[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 121 (Friday, September 5, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1705-E1707]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL SERVICE
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HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL
of new york
in the house of representatives
Thursday, September 4, 2003
Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to share an excerpt from an important
policy brief published by the Brookings Institute on the meaning of
citizenship and national service.
What is our civic responsibility to this land, as people who enjoy
the benefits of living in a vibrant democracy? How can we keep the
social contract between all segments of society without a shared sense
of sacrifice and duty? Authors E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Kayla Meltzer
Drogosz provide a good overview of the subject and the importance of
this issue to the future success of this country.
The Promise of National Service: A (Very) Brief History of an Idea
(By E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Kayla Meltzer Drogosz)
the service idea and the american experiment
Divisions over the meaning of service are rooted deeply in
our history. When the United States was founded, liberal and
civic republican ideas jostled for dominance. The liberals--
they might now be called libertarians--viewed personal
freedom as the heart of the American experiment. The civic
republicans valued freedom, too, but they stressed that self-
rule demanded a great deal from citizens. The liberals
stressed rights. The civic republicans stressed obligations
to a common good and, as the philosopher Michael Sandel has
put it in his book, Democracy's Discontents, ``a concern for
the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at
stake.'' In our time, the clash between these older
traditions lives on in the intellectual wars between
libertarians and communitarians. On national service,
libertarians lean toward skepticism, communitarians toward a
warm embrace.
America has changed since September 11, 2001. Respect for
service soared as the nation forged a new and stronger sense
of solidarity in the face of deadly enemies. What has been
said so often still bears repeating: our view of heroes
underwent a remarkable and sudden change. The new heroes are
public servants--police, firefighters, rescue workers, postal
workers whose lives were threatened, men and women
in uniform--not the CEOs, high-tech wizards, rock stars,
or sports figures who dominated the 1990s. At a time when
citizens focus on urgent national needs, those who serve
their country naturally rise in public esteem. Robert
Putnam, a pioneer in research on civic engagement,
captures the post-9/11 moment powerfully. He argues that
because of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon--and the courage shown by those on the plane that
went down over Pennsylvania--``we have a more capacious
sense of `we' than we have had in the adult experience of
most Americans now alive.''
september 11 and the service ideal
Accordingly, the politics of national service were also
transformed. Even before September 11, President Bush had
signaled a warmer view of service than many in his party. In
choosing two Republican supporters of the idea--former Mayor
Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis and Leslie Lenkowsky, CEO of
the Corporation for National and Community Service--to head
his administration's service effort, Bush made clear he
intended to take it seriously.
After September 11, service became a stronger theme in the
president's rhetoric. In his 2001 State of the Union message,
he called on Americans to give two years of service to the
nation over their lifetimes and announced the creation of the
USA Freedom Corps. It was a patriotic, post-September 11
gloss on the old Clinton ideas--and the ideas of John F.
Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bush's father, the first
President Bush, who offered the nation a thousand points of
light.
There is also a new acknowledgment across the political
divides that government support for volunteers can provide
essential help for valuable institutions that we too often
take for granted. It is easy for politicians to talk about
the urgency of strengthening ``civil society.'' But through
AmeriCorps and other programs, the government has found a
practical (and not particularly costly) way to make the talk
real. Paradoxically, as the journalist Steven Waldman points
out, AmeriCorps, a Democratic initiative, fit neatly with the
Republicans' emphasis on faith-based programs. Democrats
accepted the need to strengthen programs outside of
government; Republicans accepted that voluntary programs
could use government's help. This interplay between
government and independent communal action may be especially
important in the United States, where powerful and intricate
links have always existed--long before the term ``faith-based
organizations'' was invented--between the religious and civic
spheres.
That national service has become a bipartisan goal is an
important achievement. It is reflected in the White House's
Citizen Service Act and in bills cosponsored by, among
others, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Evan Bayh (D-
Ind.). Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has made an ambitious
service proposal a centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
These legislative ideas mirrored the spirit of the moment. As
Marc Magee and Steven Nider of the Progressive Policy
Institute reported a year ago, in the first nine months after
September 11 applications for AmeriCorps jumped 50 percent,
those for the Peace Corps doubled, and those for Teach for
America tripled. Yes, a difficult private economy certainly
pushed more young Americans toward such public endeavors.
Nonetheless, their choices point to the continued power of
the service idea.
citizenship and service
Citizenship cannot be reduced to service. The good works of
faith communities and the private sector--or ``communities of
character,'' as President Bush has called them--cannot
replace the responsibilities of government. Service can
become a form of cheap grace, a generalized call on citizens
to do kind things as an alternative to a genuine summons for
national sacrifice or a fair apportionment of burdens among
the more and less powerful or wealthy. But when service is
seen as a bridge to genuine political and civic
responsibility, it can strengthen democratic government and
foster the republican virtues. Lenkowsky made this connection
when he urged attendees at a Corporation for National and
Community Service conference to turn ``civic outrage into
civic engagement'' by increasing the reach and
effectiveness of volunteer programs. No one can dispute
visionaries like former Senator Harris Wofford, chairman
of America's Promise, and Alan Khazei, cofounder and CEO
of City Year, who have shown how AmeriCorps, VISTA, Senior
Corps, and Peace Corps have transformed communities. But
Paul Light of Brookings questions whether this
transformation is sustainable. Can episodic volunteerism
build the capacity and effectiveness of public and
nonprofit organizations?
Will the new respect for service make government bashing
less satisfying as a hobby? It is possible, but not likely.
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Underlying the debate over national service is an argument
over whether service is necessary or merely ``nice.'' If
service is just a nice thing to do, it's easy to understand
the strong reservations about government-led service programs
from critics such as Bruce Chapman who, in 1966, wrote The
Wrong Man in Uniform, one of the earliest calls for a
volunteer military.
But service has the potential to be far more than something
nice.
Will Marshall and Marc Magee of the Progressive Policy
Institute argue that the service idea could be a departure
comparable to breakthroughs in earlier eras toward a stronger
sense of citizenship. ``Like settlement houses and night
school, which helped America absorb waves of immigration,''
they write, ``national service opens new paths of upward
mobility for young Americans and the people they serve. And,
like the G.I. Bill, national service should be seen as a
longterm investment in the education, skills, and ingenuity
of our people.''
Service, then, is not simply a good in itself, but a means
to many ends. It creates bridges between groups that have
little to do with each other on any given day, and as the New
Left's Port Huron Statement put it forty years ago, draws
citizens ``out of isolation and into community.'' Michael
Brown, the co-founder of City Year, says service can activate
``people's justice nerve,'' creating a thirst for social
improvement. It could foster civic and political
participation in a society that seems not to hold public
service in the highest esteem.
But this very plurality of ends creates a certain
skepticism about service. If it offers something for
everyone, how serious can the idea really be? Michael Lind, a
senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is right when he
says that ``within the small but vocal community of national
service enthusiasts, there is far more agreement on the
policy of national service than on its purpose.'' In the
post-September 11 environment, he argues that the one
compelling case for citizen service would rest on the need to
expand the nation's capacity to prepare for and respond to
domestic emergencies, notably those caused by terrorism.
answering the call to service
However one conceives of service, surely one of its ends--
or, at least, one of the ends that wins the broadest assent--
is the urgency of finding new ways to engage young Americans
in public life after a long period of estrangement. In his
2000 campaign, Sen. McCain--initially a skeptic of national
service, now a strong supporter--won a wide following among
young people by urging them to aspire to things ``beyond your
own self-interest.'' Many surveys suggest that young
Americans are deeply engaged in civic activity. One by
Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics in October 2002 found
that 61 percent of its national sample of undergraduates
reported performing some form of community service in the
past year. And as Paul Light has shown in a new survey,
liberal arts college graduates from the Class of 2003 are
eager to find jobs that provide opportunities to help people.
However, when they hear the phrase ``public service,''
they think of the kind of work they see in the nonprofit
sector and not in government or politics. If we are to
expand young people's understanding of public service,
then service learning initiatives in public schools must
continue to be linked with a heightened sense of civic
responsibility and personal effectiveness.
If the new generation connected its impulses to service
with politics, it could become one of the great reforming
generations in American history. And service could become a
pathway to a stronger sense of citizenship. As the columnist
Jane Eisner argues, service ``must produce more than
individual fulfillment for those involved and temporary
assistance for communities in need.'' It should, she says,
``lead to an appetite for substantive change, a commitment to
address the social problems that have created the need for
service in the first place.'' Eisner and others have
suggested that as a nation, we should celebrate the first
vote cast by young people with the same fanfare that greets
other moments of passage to adult responsibility. The goal
would be to encourage a new generation to make the connection
``between service to the community and participation in the
very process that governs community life.''
A focus on the links service forges between the rights and
responsibilities of citizenship could offer new ways out of
old political impasses. For example, Andrew Stern, the
president of the Service Employees International Union,
suggests that a two-year commitment to national service could
become a pathway for undocumented workers to legalize their
status and for legal immigrants to speed their passage to
citizenship. Stern also proposes that former felons now
denied voting rights might ``earn credits toward restoration
of full citizenship'' through service.
At its best, service is not make-work, but what Harry Boyte
and Nancy Kari, in their book, Building America, have called
``public work.'' It is work that ``is visible, open to
inspection, whose significance is widely recognized'' and can
be carried out by ``a mix of people whose interests,
backgrounds, and resources may be quite different.'' Service
as public work is the essence of the democratic project. It
solves common problems and creates common things. Public work
entails not only altruism, but also enlightened self-
interest--a desire to build a society in which the serving
citizen wants to live.
Skepticism, Realism, Hope
Service alone cannot build a stronger sense of citizenship.
Citizenship is meaningless unless citizens have the power to
achieve their goals and to change their communities and the
nation. It is thus possible to be skeptical about the new
call to service, and it is absolutely necessary to be
realistic. Speeches about service can be a convenient way for
politicians to call for sacrifice without demanding much of
citizens. At little cost to themselves, advocates of both
conservative and liberal individualism can use service to
shroud their real intentions behind the decent drapery of
community feeling.
William Galston, a scholar who has devoted years of energy
to promoting research and action to excite young Americans to
public engagement, worries that the failure to link post-
September 11 rhetoric about service to actual calls for civic
action could lead to the very sort of cynicism service
advocates decry.
``Would Pearl Harbor have been a defining event if it had
not been followed by a national mobilization and four years
of war that altered the lives of soldiers and civilians
alike?'' Galston asks. ``In the immediate wake of September
11, the administration's failure to call for any real
sacrifice from citizens fortified my belief that the
terrorist attack would be the functional equivalent of Pearl
Harbor without World War II, intensifying insecurity without
altering civic behavior.''
Theda Skocpol, another wise student of American civic life,
sounds an equally useful warning. ``Absent organizational
innovations and new public policies,'' she writes, ``the
reinvigorated sense of the American `we' that was born of the
travails of 9/11 may well gradually dissipate, leaving only
ripples on the managerial routines of contemporary U.S. civic
life.'' In fact, as Skocpol and Galston suggest, mere
exhortation to serve will do little to foster public--and
especially political--participation if too many citizens see
the public realm as broken.
The issue of whether Americans have been called to any real
sort of sacrifice is, of course, the point of Rep. Rangel
calling for a renewal of the draft. It is neither race-
baiting nor class warfare--Rangel was accused of both--to
suggest that a democratic society has a problem when members
of its most privileged classes are not among the first to
rally to the colors at a time of trouble.
This problem also worries Charles Moskos, the nation's
premier student of service and the military experience.
Moskos has explored ways of expanding the circle of
commitment and promoting the idea of the ``citizen soldier.''
This idea has caught on in a wide range of political circles.
As Stanley Kurtz wrote in the National Review in April, ``In
a world of looming military challenges, the citizen-soldier
program may be our last chance to expand the armed forces
without a draft.'' John Lehman, the Navy Secretary under
Ronald Reagan, has also offered helpful remedies short of a
draft to overcome what he agrees is a fundamental problem:
that ``the burdens of defense and the perils of combat do not
fall even close to fairly across all of our society.''
From Service to Citizenship
If the problems of inequality are vexing where military
service is concerned, they can also be troubling for service
at home. Service, badly conceived, can distance citizens from
public problems by seeing the server more as a missionary
uplifting the needy than as a fellow citizen. Michael
Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of
California, San Diego, sees President Bush's ideal citizen is
a ``Rotarian, moved by a sense of neighborliness, Christian
charity, and social responsibility, but untouched by having a
personal stake in public justice.'' Schudson's point is not
to knock Rotarians. It is to argue that self-interest in
pursuit of justice is a virtue. As Schudson notes in
describing the civil rights movement, the most dramatic
expansion of democracy and citizenship in our lifetime was
brought about by citizens ``driven not by a desire to serve
but by an effort to overcome indignities they themselves have
suffered.'' The point is brought home powerfully by Charles
Cobb, who sees the civil rights movement as being best
understood ``as a movement of community organizing rather
than one of protest.'' The civil rights movement performed a
huge national service--and inspired many specific forms of
service, including the registration of thousands of voters.
This quintessentially civic, ``good government'' act, the
registration of new voters, was also a powerful form of
rebellion in places that denied African Americans the right
to vote.
These are essential points. Yet it is also true that
Rotarians are good citizens. Neighborliness, charity, and
social responsibility are genuine virtues. And it is just
possible that a nation responding to the call to service
would, over time, become a nation deeply engaged in questions
of public justice.
The debate over national service is a debate over how we
Americans think of ourselves. It is a debate over how we will
solve public problems and what we owe to our country and to
each other. If our nation is to continue to prosper, it is a
debate we will have in every generation. For if we decide
that there are no public things to which we should be willing
to pledge some of our time and some of our effort--not to
mention ``our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor''--we
will be breaking faith with our nation's
[[Page E1707]]
experiment in liberty rooted in mutual assistance and
democratic aspiration.
____________________