a random thought

Here is a quote from a philosopher named Richard Rorty that I pulled out of Stanley Hauerwas' book After Christendom? :

Accommodation and tolerance must stop short of a willingness to work within any vocabulary which one's interlocutor wishes to use, to take seriously any topic which he puts forward for discussion. To take this view is of a piece with dropping the idea that a single moral vocabulary and a single set of moral beliefs are appropriate for every human community everywhere, and to grant that historical developments may lead us to simply drop questions, and the vocabulary in which those questions are posed. Just as Jefferson refused to let the Christian Scriptures set the terms in which to discuss alternative political institutions, so we must either refuse to answer the question "what sort of human being are you hoping to produce?" or at least, must not let our answer to this question dictate our answer to the question "Is justice primary?" It is no more evident that democratic institution are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. . . . Even if the typical character-type of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may nevertheless be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom. (pp. 32-33) "Page 78 of Hauerwas"

Do Americans ever think about what kind of people our democracy produces? Or do we start to think that politics is only about the distribution of our taxes towards the municipalities? I believe that I follow Hauerwas in thinking that politics is about producing people, to be brief about it. I also think that George Will was saying this in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does.

What kind of people does our consumer/capitalist liberal democracy produce? Are we bland, calculating, petty and unheroic?

Even more pressing, are "citizens" of the United States, whose very nation is very young and yet obviously not Utopia nor anything near Utopia, whose beginnings could be called "the great experiment" able to again look into the future and gaze at what could be or are they stuck in the idea that it needs to produce as it has?