Time | We're used to choosing to join together for a goal—or not—whenever we want to
Over
the course of the last 15 years or so, there’s been an explosion in the
number of charter schools around the country. According to the latest figures (from 2012),
some 2.1 million students are enrolled in schools run by private groups
awarded public money. The schools bear optimistic names like “YES Prep
North Central” (in Houston) and “Animo Leadership High” (in Inglewood,
California). Beyond the specific concerns about education, the charter
school movement is powered by a particularly American world-view, one
rooted in the ethos of the dissident Protestant churches that were the
foundation of early American culture: Citizens opting out of a
hierarchical system to pursue personal goals by joining together in a
local, voluntary society.
This ideological impulse – which I and others call “voluntarism” – is a
cultural trait that helps explain why the United States remains
different from comparable wealthy, western nations. Broadly speaking,
voluntarism is not another term for American individualism, although it
entails individualism. Voluntarism is the way Americans reconcile
individualism and community. And we can feel the weight of
American voluntarism in our approaches to public issues, not only in
charter schools, but in debates about issues like Obamacare and gay
marriage as well.
Other western nations, by contrast, consider health care a civil
right of citizens and a moral obligation of government. American
tradition, however, treats health care as an individual’s personal
responsibility, or at least as a personal responsibility exercised
through voluntary association, as in workplace health insurance. When
the debate around gay marriage shifted from a discussion of God, gender,
sex, and propriety to a debate over individual rights, tolerance, and
the personal freedom of Americans to choose their partners, the struggle
for marriage equality became easier.
American voluntarism makes it hard for social-democratic reformers to
persuade their fellow citizens to accept the types of ambitious
state-run initiatives common in most western democracies, such as
universal healthcare, free pre-schools and guaranteed labor rights.
Conversely, the spirit of American voluntarism makes it harder for
non-Americans to understand our public policies, which are often
caricatured as being nakedly Darwinian.
That American society was notably different — exceptional was the term —
from other western societies was a staple for much of twentieth-century
social science. Researchers have offered up lists of hows and whys,
trying to distill the difference. I joined the enterprise when I started
researching my 2010 book, Made in America, and the evidence spoke to the centrality of voluntarism in understanding American culture and its so-called exceptionalism.
