A Commentary on Community in Jerry Brown's Inaugural Speech

In his third gubernatorial speech, made today, Jerry Brown said something profound:

"Many of these issues have confronted the State of California for decades, at least back to Governor Earl Warren. And, it's sobering and enlightening to read through the inaugural addresses of past governors..."

"They each start on a high note of grandeur and then focus on the same reoccurring issues: education, crime, budgets, water. I've thought a lot about this, and it strikes me that we face together, as Californians, are not so much problems, but, rather, conditions, life's inherent difficulties."

"A problem can be solved or forgotten, but a condition always remains. It remains to elicit the best from each of us, to show us how we depend on one another, and how we have to work together."

Now, that's a hell of a point. In making it, Gov. Brown introduces a fairly-well ignored concept in contemporary politics: Communitarianism. This is not Communism. Rather, it seeks to balance personal rights with communal responsibilities.

Communitarianism was a very hot topic in political science back in the 1990s. Sadly, many of the warnings delivered by its theorists, like Amatai Etzioni and Susan Tolchin, have come to pass because we ignored our responsibilities, our loyalties to community.

We seem to be on a tipping point, in which concerns for personal rights are so tremendous that they seem to be breeding almost, if not in fact, a desire for anarchy.

Strangely, in what seems to be a new, third leg of politics, the Tea Party insists on rights for plutocrats and responsibilities, loyalties really, to the plutocrats' agenda, rather than to the community's welfare. Their attitude seems to be, "Ask not what our plutocrats can do for you; ask what you can do for our plutocrats!"

And, herein lies our tipping point.

What is the risk?

I think historian Will Durant put it best when he wrote, "Every form of government seems to perish by excess of its basic principle."

By ignoring responsibility and favoring anarchy or plutocracy, are we to perish next?


--- What was the original American Aurora? The Aurora was a newspaper published by Benjamin Franklin Bache , a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. The Aurora was published in Philadelphia, our nation's capitol at the time.

The Aurora was highly critical of what Bache felt was the tyrannous Federalist governments of presidents Washington and Adams.

The result? Adams imprisoned Bache for sedition, where he languished, awaiting trial, until his death from yellow fever at age 29.