Issue: Friday, June 28, 1996 - page 5

Alexis de Tocqueville commended us. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged us. Jean Bethke Elshtain finds us sleeping in the garden allowing our plants to wither away. In her Thursday morning lecture, Elshtain placed America on trial—an America living through an age of political resentment and withdrawl from civic life. At the onset of her lecture, Elshtain asked the question, "What can be done to revivify the American democracy?"
   

   Shifting to the upcoming elections and previous campaigns, he discussed the atmosphere surrounding the 1994 elections, not as a mandate for the continuation of the conservatives figt against big government but as a display of disappointment with bad government.
   Many people still believe in government as a problem-solving body, Dionne said, as he scratched beneath the surface of the conservative revolution to find a country "mad, not moving toward the right wing."
   He saw Clinton as elected for a specific program—health care reform, welfare reform, the deficit and political reform. Of these tasks, Clinton only accomplished a balanced budget. Disappointment, not conservatism, was the main point citizens tried to make known in their voting actions.
   Dionne finds the 1994 elections and the current moral and political climate of America symptomatic of the need to return to the progressive ideal. He finds "the clearest analogy to the time we are going through right now is that period between the Civil War and the turn of the century that culminated in the last progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson."
"There were revolts against congressional salary measures. There was the sense that politics was hopelessly corrupted. There was the sense that the family was collapsing. There was the sense that we were losing our patriotic values. the progressive movement restored great order to both politics and the economy," Dionne said. He cited the G.I. Bill as an excellent example of the progressive ideal in assisting soldiers and creating America's great middle class.
   Dionne sees the current revolt against the press as indicative of systematic problems within journalism today. Journalists no longer know what they are doing or who they are obligated to. In response to this, he prescribed a two-fold solution. First, journalists must "rescue fairness" and attention to veracity. Second, journalists must seek to broaden public debate by engaging the public and investigating ideas.
   Dionne also placed the burden on journalists and citizens alike to foster an attentive society in the American progressive tradition. As a model, he used Chautauqua, a community "rooted in too-easily forgotten aspects of our American democratic tradition, the ideas of an open platform, of democracy being based on deliberation and reasoned argument, of a citizen's obligation to self-improvement and education and, above all, to the idea of having confidence that ordinary men and women with a thirst for knowledge can acquire it and master it, and after the experience of doing so will want to learn and understand yet more."