McDonald’s was once again in the spotlight, this time at a speech held at the City of Ames Auditorium titled “Identity in the Era of Jihad vs. McWorld.”

To a crowd of nearly 100 people on Tuesday night, Benjamin Barber, the Walt Whitman Chair of Political Science at Rutgers University, spoke on examining issues of identity in the context of a democratic society.

Barber has written 10 books including his latest, “Jihad Versus McWorld,” a critical study of the corrosive effects of tribalism and markets on democracy.

He said the United States is held together by a common civic heritage despite the absence of a common culture.

“But over the last 100 years — particularly over the last decade or two — the underlying conditions on which the effectiveness of constitutional faith depended has been badly eroded. This has terrible consequences for a democracy,” Barber said.

Barber said one of the powerful rivals for citizenship is a renewed tribalism, what he called a “modern Jihad,” which balkanizes nation-states.

In the U.S. this takes the form of “anti-government militias possessed by nightmares of black UN helicopters on secret missions to undermine our sovereignty,” Barber said.

The other rival is global commercialism which is “pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, by information, by entertainment, by commerce,” Barber said.

These rivals reject the common will. “Neither the tribal warrior on the one hand nor the grasping consumer on the other recognizes the claims of civil society for a democratic citizenship,” he said.

Barber said voting with dollars is not the same as voting a common political will. “The problem is not with capitalism per se, it’s with the notion that capitalism alone can respond to every human need to provide solutions to all our problems,” Barber said.

He doesn’t think education, culture, social welfare and ecological survival can be handed over to the private sector.

“A modest devolution of power to state and municipal government is one thing but undiluted privatization is a recipe for the destruction of civic identity and constitutional faith,” he said.

Barber offered the example of the difference between a consumer and a citizen with respect to transportation.

“As a consumer I want a car going 130, but as a citizen I’d vote for a reasonable speed limit to conserve gas and secure safe streets,” he said.

Barber said people need to make space for lives as public citizens. People who turn their private interest into a public passion should be valued, he said.