Not for a Faux Democracy

Democracy is more than a word. The protesting Egyptians and the

watching world are learning that between the Egyptian army and the Muslim

Brotherhood stand a lot to overcome. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got

one thing right: "It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real

democracy, not faux democracy."

Hope and change are not the same thing. Big talk and big deeds are

not the same thing, either, as our own experienced taught. Not everyone

believed the great Philadelphia experiment of 1776 would succeed, an

experiment born of hope not experience. Not everyone believes now that

what was wrought then will endure.

Despite all the high hopes that brought Barack Obama to the White

House, a lot of people here and elsewhere think he's presiding over a

weakened and dispirited America. Ronald Reagan's "morning in America"

has become, for these doubters, late afternoon.

To take advantage of his invoking a cliched Sputnik moment, certain

hard choices lie ahead. Federal spending must be cut — "slashed" may be a

better word — and the private sector must be unleashed to get things moving

again. This goes athwart Obama's instincts, but government must be put on a

crash diet (something not included in Michelle's anti-obesity crusade).

The president observed, accurately, in his State of the Union address

that American competitiveness depends on better-educated workers and a

stronger incentive to succeed. This can only happen when bad teachers with

the seniority that makes them fireproof are dispatched to wherever bad

teachers go. The president's new emphasis on the decline of learning comes

with a new study that reveals that two-thirds of fourth-graders fail to show

proficiency in science; six of 10 eighth and 12th graders perform poorly in

science. They're not doing well in history, either.

How we change this for the better requires a debate, and whether it's

civil or passionate isn't as important as getting the debate started. The

question is whether we have the stuff and imagination to transcend what

divides us, and that depends on how we assess who we are.

Claude Fischer, for 40 years a liberal sociology professor at the

University of California at Berkeley, takes note in his new book that the

American character has been forged by the pride Americans take in

themselves and their accomplishments.

"There is an American cultural

center; it's assimilative pull is powerful; and it is distinctive or 'exceptional,'"

he writes in "Made America: A Social History of American Culture and

Character."

He meticulously documents three and half centuries of the American

experience — from colonial days to the present — and tells how the nation's

natural abundance has been the engine of growth, forming the national

character reflecting a belief in expanded opportunity. We have far more than

our ancestors could have dreamed of — more material goods, better health,

greater access to information and a greater ability to use it.

He observes that the earlier belief that America is the exceptional

society, as Abraham Lincoln expressed it at Gettysburg, has been badly

ruptured by recent historians who focus only on the nation's flaws, poisoning

an entire generation of students.

Over the past four decades, historians have catalogued the details of

our devils, attempting to exile the better angels of our nature to the trash bin.

Teachers have recast a "shining city on the hill" to a befouled environment

where Indians were murdered, Africans enslaved, workers repressed,

immigrants exploited. The unique American enthusiasm to right wrongs is

overlooked or ignored as unimportant.

Fischer is something of a "fellow traveler" with Alexis de

Tocqueville, finding the 19th century Frenchman's insights into American

"volunteerism" — an ability to sustain individualism in social groups — as the

key to progress: "Equality in the American context is not equality of

outcome, but equality of opportunity, treatment and freedom."

The Founding Fathers were educated men smart enough to draw on

the sentiments and innate sense of justice of the common (and uneducated)

man for support. Americans have had the willingness to mingle comfortably

in neighborhood, regional and ethnic groups, charitable and political

institutions that cut across economic lines. What enables cohesion is the

"can-do" attitude of self-reliance.

The most recent phenomenon that illustrates this thesis is the

explosion of the tea parties. Their rugged, ragged organizing principles have

forged alliances similar to those of the early American colonists who worked

toward the common goal of limited government organized to guarantee

maximum individual liberty. The tea parties are moving the debate today,

reminding us of the vitality of our own democracy. There's nothing faux

about that.

Suzanne Fields is a columnist with The Washington Times. Write to

her at: sfields1000@aol.com. To find out more about Suzanne Fields and

read her past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at

www.creators.com.

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