Even as the drive toward bigness [and] concentration has reached heights never dreamt of in the past, we have come suddenly to realize how heavy a price we have paid: in overcrowding and pollution of the atmosphere, and impersonality: in growth of organizations, particularly government, so large and powerful that individual effort and importance seem lost; and in loss of the values of nature and community and local diversity that found their nurture in the smaller towns and rural areas of America. And that price has been too high. Bigness, loss of community, organizations and society grown far past the human scale – these are the besetting sins of the twentieth century, which threaten to paralyze our very capacity to act, or our ability to preserve the traditions and values of our past in a time of swirling constant change.
To these central dangers… we can trace a hundred others [in] the signs all round us that all is not well in the republic: spreading violence, unconcern for others, too many seeking escape in noninvolvement or in drugs, debate become acerbic and bad tempered and overall a sense that no one is listening.
Therefore the time has come when we must actively fight bigness and overconcentration, and seek instead to bring the engines of government, of technology, of the economy, fully under the control of our citizens, to recapture and reinforce the values of a more human time and place…
It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to… the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility….. and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children’s future. It is the lesson that government can follow the leadership of private citizens: that men who are citizens in the full sense of the word need not belong to the government in order to benefit their community. And it is the lesson that if this country is to move ahead in the last third of this critical century, it will not be by making everything bigger, not by piling all our people further on top of one another in huge cities, not by reducing the citizen to the role of passive consumer and recipient of the official vision, the official product. (Worthington, Minnesota, September 7, 1966).
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The second demand of the new politics is here at home. It begins with the recognition that federal spending will not solve all our problems, and that money cannot buy dignity, self-respect or fellow feeling…
The third element of the new politics is to halt and reverse the growing accumulation of power and authority in the central government in Washington, and to return that power of decision to the American people in their own local communities. For the truth is that with all the good that has been accomplished over the past thirty years – by unemployment compensation, Medicare, and fair labor standards, by the programs for education, housing and community development – for all that, still the truth is that too often the programs have been close to failures.
If this is to change – and it must change –we must recognize that the answer is not just a federal program, another department or administration, another layer of bureaucracy in Washington. The real answer is the full involvement of the private enterprise system – in the creation of jobs, the building of housing, the provision of services, in training and education and health care.
There is nothing ‘liberal’ about the constant expansion of the federal government, stripping citizens of their public power – the right to share in the government of affairs – that was the founding purpose of this nation. There is nothing conservative about standing idle while millions of fellow citizens lose their lives and their hopes, while their frustration turns to fury that tears the fabric of society and freedom. What we do need – and what 1968 must bring, is a better liberalism and a better conservatism. We need a liberalism, in its wish to do good, that yet recognizes the limits to rhetoric and American power abroad that knows the answer to all problems is not spending money. We need a conservatism, in its wish to preserve the enduring values of the American society, that yet recognizes the urgent need to bring opportunity to all citizens, that is willing to take action to meet the needs of the future. (San Francisco, May 21, 1968).
RFK: Collected Speeches, (E.O Guthman and C.R Allen, eds.) (New York: Viking Press, 1993)