National and community service belongs in the domain of neither government nor the private sector, but in civil society-indeed, such service helps define citizenship. In truth, it is an exercise in high citizenship of which Americans can feel especially proud. In the last 30 years, Democrats and Republicans have hardened their battle lines. The former are pledged to defend government, however alienating and inefficient a tool it has become. The parties are locked in a zero-sum game in which the government cannot expand justice without diminishing liberty and in which the private sector cannot expand liberty without diminishing justice.
Citizens are happy with neither choice.
It is that form of government in which rights and responsibilities are two sides of a single civic identity, one that belongs neither to state bureaucrats nor to private consumers but to citizens alone. It can contain an obtrusive government without ceding public goods to the private sphere. It also can dissipate the atmosphere of solitude and greed that surround markets without suffocating us in big government's exhaust fumes. William Bennett's Book of Virtues tells many a salutary moral tale, but the virtues it celebrates are the product neither of government nor markets but of families and citizens acting in the free space of civil society. There is a danger that Americans will think that the act of buying the book somehow is tantamount to acquiring the virtues.