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T he results of the 2008 elections suggested we might be on the verge of dramatic political changes. During the campaign, political commentators described a stalemate between “the irresistible force of secular belief in public investment set against the immovable object of faith-based laissezfairism .” But polls showed that since 1999, more than 60 percent of Americans acknowledged a broad range of necessary functions for government, and the number continued to rise. The election of President Barack Obama showed that leaders willing to “speak to people as citizens, asking them to participate in something that has a larger national purpose,” might produce a political realignment on the basis of civic renewal.1 But commentators also noted that the case for public action suffered from the failure to make a persuasive case. Scholars agreed that we possessed a rich language of individual rights, but our language of civic engagement remained weak and abstract. We may simply not know what civic means, which would explain why our civic history is so often filled with grand rhetorical pronouncements followed by disappointing results. As recently as 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to spend fifty billion dollars on public works in each of the following four years. Nothing of the sort happened. By 1998, federal outlays for public construction hit a fifty-year low. If we want to take full advantage of the opportunities that are again before us, we should briefly review a debate between “civic” liberals and “money” liberals that shaped the Clinton campaign.2 In 1990, an insurgent group of civic liberals called on money liberals to abandon their fixation with economic equality. Money liberals really wanted social equality, an “equality in the way we treat each other in everyday life.” But Conclusion B The Future of the City: Civic Renewal and Environmental Politics CONCLUSION • 269 their efforts to promote social equality through a redistribution of wealth proved ineffective and politically unpopular. The reconstruction of the public realm, civic liberals maintained, provided a better means of promoting social equality. They advocated for a shared set of civic obligations and opportunities indifferent to wealth, including a national draft and universal health care, improved public schools and parks, a public jobs program to replace welfare, and a political system sealed off from the influence of private wealth.3 Money liberals did not buy the argument. Refusing to treat “the causes of inequality [as] deep economic facts essentially beyond our control,” money liberals charged civic liberals with failing to recognize the market as a creation of civic life, a product of the law of contract and incorporation, public spending on infrastructure, the internal revenue code, the Federal Reserve Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and a thousand other political choices.“We can have a more equal distribution of wealth and income, if we want,” money liberals insisted , because different political choices created different markets.When money liberals suggested that we could “choose to pay schoolteachers and nurses more, and lawyers and bond traders less,” civic liberals were incredulous. “How? By direct regulation of incomes? Without sacrificing economic efficiency?” Civic liberals dismissed the whole proposition as nonsense. Money liberals should have pointed out that local governments already established the incomes of public school teachers and could decide to pay them more. Stockbrokers, they should have added, operated in a highly regulated industry dependent upon public policies that were just then disastrously promoting speculation. By setting the market aside as an autonomous realm that resists political control, civic liberals crippled the public realm in its relation to its most important creation. They also left their program open to the charge that it amounted to nothing more than a set of unexamined prescriptions, imposed from above, to reshape character and values. Recognizing this vulnerability, money liberals charged civic liberals with forcing “a particular view of the good life on people.” Rejecting “social engineering ,” money liberals favored addressing economic inequality and then letting “people live their own lives.” But money liberals admitted that any set of laws and regulations always imposed some view of the good life. In removing constraints on financial speculation, slashing social spending, and undercutting the power of trade unions in the 1980s, we made political choices that rewarded certain types of activities over others, sometimes in morally dubious ways. These policies supposedly rewarded a skills-based meritocracy. But what “possible conception of merit,” money liberals asked, “would require a society in which the boss earned a thousand times the wage...

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