[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 121 (Friday, September 5, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1705-E1707]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL SERVICE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 4, 2003

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to share an excerpt from an important 
policy brief published by the Brookings Institute on the meaning of 
citizenship and national service.
  What is our civic responsibility to this land, as people who enjoy 
the benefits of living in a vibrant democracy? How can we keep the 
social contract between all segments of society without a shared sense 
of sacrifice and duty? Authors E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Kayla Meltzer 
Drogosz provide a good overview of the subject and the importance of 
this issue to the future success of this country.

   The Promise of National Service: A (Very) Brief History of an Idea

            (By E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Kayla Meltzer Drogosz)


              the service idea and the american experiment

       Divisions over the meaning of service are rooted deeply in 
     our history. When the United States was founded, liberal and 
     civic republican ideas jostled for dominance. The liberals--
     they might now be called libertarians--viewed personal 
     freedom as the heart of the American experiment. The civic 
     republicans valued freedom, too, but they stressed that self-
     rule demanded a great deal from citizens. The liberals 
     stressed rights. The civic republicans stressed obligations 
     to a common good and, as the philosopher Michael Sandel has 
     put it in his book, Democracy's Discontents, ``a concern for 
     the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at 
     stake.'' In our time, the clash between these older 
     traditions lives on in the intellectual wars between 
     libertarians and communitarians. On national service, 
     libertarians lean toward skepticism, communitarians toward a 
     warm embrace.
       America has changed since September 11, 2001. Respect for 
     service soared as the nation forged a new and stronger sense 
     of solidarity in the face of deadly enemies. What has been 
     said so often still bears repeating: our view of heroes 
     underwent a remarkable and sudden change. The new heroes are 
     public servants--police, firefighters, rescue workers, postal 
     workers whose lives were threatened, men and women 
     in uniform--not the CEOs, high-tech wizards, rock stars, 
     or sports figures who dominated the 1990s. At a time when 
     citizens focus on urgent national needs, those who serve 
     their country naturally rise in public esteem. Robert 
     Putnam, a pioneer in research on civic engagement, 
     captures the post-9/11 moment powerfully. He argues that 
     because of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the 
     Pentagon--and the courage shown by those on the plane that 
     went down over Pennsylvania--``we have a more capacious 
     sense of `we' than we have had in the adult experience of 
     most Americans now alive.''


                   september 11 and the service ideal

       Accordingly, the politics of national service were also 
     transformed. Even before September 11, President Bush had 
     signaled a warmer view of service than many in his party. In 
     choosing two Republican supporters of the idea--former Mayor 
     Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis and Leslie Lenkowsky, CEO of 
     the Corporation for National and Community Service--to head 
     his administration's service effort, Bush made clear he 
     intended to take it seriously.
       After September 11, service became a stronger theme in the 
     president's rhetoric. In his 2001 State of the Union message, 
     he called on Americans to give two years of service to the 
     nation over their lifetimes and announced the creation of the 
     USA Freedom Corps. It was a patriotic, post-September 11 
     gloss on the old Clinton ideas--and the ideas of John F. 
     Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bush's father, the first 
     President Bush, who offered the nation a thousand points of 
     light.
       There is also a new acknowledgment across the political 
     divides that government support for volunteers can provide 
     essential help for valuable institutions that we too often 
     take for granted. It is easy for politicians to talk about 
     the urgency of strengthening ``civil society.'' But through 
     AmeriCorps and other programs, the government has found a 
     practical (and not particularly costly) way to make the talk 
     real. Paradoxically, as the journalist Steven Waldman points 
     out, AmeriCorps, a Democratic initiative, fit neatly with the 
     Republicans' emphasis on faith-based programs. Democrats 
     accepted the need to strengthen programs outside of 
     government; Republicans accepted that voluntary programs 
     could use government's help. This interplay between 
     government and independent communal action may be especially 
     important in the United States, where powerful and intricate 
     links have always existed--long before the term ``faith-based 
     organizations'' was invented--between the religious and civic 
     spheres.
       That national service has become a bipartisan goal is an 
     important achievement. It is reflected in the White House's 
     Citizen Service Act and in bills cosponsored by, among 
     others, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Evan Bayh (D-
     Ind.). Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has made an ambitious 
     service proposal a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. 
     These legislative ideas mirrored the spirit of the moment. As 
     Marc Magee and Steven Nider of the Progressive Policy 
     Institute reported a year ago, in the first nine months after 
     September 11 applications for AmeriCorps jumped 50 percent, 
     those for the Peace Corps doubled, and those for Teach for 
     America tripled. Yes, a difficult private economy certainly 
     pushed more young Americans toward such public endeavors. 
     Nonetheless, their choices point to the continued power of 
     the service idea.


                        citizenship and service

       Citizenship cannot be reduced to service. The good works of 
     faith communities and the private sector--or ``communities of 
     character,'' as President Bush has called them--cannot 
     replace the responsibilities of government. Service can 
     become a form of cheap grace, a generalized call on citizens 
     to do kind things as an alternative to a genuine summons for 
     national sacrifice or a fair apportionment of burdens among 
     the more and less powerful or wealthy. But when service is 
     seen as a bridge to genuine political and civic 
     responsibility, it can strengthen democratic government and 
     foster the republican virtues. Lenkowsky made this connection 
     when he urged attendees at a Corporation for National and 
     Community Service conference to turn ``civic outrage into 
     civic engagement'' by increasing the reach and 
     effectiveness of volunteer programs. No one can dispute 
     visionaries like former Senator Harris Wofford, chairman 
     of America's Promise, and Alan Khazei, cofounder and CEO 
     of City Year, who have shown how AmeriCorps, VISTA, Senior 
     Corps, and Peace Corps have transformed communities. But 
     Paul Light of Brookings questions whether this 
     transformation is sustainable. Can episodic volunteerism 
     build the capacity and effectiveness of public and 
     nonprofit organizations?
       Will the new respect for service make government bashing 
     less satisfying as a hobby? It is possible, but not likely.

[[Page E1706]]

       Underlying the debate over national service is an argument 
     over whether service is necessary or merely ``nice.'' If 
     service is just a nice thing to do, it's easy to understand 
     the strong reservations about government-led service programs 
     from critics such as Bruce Chapman who, in 1966, wrote The 
     Wrong Man in Uniform, one of the earliest calls for a 
     volunteer military.
       But service has the potential to be far more than something 
     nice.
       Will Marshall and Marc Magee of the Progressive Policy 
     Institute argue that the service idea could be a departure 
     comparable to breakthroughs in earlier eras toward a stronger 
     sense of citizenship. ``Like settlement houses and night 
     school, which helped America absorb waves of immigration,'' 
     they write, ``national service opens new paths of upward 
     mobility for young Americans and the people they serve. And, 
     like the G.I. Bill, national service should be seen as a 
     longterm investment in the education, skills, and ingenuity 
     of our people.''
       Service, then, is not simply a good in itself, but a means 
     to many ends. It creates bridges between groups that have 
     little to do with each other on any given day, and as the New 
     Left's Port Huron Statement put it forty years ago, draws 
     citizens ``out of isolation and into community.'' Michael 
     Brown, the co-founder of City Year, says service can activate 
     ``people's justice nerve,'' creating a thirst for social 
     improvement. It could foster civic and political 
     participation in a society that seems not to hold public 
     service in the highest esteem.
       But this very plurality of ends creates a certain 
     skepticism about service. If it offers something for 
     everyone, how serious can the idea really be? Michael Lind, a 
     senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is right when he 
     says that ``within the small but vocal community of national 
     service enthusiasts, there is far more agreement on the 
     policy of national service than on its purpose.'' In the 
     post-September 11 environment, he argues that the one 
     compelling case for citizen service would rest on the need to 
     expand the nation's capacity to prepare for and respond to 
     domestic emergencies, notably those caused by terrorism.


                     answering the call to service

       However one conceives of service, surely one of its ends--
     or, at least, one of the ends that wins the broadest assent--
     is the urgency of finding new ways to engage young Americans 
     in public life after a long period of estrangement. In his 
     2000 campaign, Sen. McCain--initially a skeptic of national 
     service, now a strong supporter--won a wide following among 
     young people by urging them to aspire to things ``beyond your 
     own self-interest.'' Many surveys suggest that young 
     Americans are deeply engaged in civic activity. One by 
     Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics in October 2002 found 
     that 61 percent of its national sample of undergraduates 
     reported performing some form of community service in the 
     past year. And as Paul Light has shown in a new survey, 
     liberal arts college graduates from the Class of 2003 are 
     eager to find jobs that provide opportunities to help people. 
     However, when they hear the phrase ``public service,'' 
     they think of the kind of work they see in the nonprofit 
     sector and not in government or politics. If we are to 
     expand young people's understanding of public service, 
     then service learning initiatives in public schools must 
     continue to be linked with a heightened sense of civic 
     responsibility and personal effectiveness.
       If the new generation connected its impulses to service 
     with politics, it could become one of the great reforming 
     generations in American history. And service could become a 
     pathway to a stronger sense of citizenship. As the columnist 
     Jane Eisner argues, service ``must produce more than 
     individual fulfillment for those involved and temporary 
     assistance for communities in need.'' It should, she says, 
     ``lead to an appetite for substantive change, a commitment to 
     address the social problems that have created the need for 
     service in the first place.'' Eisner and others have 
     suggested that as a nation, we should celebrate the first 
     vote cast by young people with the same fanfare that greets 
     other moments of passage to adult responsibility. The goal 
     would be to encourage a new generation to make the connection 
     ``between service to the community and participation in the 
     very process that governs community life.''
       A focus on the links service forges between the rights and 
     responsibilities of citizenship could offer new ways out of 
     old political impasses. For example, Andrew Stern, the 
     president of the Service Employees International Union, 
     suggests that a two-year commitment to national service could 
     become a pathway for undocumented workers to legalize their 
     status and for legal immigrants to speed their passage to 
     citizenship. Stern also proposes that former felons now 
     denied voting rights might ``earn credits toward restoration 
     of full citizenship'' through service.
       At its best, service is not make-work, but what Harry Boyte 
     and Nancy Kari, in their book, Building America, have called 
     ``public work.'' It is work that ``is visible, open to 
     inspection, whose significance is widely recognized'' and can 
     be carried out by ``a mix of people whose interests, 
     backgrounds, and resources may be quite different.'' Service 
     as public work is the essence of the democratic project. It 
     solves common problems and creates common things. Public work 
     entails not only altruism, but also enlightened self-
     interest--a desire to build a society in which the serving 
     citizen wants to live.


                       Skepticism, Realism, Hope

       Service alone cannot build a stronger sense of citizenship. 
     Citizenship is meaningless unless citizens have the power to 
     achieve their goals and to change their communities and the 
     nation. It is thus possible to be skeptical about the new 
     call to service, and it is absolutely necessary to be 
     realistic. Speeches about service can be a convenient way for 
     politicians to call for sacrifice without demanding much of 
     citizens. At little cost to themselves, advocates of both 
     conservative and liberal individualism can use service to 
     shroud their real intentions behind the decent drapery of 
     community feeling.
       William Galston, a scholar who has devoted years of energy 
     to promoting research and action to excite young Americans to 
     public engagement, worries that the failure to link post-
     September 11 rhetoric about service to actual calls for civic 
     action could lead to the very sort of cynicism service 
     advocates decry.
       ``Would Pearl Harbor have been a defining event if it had 
     not been followed by a national mobilization and four years 
     of war that altered the lives of soldiers and civilians 
     alike?'' Galston asks. ``In the immediate wake of September 
     11, the administration's failure to call for any real 
     sacrifice from citizens fortified my belief that the 
     terrorist attack would be the functional equivalent of Pearl 
     Harbor without World War II, intensifying insecurity without 
     altering civic behavior.''
       Theda Skocpol, another wise student of American civic life, 
     sounds an equally useful warning. ``Absent organizational 
     innovations and new public policies,'' she writes, ``the 
     reinvigorated sense of the American `we' that was born of the 
     travails of 9/11 may well gradually dissipate, leaving only 
     ripples on the managerial routines of contemporary U.S. civic 
     life.'' In fact, as Skocpol and Galston suggest, mere 
     exhortation to serve will do little to foster public--and 
     especially political--participation if too many citizens see 
     the public realm as broken.
       The issue of whether Americans have been called to any real 
     sort of sacrifice is, of course, the point of Rep. Rangel 
     calling for a renewal of the draft. It is neither race-
     baiting nor class warfare--Rangel was accused of both--to 
     suggest that a democratic society has a problem when members 
     of its most privileged classes are not among the first to 
     rally to the colors at a time of trouble.
       This problem also worries Charles Moskos, the nation's 
     premier student of service and the military experience. 
     Moskos has explored ways of expanding the circle of 
     commitment and promoting the idea of the ``citizen soldier.'' 
     This idea has caught on in a wide range of political circles. 
     As Stanley Kurtz wrote in the National Review in April, ``In 
     a world of looming military challenges, the citizen-soldier 
     program may be our last chance to expand the armed forces 
     without a draft.'' John Lehman, the Navy Secretary under 
     Ronald Reagan, has also offered helpful remedies short of a 
     draft to overcome what he agrees is a fundamental problem: 
     that ``the burdens of defense and the perils of combat do not 
     fall even close to fairly across all of our society.''


                      From Service to Citizenship

       If the problems of inequality are vexing where military 
     service is concerned, they can also be troubling for service 
     at home. Service, badly conceived, can distance citizens from 
     public problems by seeing the server more as a missionary 
     uplifting the needy than as a fellow citizen. Michael 
     Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of 
     California, San Diego, sees President Bush's ideal citizen is 
     a ``Rotarian, moved by a sense of neighborliness, Christian 
     charity, and social responsibility, but untouched by having a 
     personal stake in public justice.'' Schudson's point is not 
     to knock Rotarians. It is to argue that self-interest in 
     pursuit of justice is a virtue. As Schudson notes in 
     describing the civil rights movement, the most dramatic 
     expansion of democracy and citizenship in our lifetime was 
     brought about by citizens ``driven not by a desire to serve 
     but by an effort to overcome indignities they themselves have 
     suffered.'' The point is brought home powerfully by Charles 
     Cobb, who sees the civil rights movement as being best 
     understood ``as a movement of community organizing rather 
     than one of protest.'' The civil rights movement performed a 
     huge national service--and inspired many specific forms of 
     service, including the registration of thousands of voters. 
     This quintessentially civic, ``good government'' act, the 
     registration of new voters, was also a powerful form of 
     rebellion in places that denied African Americans the right 
     to vote.
       These are essential points. Yet it is also true that 
     Rotarians are good citizens. Neighborliness, charity, and 
     social responsibility are genuine virtues. And it is just 
     possible that a nation responding to the call to service 
     would, over time, become a nation deeply engaged in questions 
     of public justice.
       The debate over national service is a debate over how we 
     Americans think of ourselves. It is a debate over how we will 
     solve public problems and what we owe to our country and to 
     each other. If our nation is to continue to prosper, it is a 
     debate we will have in every generation. For if we decide 
     that there are no public things to which we should be willing 
     to pledge some of our time and some of our effort--not to 
     mention ``our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor''--we 
     will be breaking faith with our nation's

[[Page E1707]]

     experiment in liberty rooted in mutual assistance and 
     democratic aspiration.

                          ____________________