We can provide opportunities for more deliberative citizenship at both the national and the local level, but citizens have to seize those opportunities and take individual responsibility. We also have to give the distinctive moral language of civil society a more permanent place in our public conversation. But the language of community, family and citizenship at its core is about receiving undeserved gifts. What this nation needs to promote is the spirit of giving something freely, without measuring it out precisely or demanding something in return. At a minimum, the language of mutual obligation has to be given equal time with the language of rights that dominates our culture.
Rights talk properly supports and individual's status and dignity within a community.
It has done much to protect the less powerful in our society and should not be abandoned. The problem comes in the adversarial dynamic that rights talk sets up in which people assert themselves through confrontation, championing one right to the exclusion of another. Instead of working together to improve our collective situation, we fight with each other over who has superior rights. Americans are too often given to speaking of America as a country in which you have the right to do whatever you want. On reflection, most of us will admit that no country could long survive that lived by such a principle.