merican democracy has come to be about entitlements and only about entitlements.  Everyone is entitled to just about everything.  In particular, American democracy has come to be entirely shorn of gratitude.  I hold a very simple thesis, namely that democracy shown of gratitude will flounder.  This is because few things nourish a sense of community—fellow feeling, if you wlll—like gratitude.  Now, it might be thought that being rightly entitled to something excludes having gratitude for that the thing one receives.  Not so, however, as the case of parental love magnificently shows.

If there are any indisputable truths in a world of uncertainty and relativism, it is that parents ought to love their children and that children are entitled to being the undisputed object of the love of their parents.  Yet, if anything else is also true, it is that every child who has been the undisputed object of the love of her or his parents should have a deep and abiding sense of gratitude towards them.  When parental love it at its best, there may not be any form of gratitude that can rightly surpass it.  Once more, though, I point out that children are surely entitled to the love of their parents. 

Democracy shorn of gratitude becomes a plethora of citizens who have little or no concern for one another accept for what they can get from others.  In this respect, the language of rights has done enormous damage to a sense of fellow-feeling.  For the language of rights have become synonymous with what people are owed, where the sense of being owed is privileged in a way that allows for no regard whatsoever for the goodwill with which people have served up what is owed. 

Democracy without gratitude exemplifies what I call the manna-from-heaven mentality.  No one gives up something so that others may have something.  Rather, it all just falls from heaven. 

A marvelous example of this is the claim on the part of some non-citizens that they have a right to become citizens of the United States, as if there is something called the government with endless resources.  Never mind that we are having trouble doing right by those who are already citizens. 

Sometimes the elderly present themselves as if they have a right to anything and everything that they might need in terms of medical assistance.  Of course, any society should make an effort to help its elderly.  That truth, however, does not change the fact that helping the elderly means that some resources cannot go elsewhere. Even for the elderly, there are no funds that descend from the heavens.

This way of looking at things point to why a democracy at its best must also be one in which gratitude abounds.  For it is necessarily the case that decent law-abiding citizens sustain the well-being of other members of society.  Even those who merely “put up” with the laws are sustaining the well-being of others.  And sometimes in life, a person deserves a lot of credit for doing just that: “putting up” with the behavior or law in question.

The goodwill of citizens makes for a salubrious moral climate in which to live.  And things have gone terribly wrong when we have become so fixated with our own self-interests that we cannot see the goodwill of others. 

Interestingly, teaching provides a marvelous example in this regard. Nothing is more obvious than that if a student earned an “A” for a course, then the instructor should give the student an “A” for the course.  Yet, there is all the difference in the world between an instructor took delight in the student’s learning and who was marvelously supportive and encouraging of the student, on the one hand, and an instructor who to no avail did everything permissible to see to it that the student would fail.  Gratitude is owed in the first case although the student earned the grade. 

A society shorn of gratitude is a less decent society.  More importantly, it is a society that is less able to surmount the difficulties that confront it.  This is because from the outset people do not see one another as allies but as hostile competitors instead. 

When we experience gratitude towards another we are motivated to act on that person’s behalf even we do not in any way have to do so.  There is a fundamental level with which we identify with that person.

The United States has become the land of rights-assertion.  We are owed one thing after another—almost as it were ours in the first place; and those who do not rush to give us what we take ourselves to be owed are bastards.  That is, in our characterization of that to which we have a right, we have deemed the other a hostile component. 

It is a simple truth that people who have masterfully cultivated hostility towards one another are in no position at all to confront in a united way the problems that could be resolved if only people would work together in unison.  And while some problems can be solved through fierce competition, some of the deepest problems have their solution only in the unity that comes with fellow-feeling.  Defeating the Nazis, for instance, was not tied to fierce competition, but to nations working in unison with one another. 

In one straightforward sense, gratitude is so much weaker than love.  Yet, like the warm sunlight that comes through a window, experiences of gratitude remain ever so memorable and always far more expansive.  It is not possible for everyone to have feelings of love for one another.  But universal gratitude, or something very close to that, is very much a possibility. 

The America of John F. Kennefy spoke to that possibility.  By contrast, the American of the present has lost the will to speak to that possibility.  Doing so would resonate with so very few.  It is no wonder that America is floundering.