The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard

The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard

Author:Philip K. Howard [Howard, Philip K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64410-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-02T16:00:00+00:00


THE GREAT RIGHTS RUSH

TOCQUEVILLE OBSERVED THAT the period of productive reform is often also the most dangerous for a society:

The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.… For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.

It seems like ancient history, but barely forty years ago segregation of blacks was required by law in certain states. Women, trapped in a different cage, were offered labor-saving appliances as the key to fulfillment. Even an ardent sexist would grimace when reminded that Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, after graduating at the top of her class at Stanford Law School in 1952, couldn’t find a job in San Francisco.

The 1950s American dream, with its ranch houses and cars with tail fins, was not decadent: It was optimistic, even buoyant. Our country had just finished two decades of struggling to overcome the Depression and the worst villain in history. We aspired to decent values of hard work and community.

Our collective gaze, however, had been trained not to notice the victims of injustice and neglect that were all around us. Racism had been accepted for centuries. Sexism, a term that would have been almost incomprehensible in the 1950s, reached back millennia. Mental patients were locked up in institutions and largely forgotten. What were known as retarded children had little or no support from local school systems. People in wheelchairs often wasted away at home. Gays were securely locked in the closet. The “environment” was not known as such, but lakes and rivers were getting filthy.

Some people began looking around and asking why these conditions existed in a heroic and enlightened society. But our frame of reference, including racism and neglect, had been accepted for so long that a mighty heave was required to dislodge it. As Tocqueville warned, however, the momentum was likely to carry it to a point where the values that prompted the reform were themselves eroded. Something similar has happened to us. Freedom is now confused with power: “You must do this for me” has replaced “We should all be free.”

Seeking balance has become difficult because we have misplaced the vocabulary of accommodation. Indeed, we seem to have forgotten why accommodation was ever necessary. The idea of weighing priorities has somehow become un-American. Unless something is done, the forces of change will be reversed, with the aid of Rush Limbaugh and others, with equal force. “Let’s fight” is the increasingly common response to “It’s my right.”

The “rights revolution” did not begin with any of this in mind. It was an effort to give to blacks the freedom that all the rest of us enjoyed. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education overturned laws mandating “separate but equal” public schools. Other decisions soon applied the Brown ruling to other public facilities: Southern states, having been given a clear mandate by the United States Supreme Court, then proceeded to ignore it.



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