A Patriot Is A Revolutionary
by Fred Newman

Despite their disagreements, liberals and conservatives share an 
impoverished vision of citizenship, leaving them unable to address the 
anxiety and frustration abroad in the land. If American politics is to 
recover its civic voice, it must find a way to debate questions we have 
forgotten how to ask.

Michael J. Sandel
 "America's Search For A New Public Philosophy"
The Atlantic Monthly, March 1996

The "search for a new public philosophy" is, to me, the singularly most 
important task for the complex and ever-developing independent political 
movement. Made up of forces so diverse that it can only be called American, 
the independent movement -- from Perot to Weicker to Lamm to Fulani -- 
is now large enough and varied enough to be viewed as a serious social 
experiment: an experiment to discover whether, as we approach the 21st 
century,  Americans can live together and govern together. At the heart 
of this experiment is our capacity to collectively create, in practice, 
a new civic voice; a new public philosophy. The significance of 
programmatics and principles notwithstanding it is our exceedingly 
modest success (so far), and our potential for even greater success, 
in raising new questions in new ways (creating a new and qualitatively 
more advanced democratic mode of discourse and action) that will determine 
whether we are making a genuine contribution to American society and culture.

Many thinkers across the American political spectrum are now engaging the 
issue(s) of a new public philosophy. What they have to say is all valuable. 
Yet we inside the independent movement no doubt share a predilection for 
practice over theory. We are all activists who are seeking to build a new 
philosophy rather than to philosophize abstractly about one. As such we 
are very much within the great tradition of the extraordinary social 
experiment that is America itself. Despite all our great thinkers, from 
Jefferson onward we are fundamentally a nation of pragmatic revolutionaries. 
We are a people and a culture of activists. Still, in my view, we can 
benefit from examining our customary "normal" way of looking at things 
as part of the process of creating new ways of doing things. Sandel's 
writings are useful for this purpose. In my reading on this critical 
topic over the last several years, I have found the work of another 
thinker/writer to be also of enormous value. He is the distinguished 
psychologist Kenneth Gergen, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore 
College (and, incidentally, the brother of political insider David Gergen).

Gergen writes of the ultimately corrosive effect of identity politics. 
Identity politics is, simply put, the carrying out/on of political action 
(electoral campaigns, lobbying, petitioning, etc.) on behalf of an 
identifiable grouping of people, e.g., women, gun owners, pro-abortionists, 
anti-abortionists, Blacks, small business people, fundamentalist Christians, 
gays, et al. This mode of political activity has dominated the past 50 
years of American history across the traditional right-center-left spectrum. 
Identity politics derives from the liberal tradition of American political 
thought: "Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any 
particular conception of the good life: instead it should provide a neutral 
framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and 
ends" (Sandel, p.58).

Yet the practice of identity politics has not been limited to liberals; 
conservatives do it too. This deep-rooted conception of liberal thought 
in American political history has traditionally been juxtaposed (though 
not necessarily contrasted with or in opposition to) so-called republican 
theory: "... the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government" 
(Sandel p.58). But over the past half century the liberal conception of 
identity politics has all but become the public philosophy of America and 
Americans from far right to far left. As such it overdetermines the 
political dialogue: the kinds of questions allowable, and therefore the 
kinds of answers possible, in the civic debate (to the extent that there 
still is one).

Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the domination of identity 
politics over the last 50 years or so has left America and Americans without 
"an identity." The typically justifiable demands of various groupings to 
get more for themselves (their causes and rights) in order to compensate 
for past deprivations or to assure the neutrality of government -- that 
is, to address existing biases against them -- has left the constitutional 
government (mainly the Bill of Rights) which guarantees those very rights 
without advocates; it has deprived America of the "liberty [which] depends 
on sharing in self-government." Consequently, the accelerating engine of 
American dissent (from term limits to independent politics) is being 
driven by the quite justified and terrifying concern that we the people 
are throwing out the beautiful baby with the selfish bathwater -- that 
in the name of identifiable groupings getting their fair share of their 
rights we are losing that very constitutional arrangement which guarantees 
them. Ironically, tragically, America is corroding as ever-proliferating 
groupings -- center, left and right -- fight over dividing up its dwindling 
spoils. 

This frightening situation has produced strange bedfellows. Defenders of the 
First Amendment, typically ACLU types on the left of the body politic, for 
example, have joined (albeit tentatively) defenders of the Second Amendment, 
typically right-of-center gun owners and activists, in opposition to the 
growing intrusiveness of Big Government. Term limits consistently gains 
support across the political landscape and in opposition to the 
Establishment -- political and journalistic. And the independent 
political movement brings into the same room Americans who have 
traditionally been separated from each other by light years. 

The Republicans (not to be confused with advocates of republican theory) 
have in recent years benefited the most from the crisis brought on by the 
dominance of identity politics. Making a show of nationalism, they have 
opportunistically tried to cover up their participation in the identity 
politics game. But they haven't succeeded in fooling the American people 
any better than their "identity twins," the Democrats. For in their 
contemporary form the two major parties are obviously far more interested 
in their respective identities than in the American people and/or a new 
American public philosophy for the approaching new millennium.

Identity politics is the quite understandable activity of getting one's 
due. But the new public philosophy must be, it seems to me, more a 
philosophy of giving. "Sharing in self-government" is fundamentally a 
giving. In this sense the new philosophy must be republican. Moreover, 
it must be a philosophy of giving which creates something new. In this 
sense it must be revolutionary; that is, what's required is that the 
American people (now all the American people, not merely the handful of 
1776) make a new revolution in new ways. It must be in the spirit of 
Jefferson's recognition that in a true democracy revolution is continuous. 
It must be in the political postmodern style of deconstruction and 
relational reconstruction: a readiness and a willingness to take 
everything apart and put it back together again. It must be at once 
a defense of the Constitution (our principles) and a populist revival 
of democracy -- not merely advancing representative democracy but using 
modern technology to create a more fully participatory democracy.

For a Patriot is a revolutionary. And a revolution is the creation of a 
new public philosophy. To be sure, such a revolution/new philosophy must 
be created in practice. Yet it must also be practiced creatively. When it 
isn't, it is merely another word to fool the American people and get more 
for ourselves rather than a means of giving to our country and, indeed, 
our world. This is what our independent experiment is all about. It is 
all about America, all Americans together, taking another revolutionary 
step. 

(FRED NEWMAN is a National Committee member of the Patriot Party. He is 
from New York state.)
