My personal vision is of a renewed America that cares—both about and for its people. This will require a shift. Right now, we are a nation that embraces and thrives on competition, from sports teams to small businesses to Silicon Valley. But in the competition paradigm, success is defined in terms of who wins, typically through a combination of talent, luck, and working harder and longer than anyone else. In this paradigm, if everyone is pursuing self-interest and striving to beat out competitors to get to the top, society as a whole will benefit.

I’m all for competition—in its place. But we have lost sight of the care paradigm, which is the necessary complement to competition. As Bill Gates put it, “the two great forces of human nature are self-interest and caring for others.”

The care paradigm starts from the premise that human beings cannot survive alone. Our progress as a species flows from our identity as social animals, connected to one another through ties of love, kinship, and clanship. Success is defined not as individual victory but as group progress, whether the group is family, clan, community, company, or any particular subdivision of society. In the care paradigm, the individual does not disappear; the progress of the group advances the individual as well. All members of the group also have the security of knowing that whether they are young or old, ill or weak, they will be cared for in their turn. Caring is part and parcel of building community.

An America that puts an equal emphasis on care and competition would be a very different place. We would invest in a national infrastructure of care in the same way that we invest in the infrastructure of capitalism. We would institute:

High-quality and affordable child care and elder care facilities

Higher wages and training for paid caregivers

Support structures to allow elders to live at home longer

Paid family and medical leave for women and men

Flexible work arrangements and career life cycles to give breadwinners who are also caregivers equal opportunity to advance over the course of their careers:

Financial and social support for single parents

Far greater social esteem for the “caring” professions

In short, we would build a social infrastructure that allows people to care for one another, in the same way we provide the basic physical infrastructure that allows them to compete.

All this talk of an America that cares is not pining for Neverland, but rather a call to recommit to a communal strand that runs through our history and our civic mythology. Frontier stories of barn-raisings and quilting bees are just as celebrated as Wild West shootouts between the sheriff and the outlaw. Nineteenth-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville focused less on America’s rugged individualism than on our remarkable social capital—the civic associations we created for every purpose imaginable, or what he called our “habits of the heart.”