Agenda 2000

First Quarter 2000

First of a Four-Part Election-Year Series

The presidential candidates are contending. The Supreme Court is deliberating. Congress and the White House are electioneering. What should citizens be asking of political and judicial leaders this year and in the decade beyond? In our view, there are four priorities:

reform government's relation to families, schools, and the social sector
rebalance responsibilities between federal and state governments
strengthen the democratic process and government's accountability to citizens
clarify America's international responsibilities in an era of rapid globalization

In this and the next three issues of the Public Justice Report we will take up each of these priorities in turn.

The Government-Society Connection

Too much American political rhetoric is still framed by the conflict between calls for more government and calls for less. Most Republicans emphasize federal tax cuts, demoting Washington, and giving more freedom to individuals, the market, and the states. Most Democrats trumpet a reinvented and reinvigorated federal government that can function as a better partner with citizens, business, and volunteer groups to solve the problems individuals can't solve by themselves. This rhetoric is not adequate to deal with reality and that is why fewer and fewer Americans are listening to it.

We need a new political rhetoric, one that reflects the fact that the responsibilities of family life, education, and organizations of shared purpose are not borne by individuals on their own. Nor are those responsibilities defined primarily by the relation between individual citizens and government (whether more or less of it). Government's relation to society must change to do justice to the independent social and cultural character of families, schools, organizations of shared purpose, and communities of conviction. These constitute the core of society and the foundation of the public commonwealth.

The Cry for Education Reform

Take education policy, for example. The pressures of reality are mounting inside old structures, like the pressure of volcanic lava building toward release. Justice cannot be done to all families, children, and schools when the only free education is offered through a uniform and unionized public bureaucracy. The current system contributes to the impoverishment of the poorest families and to the denial of the deepest convictions and economic aspirations of many parents. We need a new structure in which all families and schools can be treated with equal dignity as independent institutions in their own right, situated as they are in diverse communities of conviction. None of these communities, families, or schools should be ignored by government or treated as a "sectarian" outcast, unfit for full participation in the public square because of skin color, or pedagogical distinctives, or religious faith. For government to properly encourage and fund the education of all citizens, it should uphold and reinforce the responsibilities of the families and schools that are even more centrally involved in the education of children.

Growing appeals for school choice, especially from our poorest urban neighbors, represent a reality that the old order of cultural homogenization is still trying to suppress. If equal educational choice is not given to all families by fundamentally restructuring the relation between government and schools and families, then those fighting for educational improvement will prove to be about as successful as firefighters pouring water into a volcano to try to stop the eruption.

State governments, encouraged by the president and Congress, should go beyond the promotion of charter schools and small-scale experiments with vouchers. They should hold out a vision of America finally realizing its pluralistic promise: justice for all—for all families and children and schools. The new order should be genuinely pluralistic—equal public support of education for every child, enabling parents to choose equally from among an array of school systems. And the U.S. Supreme Court should reinterpret the First Amendment's religion clauses properly to uphold the right of all families and schools to enjoy the full benefits of public life without discrimination.

Only if the deep convictions and entrepreneurial energies of parents and educators are set free to prepare children for the future, can there be hope of cultural and civic renewal. Only then can there be hope of overcoming some of the most ingrained features of poverty in America.

The Wider Social Sector

The principles to which we are appealing extend well beyond education reform. They hold for a wide range of social and welfare policies. Alleviating poverty, for example, is not something government can do by pushing economic growth, on the one hand, and then offering money and non-binding advice to individuals who fall below the poverty line, on the other. Poverty may be the result of extended unemployment, long-term recession in one sector of the economy, poor schooling, broken families, debilitating neighborhoods, lack of motivation or skills, or hopelessness. Poor people are real people, multi-dimensional people, and should be treated as social creatures who have, or need, relationships to families, friends, churches, places of employment, counseling centers, job-training programs, and good schools, all of which will come in a variety of cultural forms. The health and well-being of these institutions should be of as much concern to government as holding down inflation, curtailing monopolies, and promoting American exports.

Just as the Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare-reform law began to change government's relation to a few faith-based social-service organizations, so the law needs to change government's relation to faith-based organizations that provide job training, housing assistance, health care, drug treatment, family counseling, day care for children and the elderly, and after-school work with youth. We are talking here not about additional billions of dollars for government-dispensed services, but about redefining the way government relates to a wide range of non-government organizations and institutions, including those that are explicitly faith-based.

Marriage and Family

Beyond schooling and the wider social sector, the question of government's relationship to society also concerns the basic definition of marriage and family. Here we call for political leaders to recognize and uphold families as the generators and primary nurturers of human life—especially of the emerging generations and declining generations. These institutions should have no authority to take life, whether that be the life of the elderly, the unborn, or unwanted newborns. Marriage, the basis for a new family, should continue to be defined in law as a heterosexual institution. Homosexual friendships and other kinds of relationships between individuals, whether approved or not by others in society, should neither be denied the right to exist nor given the institutional status of marriage. In all cases, government should assure citizens of equal protection of life, property, and opportunity to associate, organize, and develop communities of conviction.

This is the other side of doing justice to families and communities. A pluralistic society can make room for new kinds of associations, organizations, communities, and friendships. Our society should have done this in the 1840s when, instead, Protestants set up a monopolistic school system and denied Catholics equal access to education benefits. However, government does not make more room for diversity by legally confusing marriage with friendship or family with a community of friends. It is unjust and counter-pluralistic to define away the institutions of marriage and family as simply one among many forms of individual partnership.

The Economic Sector of Society

One might ask why a priority focus on the structure of government's relation to society makes no mention of businesses, corporations, and the market. The reason is that compared to the topics discussed above, fundamental structural change is not in question. Thousands of important details about how government relates to rapidly changing economic conditions are important and require the federal government's attention. Tax cuts or no tax cuts; deciding whether new mergers are monopolistic or not; encouraging employee stock ownership; finding a way to control speculation on Wall Street; guarding against inflation, unemployment, harmful labor practices, and destruction of the environment--these and many other issues are an extremely important part of government's responsibility to do justice to society.

The urgent concern that we ought to have about the growing distance between rich and poor has more to do, we believe, with the reform of education, welfare, healthcare, Social Security, taxation, and public investment policies. We will take up some questions about the identity of corporations and the structure of the economy in a future discussion of globalization.

If, out of preoccupation with economic policy and desire for ever increasing economic growth, citizens and government alike allow fundamental injustices in the structure of society to continue or get worse, then we will be doubly wrong. Not only should economic growth not be our primary political aspiration, but even with regard to economic justice our first concern today should be to see justice done to society's most fundamental institutions.

—The Editors