Part of what's missing in our politics is an attention to citizenship and civic virtue. Most of those who have talked about virtue in politics recently have been on the right, from the moral majority to the Christian Coalition - Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett. I don't share their politics, but they're right to talk about civic virtue. The cultural conservatives are also right to worry about the erosion of moral authority and community.
Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.
The best examples of moral and civic discourse on the left go back, unfortunately, three decades, to Robert Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1968, and Martin Luther King. That has left conservatives with a monopoly on the most potent themes of politics. Only with Bill Clinton, in 1992, was there the beginning of an awareness by liberals or Democrats of the importance of reconnecting with the language of civic virtue, community, citizenship. And what a tragedy it is that so gifted and resourceful a political figure should have squandered so much of his opportunity to redefine the political agenda. Now, we're drowning in rhetoric about community and virtue and religion and family.