by the mid–1970s, America had lost its edge. America lost its
edge because it lost its way. We forgot what we were here for.
The rebellion of the 1960s, the Me Decade that followed,
the yuppies of the 1980s, and the subsequent rise of Wall
Street’s Gordon Gekkos with their philosophy that greed is
good are all consequences of the mistakes and crudities of the
organization men. Unable to find America’s head or heart,
many of its citizens seem to have declared their independence
from it and from each other.
While the 1960s saw the birth of such important contribu-
tions to our country as the civil rights movement and the
women’s movement, too many of its so-called breakthroughs
became breakdowns. We talked about freedom and democracy,
but we sometimes practiced license and anarchy. People were
often not as in terested in new ideas as they were in recipes and
slogans. Gurus Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers told us we
could create our own reality, and we did, with everyone insist-
ing on having it his or her way.
There has always been a tension in the American character
between individual rights and the common good. While we’ve
loved and admired John Wayne striking out on his own with
just a horse and a rifle, we’ve also known that the wagon train
couldn’t make it across the plains unless we all stuck together.
That tension is as fierce today as it has ever been. Whenever
upward mobility and good citizenship diverge, we have less and
less in common, and less and less that is good.
Our Founding Fathers based the Constitution on the assump-
tion that there was such a thing as public virtue. James Madison
wrote, “The public good... the real welfare of the great body of
people... is the supreme object to be pursued.”
Mastering the Context