Copyright 1998, the Brookings Institution Press. OCR for page 93 - . The very word community has found a place, however fuzzy and im- precise, all over the ideological spectrum. In the middle it seems to reflect a much simpler yearning for a network of comfortable, reliable relationships. But it has been all over the pages of popular journalism and political dis- course in the 1990s.
Authority is something else again.
It evokes no similar feelings of nos- talgia. On the one hand, few would dispute that it has eroded over the last generation. Walk into a large public high school in a typical middle class suburb today, and you will see a principal who must spend huge portions of his or her day having to cajole recalcitrant students, teachers, and staff into accepting direction that, a generation ago, they would have accepted unquestioningly just because the principal was the principal and they were subordinates. You will see teachers who risk a profane response if they dare . . . Or consider the mainstream Protestant church.