An American Melting Plot

...Particularly important are casual gathering places like taverns, coffee houses, and drug stores...

...There are other, more technical problems with the AVF that have less to do with egalitarianism, such as the fact that the pool of young men from which we must buy our volunteers is shrinking (from 8.6 million men aged 18 to 21 in 1981 to an estimated 6.6 million in 1995...

...No communal experience is involved...

...If some young Americans are freely willing to go into battle for $25,000 a year-well, it’s a deal...

...Universal service was endorsed by Gary Hart, who predicted it “might be the biggest issue” of the dlecade...

...Unlike schools, day care centers can be conveniently located near places of work rather than near homes...

...If chosen, they would serve together for two years...

...But if a man who can’t afford medical care is bleeding on the sidewalk, we are going to provide him with it one way or another, at public expense if necessary...

...Care for the infirm elderly is probably the most pressing need...

...One solution is to restrict national service to a few concrete tasks of proven utility and practicality...

...It’s not necessarily true that the more “socialized” a system is, the better it satisfies the demands of social equality...

...Instead of worrying about distributing and redistributing income, it worries about rebuilding, preserving, and strengthening community institutions in which income is irrelevant, about preventing their corruption by the forces of the market...

...Even Henry Kissinger used to hang out with his old Army buddies...

...Meanwhile, the affluent and the poor no longer rub shoulders in the public schools of even small cities, as the middle class flees to its suburban enclaves or else abandons public education entirely...

...Day care is another service with impressive potential for growth...

...natelv...

...Health isn’t a good like other goods...

...It tries to reduce the influence of money in politics, to revive the public schools as a common experience, to restore the draft...

...One essential characteristic of a good third place is that it is accessible to people of all income levels...

...What happens when affluent Americans-increasingly affluent Americans-are faced with this rationing...

...Her list: teachers’ aides, police aides, nurses’ aides, a rural “conservation corps” to clean up the environment, plus a similar corps to repair and maintain urban public spaces...

...Not surprisingly, most remain with their assigned funds...

...The Gulf war proved that the egalitarian objections to an AVF become loudest at the worst time, just as the prospect of combat and death looms...

...The British, German, and Canadian systems all currently meet the goal...

...This helps clarify the sort of national service program we’re talking albout...

...It could also be a heavy monetary penalty that judges could tailor to fit the financial circumstances of any refuseniks-though it would have to be a potential fine of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, trol public spaces, sorting library books, perhaps assisting in the care of preschool children in day care...

...It’s simply whether a large cross section of the population winds up serving together under conditions of equality...

...But they embody much of what Americans feel they’ve lost since the move from small towns-the general store, the pharmacy soda fountain of It’s a Wonde&l Life, the neighborhood bar romanticized on “Cheers...

...Some of these reasons are related to social equality...

...A range of other government institutions-museums, post offices, libraries-at least potentially reinforce social equality by providing services to all citizens...

...The tax deduction for stadium skyboxes and season tickets could be completely eliminated, for examplenot on economic grounds, but on social-egalitarian grounds...

...And poor preschool children aren’t nearly as threatening to upper-middle-class parents as, say, poor adolescents...

...Nor is the Civic Liberal test of success whether national service participants become less selfish...

...There are perfectly good military reasons for replacing the current all-volunteer force (AVF...

...When everyone uses the same system, it not only reinforces “solidarity,” it also ensures the quality of care...

...The Germans do this by the simple expedient of requiring 75 percent of the population to join one of several “statutory sickness funds...

...Each of these institutions attempts to treat all citizens, rich and poor, with equal dignity...

...Clearly, military service should count as the fulfillment of any service requirement...

...Even under the most promising plans, the crunch for Civic Liberalism will come when attempts to control the overall cost of health care force some method of rationing ever-more expensive medical procedures...

...True, thanks to communism’s collapse, the military will only need about 11 percent of America’s draft-age men by 1995...

...But some privately operated enterprises that are part of our public life don’t rely on class-mixing at the neighborhood level...

...Still, it would be hard for even a nearby neighborhood tavern to mix classes in a neighborhood that is itself segregated by class...

...A better approach, for social egalitarians, would combine universal service with conscription...

...Television coverage of sporting events could be regulated to keep it universal, preventing cable companies from buying the rights and then broadcasting only to the cable-ready affluent...

...Between 31 and 37 million people in this group aren’t insured at all, and that number has been growing...

...Uppermiddle-class Americans & ill not tolerate bad treatment for very long (just as they wouldn’t have tolerated the Vietnam war if their sons had been drafted...

...The point is that once we set out to rebuild the public sphere, we can make fairly large improvements fairly expeditiously...

...But other institutions have not been so hardy...

...Taxpayers (most of whom would already be covered, one way or another) probably wouldn’t want to pay for much in the way of gap-filling last-resort insurance...

...The foundation of this community sphere in the United States is, of course, the political institution of democracy...

...To reinstate it, we don’t need new taxes or new leaders-simply a new law...

...Genuine draft Yet it would be even more effective to involve more than 11 percent, and more than just men-to make the military part of a broader scheme of national service, including civilian service...

...The point is that money equality isn’t the mly factor that determines social equality, and it may not be the crucial one...

...What’s more, they require stints of service lasting at least two years (otherwise training costs become too high...

...If they weren’t chosen, they would still serve together as civilians for one year...

...some would consign their employees to spartan HMOs...

...The final question facing any mandatory national service scheme is how to integrate it with the military...

...We just have to do them...

...Let’s start with the institution that has deteriorated most dramatically: the military...

...If somebody can’t afford a car, we’re willing to say, well, he doesn’t have a car...

...Requiring two years of civilian service seems a bit much...

...That will require something more...

...This hybrid drafthervice setup might well be perceived as fairer than any attempt to allow more freedom of choice at the expense of universal exposure to military risks...

...At the very least a heavy tax disincentive will be necessary...

...That’s trickier than you might think...

...We know it cements social equality to have Americans attend the same schools and serve in 1 he same army...

...It is the draft in a weaker dose, more widely dispensed...

...In bigger cities, the everyday experience of public life in streets, parks, subways, and libraries has been ruined by crime, incivility, and neglect...

...as Oldenburg puts it, “Worldly status claims must be checked at the door in order that all within remain equals...

...The “socialized” British system allows those with money to purchase private insurance, but that doesn’t undermine classmixing because most of the private insurance merely supplements the national health system, where the most advanced, high-tech medicine is still practiced...

...The jury system, for example, still brings disparate members of the community together, if only occasionally, in a way that often convinces those who serve that common sense isn’t a function of income or race...

...They wait together, flirt, swap sob stories and advice, save each other’s place in line, keep an eye on each other’s kids...

...Here again, it matters that social equality is the main goal...

...There the marketplace stops, and the rule is not “one dollar, one vote” but “one citizen, one vote...

...The cash is spent, and is intended to be spent, in the private, money sphere...

...This is the stuff of social equality...

...William F. Buckley distinguished himself from most on the right by calling for a ,service scheme that would enroll 80 percent of America’s youth by means of various “inducements” and “sanctions...

...Put those together and you probably have enough jobs to keep several million young people usefully employed at a time...

...But none of these virtues is evident when all the government does is send out checks-even if, as liberals typically recommend, benefits go to the middle class and rich as well as the poor...

...As the network audience share declines (it’s fallen from 92 percent to 64 percent), that is increasingly no longer true...

...Kids or cash...

...It’s another thing to make it easy for money to buy life itself...

...The Nunn-McCurdy bill went nowhere when the education establishment realized it would supplant existing loan programs...

...Let their parents worry together and visit together...

...If they escaped in the draft lottery, they’d have to do a year of civilian service...

...Let’s end it by Mickey Kaus isked themselves, I think, they would probably liscover they’re actually after social equality --equality of dignity, of the way we treat each 3ther in everyday life...

...Because the rich would be less tempted by such financial incentives than the nonrich, the result would probably be class division, with the military disproportionately poor and the affluent opting to avoid the perils of potential combat...

...It allows us to carve out a part of life where the market is negated, where common, nonmarket values that even conservatives like Buckley invoke-fellowship, solidarity, and social equality-can flourish...

...We can frame our obligations so that rich and poor Americans serve the nation together...

...Attending a ball game has become a distinctly less egalitarian experience, for example, with the unfortunate invention of the taxdeductible corporate “skybox...

...Only about 10 percent of the population uses the private system (though that percentage is growing...

...an emgovernment benefit phasis on the most useful work puts national check...

...Zoning changes that allow coffee shops, stores, and taverns to locate near residences, instead of in singlepurpose commercial strips, would help...

...What effect would it have if they ust:d the same doctors...

...Team owners now routinely demand stadium renovations that enable them to maximize the square-footage devoted to the rich...

...For social egalitarians, however, national service is valuable precisely because it would force Americans to pause in their disparate career trajectories and immerse themselves in a common, public enterprise...

...Of all the potential new egalitarian institutions on the horizon, the biggest involves the provision of health care...

...But these are precisely the sort of things with which Civic Liberalism concerns itself...

...There are other needs almost as critical: tutoring the illiterate and semiliterate, helping maintain or pagreater the chance some union member is already doing it...

...Medicaid and Medicare would still exist, probably with differential standards of care...

...How much solidarity is there in cashing a check...

...Rich and poor teenagers would take their chances in the draft together...

...What would they be doing...

...In the United States, we have a patchwork system that, rather than putting everyone in the same boat, puts different groups in different boats and lets some fall in between...

...Canadian waiting rooms mix virtually 100 percent of the population...

...Some national service advocates (like Buckley) nevertheless hope that “incentives” of various sorts might subtly induce participation by the rich...

...We did that in World War II...

...Rich and poor service on a collision course with Dublic employee unions, which see young draftees as threats to their jobs (the same WPA-style guaranteed jobs program...

...In 1987, most New York Yankee home games were available only on cable...

...And it searches for new institutions that could enlarge the sphere of egalitarian community life...

...The temptation will be to let them, with the result of producing a two-tier health system of elaborate care for the affluent and basic care for everyone else...

...Those who are incapable of leaving nursing homes often lead lives of brutal lonelinessbut the cost of professional attendants is simply too great for the vast majority of American families to bear by themselves...

...They are left to fend for themselves, to buy private insurance (with after-tax dollars...

...In general, the decline of network broadcasting (and the advent of demographically targeted “narrowcasting” on cable) should disturb social egalitarians...

...The draft has been replaced by a volunteer army that the rich can simply avoid...

...There is an important distinction to be made here-one typically ignored by American admirers of European social democracies-between provision of such common services and the provision of cash...

...it breaks them down for life, in part by giving all who serve a network of military acquaintances that crosses class lines...

...For Civic Liberals the overriding goal, of course, is class-mixing...

...There are four or five jobs we clearly know how to train kids to do,” says Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who runs a student service organization for the state of Maryland...

...The same principle applies to other important components of our community life, such as public schools, libraries, highways, parks, and the military draft...

...Germany also manages to include about 90 percent of its population in a single system...

...The armed forces, as noted, need only a small fraction of those eligible to serve...

...We can have a society in which the various classes use the same subways and drop off their kids at the same day care centers and run into each other at the post office...

...It could be jail...

...It jerked everyone free...

...A Civic Liberal strategy would require regulations, such as those in Germany, making it unappealing to opt out of the “universal” system...

...Those with incomes above a certain threshold can opt out, but once they’ve done so, they can never opt back in...

...But national service lets us do something in addition to providing services...

...Indeed, day care is a public sphere institution offering a unique escape from the tyranny of suburban classsegregation...

...Recipients receive their benefit checks in isolation...

...Instead of everybody watching Milton Berle, young professionals watch the Arts & Entertainment Network while the less cultured tune in to “Married with Children...

...But precisely because it is intrusive, it holds out the possibility of doing for everyone what Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar, remembers the peacetime draft did for him: “[Ilt jerked me free, if only for a few year:;, from the social class in which I have otherwise spent nearly all my days...

...In strict economic terms, national service is almost surely an inefficient way to help these lonely, old and ill Americans...

...This is the Civic Liberal alternative...

...Organized professional sports are an obvious example...

...Rich and poor don’t even cash them in the same places...

...Confronted with vast disparities of wealth, it attempts, not to redistribute wealth “progressively,” but to circumscribe wealth’s power-to prevent money inequality from translating into social inequality...

...But it is one thing for society to pay people to pick up its garbage and drive buses...

...If the TV networks collapse completely, the government could establish a BBCstyle network, less snooty than the current Public Broadcasting System, with a preferred spot on the broadcast spectrum nationwide...

...Ray Oldenburg calls these “third places” because they offer an alternative to the other two main sites of our liveshome and work...

...At the bottom, Medicaid covers only about 42 percent of the poor, mainly those on welfare or other mothers with young children...

...That requires the threat of a penalty harsh enough to be coercive...

...the ambitious sons and daughters of upper-class families simply don’t sign up...

...The draft is the most natural and-again, because it involves the risk of death-most potent, arena of democratic experience...

...They need to seize on new possibilities to expand it...

...We’d still have a system in which different classes report to different waiting rooms...

...So do many other, less obvious but important institutions such as museums and post offices, even parades and softball leagues...

...Now, you can argue that money “talks” in our democracy, too, and that it talks even louder these days as politicians depend more and more upon rich donors to fund their increasingly expensive campaigns...

...As the pre1989 Eastern European champions of “civil society” tried to carve out a social space free of communist domination, so Civic Liberals would carve out a space free of capitalist domination, of domination by wealth...

...Senator Sam Nunn and Rep...

...On the contrary, the recipient’s attention is focused more intensely on the importance of money and what it can buy...

...An even simpler, more effective strategy can be found in Canada, where it is flat-out illegal to buy basic private health insurance...

...Of course, saying health care should be available to everyone doesn’t necessarily mean it must be available in equal measure, or that the experience of getting it will necessarily be one that mixes classes...

...Teenagers would first be subject to a military draft, with no civilian alternative...

...National service jobs could be enjoyable, even career-enhancing...

...It’s something America has done before...

...At the top, the revenue code heavily subsidizes generous employerpaid health plans by not counting them as income (a $40 billion tax break...

...But the goal of universal coverage offers a solid base for building a potent democratic institution...

...The decline of those “private” democratic places is bound up in the process of suburbanization...

...But the Civic Liberal imperative is to mix the classes, not to beat the selfishness out of them...

...You took the money, now shut up and die,” as former Navy Secretary James Webb caricatured the argument during the Iraq crisis...

...At the very moment we were trying to intimidate Saddam Hussein in the winter of 1990-91, our country was split by a debate over whether the rich would bear their fair share of the fighting...

...But if Americans reach the magic age of 65, they can relax...

...But less sweeping plans are less likely to achieve this objective...

...Buckley notes that between 125,000 and 300,000 older Americans now living in nursing homes could move back into the “normal community” if there were enough workers to assist them with their daily chores...

...For example, it excludes Job Corps-type programs designed to help salvage underclass kids through elaborate vocational training...

...In the mid-seventeenth century, he points out, coffee houses were actually called “levelers” because they mixed the various classes in a way unheard of in the old feudal order...

...The only reason the controversy wasn’t crippling may have been that the battle turned out to be short, with few casualties on our side...

...A mandatory service scheme would enlist a lot of people-3 to 4 million a year, assuming the plan targeted young men and women of draft age...

...The only way to guarantee class-mixing is to make national service mandatory...

...Even if only 11 percent of men in the upper, middle, and lower classes served-and all the others had to think about serving-it would do more to promote social equality than all the “transfer payments” liberals might conceivably legislate...

...Going to a major league baseball game remains one of the few enjoyable experiences shared at the same time, in the same place, by people of various classes-one reason it’s considered so precious...

...Network TV is often awful, but it once had the virtue of giving all Americans a common, classless set of cultural experiences...

...As with the draft, the issue is life or death...

...It requires nothing we haven’t done ourselves in the past-or that we can’t copy, with appropriate modifications, from other democratic capitalist nations...

...Not all components of the public sphere have deteriorated in the late twentieth century...

...Volunteer-army advocates rely on the logic of the private sphere, in which everything, even soldiers’ lives, is convertible into cash...

...The debate over day care has been between those (mainly Democrats) who want to encourage communal day care centers and those (like President Bush) who would simply give cash to parents with preschool kids and let the parents decide whether to use the money to buy day care...

...But such financial inducements can still be easily ignored by the wealthy...

...But even the democratic aspects of spectator sports are threatened by a number of recent developments...

...Falling between boats are those who are unemployed, self-l:mployed, or whose employers don’t have a company plan...

...More important, perhaps, are the social attitudes and institutions that determine how much weight the money variable has...

...But they matter...

...If necessary, the sports franchises themselves could be regulated, purchased by municipalities, or even seized by eminent domain...

...In most of them, the plan’s egalitarianism is a source of fierce national pride...

...We did it in the fifties...

...Fully restoring third places as class-mixing institutions will have to await the success of longer-tern strategies to integrate the suburbs by income, as well as by race...

...With “in-kind, universal” services, Robert Kuttner notes, people of all classes actually meet and interact with each other and with those doing the servicing...

...reason they also fear a the better...

...The notion of national service was revived in the eighties-to no apparent effect...

...Locate the day care centers near work, and let the toddlers of secretaries mix with the toddlers of bank presidents...

...These may seem like relatively small things, compared with the draft or national health care...

...It’s easy to underestimate the significance of such unpretentious institutions...

...They will go outside the “universal” system and pay more money to get the expensive technology they want...

...But, however modest the manpower needs of the military, a draft is the most socially egalitarian way of meeting them...

...It’s another to pay them to risk their necks in battle...

...It would be cheaper (once you count the “opportunity costs” of forgoing all the other things the servers could be doing with their time) to raise taxes to pay for a lot of nurses and handholders...

...Beyond that, young Americans could be given a choice of military or civilian service-but the military’s wages would have to be set much higher to compensate for the greater risks and longer tour of duty...

...It’s one thing, Civic Liberals could argue, for the rich to be able to buy the nicest cars, or the houses with the nicest views...

...Buckley’s proposal, too, went nowhere...

...Health care isn’t the only new public sphere possibility...

...They will not calmly take their place in the queue for CAT scanners or proton-beam accelerators or artificial hearts...

...At the age of 18, you should be focusing on your dreams and ambitions, not picking up cans in Yellowstone,” sniffs Republican J,ack Kemp...

...An Equally promising approach would focus on changing those attitudes and institutions that translate money differences, however large or small, into invidious social differences...

...The more national service “targets” the poor, the less it will be seen as ai duty for all classes...

...Another inegalitarian detelopment is cable television, which allows broadcasters to restrict spectatorship to those who can afford to subscribe...

...The experience might not be as intense as school or service, but it would be repeated throughout a person’s life...

...If dying in combat isn’t outside the economic sphere, what is...

...Purely voluntary programs fail to meet this test...

...The goal would only be to make enough (say, 90 percent) of the populace use the public sphere’s waiting rooms...

...The result was a tremendous protest and a threat of congressional iiction, in part because large sections of New York-the poorer sectionsweren’t even wired for cable...

...A democratic draft is hardly a bold, idealistic step into the future...

...Cleaning up mud slides is just the thing to teach incipient yuppies a thing or two...

...But if that’s true, why spend all 3ur energies trying to twiddle the dial that produces greater or lesser money inequality...

...But the main justification for a draft remains moral...

...The “middle class is . . . reminded that poor people are human,” Kuttner writes...

...They qualify for Medicare, which will cover most of their bills...

...Senator Edward Kennedy’s patchwork employer-based insurance scheme, in particular, looks like a loser for social equality...

...Out at third Civic Liberalism would also recognize and protect the social-egalitarian power of class-mixing institutions that are technically in the “private sector...

...Here is an idea that separates Civic Liberals from those with other priorities...

...This sort of service scheme is the most intrusive Civic Liberal strategy...

...Doctored results Given the continuing threats to social equality, Civic Liberals can hardly be satisfied with restoring the public sphere where it has deteriorated...

...The more useful the work, the don’t even cash them in the same places...

...But one year of civilian service could hardly be treated as the equivalent of two years in the army...

...Dave McCurdy introduced legislation that would have made federal student aid contingent on one or two years of service...

...Certainly universal health insurance seems to play a major socially equalizing role in Western Europe, where every country has some sort of universal national health plan...

...But once the egalitarian importance of these private institutions is acknowledged, Civic Liberals will be able to take steps to halt their deterioration...

...More generally, the courts still treat a Michael Milken or Leona Helmsley with an inspiring lack of deference...

...Civic Liberals would tend to favor communal centers...

...The point isn’t that the Civic Liberal reforms suggested above would ensure social equality...

...The primary way it does this is through social institutions that create a second, noneconomic sphere of life-a public, community sphere-where money doesn’t “talk,” where the principles of the marketplace (i.e., rich beats poor) are replaced by the principle of equality of citizenship...

...The system’s motto might be, “We have ways of making you stay...

...it would interrupt the lives of all Americans...

...What’s important is that they have a heterogeneous, communal aspect...

...Some employers would still provide lavish, fee-for-service insurance...

...It doesn’t only break down class barriers for a couple of years...

...They are especially valuable parts of the public sphere because, in contrast with the rather formal and abstract equality of voting, they require rich and poor to actually rub shoulders with each other as equals...

...As long as the tasks are class-mixing and valuable, a national service would be free to do whatever work the market, for one reason or another, cannot of dollars if it were going to guarantee the participation of the truly wealthy...

...If we see national service mainly as an antidote to the “culture of selfishness,” then the grungier the work, do-whether that work is grungy or exhilarating, and whether or not it more cheaply some How much solidarity the government could do is there in cashing a othUernwfoarytu...

...We don’t have to equalize incomes or make incomes “more equal” or even stop incomes from getting more unequal to do these things...

...There are plenty of worthy tasks that fit this bill...