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The American spirit will not be revived merely by incantations, of course. Some argue that an improved state of reality produces a better mood, not vice versa, and the world's economic and political realities will not be easily changed. If inflation and high interest rates go down, for example, then Americans, being more secure in their savings and able to buy houses, will assuredly feel better. But morale, the condition of the spirit, is more important than materialist Americans like to admit. If they are to revive their moral energies, Americans will have to begin by devising new ideas of citizenship and community. Electronics, television, air travel, interstate highways—all the bright, glowing circuits of our communications —have made the U.S. an intimately national community. Americans must now adjust their systems of government and ways of thought to the new configurations. This will require individuals to be responsible, effective members of that new national community. A true will to set the place in functioning order would begin to settle old tragic business: it would reach out in new initiatives—new combinations of business, labor unions and government, for example—to turn the poor into productive citizens. Americans must develop levels of knowledge, tolerance, sophistication and citizenship that will transcend merely individual or tribal or regional identities. They must define the common virtues they value and the social behavior they expect from one another.
Americans need to understand how thoroughly they have become a national society. Local issues —busing, for example, or the fate of a specific highway or subway project—can have national significance. National issues —nuclear power, for example, or the location of the MX missile site—assume intense local importance. Great sprawling America, which was built by the exuberant pushing and hauling of multiple constituencies—America the pluralistic—has in a way become an extraordinarily compact society. At the same time, old regionalistic allegiances and customs still exert their considerable divisive pull; in certain respects, energy shortages and other economic factors make that pull even stronger than in the past. And in another, more elusive way, the nation suffers from severe internal fractures.
"We've ended up with what I call tribal solipsism," says University of Chicago Church Historian Martin Marty. "Blacks say if you aren't black and oppressed, you don't have the vision. Women say if you aren't a woman, you don't have the vision. The Moral Majority says if you aren't one of them, you don't have the vision. But I don't think that in the '80s we're going to have the vision. Those days may be past us."
The problem is that tolerance and cosmopolitanism often get lost among the warring tribes. If they had longer national memories, Americans might reflect in then" angry and intransigent moments upon Abraham Lincoln's democratic faith:
"Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice."