E.J. Dionne’s visit to campus for the annual Elder Lecture offered a preview of his forthcoming book on Obama and the Tea Party.
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The political and cultural divide that has fragmented the United States in recent years is rooted in a collective misunderstanding of the nation’s history, and according to a national newspaper columnist who visited campus last week, the task of bridging that divide falls to the generation represented by Elon University students.
In his April 5 lecture “Our Divided Political Heart: Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Battle for the American Idea,” based on his forthcoming book of the same title, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne tackled the undercurrents of a “mood” that has many Americans believing their nation is on the decline.
“When we feel we are in decline, we sense we have lost our balance,” he said to a Whitley Auditorium audience. “We argue about what history teaches us. And we usually disagree about what history actually says.”
That disagreement centers on the idea that since its birth, America has balanced a respect for individualism with the desire to build community and, later, to bestow equality of opportunity on its citizens. Dionne, a self-described liberal, noted that all three values are inherently at conflict with one another.
Promoting individualism can limit community, he argued, and the elevation of community over individualism can at times limit personal freedom. What’s thrown the political divide off-kilter is the conservative notion that the United States has only ever promoted individualism, and liberal voices have allowed that narrative to strengthen in the national discourse without standing up – and illustrating – the values of community and equality that the nation has also fostered over the past two centuries.
Many far-right conservative and Tea Party supporters view government as oppressive and wasteful, a force that limits individual opportunities. But the architects of the U.S. Constitution did not view the role of government that way, Dionne said.
“Our founders did not devote so much time and intellectual energy in creating a strong federal government for it to do nothing,” he said. “I am very critical of the Tea Party, but I have to acknowledge that the Tea Party deserves the gratitude of its critics because it pushed the logic of a certain kind of American conservatism to its limits.”
Why the opposition to government? Dionne suggests that Americans have always viewed the private sector and the government as counterbalancing forces. Over the past decade, with the abuses on Wall Street leading to a near-economic collapse, instead of punishing or restricting the private financial sector, the government bailed out many of the nation’s largest banks. That has led public sentiment to swing against both government, via the Tea Party, and against the private sector, as witnessed by the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
What allowed the Tea Party to ascend to its current stature was a media industrial complex feeding the notion that President Barack Obama represented the worst elements of government. But the far-right strain of conservatism isn’t new, Dionne said. It’s been around for generations.
“The Tea Party is a new name on an old movement. In this era, they have the additional advantages of a lot of talk radio hosts and a television network and a media network for a year and a half obsessed with Sarah Palin,” Dionne said. “We’ve always had this stream of opinion. The reason they’ve gained power is that there are a lot of people on the conservative side who at the end of the Bush presidency decided it was a failure, and they wanted to publicly break with him.”
Dionne finds hope in the value of today’s college students who are open on most cultural matters, including gay marriage and the welcoming of immigrants. He has observed a generation that is socially engaged and has largely dedicated itself to making the world better through its deeds.
“You are at once more passionately individual and more passionately humanitarian as any other group in the country right now,” he said. “You want to do good, but you want the good you do to last. You want to take risks, but you are not foolhardy.”
Dionne sprinkled humor throughout his remarks. He welcomed his audience with a short tribute to James Elder, the namesake of the lecture series, and made light of the frequent criticism he receives from readers.
“The people who tend to write you do so to disagree rather than agree,” he said. “Sometimes they disagree rather sharply, using words that are inappropriate in settings of this sort.”
One reader once sent a scathing email that read, in part, “Mr. Dionne, are you as dumb in person?” “If you get nothing else out of my talk tonight, you’ll be able to answer that question,” Dionne told his Elon audience. “And if you don’t mind, please don’t let me know which way you choose to answer!”
Dionne’s Washington Post opinion columns appear in more than 100 newspapers worldwide. He is a frequent guest on Meet the Press, The Evening News Hour, Charlie Rose and This Week in Washington. His book, Why Americans Hate Politics, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received his doctorate degree in sociology from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
The James P. Elder Lecture is Elon’s first endowed lecture series devoted to the exploration of critical scholarship and its impact in the public forum.
Elder graduated from Elon in 1960. He founded the Liberal Arts Forum as an undergraduate in 1958, and went on to serve on the history faculty at Elon from 1963 to 1973. As faculty adviser to the Liberal Arts Forum, he helped bring more than 150 distinguished lecturers from major universities to the Elon campus. He was instrumental in the creation of Elon’s study abroad program. Five times during his tenure, Elon students voted him as the college’s Outstanding Professor.