintness of the anonymous donor or even the brief promise of water on a sweltering day that gave me pause.
Rather, it was the very notion that at one time – and not that long ago – Philadelphians might walk these streets and find a public water fountain. This charming anachronism, however, speaks to very current issues. Small though it is, it represents a big idea for all of us looking for a new direction for this country, and especially for Democrats looking to break the current Republican hegemony.
That fountain on Arch Street was put there at the beginning of America’s great urban development in the period after the Civil War. It wasn’t simply that America’s’ big cities grew truly big in those years. More than that, American cities, at the impetus of businessmen, politicians and even anonymous ladies, endeavored to reshape those cities with some sense of a common welfare and a public good.
In the roughly 75 years between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War, American cities built a remarkable civic infrastructure designed to foster the commonweal. Great public parks, like Central, Fairmount and Lincoln; tremendous public museums like the Metropolitan, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field in Chicago; inspirational public libraries, beginning, of course with Philadelphia’s own.
And much more quotidian though no less vital things: public health systems; paved roads; garbage removal. All these were created during the years when city leaders of various kinds were attempting to take the chaotic urban life in America’s burgeoning industrial centers and make it more livable and urbane. Like finding a drinking fountain on the street on a hot day.
During the last generation, especially since the 1980s, we have retreated from all things public and even from the very notion that there is a public good. Run down the litany: public schools, public transportation, public housing – they’ve all been vilified by conservative politicians, and once in office those politicians stopped our investment in the public good, with perfectly predictable results.
To take just one example, states have dramatically de-funded their magnificent public universities. The one I teach at now receives less than 30 percent of its annual budget from the state. Such institutions must raise tuitions at a rate even faster than that of private colleges, cutting off access to higher education to a growing number of working families. No surprise the United States now ranks ninth in the world in the percentage of its population with a college degree.
Instead, we have been offered a vision in which all social good stems from the private sector, from self-interest, and from our individual pursuits. This privatized vision of America takes the measure of our society by counting the number of SUVs in the driveway rather than the 45 million who don’t have health insurance.
But the cost of this near-total retreat into the private sphere is even larger than the sum of those, and there are many, who are being left behind. The price is democracy itself. Democracy, after all, is the process through which people with competing interests come together to work out what constitutes the common welfare. That process depends, first and last, on a public thinking in public terms.
But if no one involved even believes there is a public good, democracy functions more and more like an auction where power is sold to the highest bidder. Which sounds a lot like what we’ve got in Washington today.
Once a Democratic president insisted to us that we ask what we could do for our country, rather than the other way round. Now we have a Republican leadership that has used government to enrich the already rich, a leadership for whom sacrifice evidently means sending other people’s children off to war.
Democrats looking to stake out political territory would do well to remember the lesson of that anonymous lady back in 1869. In a democratic society there is a common welfare, a public good. We are our brothers’ keepers, despite all we’ve been told to the contrary; we are, first and foremost, citizens of a nation, not consumers at Wal-Mart. Rebuilding our country means reclaiming that basic truth: We are all in this together.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer,
October 22, 2006. Reprinted with the permission of Dr. Steven Conn.
