Word: civics
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...kind of strength that only space can give. The Main Streets, often puzzled and outraged by change, but -- so far -- willing to bend to it, without breaking. The campuses, dotted with ugly racist conflict but still great generators of knowledge and ideas. The countless individual entrepreneurs and the omnipresent civic groups, committees, associations...
...America possesses a special instrument of change and reform -- what might be called the civic crusade. These grass-roots movements about particular issues have repeatedly forced the more rigid political system to follow: in the fight against racial discrimination, the movement for women's equality, the drive for fair treatment of homosexuals, the environmental movement, the campaign against smoking and many others. Not everybody is comfortable with all these crusades and the rights they champion. But they represent an extraordinary American capacity to change perceptions and habits...
...possible through organized popular pressure to make the environment and nature a major political issue, it should be possible to do the same for education. If it is possible to make smoking despised, it should be possible for drug use. And it should be possible to refocus some civic crusades. The antitax movement was an important political force, but it was too blunt and undifferentiated. To reduce the excesses of government bureaucracy, it is not enough to curb its spending powers. It is far more important (and more difficult) to monitor performance and press for efficiency...
...civic crusades also carry danger. There are so many on behalf of so many causes, including relatively trivial ones, that their energy can become scattered. They threaten to be no longer civic but merely uncivil, dismissive of the rights of others...
...reached the point that it threatens our national sovereignty." What distinguishes Choate from other recent critics of Japan is that he is, at the core, a moralist; to him, the avidity with which former government officials are willing to work for foreign interests symbolizes the erosion of America's "civic virtue." His is a critique of the familiar, entirely legal, Washington revolving door, recast in patriotic terms...