April 6, 2000 | Read Time: 5 minutes
The third sector can help save the other parts of society. The survival of the business and government sectors is dependent upon the non-profit community.
The independent sector’s power is that it can help save us from a certain style of interest-group politics. Most independent-sector organizations represent a form of rebellion against a lot of things that happen in our society. Independent-sector organizations are, in their way, embryos of a different way of looking at society, government, and business, and suggest that they have certain obligations that they should meet.
In that sense they are tied to our nation’s “progressive” tradition, which goes back over a hundred years. Many of the finest things our country has achieved in that period are rooted in that progressive tradition, which once found its life in both political parties and, to some extent, still does.
It is not simply a tradition of using government for positive ends, though that is very much a part of it. It is also a tradition that calls for continuing reform of government. And it is a tradition that lays heavy stress on the forms of community and civility organized independently of government.
It’s forgotten that when Teddy Roosevelt talked all those years ago about limits on work hours, he wasn’t just talking about limiting them because working 12 or 14 hours in a factory was unhealthy. He wasn’t even talking about limiting them because people needed more time to spend with their families to raise their kids.
He was also talking about our obligations to our communities, whether we carry those out through Little Leagues, homeless shelters, neighborhood-action programs, or politics. Teddy Roosevelt said that the whole point of limiting the hours of work was so that citizens would have “time and energy to bear their share in the management of the community.”
Indeed, as Harvard University’s Robert Putnam has pointed out, many of the voluntary organizations in our country that we take for granted — the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the N.A.A.C.P., the Shriners, the Elks, and many others — were formed in the period roughly between 1890 and 1920. That was the very moment when the progressive impulse in our politics was strongest.
The formation of all those citizen organizations reflected the progressives’ unapologetic belief in the use of government to promote valued social and political ends. But the progressives also realized that government, all by itself, would not solve the problems that confronted us. There was a sense that you needed citizen action as well as government action. You needed them both, and they needed to work together.
We are on the verge of an era of reform similar in spirit to the social rebuilding that took place a hundred years ago. But for that to truly occur, three large changes in our national life are required.
The first is a new civility in our politics. Civility is one of those words that sounds weak. It seems to involve the avoidance of conflict. But civility isn’t really about avoiding conflict or difference. It is about embracing conflict and difference and managing them constructively. It is about looking for a debate — at once vigorous, honest, and mutually respectful — over what our current circumstances require of us.
The groups of the non-profit sector could be a seedbed for that civility. Those who support those organizations — whether they be the Little League or a homeless shelter or any number of other groups that are serving people — do not go there at first, or primarily, for political reasons. People may, indeed, be drawn into political action from their work in a P.T.A. or a Little League or a homeless shelter. But they come to those groups from very different points of view because they believe there is a problem that needs to be solved, or because there are people who need some help, or because they want to bring a little more justice to the world. The non-profit sector, then, can provide a model for how we might grope our way back to more-civil politics.
Secondly, a new progressive era will require a new engagement with democratic government. That means embracing the idea that in a democracy, government is not them but us. Democratic government is the realm of self-rule, not an arena of coercion or prescription.
A certain skepticism about the power of government is deeply embedded in our tradition, and it is a constructive thing. But a complete cynicism about our capacity to do things together — whether in the civic realm or in government — is not in our tradition. It is a cynicism we need to combat. We need to work our way toward a more constructive view of government and of our civic capacities.
Finally, this new progressive era will require a rebirth and reconstruction of the communities and organizations that constitute civil society. That is the work of the independent sector. Democracy is a community of communities.
One of the most powerful things the third sector could do is remind us that not only do we have a desire to rebuild our country and our community — we have an obligation to do it. The way in which we organize work and business has to be more sensitive to this obligation.
That is not just a liberal or a progressive idea. It’s also very much a conservative idea. A lot of conservatives are ready to join in a dialogue with progressives to say, yes, we know that we’ve let our community bonds fray. We know that we have to do some things differently. And perhaps it’s possible to put aside some of the arguments we’ve had to see where there is room for cooperation in fostering the work of social reconstruction and civic revival.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This article is adapted from the essay “The Vitality of Society Rests on the Nonprofit Sector,” published by Independent Sector, and contains some material drawn from Mr. Dionne’s introduction to Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America, published by Brookings Institution Press.
