Bill Bradley's new
American narrative
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
Former Sen. Bill Bradley
called for a "new American narrative" focused
on "civil society" and team leadership on Dec.
6 during the first of five lectures he is scheduled to
give at Stanford this academic year while serving as the
Payne Visiting Professor at the Institute for
International Studies.
The popular New Jersey
politician, former Rhodes scholar and Olympic and pro
basketball player spoke to a standing-room-only crowd.
People who got caught in rush-hour traffic for the 5 p.m.
lecture had to be turned away from the 600-seat Kresge
Auditorium. Bradley, who resigned from the Senate last
year, is frequently mentioned as a potential Democratic
presidential contender. He has not said what his future
plans are, but the title of his lecture series
"In search of a new American narrative"
hardly discouraged those who hope he is spending this
year developing a campaign platform.
Dressed in a dark sport
coat and tie, Bradley compared the current American
climate to other periods in history when political
leaders searched for new language to re-envision what it
means to be an American. He referred particularly to
Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt during industrialization and Franklin
Roosevelt during the Great Depression. He then proposed
that the time was ripe for both government and the
private sector to yield some of center stage to
"civil society."
"Civil society,"
he said, is "the place where we live our lives,
educate our kids, find God and associate with our
neighbors." It includes community institutions,
families, foundations and religious institutions that
share "an ethos of giving something to someone else
with no expectation of a return." Unlike government,
civil society "does not shy away from values as a
basis of action. Unlike business, it is not focused on
maximizing material wealth."
Bradley said he sensed
that church-going Americans and the church-less alike,
regardless of their particular form of religious beliefs,
have a "great unfulfilled yearning for solidarity,
love, belonging, in short, for meaning in life that can't
be provided by material advancement. It is the
contemporary equivalent of the great religious revivals
that periodically welled up in American history. . . .
While only 42 percent of Americans report going to church
in the last seven days, 94 percent say they believe in
God."
He also listed five other
"new" aspects of the American scene: greater
integration into the world economy; wider belief that
world peace is possible; expanding use of information
technology; and on the negative side, deteriorating
circumstances for America's children and a
"dangerous" lack of interest among adults in
the political processes of democracy.
He tried to blur the
distinction that Americans usually make between
international and domestic issues. Greater world economic
integration means expanding opportunities for
well-managed American businesses to sell to huge new
consumer markets and to receive a disproportionate amount
of world capital flows, he said, but also added
vulnerability to "mismanagement" elsewhere.
"Witness the recent 500-point one-day drop in the
U.S. stock market that was caused by Thailand's lax
banking supervision. That day stands as a stark reminder
that the global economy . . . still retains the capacity
to self-destruct. . . . We have to lead, even if we can't
dictate."
Peaceful resolution to
conflict seems more possible at the end of the century
than at the beginning, he said. "The examples of
Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. de Klerk seem
contagious," he said, citing the "Oslo process
in the Arab-Israeli conflict, peace talks in Northern
Ireland, the end of the civil war in El Salvador, the
cessation of the Cambodian civil war, the birth of
Chilean democracy, the initiation of Mexican political
reforms, a dialog between India and Pakistani leaders,
the beginning of a genuine engagement between China and
the United States and the first talks in history between
North and South Korea."
Helping parents
raise children
Most of his lecture and
the questions from the audience afterwards, however, were
directed toward domestic issues. Bradley stressed the
need for community institutions that match those who want
to help with those in need. "Current volunteerism is
insufficient," he said, and government bureaucracies
and businesses both have shown they are not good at
solving social problems.
Volunteerism can be
expanded but "for those who want to give but cannot
afford to do so for free, there must be some
compensation," he said. "Using the resources
controlled by the government, perhaps cutting corporate
subsidies to pay for employee subsidies, and in the
private sector encouraging social entrepreneurship to
create paid jobs in civil society, we would make progress
in dealing with the social issues of our time, such as
the need to help parents help their children."
Bradley returned
repeatedly to the plight of children. He noted that
"the average amount of time working parents spend
with their children is 50 minutes per day for working
mothers and 17 minutes a day for working fathers."
Family income has expanded in recent years, he said, only
by more people in the family working more jobs, which has
meant children left either to television at home or at
malls and street corners. Yet when Americans are asked
about youth problems such as suicide, crime, pregnancy,
poor academic performance or drug abuse, he said he found
in research with the Advertising Council that "they
pull back in anger, they blame the parents."
"If we are really
going to deal with the problems of children in America
today, we have to have a more realistic portrayal of who
the parents are. The parents are, by and large, not
drug-abusing, irresponsible incompetents. They are people
like a lot of people in America who are working hard, a
couple of jobs. They are very stretched and they need a
little help."
Liberals "have a
government program for every problem," and
conservatives "preach self-help and leave the safety
net up to private charities, but noble individual
actions, both in terms of available resources and in
coordination of their impact, are clearly
inadequate," Bradley said. A third way would
emphasize "governance" as "something we do
for ourselves by participating in our community, taking
charge of our lives, not in the context of without
government but with a government that supports our
efforts."
Jettison the hero
myth
To get a new kind of
governance will require jettisoning the "hero
myth" of leadership for a new team approach, he
said. Presidential candidates should name their proposed
Cabinet during the campaign, he said, and then "make
Cabinet meetings more than a photo op. You are only as
good as the people you reach out to."
A problem, he conceded, is
that the entertainment and news media are
"hopelessly caught up in the hero myth themselves.
Even in team sports, their focus is always on the
individual, never on the mystery of the chemistry of the
team. . . . If a president uses team leadership, the
press won't allow it."
Asked by a freelance
journalist in the audience what might be done to change
that, Bradley responded that "there is a subversive
potential of the Internet that is not appreciated. . . .
All you've got to do is figure out how to make your
website the most attended website in the world."
Asked by a student what
individuals could do to bring in a team approach, Bradley
suggested "engaging your friends in some act of
community service, and in your interactions avoid the
dominance of hierarchy in all decisions. You are never
going to escape it totally, but try to be more open to
listen to people and ask questions as much as give your
opinion."
Asked what he would do to
narrow the substantial income gap between high- and
low-wage Americans, Bradley said that his answer is
"incomplete" and that he came to Stanford
partly to look for better answers to that question.
"My own sense is that we don't know why this is
happening," he said. Possible solutions include a
more "enlightened" management or more
unionization of low-paid service workers such as day care
workers and nurse's aides.
In response to a question
from Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution, Bradley
defended affirmative action, but not all policies that
have been labeled affirmative action.
"Discrimination continues to exist in America and a
remedy is needed. Now affirmative action to me simply
means reaching out to the broadest possible community
with talent."
Bradley also blamed some
of today's discrimination problems on Republicans and
southern Democrats, who, he claimed, forced Lyndon
Johnson to gut the 1964 Civil Rights Act of the teeth it
needed to deal with alleged cases of individual
discrimination. "If we had an adequate remedy to
individual discrimination, we would have less need for
affirmative action. A simple way to get at individual
discrimination would be to give the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission the same thing that the National
Labor Relations Board has, which is the cease-and-desist
authority," he said, so it could "throw out the
frivolous cases and remedy the ones of serious
discrimination." SR
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