I come from our little island, Washington, which is still shaking from last week’s storms. In the President’s troubled and troubling speech a week ago Sunday, he recalled events that fell like cudgels upon the self-assurance with which Americans entered the post-war era: the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Watergate disgrace. But he suggested that these events were but moments of crescendo in the growth of a far deeper national malaise, a “growing doubt about the meaning of our lives, and the loss of unity of purpose for our nation”.

He then went on to warn against “the path that leads to fragmentation and self interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests, ending in chaos and immobility. It is the route to failure”.

The President is right to speak to us of a crisis of morale in our society, and we owe him our gratitude for putting this subject at the center of public discourse. But we also owe him our help in understanding its causes. Those with experience in what is sometimes called the third sector of our national life – the realm of the voluntary, philanthropic and service organizations –  have an especially important part in this.

I would expect that your tradition would lead you to an assessment, which is somewhat different from the President’s– yet which he probably could be persuaded is sound and useful.  For you are both the creatures and the creators of an essential diversity in American life – and you can help us to understand that not all diversity need be “fragmentation”; indeed, it is necessary to the kind of higher unity our nation seeks.

Last October, I had the pleasure of meeting with United Way leaders and others who participate in the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations (ed., CONVO) to discuss the bill that Senator Packwood and I have reintroduced in the Senate – a bill which would permit taxpayers who do not itemize their tax deductions nevertheless to deduct charitable contributions from their taxable income. You are probably familiar with the basic import of this legislation, which would, the economists tell us, generate billions of dollars annually in additional charitable gifts, principally in small contributions from citizens of moderate means. I might note that we now have 23 co-sponsors for this bill in the Senate, among them our Majority Whip, Alan Cranston, one of the most thoughtful of the Senate liberals. Congressmen Conable and Fisher report that more than 80 Representatives have co-sponsored the counterpart bill in the House. I am confident that we can gain an attentive hearing for this measure in the 96th Congress, providing that, as the out-going Chairman of your Board, Mr. John W. Hanley, has so wisely advised us, we fully understand and can effectively explain its full implications for public policy – and do not permit it to be wrongly portrayed as some sort of pork barrel for “big charity.”

There are, I assure you, those who would see it that way. At the CONVO meeting last year, I attempted to argue that there are indeed two traditions and outlooks which intermingle under the broad canopy of what we frequently characterize as “liberalism.”

One of these I called the pluralist position. It is a view held by those who, with Edmund Burke, believe that “the nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible com­plexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs”.

I argued (in a speech which I was pleased to find reprinted in your magazine, Community Focus) that these liberals hold that between the individual and the state is to be found a great and beneficent array of social and economic entities. They believe that in the strength of these voluntary, private associations – church, family, club, trade union, commercial association – lies much of the strength of democratic society.

This pluralistic strain of liberalism may be contrasted to another which I described as “statist.” The term sounds rather more invidious than I intend it – for I well recall the time when it seemed that industrial democracies could endure and progress only through a massive expansion of government involvement in their institutional arrangements. One recalls the phrase “cold as charity” and the inadequacy of nongovernmental provision for human needs that led to the New Deal and the Great Society. And one is rightly fearful of the kind of reckless antigovernment impulse that appears among us today in the support for measures such as California’s Proposition 13, and of the obsessive concern we find in some quarters for balanced budgets.

But today we are also beginning to see evidence of overreliance upon the state as an instrument for improving the commonweal. We see it in the unsteady condition of the family, we see it in the erosion of private education, we see it in the bureaucratic chill that pervades so many of our government agencies, we see it in the faltering sense of neighborhood in our urban centers, we see it even, one might argue, in the awesome decline of citizen participation in our elections. For, again in Edmund Burke’s much-quoted words, “to be attached to the subdivisions, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (germ as it were) of public affections”. 

The “first principle,” may I repeat, of “public affections.” Here is the inspiration for our proposal for encouraging charitable giving by a much broader element of the public. To be sure our bill would in time cost the federal treasury several billions of dollars in lost revenues. But I wonder – is that not a shortsighted budget analyst’s view of the matter? Is it not possible that, by nourishing the private, non-profit sector, we may in the end also increase the vigor of the public sector? Is it indeed true that the only way to more effective, responsive government and to a more just and humane society lies in further constricting and denying the private sector? Burke would not have thought so. Nor do I.

But the idea of the state as the primary embodiment of the public good is not one that yields readily or painlessly to such argument. One saw this last year when Senator McGovern, an eloquent and steadfast spokesman for what might be termed the statist tradition of liberalism, complained that the evidence of widespread anti-tax and anti-government sentiment in the nation suggested that the public was succumbing to what he called a “degrading hedonism.” This thought recurred in President Carter’s address last week:  “too many of us now,” he said, “tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

I suggest that while this thought is by no means wholly wrong, it is disturbingly incomplete. The public is indeed turning away from big government as a panacea, but it is by no means inevitable that this new temper will reduce our society to a collection of selfish atoms – what Durkheim foresaw as a “dust of individuals.”

Here is a major challenge to and opportunity for the voluntary sector – and, I hasten to add, to those in government who grasp its importance. The intermediate institutions of our social order – the web of family, church, civic and ethnic association, neighborhood and school, through which the individual is linked to the larger institutions of government and the economy – have come under devastating strain in modern times. If this continues, it will leave us with no buffer between the individual and the state. These institutions can be strengthened only when government and the “third sector” cooperated to nurture them.

The President calls for a new “unity of purpose.” But such unity can be attained only if we recognize the complexity of the undertaking. “The error of Socrates,” wrote Aristotle in the Politics, “must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist, will become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been reduced to a single foot”.

The way to the unity we now seek and need does not lie in railing against pluralism, a note that can be heard in castigations of “fragmentation” or “narrow interests”. The way to unity lies in an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of differences, and an understanding that the art of politics consists of drawing them into a harmony that, if not always magnificent, at least is widely acceptable.

But if that is the primary task before the nation, we here today have one of almost equivalent significance – and difficulty. It is to persuade those men and women of good will who believe the state to be the chief agency of the common good that the third sector possesses a far greater potential than they perceive it to have.

There are not a few today who look upon the endeavors which engage those here today as old-fashioned, even dilettantish. But an even more wounding charge, made today with increasing frequency, is that, far from reflecting the true diversity of our voluntary organizations and the communities of values from which they spring, our largest and best-known charities are themselves becoming vast, monopolistic bureaucracies, which do not countervail against the great powers of business and government, but in fact emulate them and collaborate with them. If we are to defend the case for pluralism against the statists and, not at all incidentally, if we are to pass our bill for above-the-line charitable deductions – we must demonstrate that these enterprises indeed do represent a living, variegated and vibrant web of interests and organizations – a true “third sector.”

This undertaking is of the most timely and central importance. We cannot allow it to be diminished by envy, ambition, or quarrelsomeness within our own ranks. Let us instead rely upon the principled arguments for our cause. Let us encourage the widest diversity among ourselves. Let us ask that the systems of private giving and eleemosynary activity that are established within our great institutions offer the widest choice to the individuals to whom they appeal. Let us welcome into our councils the widest representation from the labor movement, from racial and ethnic minorities, and from voluntary agencies themselves – including new, unconventional, even controversial organizations.

By so doing, we strengthen ourselves. And by strengthening ourselves, we strengthen our nation.

Those who are dismayed by the events in Washington last week should not be too quick to scoff at the abilities of this Administration. We should remember that this is the fourth successive national administration to meet serious trouble in keeping the giant barge that now serves as our ship of state on a safe and steady course.  In his work  Democracy in America, an unfailing source of insight and wisdom, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the more that government “stands in the place of (voluntary) associations, the more will individuals, losing the notions of combining together, require its assistance: these are the causes and effects that unceasingly create each other”.

I do not believe that we are yet an ungovernable country. But if our voluntary sector is not strengthened, it is not impossible that we should become one.

We have corrected some obvious spelling and punctuation errors and wish to thank the staff of the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Reading Room for their generous assistance in making the Moynihan Papers accessible and navigable.