Habits of the Heart: Part Two

We're sharing the third part of our 2025 slow read.

As our team takes time off for the holidays, we are sharing the conversations Sarah and Beth had this year about Habits of the Heart. This third episode originally aired in September for our premium members on Substack.

Whether you’re also taking a well-deserved break, spending time with family, or just looking for something meaningful to listen to, we hope you’ll join us to revisit (or enjoy for the first time!) this thoughtful exploration from Sarah and Beth of this powerful, prescient book.

In this episode, they get into the different types of citizens laid out in the book, Beth’s dreaded “swooping,” the role of religion in public life, and what it truly means to care.

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Habits of the Heart: Part Two

Episode Transcript

Maggie Penton [00:00:07] This is Maggie Penton. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we’re sharing our part two discussion from Sarah and Beth’s slow read of Habits of the Heart that we originally recorded back in September. We hope that as you’re wrapping up your year in holiday season, this series can help you think about the kind of citizen you want to be in 2026. Habits of the Heart is fundamentally a book about the tension in America between our individual freedom and civic commitments. And today’s conversation digs into an idea we’ve been considering on Pantsuit Politics for years now, which is how to be a citizen. The authors of Habits of the Heart identified many ways that people approach their role in communities and show up as citizens. So we hope that today’s conversation gets your wheels turning on how you think about your citizenship as we approach our nation’s 250th birthday. We’d love to hear your thoughts over on our episode page on Substack. And if you’d like to join that conversation, we are having an end of year sale for our Pantsuit Politics premium subscription. You can get two months free if you take advantage of our annual subscription through December 31st. This is our best deal of the year, so don’t miss out on that. Just visit Pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/subscribe to take advantage of that offer. Again, it ends on December 31st. And now Sarah and Beth discuss part two of Habits of the Heart.

Beth [00:01:48] Hello everyone, we have reached part two of Habits of the Heart: Public Life. And I didn’t think I could be more engaged than I was on the love and marriage sections, but they got me. They’re doing a lot of work in this book.

Sarah [00:02:06] I don’t know how strongly to express how obsessed I am with this book. I want everyone to read it. I read half of the section out loud to Nicholas after punching him in the arm and being like listen to this. It is every stinking word, so true, so prescient, and I just keep going. I’ll just be sitting there in my chair reading. I’ll go, 1984!

Beth [00:02:34] I know.

Sarah [00:02:35] I just can’t believe it. It’s stupid.

Beth [00:02:42] Which is both amazing and comforting and also really frustrating. That makes me feel a lot of things at one time.

Sarah [00:02:53] Here’s the thing. Everything they said in this book was true. Every problem they identified, every cultural trend, they were just killing it, just naming it so accurately. And then, this is what I told Nicholas, it’s like the internet came along with a big old tank of gasoline and spread it all over everything they talked about. Just gasoline, gasoline, gasoline, and it was like, whoosh!

Beth [00:03:18] They were worried about this stuff before the whoosh.

Sarah [00:03:24] They were worried before the woosh, correct.

Beth [00:03:26] Well, let’s begin with getting involved. They give us some language to describe different ways of being a citizen. And I thought that these were so fascinating because some are based on your connection to your place. And others are based on how you see yourself as one interest of many interests trying to live together. So they started by describing the town father, which is a marriage of your place and your economic interest. And I just immediately thought of B.F. Evans Ford in my hometown.

Sarah [00:04:03] This is where I live. This is it. The town father ideal do not, in fact, draw salaries from large corporations, but rather are self-employed businessmen, usually owners of commercial enterprises whose clientele is drawn mainly from the town and its immediately surrounding area. I mean, I don’t know what to say. Everyone I know who is civically involved in Paducah either owns their own business, works for, let’s say-- I mean there’s some strain a little bit let’s say if work for the local hospital, because now our local hospitals are owned by corporate conglomerates. Same for the doctors. So there’s a lot of tension in the healthcare field in my town that I noticed around this. Like they’re still town fathers. They’re still serving the local community, but there’s some tension. Not like the used car dealers, the bankers, the real estate agents, the builders, the people who work for the school system, like it’s so true. And honestly I think it’s better, I think it’s a better situation to live in when you’re not beholden to, I don’t know, Blackstone (let me just pick one out of the clear blue sky) and you’re really invested because it’s almost like it keeps that-- and I don’t remember if they name this or not, but it does keep the sort of, there’s like a check, a tiny check, not a big check, but a tiny check on that corporate interest. The profit motive when as a town father and mother also those two, it’s wrapped up with the people you live with the people you are making money from.

Beth [00:05:42] Yeah, because there is not an unlimited amount of wealth available doing that. You can get fantastically wealthy, but there’s a ceiling.

Sarah [00:05:53] Right, not Bezos wealthy. Yeah.

Beth [00:05:56] So my place is a mix. I have town fathers, for sure, here. We also have concerned citizens. These are people who get involved in response to threat. And so I thought of how many sitcom episodes we watched about Neighborhood Watch growing up, right? That’s the concerned citizen. Suddenly something is off and I’m activated. I feel like we saw a lot of this in my community around the city pool, whether we were going to have a public pool or not. We have some of this happening right now. Sarah, I don’t think I’ve talked to you about this. Our elementary school has outgrown itself. And so the fifth grade has several classes, including Ellen’s in trailers out behind the school. And the trailers have mold in them.

Sarah [00:06:42] Oh, no!

Beth [00:06:44] And we are told that it is at a safe level of mold right now. Do you think that at this moment of MAHA sentiment there’s a safe of mold that’s acceptable to people?

Sarah [00:06:53] I don’t love hearing safe level of mold personally.

Beth [00:06:59] So concerned citizens, we have a lot of those. And then we have a lot. And I guess this feels weird as applied to me, but I think this is how I came into my community as urban cosmopolitan, mobile professionals. You have to move here to work here and I will move again if the job takes me elsewhere. And to the urban cosmopolitan’s class, everything is about personal preference. Do I like it? Am I happy? Is it meeting my needs? And when it’s not, I will cut my ties and go elsewhere.

Sarah [00:07:34] I don’t love that. And I hated the sense of like as the urban cosmopolitan, there was a guy who sort of was functioning as a town father. And then if he just wanted to keep his job, he had to move and cut all these ties. And I’ve seen that a lot here where people have friends who are very, very close, tied in with our community. Our kids are hanging out all the time, but the husband’s job changes and they have to move and it’s so hard and I hate it for them. And I hate that people are put in that position because we’ve said the thing you should prioritize at all cost is your career. And these career paths that just require tons and tons of moving, I don’t know. It’s just such a bummer.

Beth [00:08:17] It’s also really challenging within that group. So that was me. I had no connection to Northern Kentucky whatsoever. I came here strictly to work in Cincinnati. Because I had not connection, I needed paid childcare for my kids and I wanted them to be in small settings. So I hired people who were offering care in their homes and the first two people who cared for Jane who were both phenomenal, we loved them, they were so important to us, moved with their husbands. And it was like the foundation of our lives crumbled until we figured that out. You know what I mean? So for the urban cosmopolitans, the precariousness of it, the potential that anybody leaves at any moment is hard. I have lived that. So that’s kind of our first grouping. Then we have these groups that are based as citizens more on other things than place. We have the civic-minded professional. I just wrote down for this one, Sarah, data and therapy.

Sarah [00:09:31] No, that’s right.

Beth [00:09:33] And then the professional activist, so community as a set of interests to be adjudicated. And the volunteer. And this is the one that I think our authors like the best, the volunteer. They talk about Mary Taylor in this section, somebody who really feels like she is involved in her community, not for economic interests, but because she feels connected to other people.

Sarah [00:10:01] A debt to society. Listen, I was like Mary Taylor and I, we the same. Like, all her language, I was, like, yes, I totally agree. Like, generosity of spirit is thus the ability to acknowledge an interconnectedness, one’s debt to society that binds one to others, whether one wants to accept it or not. I’m like, yeah, me and Mary Taylor, like yeah, I agree. And, look, even, I thought it was one of the most to the data and therapy, the part I really underlined under the civic-minded professional because I thought we are hitting the end of the road on this one. And they saw it coming the whole time, 1984. Is that even the right year? Whatever. The civic-minded professionals hope for a technical solution to political conflict assume that technical expertise, the ability to carry out comprehensive research from the economic, sociological, and political points of view, uncontestably qualifies one to be a leader. I was like, damn y’all, that is so true and also not true. It is true that we all made that assumption and it is also true that it is not true. And being an expert doesn’t make you a leader.

Beth [00:11:03] I was thinking about my experience doing leadership Northern Kentucky, the Chamber of Commerce program and how it really is a mix of town fathers and mothers, civic-minded professionals and a handful of the urban cosmopolitan. But it really is a lot of nonprofit leaders, lawyers and bankers, real estate agents, some get in, you know what I mean? But that’s the mix of people who show up there. And then I was trying to think about political organizing in my community and how it is much more the professional activist and the concerned citizen.

Sarah [00:11:40] Yeah, that’s so interesting. And look, we’re all probably-- it’s like the enneagram, we are all of these at some point in our lives. A lot of us are.

Beth [00:11:49] Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah [00:11:49] I thought this was such a smart kind of conception of-- because really what they’re scratching at, I think, and they’re getting more and more clear over the course of this section, is what do we want? What are we trying to find? By the end we’re really talking openly about public virtue. And that’s what they’re always scratching out with all these different roles.

Beth [00:12:14] Why?

Sarah [00:12:16] What’s the purpose? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this, Mary Taylor? Listen, I think Mary Taylor has the best answer, personally.

Beth [00:12:23] I think they did too. The author.

Sarah [00:12:24] I think they did, too. She said Mary Taylor’s remarkable strengths; her courage and vision and commitment show us a conception of citizenship that is still alive in America. But we did not meet many Mary Taylors, a virtue that goes against the grain of much of American culture right now, that we are connected, that we owe each other something. Yes, Mary Taylor.

Beth [00:12:45] There were two moments in this section that knocked my socks off. And we were coming up on the first one, which is when they talked about how, when you say, what do we want? They named what we don’t want. That we think we are unhappy when we are trapped in involuntary relationships, and that we want our social commitments to be purely voluntary, to be low key so we can dip in and out of them as we want to, and deeply meaningful.

Sarah [00:13:17] Yeah. You’re like, guys, but this is the consumerism lie. This is what they tell us. Everything you need to make you happy you can basically buy probably including people. But we just kind of think about it transactionally. Wait, is this in citizenship or was this in getting involved?

Beth [00:13:35] This is in getting involved. At the very end of that section, they just talk about we really want these experiences to be meaningful, but we also want them to be easy, untethered from us.

Sarah [00:13:48] Well, and that’s the part that I really can’t emphasize enough. When they talk about particularly like in urban environments. And I don’t think I could have articulated it to you when I lived in D.C. and why I was choosing to move back to Paducah, but they articulated it. I’m reading and I’m like that why. Which is the only thing that binds us is shared interests. That we work in the same places, we do the same things for fun, we’re around the same ages. And it’s not that I didn’t love my time in DC. It’s not the people who I socialized at that time and like I’m not still close to some of them or they’re not important to me. I just was reaching the end of the road on that. I needed people that I wanted or I kind of had to be around whether I shared everything with him or not, and that weren’t just like me. And then didn’t just like all the same movies and books and novels and music as I did. I wanted some--

Beth [00:14:52] You wanted to be trapped?

Sarah [00:14:53] Yeah, I wanted to be trapped. I don’t know how to put it except for I wanted some teeth. I wanted a little bite. I needed something to work against. Do you see what I’m saying? I feel like I needed something more than just we all really like the West Wing. I’m sorry, I know about some West Wing a lot, but you know what I mean? I needed more.

Beth [00:15:18] Well, look, this really hit some buttons for me because for my entire adult life, professionally and as a volunteer and as a citizen, the thing that grinds my gears more than anything else, is what I refer to as the swooping. The people who swoop into something wanting to be a hero because it’s gone off track, but then swoop out as soon as they lose interest. Or swoop in with a comment because you did something a way they didn’t like, but then sweep out when it’s time to do something. The people who say, “I am just here to help and support you,” and then are gone as soon the meeting’s over. I hate the swooping. And I think that when I was reading about this with respect to our commitments that we want to have social ties, but I feel like what they said is but we want to be able to swoop whenever we want. And I hate that. And it has been the source of so much unhappiness, so much failure, so many abandonments of projects or abandonment of efforts or communities. So, they got it for me here with that we need to be a little trapped if we want it to be deeply meaningful. It will not be with the swoop.

Sarah [00:16:35] I just think that they really moved on to something easier with the next section in citizenship, success and joy. Not shying away from the big topics over here at Habits of the Heart. I love these people so much.

Beth [00:16:47] And that we are so much more reliant on success because we only believe in joy when there is harmonious unanimity. I was like, guys. You nailed it.

Sarah [00:17:01] Stop it. They will preach, these people, they will preach. They will lay a gospel track on your heart. I’m not even playing. I love it so much. Yeah, this is where they really talk about that ever present risk. Leaving home for the professional middle class is not something one does once and for all. It is an ever present possibility. Thus the pressure to keep moving upward in a career often forces the middle class individual, however reluctantly, to break the bonds of commitment forged with a community.

Beth [00:17:28] And, look, it’s not wrong to live that way. And it also is not a life sentence, but it is hard to reach a point where you decide I’m ready to be done with that. I have reached the level I’m happy reaching and I’m going to stay here.

Sarah [00:17:48] Yeah. Oh, gosh. So this is where they do the politics of community.

Beth [00:17:56] Yes, interests and nation.

Sarah [00:17:59] Interests and nation. I thought that was a really helpful framework.

Beth [00:18:03] So politics of community is where you are making the moral consensus of the community through face-to-face discussion the way decisions are made. And politics of interests are about neutral, agreed-on rules that help us just adjudicate relative rights and responsibilities. And then the politics of nation are where national life transcends particular interests. And I was trying to think about, Sarah, what aspects I see of each of these. I think this is also like the Enneagram, like we have all of this going on at once. And it would be easy for me to say that politics of nation are like the driving force right now, but I do think the politics of interest has so much to say about what people are struggling with right now.

Sarah [00:18:54] I think it’s the conflict of all of these. I was so struck when they’re talking about politics of interest is where you really get coalitions, right? In sharp contrast to the image of the consensual community stands, the second understanding for which politics means the pursuit of different interests according to the greed upon neutral rules. This is the realm of coalition among groups with similar interests of conflicts between groups with opposing interests, and of mediators and brokers of interest, the professional politicians. I thought that was so interesting in this bargaining and influence and the predominance of political parties. This politics of community which de Tocqueville set up really as the New England township, like we all come together and we decide. And no one’s going to argue that we didn’t get to a point in Americans, just our pure size, where we weren’t going to make all these decisions at the community level. But the disempowerment that happened when so much got focused on this interest group, the politician, the give-and-take, the lobbying. And I think often people’s dissatisfaction with that expresses itself through conversations around the politics of the nation.

Beth [00:20:13] Yeah, that’s right.

Sarah [00:20:14] It expresses itself through this language of national purpose and cultural issues. I feel like injustice. I think that’s where we’re more comfortable talking that way, but really what we’re dissatisfied with is the politics of interest that has become so predominant.

Beth [00:20:33] Because it doesn’t have anything behind it except the interest, right? It is the politics of selfishness. It is just the sense of what is good for me regardless of the effect on the community and let’s figure out a way to put that in a calculator and decide who wins each time. And when you take their observation that we only believe in joy when we have unanimity, of course, we hate the politics and interests because there can be no unanimity. It is a zero sum kind of fight. I loved the sentence when they were talking about how we’re so individualistic but we hate conflict. There is something baffling and upsetting in the actual differences that divide us. Like we really want you to do you, everybody to be free to think whatever they want to except that we hate it when we don’t think the same thing.

Sarah [00:21:27] Yeah. Oh, it’s so hard. The politics of nation, which they’re really pointing to, is definitely during times of war, public rituals around patriotism and around that national identity. And I think for a long time, and I think it makes sense if you’re talking about a post-World War II era, which stretched for so long and had defined a lot of people and adults and adults in power’s lives, like that that could keep us going. You know what I mean? There was a lot. I just think we have just taken so many withdrawals from that bank that it is a deficit from that sort of like... Even you have the small moment after 9/11, but it was so small and it didn’t last and it wasn’t enough to keep us together. Although I do think it was like a last gasp. It gave it a little more juice for just a little bit longer. But I do think we’re missing some of this national politics that gives a sense of common purpose that it’s running on empty right now.

Beth [00:22:47] And I think that the authors are really unsure about how to get that in a society as diverse as ours. Like that to me is the thread that runs all the way through this. Maybe you can find that about your town, but even in your town it’s complicated. How are we going to scale something that is the animating force?

Sarah [00:23:10] They did write at the end of that section, understanding a complex modern society is indeed not easy, particularly when we cannot relate its problems to immediate lived experience. And I wrote underneath that, tell me about it.

Beth [00:23:21] Mm-hmm.

Sarah [00:23:23] Yeah, invisible complexity. I get it.

Beth [00:23:24] I liked the phrase invisible complexity and I liked how they tied all of these specialized professions that we’ve created to try to understand it and manage it to (sorry) Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of administrative despotism. I thought that that was an important and hard connection.

Sarah [00:23:52] Yeah, this invisible complexity. There’s so many parts where they’re saying something and I’m like, oh my God, this is our battle with expertise.

Beth [00:23:59] Yes.

Sarah [00:24:01] Exactly. Word for word. They just talk about life has gotten so big and so complex and there’s so many aspects that people don’t understand it. They even got in a little dig at social science, which these are people that are largely in the social sciences. But they say, whatever the achievement of social science largely after all, a realm of experts, the Americans with whom we talked had real difficulty piecing together a picture of the whole society and how they relate to it. We call this a problem of invisible complexity. And it’s like there’s one part where I think they even say the experts specialize and talk to other experts. They’re not talking to the public. They get specialized and they talk to other experts. And so this invisible complexity just gets more opaque and more opaque and people feel like resentment, but they can’t exactly name why.

Beth [00:24:49] Well, I thought this whole run quoting Democracy in America, where they talk about how when your society is dissected, explained, interpreted, managed through expertise, it doesn’t squash you, but it holds you back. There is something that feels fenced in by that as opposed to the freewheeling nature of America that we all kind of hold onto as part of our why.

Sarah [00:25:20] Is this where they first start talking about communities of memory? I thought that was so interesting.

Beth [00:25:25] I think so. I really liked that phrase too. I keep thinking about what does it mean to be a community of memory.

Sarah [00:25:32] It says vigorous citizenship depends on the existence of well-established groups and institutions, including everything from families to political parties on the one hand and new organizations, movements and coalitions responsive to particular situations on the other. The social movement has been of particular importance as a form of citizenship in the United States. And that’s what they kind of like talk about as far as they talk about the New Deal and they talk about the civil rights movement, and they’re trying to name these movements as an example of a community, a public virtue. Again, they’re like the why. Well, here seems to be at moments an ability to offer a why.

Beth [00:26:19] And then we move into their discussion of religion.

Sarah [00:26:23] Oh my God, it’s my favorite chapter.

Beth [00:26:25] A critique that listeners have had of this book, that I think they make more transparent in this section than in others, is that this book is principally concerned with middle-class to lower-upper-class people, probably mostly white people, and definitely, as you get into this section, mostly Christian people. And I feel like I start to understand better why, because they are really trying to get at the experience of American life that narrates all other experiences. That has constructed the dominant strain of how we talk about our politics and how we do our politics. And so this religious section, I was kind of like, oh, this is just about Christianity and what Christianity has to do with politics and our sense of why we’re here. And it was helpful to me to just at the very beginning be able to put that container around it.

Sarah [00:27:24] Yeah, they talk about the history and I think they’re so fair. They’re like, look, yeah, some of these guys were deists. And also they weren’t running from persecution. They were running to establish their religion as the state religion. All of these things are true at the same time. And all of those things are a thread of what has created religious life in America and particularly created the thread of Christian religious life and America. And I thought what was so fair minded about what they did in this chapter was instead of doing the social science, materialism, expert, whatever thread you want to call it, like agreed upon narrative of like, well, churches for dumb people. It’s morally bankrupt, it’s hypocritical, it’s created all this harm and pain and oppression and like almost like an eye roll at the consideration of church, which bugs me, obviously, as someone who goes to church. But it’s something I definitely adopted for a long time in my 20s. I would not cross the threshold of a church. I just thought it was such a corrupt toxic institution. But I thought that it’s not like they were trying to like whitewash it, they’re really trying to-- I mean that’s pun intended, figuratively and literally. But they go in and they’re like here are the strands. The church also doesn’t quite know what it wants to do. I thought the most interesting part is when they talk about like this progressive church and this conservative Christian church. And they’re both using this individualism and they are both using this form of sort of therapy speak and just very subtly different ways to sell a very particular form of the church. And they are arguing that there are other forms of the church. I thought the thing about the church as a church, the church as a sect, and the church as like spiritualism, was so interesting.

Beth [00:29:25] Yeah, I was really struck by the churches in this society where they have to market themselves more, where going to church is more of a choice than a expectation, that the church has to become more about Christ’s love than God’s demands. The church has to present itself as a haven from a harsh world instead of a body that challenges and shapes the world. And I wrote this down, in this respect, religion was a precursor of therapy in a utilitarian managerial society. And I just had to take a beat with all that. That was a lot to absorb.

Sarah [00:30:05] I had to take a beat with that. Because, look, I like this one part where it was like morality becomes personal, not social. Private, not public. And because I think they argue fairly that congregations on all sides of the political spectrum would not demand things, would not hold this church function. The church function is in the world. It is exerting influence on the world. And I do think that they’re writing this a little bit before you get like real conservative Christianity inside the Republican party. Because there were clearly some churches that were ready to stand up and take that and assert that control. But, to me, it’s like, well, yes, and then the morality became political. Like that’s where that got pushed to. Well, if the church won’t enter the conversation about what are we doing? What are we asking of people? And also let me just say in full disclosure, I’m reading this chapter after literally the day of or day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. So I’m thinking real deeply about what’s going on with Christianity and politics and why some people are drawn to people who say, I’ll ask something of you. I’ll say that there’s a right way to do it. And I will demand and that people follow my way.

Beth [00:31:30] Yeah, but I have to tell you that what landed for me when I was thinking about all those things together, it was very intense. I was thinking about how I do believe this model of church was inadequate to people, but the church is still in a marketplace competing for people’s time and attention and money. And so, if you want a church that’s more influential, I feel like a lot of churches answer has been, yeah, we’ll talk about God’s commands and we’ll say something, but we won’t ask it of you. We’ll just tell you how the world is falling short on this. We’ll tell you how everybody else is missing this. Your only responsibility is to come here and give your money and sometimes vote the way that we tell you to vote. But actually shaping the world, actually doing the work, actually influencing things, that is somebody else’s job. You just believe the right things and be loyal to us and you’re good. It is still not a call to responsibility.

Sarah [00:32:39] I don’t know. I think it depends. I saw a lot of people and still see a lot of people working their butts off for causes they believe in related to like conservative Christianity. When you said that though, I thought, they’re institutions that have to compete in a marketplace as institutions that were never designed to compete in a market place.

Beth [00:32:57] That’s right.

Sarah [00:32:58] Well, like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, these were things that you did because your parents did them and everyone around you did them. There wasn’t this like competition where you had to have the nicest fucking coffee shop or the best music. It’s not that there wasn’t ever a debate of ideas. Look, I’m like deep in the Cromwell series right now. Like, I get it. But it so interesting. This is not what this was ever designed to do. You got the words of Jesus being like you’re going to leave your mother and father thing, everything’s going to suck. Like, that’s not a marketing. Bad marketing, Jesus. We just hit that scripture in the liturgy where it’s like if you haven’t lost everything, you’re not doing it right.

Beth [00:33:45] Look, I often, semi-often think, am I called to ministry? Should I go to seminary? And almost every time I feel like something, voice of God, something, Holy Spirit says, we are not specific enough for you, Beth? It is not concrete enough. We will drive you crazy. The reason that I often want to dive into it deeper is because I’m dissatisfied with the ambiguity of it, with the mystery of it. So I attend a church in a denomination that is very much about individual discernment and meaning making. And so I was really blown away when we got to the statistic about how many people, even churchgoers, regular churchgoer think that we are to arrive at a personal belief system.

Sarah [00:34:37] But without the influence of church or synagogue.

Beth [00:34:40] Yeah.

Sarah [00:34:41] Ha! Americans, we’re so silly. I love us so much. We’re the funniest.

Beth [00:34:45] Which I understand because it gets so oppressive. Like the other way was so confining. We did feel too constrained. And sometimes it was abusive, like in the most concrete terms.

Sarah [00:35:06] Literally. Sometimes it was deadly. Forget abusive, sometimes it deadly.

Beth [00:35:09] So we’re correcting from something, but how do we-- I just don’t know what we want or what we expect. I don’t know what I want or what I expect from church. I think about this all the time. What is church to me? And what am I to church? I don’t know. It’s hard.

Sarah [00:35:22] I would like to ask you how you felt about these sections? I think this is when they’re kind of going through the history. Yeah. Religion and American history and they’re talking about the people who fled the Protestant Reformation and all this stuff. Then we’re to the townships and the privatization of religion. Sermons turned more to Christ’s love than to God’s command. They become less doctrinal and more emotional and sentimental. By the middle of the 19th century, the feminization of American religion that Anne Douglas had described was fully evident. Religion like the family was a place of love and acceptance in an otherwise harsh and competitive society. I was like, oh, they went there.

Beth [00:36:05] I wrote that down. Yeah.

Sarah [00:36:07] Did you write down they went there? Because that’s how I felt.

Beth [00:36:10] I thought the word feminization really stood out because this was written in 1984 before we were having this exhausting, pervasive conversation about the feminization of spaces. And I really wrestle, obviously, with what that means and what its upsides and its downsides are. I do primarily think of church as a haven from a harsh and competitive world. And when it becomes otherwise, I am mad at it. So I don’t know. It’s tough.

Sarah [00:36:53] I think it is so important. I think about Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, all the time and how hard it is when you have an articulated value. Because I also think all the time about that book I read that I can never remember exactly which one or where he said where he’s like, it’s not a value unless it’s universal. That’s what value means. And intuitively I get what he’s saying, but I don’t really think that’s true. Because I think in his book where he’s talking about there are a lot of values. And I just think because of the feminization of spaces, because of a lot things I can point to, it became like caring is the only thing that matters. Care is the only value that matters. We should care at school, we should care at church, we should care at hospitals, we should make people comfortable, there should be care, care, care. And I like reading his book and realizing like, oh, there are other values. It doesn’t mean someone’s an uncaring monster, they just don’t live in that super care-oriented mindset that a lot of people, and primarily women, exist within. And I think there was literal eons of time in human space where power and other values motivated. And it’s not that I don’t think there wasn’t room for a little bit of care, but I do think they’re naming something with church. I think it’s true in education. I think it’s true in a lot of places where it’s like care didn’t become the predominant value, it became the only value.

Beth [00:38:32] I think that’s a shallow conception of care though that we are living because there’s a difference between care and comfort. There is a form of care that courageously tells a hard truth. And there’s the form of that pushes and that insists on excellence, right? Mothering is not like let me just tell you how special you are all the time. That’s not what being a mom is. That’s a very small percentage of what being a mom is.

Sarah [00:39:01] But I think care became such a behemoth. Now you’re getting to language, which is hard. But that’s not the traditional conception of care. That’s the contextualization of like leadership and discipline and parenting and all these words that became like the opposite of care when like there is room for care, but everything is not caring. You know what I mean?

Beth [00:39:28] I think this threads together with the idea that joy only exists when things feel harmonious, and the idea that we are individualistic but conflict-averse. To me, it’s like we can’t find any depth in our care because we are so allergic to disagreement and to tension. And so our care becomes just are you comfortable? Are you good? Do you feel nice right now? Yeah. And I do think we’ve overdone that. I love to make people feel nice. It’s my favorite thing. But I recognize that that’s dramatically overdone everywhere and has cost a lot.

Sarah [00:40:17] Yeah. I just think that that’s like they’re asking hard questions. Like we have to push ourselves. That’s what I like about Mary Taylor. Mary Taylor’s not trying to make everybody feel better. Anything worth doing is got to be hard. It’s going to hurt a little bit. And I think that’s that they’re pushing on. It’s like this pursuit of individualization is not working. It wasn’t working in 1984. And again then the Internet came and along went whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

Beth [00:40:51] My church friend Maggie says about sermons that she likes to leave a sermon feeling a little bit bad about herself. Like that she wants to be pushed on at church and that church doesn’t push hard enough for her liking right now. And I really respect that. And I think I feel some of that too, that I want to be challenged. I don’t want to just be affirmed. Maybe that’s it. That we’ve really associated care with affirmation and that a lot of church feels kind of empty and is prone to that swooping in and out because people show up just in periods of life when they need that affirmation instead of hanging around for the rest.

Sarah [00:41:38] I think people want to be challenged. I think, honestly, that’s why I’ve all but abandoned contemporary fiction. That’s why I read classics because they will challenge you. They will push you. And they will present some hard things. And they will say hard things are inevitable and the chaos already is going to come for you. So what are you going to do when it does? And I think art that’s not just trying to not just tie it up with a bow, but just present this like the only thing I can call it is a mush of everybody is trying hard. Yeah, I know. I get it. But that is true. And also, some people are rising above in a way I want to learn from. Everything I do is not great. I want to be self-critical. I want to be self-aware. I want to learn from people who are self- critical and aware. I want to to learn from institutions that say-- the problem when I was growing up with the Baptist Church is not that it wasn’t pushed. There was lots of ways that it pushed me that I still am thankful for. It pushed me to understand forgiveness and grace and redemption and that sort of questioning of your ego and your id. So how do we find that without the second half, which I didn’t care for, which was, and you’ll never be good enough.

Beth [00:42:57] Right. It’s like you should feel really bad about yourself when you leave because you’re irredeemably flawed. You are born into a flaw. Again, we didn’t react to nothing. We got here for reasons. I think what the Habits of the Heart authors would say when you say everybody’s trying hard is, right, but for what?

Sarah [00:43:18] For what? Well, they got to the next one and I was like, okay, they did it. They took us to a place. For what? The National Society. It’s okay, we can do it. Public virtue.

Beth [00:43:43] What really leapt out at me in this section before they even lay out the six visions of the public good was the sentence, “Pursuit of the joys of involvement is always a precarious venture subject to derailment from frustration or burnout because of the fragility of voluntary expressive community.”

Sarah [00:44:04] Out there using the word burn out in 1984. I should really check and make sure that’s right year as I keep chanting it over and over again. It was 1985. That was close enough

Beth [00:44:18] At Alise’s recommendation, I just read this beautiful novel called Search about a unitarian church looking for a new pastor and the experience of one of the search committee members. And they talk in that book about how many church board chairs leave the church after their term ends. And it’s high. It’s a lot. And then I started doing some math in my own experiences of that and it tracks. And that sentence just really jumped out at me because I see that with community volunteers too. I see it with PTO people. People who jump in with both feet and say I’m going to get involved, jump out with both feet real soon after because of how hard it is and how lonely it is and how when everybody’s a volunteer, no one’s reliable and it sucks. And I just thought they have wrapped that up in a sentence.

Sarah [00:45:16] All right, let’s talk about the six versions. Visions of public good.

Beth [00:45:21] So we have three dueling pairs in the six version of the public good. The first dueling pair is establishment versus populism. Establishment as the philanthropists and the elites bargaining interests between the private sector and the public sector. And it’s the politics of personal influence that you reach a stature in society, whether you’re in the business sector or the public, where you are able to get things done. And they named Teddy Roosevelt as sort of the embodiment of this kind of vision. And the populist vision is mostly oppositional to that. And once expanded government power over economic life to try to democratize the country and often sells that democratizing idea using like religious mystical language. That there is something morally good just about more people having say and influence over the society.

Sarah [00:46:26] Yeah. When they do these historical reviews, these are my favorite for like lots of obvious reasons. And they talk about this noblesse oblige. So you have the Carnegie, the establishment of like, yeah, we’re really rich, but we’ll take care of you. Don’t worry. And I think Teddy Roosevelt’s a little complicated. He came from that, but he was also like super involved in progressive reforms, like really upsetting a lot of these establishment rules and stuff. But that is MA. They talk about Eugene Debs. So they’re talking about Carnegie. Then they say, Henry Lee Higgins, a leading member of Boston’s business establishment, wrote in 1911, “I do not believe that because a man owns property, it belongs to him to do with as he pleases. The property belongs to the community and he has charge of it and he can dispose of it if it’s well done and not with sole regards to himself or to his stockholders.” And then I wrote beside it, no billionaires. Still having that debate today, like, yes, you are rich and you’re, I guess, taking care of us. Although I think, again, we’ve reached the edge of that with something like the Sacklers. But under underlined populism the establishment vision was large-scale, national and international in scope, and populism was often suspicious of size. But both say politics like work is a matter of public trust and ultimately of personal relationships. So this tension that you can still see in so many populist threads and the critiques of these billionaires that have so much influence and so much power.

Beth [00:47:56] Yeah, and they deal with the progressives by saying progressives borrowed from both of these traditions and then they added into it rationality and science. So it was time for some reform.

Sarah [00:48:08] The growth of mastery, that’s my favorite. The growth of mastery.

Beth [00:48:13] Okay, our next dueling pair is neo-capitalism and welfare liberalism.

Sarah [00:48:20] Welfare liberalism, FDR. There, you’re all caught up. You don’t even need to hear anything, you get it.

Beth [00:48:24] Or you could think of this as Reagan and Carter. That neo-capitalism is the idea that if it makes money and employs people, it’s good enough. That’s all. That is a good into itself. And then welfare liberalism is the idea (and I thought this was really helpful language) that the market is in permanent need of intervention. I think that’s what Reagan really seized on. Like a lot of people have comfort with temporary intervention. But welfare liberalism is the idea that the market permanently needs intervention to ensure some level of fairness because the market is always going to be at its core exploitative and unfair.

Sarah [00:49:09] Well, and I thought now like everything I’ve read is starting to like meld together. Don’t they talk about, too, that the problem is it’s like it’s always about the market.

Beth [00:49:19] Yes.

Sarah [00:49:19] There’s no language about public life. There’s not language about what a good life looks like. It’s almost like that David Brooks editorial we’re talking about. It just becomes about government intervention in the market. Like that’s the government money. That’s really what welfare liberalism is about. Instead of drawing on like a bigger, definitely not the politics of nation and definitely not the politics of community. And all the rest of that drops away because when you put all your eggs in the basket of expertise and the wealth of mastery, well, what are you going to say about what it means to live a good life or what it means to be a good citizen?

Beth [00:49:55] Yeah, I was thinking about that as we go along. Like under what circumstances would you go to war under any of these rubrics? Because it doesn’t articulate that kind of thing. But they point out that neo-capitalism and welfare liberalism did share these objectives of material well-being for people, as much individual choice as possible, physical security to facilitate that individual choice and that material wellbeing. And then we get that sense that it’s all about the economy on steroids with our last dueling pair of the administered society versus economic democracy. And both of these are about material well-being guaranteed through expertise. That the administered society is about cross-sector partnerships to navigate change with a focus on economic stability, and economic democracy is about empowering citizens to bring their own expertise and to hire their own expertise as a counterweight to the state. But neither of these have any moral lens, nothing prophetic, nothing even very political. They call this high-tech politics of interest.

Sarah [00:51:07] The politics of competing experts sounds like a high-tech version of the politics of interests.

Beth [00:51:14] And I wrote down here, this is it. This is a discourse of means without ends. That’s the second moment that I just gasped and was like, that’s it. A discourse of means without ends.

Sarah [00:51:26] Yes. Because they talk about like our fathers, our founding fathers, and they were worried about an aspect of this, but they never really got to-- they just thought like the guys in charge will be good enough, they’ll protect us.

Beth [00:51:43] They couldn’t have told us in more words there is nothing to protect you from people who have no virtue. None of this works if people aren’t virtuous. They told us, like the Federalist Papers every which way, and we’re like but maybe it could. I don’t know.

Sarah [00:52:01] And the citizen has been swallowed up, an economic man, and a free Republican is the task of the citizen whether ruler or ruled to cultivate civic virtue in order to mitigate the tension and render it manageable. I don’t think it’s manageable right now.

Beth [00:52:18] Well, I do think it’s interesting how much the administered state sounds like the Trump administration to me. Because here we have a cross-sector partnership. Big tech and government. For the purpose of economic growth, I wouldn’t say an economic stability. They’re betting the farm because they want to win big for a small number of people. But to manage society with economic objectives, driving the whole bus, driving the foreign policy bus, driving the domestic policy bus. And much like the establishment versus populist, adopting mystical, even religious language to bring everybody along with that. That’s what the Trump administration feels like to me.

Sarah [00:53:03] But no articulation of public virtue.

Beth [00:53:05] No, they don’t give a shit about that. They don’t believe in public virtue.

Sarah [00:53:10] No. Beth, is it possible that we could become citizens again and together seek the common good in the post-industrial, postmodern age?

Beth [00:53:17] I really hope they tell us in the conclusion.

Sarah [00:53:19] I want to have conversations about civic virtue and public virtue. I want to articulate what that looks like. What are we trying to protect? Why are we doing all this? Are we just in this postmodern nihilistic spiral? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Beth [00:53:49] I definitely don’t think we have to be.

Sarah [00:53:52] Okay.

Beth [00:53:53] I don’t think we have to be. But I think the challenge that we have is that feeling of success and joy. Can we tolerate saying some hard things to each other and arguing about what civic virtue means? And what do we do about the fact that so many people might not even be happy with where they fall in those categories of citizenship, but don’t feel that they have any options. We have a chicken and egg problem, I think.

Sarah [00:54:30] Yeah. I think so much of it is that the politics of interest is not just driven by our culture of individuality, but is driven by weaknesses in the process that the founding fathers thought would be prevented just by virtuous leaders. I don’t know why they were all hanging out together. They knew some people were making choices.

Beth [00:54:55] Don’t you think that’s why they talked about it so much? They were like we have got to have some virtuous leaders around here.

Sarah [00:55:03] I mean, Benjamin Franklin he was a hoe. You understand what I’m saying? Like he was a hoe. We all know what Thomas Jefferson was doing. I’m assuming they did too.

Beth [00:55:14] We just read, Ellen and I, about Ben Franklin’s air baths, where he just liked to sit naked in his house because he found the water too cold in his bath. So he just spent about 30 minutes reading naked.

Sarah [00:55:24] Listen, when I call Benjamin Franklin a hoe, no, I greatly enjoy Benjamin Franklin. In fact, most of all, when he is writing about being such a hoe.

Beth [00:55:33] Yeah, I say this with no judgment whatsoever. He also, though, every morning wrote in his little plan for the day, like, what good shall I do today?

Sarah [00:55:42] I know. I love it.

Beth [00:55:43] And before he went to bed was like what good have I done today?

Sarah [00:55:45] Did I do it? Yeah. I don’t know how we get back. Well, we have one more section. I bet they’re going to solve it for us.

Beth [00:55:56] I hope so.

Sarah [00:55:56] Although, I’m worried that if they did, and they wrote it in 1985, maybe enough people just didn’t read it. I don’t know.

Beth [00:56:04] We’ll see.

Sarah [00:56:05] Super excited about this appendix, Social Sciences, Public Philosophy. Dun-dun. All right, Transforming American Culture. I’m sure they’re going to figure it out for us.

Beth [00:56:13] We’re going to get it. And we’ll all be here together to talk about it when we do.

Sarah [00:56:17] Okay, good. I’m looking forward to it.

Maggie Penton [00:56:22] Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. We’ll be back in your ears with the final episode of this series on Friday. If you enjoyed this series once again and would like to join our premium community to get access to our comments, community chat, and premium episodes, we do have that special discount available through December 31st. This is your last chance to take advantage of our best deal of the year. So we hope to see you on Substack. Just visit pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/subscribe, and you can choose your subscription there. We’ll be back Friday with the next episode in this series, and until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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