{"id":2715,"date":"2022-09-08T15:18:13","date_gmt":"2022-09-08T19:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americancompass.beckandstone.com\/servants-no-longer\/"},"modified":"2022-11-25T22:19:05","modified_gmt":"2022-11-26T03:19:05","slug":"servants-no-longer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americancompass.org\/servants-no-longer\/","title":{"rendered":"Servants No Longer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Aristotle uses the term \u201ccivic friendship\u201d to describe the bonds that emerge from a sense of common purpose in a shared political project. \u201cCitizens are civic friends,\u201d the Aristotelian philosopher Paul Ludwig writes<\/a>, \u201cwhen they share an agreement about important practical matters: preeminently, they agree about the regime, their political system.\u201d Communal commitment to a common endeavour results in a kind of general goodwill of citizens toward one another\u2014the seeds of civic friendship. It is what allows<\/a> a society to remain whole and undivided rather than fragmenting into warring subcommunities. It is also a good description of what American life so conspicuously lacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How, though, does a society ensure that its members do <\/em>believe themselves to be in it together, with common goals and shared outcomes? In December 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered remarks to the Fourth AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention in Miami Beach, and attempted to answer that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n King was stepping into a heated and challenging situation. The AFL-CIO was plagued by internal acrimony and public hesitation regarding civil rights. King chose to address the tension directly. He told the assembled delegates that the civil rights and labor movements had<\/em> to work together, because their aims were inseparable. Democracy was not complete and could not remain stable without a working public empowered to fully participate in the nation\u2019s economic life. A voice at the ballot box represented only incomplete equality without a collective voice in the workplace. Deploying the dream motif that would later define his most celebrated language, King invited his audience to understand what was at stake. \u201cTogether,\u201d he said, speaking of the civil rights and labour movements, \u201cwe can be the architects of democracy,\u201d and \u201cbring into full realization the dream of American democracy\u2014a dream yet unfulfilled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n