Prologue
Just about everybody these days agrees that our country and democracy are not better off than 50 years ago. In a Jan. 7 commentary, "Blame it on '68," one of the co-authors of the article you're now reading, Stephen B. Young, attributed the decline of democracy in America to a generation of baby boomers who refused to conform, rejected personal responsibility, and had no sense of duty to family or country. Thinking Mr. Young wrong, the other current co-author, Andy Dawkins, wrote to him, attributing democracy's decline to the ascendancy of corporate domination of the political process.
This led to a conversation over coffee, where, after hearing about each other's different vantage points to 1968 — Young was the son of the U.S. ambassador to Thailand and Dawkins was a protester at the 1968 Democratic National Convention — they found, first, humility in admitting each had things to learn from the other, and then some common ground, with Young agreeing that the reign of wealthy America over our democracy needs to be checked and Dawkins agreeing that values are tremendously important to a democracy. Together, they wrote this article urging an end to the blame game and suggesting a common path forward.
Readers can find Young's original article and Dawkins' initial response at tinyurl.com/blame68-and-response.
Some 50 years have passed since 1968, one of the most tumultuous and wrenching in American history. The Tet Offensive, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, riots in American cities, the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and much more seemed, for a while, to portend some revolutionary change in the country's basic system.
Ultimately, these events did not portend such a violent change. What they did portend, and did mark, was the beginning of a steep decline in our collective faith in the American experiment. For all the patriotic ballyhoo peddled by political campaigns and commercial enterprises, the American people have experienced a steady erosion in their experience of the fairness, openness and opportunity of American culture. And that, in turn, has led to a steady erosion in our collective faith in American democracy.
What is to be done? Today the air is filled with accusations and ideological conflict, but what is needed now is not the zero-sum triumph of one political party over another. We need a movement, one that, like the civil rights movement, transcends divisive issues of partisanship, economic status, race, regionalism and all the other causes we like to blame for our problems. We need a movement that does not look to politicians for leadership, that unites rather than divides, that lifts us past today's despair and leads us into tomorrow's hope and progress. We need a movement toward a renewed democracy.
Where to begin? Obviously, not with the left and the right — the social democrats and the neoconservative capitalists blaming the other. No. It must begin with the one essential feature without which no democratic system can survive. It must begin by embracing that each of us — with few exceptions — wants what is best for America no matter how much we may differ on individual points of policy and culture.
To renew democracy, we must first restore our faith in ourselves. In this time of so much "fake news," with so many Americans hearing the news differently and with so much hostility to the political process, valuing a conversation with a degree of trust, some humility and a search for truth becomes paramount. In a commentary in the New York Times ("How Lies Spread Online," March 8), Sinan Aral of the MIT Sloan School of Management put it this way: "Some notion of truth is central to the proper functioning of nearly every realm of human endeavor. If we allow the world to be consumed by falsity, we are inviting catastrophe."