Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society · Jeremy Beer

Susan McWilliams Barndt & the practice of fraternity

·40 min·2 clips

Susan McWilliams-Bart says to ask, not just “what do you want to do,” but “with whom do you want to be?”

1. Givers, Doers, & Thinkers discusses Susan McWilliams-Bart and the concept of fraternity in American political life. 2. Jeremy Beer speaks with Susan McWilliams-Bart, a professor of politics at Pomona College and editor of The Idea of Fraternity in America. 3. The episode asks why fraternity is “shockingly under-emphasized” in the United States and what Wilson Carey McWilliams thought was missing. 4. McWilliams-Bart says her father chose the word fraternity because Americans talk about liberty, equality, rights, freedoms, and justice, but rarely fraternity. 5. She defines fraternity as relationships beyond biology and beyond mutual private benefit, including friendship and romantic attachment. 6. Beer presses her on whether fraternity differs from community or solidarity, and she says “community” is often used casually in advertising and online life. 7. McWilliams-Bart argues that even where Americans think they have community, they often miss the deeper connection her father meant. 8. She rejects a simple identification of fraternity with the French Revolution and says her father was not a fan of the revolution’s destructive effects. 9. She says the book also draws on ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian ideas of kinship that transcend biology. 10. McWilliams-Bart notes that Lakota and African-American usage of “brother” and “sister” shows non-biological kinship still appears in American life. 11. She says her father placed Black political thought at the center of American political life because it reveals what American politics lacks. 12. McWilliams-Bart reports his view that slavery and anti-Black racism express a deeper failure to treat human beings as brothers and sisters under the skin. 13. She places the book in the early 1960s Berkeley world, where he helped found Slate, an early New Left student group focused on governance and racial equality. 14. She says the communal energy of that period gave way to more individualistic and hedonistic habits, and Slate itself dissolved. 15. McWilliams-Bart says her father traced American unhappiness not to postwar life or recent technology, but to the constitutional framing of the United States. 16. She explains that he used “framers” rather than “founders” because he thought many Americans, including W.E.B. Du Bois, helped found the nation. 17. McWilliams-Bart says the framers built a system that favored the individual, natural right, freedom, and large-scale governance, but made stable relationships harder. 18. She highlights James Madison’s concern with faction and roads as evidence that the Constitution treated communities as obstacles as much as goods. 19. The interview stays conversational and reflective, with Beer asking broad historical questions and McWilliams-Bart answering in a calm, analytic style. 20. Listeners interested in American political thought, civil society, and fraternity will get the most from it; listeners seeking a fast policy debate may skip it.

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