Free Our Divided Political Heart by E. J. Dionne Jr. Page A

communitarian and family-minded. One emphasizes civil rights; the other civic responsibilities. They are not at war with each other, by any stretch, but they also are not entirely at ease with one another. Many of the liberationist activists who cut their teeth in the 1970s disdained the domesticating implications of marriage, and many of the younger gay people who came of age in the 1990s disdained the libertine ethos of gay-liberation. Gay marriage thus came on the scene with two constituencies, one more socially conservative than the other, allied, but with somewhat different destinations in mind.
    In light of the broader argument I am offering here, the campaign for gay marriage might be seen as a classically American reform movement. It harnesses libertarian individualism to a communitarian emphasis onresponsibility. Like the effort to allow gays and lesbians to serve equally and without harassment in the armed forces, the gay marriage movement links rights with duties, self-fulfillment with social obligation. For liberals who value equal rights, it is an instructive story.
    Recovering their communal bearings is even more vital for conservatives, if only because the communitarian side of conservatism has been in full retreat from the beginning of the Obama administration—and arguably from early in the Bush years, when the war on terror replaced compassionate conservatism as the administration’s driving idea. And as I argued in Chapter 5 , the Tea Party has only driven compassionate conservatism further to the margins.
    But a conservatism without a strong communal and compassionate side will be untrue to its intellectual roots, unfaithful to the Christian allegiances of so many of its supporters, and disconnected from some of the most vital streams of conservative thought and feeling in American history. Similarly, a Republican Party that cuts itself off from the tradition of republican nationalism embodied by Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt will not only be abandoning the ideas that gave it life and purpose. It will also squander the opportunity to help infuse the next American consensus with the particular blend of entrepreneurialism and public purpose that the past’s best Republican leaders always advanced. My concern is that instead of seeking a consensual balance between our libertarian and communal sides, Republicans will continue to push for a one-sided settlement in which government recedes, the nurturing of community is relegated to a purely private endeavor, and the market is allowed to operate with little oversight or public accountability. Such an approach may command occasional majorities. But it will never produce the larger consensus required to save us from many years of polarization and angry discontent.
    It would be tragic if conservatives and Republicans sacrificed their great traditions on the altar of an individualism that disdains government, downplays communal obligations, and sees the economic market not simply as an efficient mechanism for the production of goods but also as the ultimate arbiter of what should be valued.
    Although the 2012 Republican primaries seemed to push the partyever farther to the right, I would like to think that these fears are misplaced. If nothing else, pure pragmatism and electoral calculation may eventually militate against the dangers I see now. There have been signs in the polls of rising opposition to the Tea Party, and this may nudge the realists among our conservative politicians toward a new appreciation for moderation and balance. They might begin to soften the edges of their individualism and to remember their communal impulses. Perhaps they will decide that the American social insurance system is too popular to be overturned and that modern capitalism is too complicated to be allowed to run with minimal supervision and few safeguards.
    What I do know is that we will not restore our greatness as a nation or heal our political wounds unless