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« Back to American Greatness main page    Transcript for: American GreatnessTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1312 AMERICAN GREATNESS FEED DATE: May 12, 2005 Alan Wolfe Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. BEN WATTENBERG: Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg… The 20th Century, has been called 'The American Century.' And at the beginning of the 21st, America is the world’s only superpower. Among the world’s nations, America ranks number one economically, militarily and culturally. But has America lost its sense of what once was called 'American Greatness'? Does America need to rediscover its sense of purpose? To Find out, Think Tank is joined by… Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, and author of Return to Greatness: How America Lost its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It. The Topic Before the House: American Greatness. This Week on Think Tank. MR. WATTENBERG: Alan Wolfe, welcome back to Think Tank. You’ve been on before. MR. WOLFE: I’ve been on before. MR. WATTENBERG: When I saw the topic of your book, the title, Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It, I said 'I need to get Alan back on this show, so here you are. Why don’t you tell us to begin with briefly and then we’ll explore some of this. What is the theme of this book? MR. WOLFE: Well, the theme of this book is to try to rediscover this idea of American greatness that some of your friends like David Brooks and Bill Crystal talked about a few years back. I think the idea of American greatness fits in much more with a – at least these days - with a liberal than with a conservative understanding of how the world works, so I’m trying to recapture the meaning of American greatness for the United States now. I say that greatness really involves three things. It involves having a credible understanding of liberty and equality, these great American ideals... MR. WATTENBERG: That’s equality of opportunity. MR. WOLFE: I think a whole lot depends on how you go about defining it. We can talk about that, but lets not get to the conclusion at the beginning. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. WOLFE: So some sense of liberty and equality and what they mean. I think even more importantly, some mechanism for realizing those things. So they’re not just abstract ideals, but they actually take real meaning and – and for that, equality for me means the idea of equal national citizenship. That we’re all members of one country; that we all have the right to vote; that we all are expected to participate. That’s what I think equality means. And then thirdly, as you suggest, some sense that we have an obligation if we believe in these ideals to try to guarantee them around the world and to try to promote them around the world. MR. WATTENBERG: So no one disagrees these days that we are one nation and we should be a strong nation. MR. WOLFE: That’s... MR. WATTENBERG: Certainly not the – certainly not the neo- conservatives and – and certainly compared to the liberals, not even the conservatives. MR. WOLFE: Oh, I completely disagree with you, Ben, as much as I love you and respect you... MR. WATTENBERG: No, that’s great. No, I want to... MR. WOLFE: In a 1991 the Supreme Court decision involving the question of term limits, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that we are a nation – we are a society of states; we are not a national government. He wrote as if the entire Civil War had never been fought; he wrote as if Abraham Lincoln had not died; he wrote as if John C. Calhoun were still alive. I mean, he was speaking for what in Washington you call the federalist society but what I would call the anti-federalist society, which very much – very much questions the idea. There’s been a regionalism in the United States that doesn’t put the nation first. In fact, I’ll even give you one example from the left to show you how fair I am. After George W. Bush won in 2004, in Vermont they started talking about secession. Now, it wasn’t all that serious, but I mean... MR. WATTENBERG: Who was talking about it? MR. WOLFE: Oh, some people in Vermont. MR. WATTENBERG: Oh. In Vermont. Well, that’s from the left. MR. WOLFE: Right. That’s from the left. So you know, we... MR. WATTENBERG: And they said they were going to go to Canada. MR. WOLFE: So we do get from both ends of the political circle... We’ve – actually the creation of a strong national government has been the exception rather than the rule. The one nation idea. John Marshall fought for it his entire life, and at the end of life he wrote a letter and he said I failed because the spirit of John C. Calhoun, he thought, had triumphed over the spirit of John Marshall. The idea that we were primarily sectional in our loyalties rather than a strong nation. MR. WATTENBERG: What’s wrong when you have a constitution that provides for amendments, and you have a legislature that can make laws with having at least some Supreme Court justices say, 'lets look at what the constitution says. You want to change it; change it.' But don’t have the judiciary change it. You don’t want a bunch of guys in black robes saying 'here’s what the law’s going to be,' – I mean, do you? MR. WOLFE: No. Let them say it. Let them say it all they want. But if - again, to cite one of the most prominent conservatives in history, John Marshall, if John Marshall had believed in original intent, we wouldn’t have had a strong national government. We would have fallen apart, but for the Civil War. MR. WATTENBERG: David Broder, who’s always called 'the dean of the political journalists'... MR. WOLFE: You can’t take Broder without saying Dean. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. And he’s sort of a moderate liberal I’d say. He keeps talking about the states as laboratories of democracy. Isn’t this a wonderful system? You can try out all these different things. MR. WOLFE: By all means. By all means. But let’s have – to be strong and to be a strong nation - let’s have a strong sense of national citizenship. My belief, and I argue this in the book, Ben, is that we actually did not become a nation until 1965 when we passed the Voting Rights Act which guaranteed the right to vote. The fundamental thing I try to show is that it’s not liberalism and conservatism that really divides us, and it’s not democrats and republicans; it’s what I call greatness versus goodness. That one strain of our history has always talked about a strong national government, strong American power in the world, strong American citizens; and another has always spoke for the idea that we are virtuous, that we are innocent, that we are blessed by God to do good in the world, and that these strains really contradict each other. You got to choose one or the other. It would be lovely if you could be good and great at the same time, but the only person who ever really tried that was Woodrow Wilson and he was just torn apart by it. MR. WATTENBERG: Tell me why you can’t be great and good at the same time. I mean, again, I hate coming back to the neo-conservative view of this world, but in foreign policy the neo-cons always said that the best realism, which is one school of foreign policy, is idealism. So why do you say they either have to be great or good? Why can’t we be both? MR. WOLFE: I wish we could, actually and you know, I have nothing against it in principle. But when I look at American history and I see people who try to do both, I see them facing enormous difficulties, just as I see the neo-cons doing that. I mean, I’m very sympathetic to what a lot of neo-conservative foreign policy people want to do with American foreign policy now. But I think you can’t do it on the cheap. MR. WATTENBERG: Alan, you write in your book that Iraq has backfired spectacularly. Maybe you were just caught in a publishing time warp, but since the activity of America in Iraq, we’ve seen movement toward a democracy in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, in Israel and Palestine, a little bit in Libya, something in Saudi Arabia, and something perhaps quite significant in Egypt. So – and this is – was a military action initiated by President George W. Bush. MR. WOLFE: Well, I’m no great fan of President George W. Bush, and anyone who reads my book will see that, but if this works, if what Bush did turns out to be positive...Look, I’m not one of those people on the left that wants to see the Iraqi people go down in order to vindicate my dislike of George W. Bush. I’ll be the first to congratulate him. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you... MR. WOLFE: But I have a deep suspicion that it’s never going to happen. We never learned from history, we never learned from the British experience in Iraq, but fundamentally we’ve never learned that how incredibly difficult, how incredibly expensive the commitments that the President has taken on are. And I think that if we’re going to be successful we need to get over this fetish about tax cuts which is crippling us, crippling our ability to do these things. We’ve got to talk much more about the energy sacrifices that we need to make. I mean even the hardest line critics in Washington are saying that we need to do something more on the energy front to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question. If we are such a conservative nation with such a restricted view of what government can do, how come with each successive budget cycle the amount of spending by the federal government keeps going up and up and up, much to the dismay of a lot of conservatives? I mean, Bush is not a no-spender. MR. WOLFE: We’re not a conservative nation. I mean, I think that’s what the Bush administration proves. That people wanted Medicare, now they got one that’s enormously expensive; it’s even too expensive for me let alone your libertarian friends in Washington. But you know, I think that the clear indication is that while Americans vote conservative, they don’t want conservatives to actually carry out their most conservative policies. There’s this lingering sense that people understand for all their popularity of tax cuts as rhetoric among politicians, tax cuts don’t get that big support in public opinion. MR. WATTENBERG: Do you have to be for greatness? Do you have to be for higher taxes? MR. WOLFE: Yes. Yes. I think you basically do. It’s expensive. To be a great country costs money. Now look; it’s not necessary. I mean if you could find more efficient ways of doing it, fine. But you can’t be antigovernment. Government represents the collective will of the American people. Government is a good thing. Government has been a good thing throughout our history... MR. WATTENBERG: Well why... MR. WOLFE: ...neo-conservatives have believed that government is a good thing. I believe that government’s a good thing. There is this extreme right wing movement in the United States that believes that government is evil. That’s the party that, you know – the faction that fundamentally calls the shots in the Republican Party these days. MR. WATTENBERG: Yes. Now, the – you say that a great government has to maximize potential for all people. I mean, again, here’s this administration. They led maybe the biggest bill is this No Child Left Behind Act. Some people say it’s not funded enough, but it’s a significant departure. You’re an education man; you would know that. I think most every time we have a tax cut, we take a whole lot of people off the tax rolls - I don’t know what it is, thirty/thirty-five percent of the people don’t pay any taxes at all. The idea that this is freebie tax stuff for the wealthy, I think is an overstatement. MR. WOLFE: Well, I think that when history looks back on this period, Karl Rove will be remembered as the man who invented the formula that government can spend all the money it wants and it never has to raise any of the money to pay for it. I mean, the deficits this administration is running - again, this is not a great country. A great country doesn’t do this. A great country doesn’t pass on the debt to future generations. It doesn’t make my children pay for the fact that this president can’t veto a bill. That this president wants to please as many people as he can by spending money without, you know, restraint. I mean, so the very things that you’re citing as an indication of, you know, some of the better things he’s done, to me, you know, represent almost a kind of irresponsibility that frankly reminds me of the left when I grew up in the 1960s with its irresponsibilities. MR. WATTENBERG: You said that now you have come to love America, and I think you used that word ’now’. Most of the radicals that I knew always said, it’s because we love America so much that we’re burning down this building, or whatever it is. Did you not love America when you were quotes, 'a radical'? MR. WOLFE: I think a lot of people who said that at the time weren’t being truthful. MR. WATTENBERG: Were not being truthful? MR. WOLFE: No, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that the feeling was that - you know, as I recall among my friends and myself - that we really were in fundamental – so fundamental disagreement with what the government was doing. And so unable to come to terms with the fact that Americans had elected Richard Nixon. I mean, we said all kinds of things. We said we liked the American people but not the government. But fundamentally there was a strong strain of anti- Americanism there, and I think I shared it and I think I’m over it. And I think that over the – especially the collapse of communism - for me visits to places like Cuba and eastern-European socialist countries were eye-opening experiences in negativity... MR. WATTENBERG: No, I understand. And you say that very eloquently in your book. MR. WOLFE: Absolutely. And so there I was moving in the direction of loving my country, then the country was under attack September 11th – a horrifying event. It shattered me. It shattered all of my people I know. And I came to the instinctive defense of the country, and by the way, to the instinctive defense of President Bush. I spoke everywhere I could in favor him. And then he took that opportunity and did not use it to unify us, but used it to divide us and I’ve been so furious ever since. MR. WATTENBERG: How did he – how did he divide us? MR. WOLFE: Because he had such an opportunity... MR. WATTENBERG: On 9/11. I mean, he got up there and said we’re going to go kick butt of the people who did this to us, and you know... MR. WOLFE: Right. And then he went back to Plan A, which is the Republican, you know, idea that Rove and Tom DeLay and all these others hatched, of dividing the country in half, of pitting one against the other. I kept waiting for that speech, Ben, that speech that said, you know, Osama bin Laden didn’t care whether you were gay or straight; he didn’t care whether you were a republican or a democrat; he attacked us all and we all have to come together. And instead I heard about stem cells. I mean, stem cells of all things after September 11th? The abortion thing… MR. WATTENBERG: Look. Look. Republicans are a pro-life party and they’re very concerned about things like stem cells. But it’s very interesting, getting back to this federalism idea, you now have a number of states spending significant amounts of state money on research on stem cells because the feds won’t do it. MR. WOLFE: That’s right... MR. WATTENBERG: So this system has a lot of ways to work. MR. WOLFE: Oh, no. Federalism – yes, I have nothing against federalism at that level. I’m talking about, in my book, about the idea of national citizenship. Citizenship is the one thing you can’t devolve to the states. Citizenship has to be national. But all kinds of things like that I’m all in favor of it. The Republicans are a pro- life party. The Republicans these days - in my opinion, and it’s all in the book - the Republicans are a party that put their ideology and put their partisanship ahead of the country. They – if they’re given a choice between winning an election and unifying the country, they’ll choose winning election every time. And that disturbs me and that reminds me of the kind of radicalism I used to see. I think it’s fundamentally an irresponsible position. I don’t care how fundamentally politically successful it is. MR. WATTENBERG: And you think that putting ideology first with their own special interest groups is not also a hallmark of the Democratic Party? MR. WOLFE: Look; read the book. Go after both of them. I mean... MR. WATTENBERG: You do go after both. MR. WOLFE: I want to see – I mean, as I put it in the book, I think the ideal political system is one that has two parties that both try to appeal to the idea of a nation. They do it in different ways. You can have a conservative party that talks about a sense of duty and obligation, that has a different conception of equality and liberty. You have a liberal party that tries to reach out to the poor in different ways. You can have all kinds of different variations. But in a good political system, both political parties have to put the nation first. And the great tragedy of our country right now is that neither of them are doing it. And it happens to be the Republicans that are in power, so they get a little more of my attention. MR. WATTENBERG: What I don’t understand is this. I mean, I would say that in this day and age – not all times for everywhere - but in this day and age, the great hallmark of national greatness would be to extend and promote and encourage liberty and democracy around the world. You have a President who’s going around saying, 'that’s what we have to do; that’s our mission'. And that’s what you’re saying. MR. WOLFE: And that’s what the Democratic Party is saying. MR. WATTENBERG: The Democratic Party was saying... MR. WOLFE: Its leaders were. MR. WATTENBERG: The Democratic Party... MR. WOLFE: Its leaders were supporting the war in Iraq. MR. WATTENBERG: Excuse me? MR. WOLFE: Its leader supported the vote for the war in Iraq. MR. WATTENBERG: Which leader supported...? John Kerry... MR. WOLFE: He voted for the authorization. MR. WATTENBERG: And... MR. WOLFE: And then raised proper questions about it. MR. WATTENBERG: And then voted against funding it. MR. WOLFE: He very – yes, he had questions about how the war was being carried out. Which - I have questions about how the war was carried out. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question. MR. WOLFE: It’s not unpatriotic to do that. MR. WATTENBERG: You say conservatives detest modernity. And yet you have so many conservative businessmen on the cutting edge of this incredible technology, both in biotech and high tech and computers. I mean, certainly as much as liberals, and I would guess more because they’re sort of, you know, they’re the businessmen. MR. WOLFE: I think Christian conservatives are against theory of evolution and in favor of something called creationism. I think they have serious questions about certain kinds of medical advances, including stem cells and so on. But, you know, I think you’re absolutely right about, you know, the technology – technological cutting edge. I mean, one of the things I’m sure we’re going to be seeing in the future is that this thing we call conservatism is going to have these big splits between the much more forward-looking libertarian... MR. WATTENBERG: Oh, they already got them. MR. WOLFE: And the Christian conservatives. MR. WATTENBERG: Alright, another quote. You talk about – I think you overstate it – savage, free market capitalism. That’s what we have now. There was a book written – we did a program on it with a guy named Paul London who was a deputy undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, called The Competition Solution. And he makes the case, sort of from a fairly liberal point of view, that what this free market capitalism has done - the deregulation - it has lowered prices for consumers, enormously include and cut inflation – cut the legs out of inflation. And that free market capitalism is really quite liberal. MR. WOLFE: I have lots of sympathies for free-market capitalism if it’s fair and if it gives people equal opportunities to compete. My critique of the way the Republicans do things these days is that it’s a kind of combination of free-market capitalism combined with using government to promote the privileges of the already very, very powerful. So, making entry costs for competitors much more difficult, and so on, protecting the big contributors. Like drug industry, the drug and pharmaceutical firms and so on. MR. WATTENBERG: You go out of your way in a sentence or two to criticize American universities - and in particular the American studies programs - for being – I think I’m – maybe I’m characterizing it, but it’s a tough criticism that they are anti-American. Which coming from a (inaudible) like myself, you would expect. What did you mean by that? MR. WOLFE: Well, I do think they’re anti-American. I... MR. WATTENBERG: This is your friends and the faculty. MR. WOLFE: Well, they’re not my friends... MR. WATTENBERG: I mean... MR. WOLFE: I write at length both in the book and in other articles about the virulent hatred for America that this thing called American studies, which is an academic discipline, has developed. It’s really quite remarkable. You know, American studies is important because it not only teaches Americans about America; the State Department’s always funding people in American studies to go out and, you know, spread the word in Germany, Egypt, wherever. MR. WATTEMNERG: I think talking about American greatness involves in this world a bigness, and you’re going to get bigness from immigration. MR. WOLFE: That’s something we agree on and that – immigration, you’re right, Ben; it’s an issue that cuts liberal conservative categories and it really divides people into sort of the big America versus the small America. MR. WATTENBERG: I want to ask you one thing about the Vietnam War. The case has been made - and I worked for Lyndon Johnson so I have some sympathy with it - was that there was something called the Cold War. And a war by definition is a series of battles. And we lost one - or our allies actually lost one after we left - but one was lost. But then we won the war, which was one of the great events in history, winning the Cold War. I mean, that was not some brief interlude. I mean, the rise of totalitarianism was eighty years. And we won the Cold War, all of us, Democrats and Republicans. Might that give you any pause to say, 'well, we lost one of the battles but the Cold War was the right thing to do'? MR. WOLFE: The Cold War was the right thing to do. I may not have thought that in my youth but... MR. WATTENBERG: No, I understand. MR. WOLFE: I just had reason to reread a book from 1949: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, 'The Vital Center', in which he calls upon liberals to say that the struggle against totalitarianism is the defining feature of liberalism. And I think he was right then, and I think others like Paul Berman who make a similar argument today about Islamic terrorism are right. I spent the fall semester of 2004 in Berlin, the whole semester. I had a great time there, but, you know, I’m one of those people who sort of thought, well, Berlin had this tragic history ’cause of the Nazis. But it ended in 1945. And what you discover when you go there now is, no; totalitarianism lasted until 1989 in the eastern part of Berlin and in the eastern part of Germany and the Soviet Union was a pretty horrible thing. MR. WATTENBERG: Everybody who writes a book about politics ultimately has a five-point plan or a three-point plan or a seven-point plan. Just for our viewers, you can do it in a sentence each, what is your plan? In this book you say, 'what America needs to do to recover its sense of purpose and to return to greatness' - and by the way, I must say return and recover are typically conservative words; it’s very interesting, I thought. But anyway, what should we do? MR. WOLFE: Well I think the Republicans, they have to rediscover the idea that – that government is our friend the way Teddy Roosevelt, who was a Republican did; the way Abraham Lincoln, who was a Republican did. For the democrats, I think they have to be much stronger as we’ve suggested throughout this program with the foreign policy side, and not be so apologetic and defensive as they’ve been. But I also think they have to be strong advocates of the Roosevelt legacy. And Democrats should not be ashamed of tackling issues like national health insurance. As unpopular as they were when Clinton tried to do it and as unpopular as they can be, the fundamental liberal idea is that you strengthen America by strengthening Americans, and you’ve got to help every American live up to their greatest potential. And that’s something I think Democrats could do. And the only sort of last thing I could add, you know, we hear all this discussion about values and the importance of moral votes and so on. I think that there are enormously great American values. They are the values of Abraham Lincoln; they’re the values of John Marshall; they’re the values of Alexander Hamilton. This was a country that was fashioned by brilliant men, descendants of the Enlightenment with a very positive, confident vision. You’re someone, Ben, who’s talked a lot about how Americans are almost afraid of good news. And I think Democrats have to be – get over their fear, get over their defensiveness; recognize that this has been a great country and strongly support it. MR. WATTENBERG: OK, Alan Wolfe, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please, remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. 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