When secular talk abandons the common good, only relig

Evidence

The irony in the United States is that while the ”humanists” avoid talking about the common good, fundamentalists and free-market advocates join hands, using the language of the collective good to advocate private schooling, private health care, private charity instead of welfare, individual punishment instead of social compassion. The point for a modern public is to develop a way of talking about the common good of diverse citizens that remains open to debate (Lerner 1991). But when public spirit evaporates from everyone else’s public discourse, the only ”moral” voice left in public is the voice that calls for citizens to abandon the public good. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1811

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the vacated-public-square argument in communication-as-culture work and the ‘moral voice’ gap the reader has tracked across other sources.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-challenging observation about why public moral language defaults to those who disallow debate.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1811