“A friend of mine told me, ‘The older you get, the more you sound like a Republican. It’s scary.’ I agree. It is scary. But now I can say, ‘I’m not a Republican. I’m a communitarian.’”
“Then three individuals, one of whom at least is a member of the Environmental Advocates, brought an action against the village with the state Department of Human Rights. They claimed that they were handicapped by chemical sensitivity, that our spraying kept them out of the parks, and that therefore we were denying the right of access to handicapped people.”
To Jay Miller, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, such talk is an annoying mixture of the obvious and the absurd. “I don’t understand why people who believe in community think they have to attack individual rights,” he told me a few days after debating Etzioni and Conner under the auspices of the Chicago Metro Ethics Coalition at Roosevelt University. “Either they’re borrowing from the right wing or they are right-wingers themselves. Thirty years ago, when I worked for the American Friends Service Committee, Dr. Etzioni was a great peace leader. I don’t know what’s happened to him.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Several things have happened to Etzioni since 1962. A University of Chicago colleague told him about a study showing that most young Americans would want to be tried by a jury of their peers, but would seek to avoid serving on one if called. He heard a member of a TV studio audience blurt out, “The taxpayers shouldn’t pay for this [the S & L mess], the government should!” He learned that in Maryland organized motorcyclists oppose both mandatory helmet and mandatory insurance laws–in other words, they claim the right to ride unsafely and to have society pay the bills if they get hurt.
Disorienting, isn’t it? The items on this list at first seem to have been pulled at random from both liberal and conservative camps. So do its signers–liberals like Henry Cisneros, Harvey Cox, Carol Tucker Foreman, and Lester Thurow along with conservatives Bryce Christensen of the Rockford Institute and Richard J. Neuhaus.
As you might guess from that passage, communitarians as such have little interest in economics–a sphere in which the voluntary absorption of losses is not often rewarded. Etzioni says that communitarians could be either socialists or free-marketers, as long as they speak in complete sentences about who pays. Etzioni’s own economic views do not tilt to the left: asked if government should be the employer of last resort, he describes that as a palliative, not a solution: “You have to restore the private sector.”
Karanja continued, “I think that the Responsive Communitarian Platform has some power and could be part of a moral voice in the nineties. . . . [But] White America can not expect to continue to give itself all the goodies and then have a call for moral rights and responsibility and expect anybody who is broadly and deeply oppressed to take the call seriously. If this new movement continues without the kind of indepth, revolutionary commitment of a John Brown, the only realistic response for the African community in America is Mqowa!–Black Power, Power to the People.”
