The scene in America is not hard to imagine in visual terms: pretty much every organized interest, and many citizens, are grabbing at the common good as if it's a dead carcass. What makes this situation different than politics-as-usual is where it's progressed. Pretty soon the common good will be picked to the bone. If our political leaders were accountable the way business leaders are for keeping the books straight, they would all be in jail. The unfunded liabilities and ridiculous assumptions on investment returns render balance sheets of states like New York and California works of fiction. Most knowledgeable observers would not blanch at this conclusion: public accounting is a fraud.

The hardest problem is not coming up with a solution. Societies have clawed their way from far worse situations--for example, post-war recoveries. This month's Esquire contains a credible plan to balance the budget devised by retired Senators Bill Bradley, John Danforth, Gary Hart, and Bob Packwood.

The hard problem facing America is how to dislodge the politics of selfishness.

There's a new book out by Princeton philosopher Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code, in which he argues that immoral cultural habits change only when they become dishonorable. He uses the examples of dueling, the Atlantic slave trade, and binding the feet of Chinese women. He describes how reformers eventually convinced the public that those practices were dishonorable and should be ridiculed. At that point, even massive economic self-interest--such as that held by slave traders--could not block transition to what we would all consider more humane and moral social norms.

Perhaps what's needed to break the downward spiral of narrow selfishness in American politics--what Tocqueville might call "self-interest, wrongly understood"--is to embrace the language of honor and shame. Honor is powerful.

It is shameful that we lack the public discipline to live within our means, and will leave our children obligated to pay twice the taxes we do, for what we're spending today.

It is shameful that we've hijacked the language of rights, intended to preserve our common freedoms, in order to advance our own self-interest at the expense of everyone else in society.

When someone comes to the public table and demands their rights--public employees, corporate farmers, greedy litigators, you name it--we should no longer cower and dole out money we don't have. We should ask them which school programs, or health care benefits, or police protection, we should give up to pay for them.

I am under no illusion that our political system has the backbone to do this. Nor did the political establishment in any of the examples Appiah describes in The Honor Code. What's needed is a movement with leaders who aspire to moral authority, not political power. Everyone knows that our political system is leading us over a cliff. This is the challenge of the current pathetic state of things in America. The opportunity is to reclaim a vision of responsible leadership, and to find a vocabulary of honor and shame to discredit the current political game.