| A call is being sounded throughout the United States. It echoes from our schools, spiritual institutions, houses of government, and newspapers. It is a plea for public dialogue and an acknowledgment of its absence in our time. Our magazines and talk shows offer a steady stream of authorities who worry that Americans do not congregate, volunteer, join, vote, or, most important, talk enough.1 Our foundations donate generous sums to promote what they call "civic culture."2 Recent books on American life, with chapter titles such as "Can We Talk?" or "Can We Be Brought Together?" call for greater communication between blacks and whites (or Jews), women and men, those who favor and those who oppose the legality of abortion, Republicans and Democrats, white women and women of color.3 The World Wide Web arguably the last technological panacea of the twentieth century hosts numerous sites that help organize or instruct people in the art of discussion.4 |
| Much of this admirable activity is motivated by civic pride, patriotism, or sociability. But the crusade for dialogue also seems to be fueled by fear, either vaguely sensed or explicitly experienced. Immigration, globalization, identity politics, the supposed breakdown of the family, the decline of our cities all these phenomena have produced a generation of writers who think we had better start talking as soon as possible. |
| Since the 1960s our nation has experienced an "unraveling," according to one historian.5 We are a "disunited" culture, bereft of singular purpose, thanks to the "cult of ethnicity." Another author pleads for a return to assimilationism for us to be "Americans simply," above all else. ''Let us celebrate that choice," argues Nathan Glazer, "and agree it would be better for America if more of us accepted that identity as our central one, as against ethnic and racial identities."6 |
| Even those observers sympathetic to such sentiments detect more than a bit of ahistorical panic in all this. As sociologist Todd Gitlin observes, |
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