Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

On June 1st,President Barack Obama proclaimed June 2009 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month and called “upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.” If President Obama expected to be showered in lavender love in return for this proclamation, he was sorely disappointed. During June, grumbling about the Obama administration’s public stance on such issues as gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) reached a crescendo. Candidate Obama had expressed his determination to overturn the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy and DOMA; now-President Obama is taking a decidedly more muted tack—in the name of pragmatism. At a White House reception for invited gay and lesbian leaders on June 30th, with wife Michelle prominently at his side, the President implicitly acknowledged the slow pace of change (critics might say the no-pace of change) and counseled patience: “I know that many in this room don’t believe progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It’s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half-century ago. We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.”

The timing of the reception was historically resonant, coming just two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. “Stonewall” began on June 28, 1969, when patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, upset by constant police harassment, fought back and resisted arrest. Their resistance is commonly set down as the beginning of the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement in the US. As numerous historians of lesbian and gay history have argued, this way of narrating lesbian and gay history leaves out of view the important activist efforts—of groups like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis—that preceded the events at the Stonewall Inn. This is not a minor historical quibble: Stonewall as origin tale forgets that social change happens over time, sometimes over a long time. If this is what President Obama means when he counsels his gay and lesbian critics to be “patient,” then we are sympathetic to this long view of what it means to build and sustain a social movement. But it is not clear that this is what the President had in mind with his call for “patience.”

Instead, Obama was asking for time so that Congress could take the lead on gay issues like DADT and DOMA. Obama’s reticence to speak out for gay rights, let alone show leadership on them, is all the more glaring in light of his much-vaunted ability to redefine the terms of public debate on a number of other divisive issues. For example, his promotion of “abortion reduction” has been widely hailed for the way it eschews the polar oppositions “pro-choice” and “pro-life” to produce a new political center. This new political center has seemed to come at the cost of Obama’s retreat from his previous support—in the Senate and on the campaign trail—for the “Freedom of Choice Act.”  When it comes to sexual freedom, the center does not seem to hold much promise at all, neither for a broad array of reproductive rights nor for LGBT rights. What makes gender and sexuality, but especially homosexuality, such a stumbling block for this otherwise rhetorically and strategically nimble politician?  As Hendrik Hertzberg put the matter in a recent New Yorker column, “where gays are concerned [Obama's] fine-tuned ear for the emotional resonance of his actions has an alloy of tin.”

As we argue in a forthcoming article in Social Research, this strange hesitation is due less to some personal failing on Obama’s part than to the force of Christian secularism in US. How so?  Not only does it seem pragmatically difficult for the Obama administration to address an issue like gay marriage, which remains a rallying cry for religious conservatives even as it may be less so for many other Americans, Obama’s commitment to marriage as between “one man and one woman” is in line with both his stated personal religious commitment and his efforts to promote a new culture of responsibility—from corporate executives to unmarried fathers—as part of the answer to the country’s economic problems. This language of “responsibility” (variants of which he used fourteen times in his first address to Congress) is not itself directly religious. It is, however, deeply indebted to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, understanding of the individual’s role in society. This version of responsibility connects secularism to Christianity even for those who understand themselves to be fully secular, and it does so by using gender and sexuality as sites of “moral” suture between individuals and the state. Simultaneously, Christian secularism links some conservative religious constituencies to broader secular forces such as the economic neoliberalism of the last thirty years, the devastating effects of which Obama is so desperately trying to manage. The secular parts of this equation are crucial to recognize, because focusing on religion alone not only occludes the many religious people who are themselves gay or supporters of gay rights, it also perpetuates the idea that religion is “the” problem blocking gay rights and sexual freedom more generally.

This notion—that religion and sexuality are somehow in opposition—is one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights. Yet it has significant policy implications, particularly in recent moves to enact far-reaching “religious exemptions” as a condition of passing state laws permitting same-sex marriage. In New Hampshire, Governor John Lynch threatened to veto same-sex marriage unless state legislators also passed a bill framed as “protecting” religion and extending “religious liberty,” but that in practice exempts religious organizations and their employees from otherwise applicable state anti-discrimination laws. (Legal scholar Nan Hunter has predicted that the New Hampshire language could become a model for same-sex marriage laws nationally.)

In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional. Unfortunately, the impact of “religious exemptions” like those included in the New Hampshire law is to codify a narrow version of religious freedom in which religious liberty and sexual freedom can only be seen as mutually exclusive. This is not just a loss for sexual freedom; it also significantly narrows the parameters of religious freedom offered by the US Constitution.

If there is a “religion problem” posed by gay marriage, it is not that some religious organizations might be “forced” to provide secular benefits to same-sex couples, such as healthcare or equal access to residential housing; it is rather the entanglement of the state with the business of any couple’s religious marriage. The problem here is that the state legitimates religious marriages, performed by members of the clergy, rather than only civil unions performed by representatives of the state, thus entangling, rather than separating, state and religious practice. When such entanglements are maintained in law, religious practice is not “protected” from the state any more than citizens are “protected” from the imposition of religious convictions they do not share. New Hampshire and other states could actually “protect” both religious practice and those who are not religious (or who are differently religious) by providing civil unions on the basis of equality and letting religious bodies provide for religious marriages. No secular benefits would then flow from religious marriage, and the secular benefits that follow on civil unions would be separated from religious debates over homosexuality.

This is not a matter of fine-tuning the President’s ear on gay issues. Instead, we call on him to take up a broad-ranging version of religious freedom as a means of reframing the entire debate over gay rights. Yes, of course Obama should repeal DADT—and suspend it immediately by executive order as is in his power. Of course he should move to repeal DOMA. But is this really the legacy of generations of activism for sexual freedom: gays in the military and marriage equality?  Or might sexual freedom implicate broader questions of social justice that exceed the frame of “gay identity,” per se?

In a recent issue of the Nation, Lisa Duggan highlighted Equality Utah’s proposal for an Adult Joint Support Declaration, which would allow a legal framework for caretaking—medical decision-making, health insurance benefit designation, and inheritance—among adults who are not necessarily related by sexual or romantic partnerships. Such a proposal separates secular benefits not just from marriage but from sexuality as well, further removing the current entanglement between state benefits and religious debate over sexual practice. As Duggan points out, such a measure could spark unexpected political alliances as well as expand the support for caretaking in our society well beyond the question of marriage or domestic partnership, getting, in her words, “the AARP on board to lobby for medical next of kin, tax and inheritance rights for ‘Golden Girls’ households, or attract libertarians who want to take the state out of the business of ‘recognizing’ sexual or romantic relationships entirely.”

This shift in framework—from gay rights to the basic ground of freedom and equality—would do much not only for gay people and for the Obama administration’s standing with the oft-invoked “gay community;” it could significantly alter how controversial issues are approached in American public life. We might move beyond the identity politics of rights-based movements, even as we preserve the ability to act on identity- and rights-based claims. Who knows, but we might even create the basis for one of the most promising possibilities invoked by the early Obama campaign: not just change we can believe in on given political issues, but the possibility of creating a “new majority” that goes beyond individual issues to larger questions and practices of liberty and justice for all. Achieving this new majority cannot happen if we trade off some people’s sexual freedom for some other people’s religious freedom (or vice versa).

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

“There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”

–Mark Twain, commenting upon the U.S.-Philippine War, 1901

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr., commenting upon the U.S.-Vietnam War, 1967

As Barack Obama stood on the stage at Grant Park in Chicago on election night, my euphoria yielded to a strange unease in the pit of my stomach and all good feeling drained away. I soon realized what caused this sensation as I consciously registered the reflected image in the bulletproof glass that imperceptibly framed Obama’s face. Even as his mouth formed words that announced a new founding and the vindication of old foundations, the ghostly image conjured a recurrent, traumatic history of unfulfilled promises, unredeemed struggles and unaccounted losses, the many thousands gone.

Perhaps any victor that night would have been so protected. Nevertheless, that black existence and aspirations toward inclusion and equality in the U.S. readily associate with a history of legal and extra-legal violence deployed to produce and preserve racial distance and disparity is hardly surprising. However unseemly, the strongest prospective parallels between Obama and King drawn during the Democratic primary and Presidential campaign implicated the threat of premature death. In turn, Obama’s ostensible fulfillment of King’s dream arguably has less to do with substantive political connections between the two men than with the racial form and symbolism of one life and its associated promise repairing the violently truncated closure of another before its time.

Racism and violence, their past and their presence: the 2008 election season at times appeared to turn on exorcising the ghosts and demons of a still unfinished civil war. George Wallace and Martin Luther King, Jr., Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were figures of the past made present by another massive military intervention built on distortion and lies, a storm that laid bare the immorality and catastrophe of a post-civil rights era of (not so) benign neglect, and a politician of hope and change who promised reconciliation and redemption from crimes too large to be named.

Exorcism and reparation: but at what price? As unmistakable as these subtexts are, in my view, Obama’s winning strategy was to accentuate the value of his campaign’s egalitarian racial appeal through disciplined and calculated non-reference. Invisible protective glass in this sense may be a suitable metaphor for the reigning orthodoxy of color-blindness cum post-racialism, whose architecture in politics and law becomes more durable and less assailable with every U.S. Supreme Court decision: a state sanctioned enclosure increasingly hard to perceive or identify between those who are protected from racially differentiated vulnerability and those who continue to bear its marks and suffer its consequences.

Obama’s call to “choose our better history” might be read productively in this light. First, it is worth recognizing how it constitutes a rejoinder to a preferred formulation of John McCain: “We face no enemy, no matter how cruel; and no challenge, no matter how daunting, greater than the courage, patriotism and determination of Americans. We are the makers of history, not its victims.” Although McCain eschewed the direct (even murderous) racist appeals of some of his supporters, he nonetheless tapped the exclusivist, supremacist kernel of the American political tradition—the racial nationalism often invisibly braided with purportedly civic appeals to true Americanism. History for McCain is a domain of friends and enemies. Make history, (my friends), he seems to say, or become its victims. How to know the difference? Real Americans understand that making history sometimes requires turning another people into victims.

The idea of our better history, by contrast, expressly adopts what Frederick Douglass called “the standpoint of the victims of American history.” This standpoint, however, is no endpoint, for it is through the struggles of the trammeled and dispossessed—slaves, women, workers, the segregated, all disfranchised and stigmatized—that “our better history” presumably has been realized. In other words, even as Obama evokes timeless values and solid foundations, his conception of history remains explicitly revisionist and revisionary in this sense. Thus, while it is accurate to say that he resists the prophetic and agonistic tones of black radicalism, he appears to have internalized one of its central claims: without struggle there is no progress.

In his “More Perfect Union” speech, and his arguably riskier 2004 preface to Dreams from my Father, Obama approvingly quotes Faulkner: “the past isn’t past; it isn’t even dead and buried.” Clear and certain lines of tribe and geography, time and syntax no longer separate victims and makers of history. Indeed, one might say victims become (and are continuously becoming) makers, through assertions of will and acts of remembrance and communication that transform old divisions and augur reconciliation, even as they may threaten new victimizations. The conflict between “worlds of plenty and worlds of want,” he writes arrestingly, “twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of the children on the South Side of Chicago.” Failing to grasp this dialectic, the powerful needlessly intensify a destructive spiral with their “dull complacency,” their “unthinking applications of force,” their “longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware.”

Bolstered by these thoughts, my exuberance was fully restored by the time of Obama’s Inauguration. Just a day had passed when I awoke to a New York Times headline announcing the new President’s first order for air strikes by unmanned predator drones in North and South Waziristan. The queasy disquiet from election night returned. Why had these disparate events produced the same uncanny sensation? It occurs to me that what links the episodes is how they encapsulate a constitutive paradox of Obama’s ascent. For as much as an Obama presidency reflects the undeniable culmination of the long, black-led struggle for genuine democracy in America, it is also captive to the violently truncated inheritance of this struggle that continues to constellate the present.

At its most profound and far-reaching, the black freedom movement proposed a general social transformation of the United States, one rooted in opposition to what King in his final hour called America’s interrelated flaws: “racism, materialism and militarism.” The conventionally bifurcated history of the movement we now inherit—with one part annexed to the teleology of liberal-democracy and its clichés of progress, and the other told as a tale of inner city decline and sectarian racialism—fails utterly to reckon with this aborted challenge and vision. A post-civil rights legacy that conscripts racial progress to state legitimacy and assigns social decay and pathology to increasingly isolated individuals and vulnerable communities once again renders imperceptible the technical and ethical infrastructure upon which U.S. imperial citizenship has long depended: the production and maintenance of substantive value-differentiations among human populations through the development and deployment of an institutional capacity and public willingness to kill and quarantine (and let die) from a distance.

Scorched by the images of Katrina, you may recall that the Bush administration dispatched Condoleezza Rice to the Gulf Coast where she proceeded to argue that the damage on view was little more than a “vestige of the Old South” and that the civil rights movement had helped the U.S. to finally “find its voice” as a champion of democracy overseas. These were odd and unconvincing statements, particularly in a context in which it was possible to mistake New Orleans and its people with ruined places and peoples occupied by U.S. military forces from Baghdad to Kabul. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that much of Obama’s reparative and restorative quality circles back to Rice’s claim. For even as visible and indisputable signs of racial division and neglect can now be used to discredit the governors, the promise of “transcending race” and its’ associated ills is a powerful legitimating tool of U.S. state purpose at home and abroad.

It seems undeniable to me that a fundamental aspect of Obama’s appeal was a promise to bridge the domestic and foreign discord of populations divided by race and war. His consistent hawkishness on Afghanistan in this context could be viewed as political cover for what is a more deeply held anti-war position. Obama would not only close Guantanamo and end the policy regimes of torture, rendition and rightlessness, he would also re-think, reduce the scope, if not end altogether, the “war on terror.”  Indeed, among the slew of correct moral and ethical positions that now give way to “realism,” the candidate Obama condemned the air war in Afghanistan as both immoral and politically self-defeating for the routine and entirely predictable “collateral damage” it yielded. His rapid and symbolically significant retreat from this position was just the first among a series of policy decisions that now ineluctably link the Obama and Bush administrations within the domain of “national security.”

Just who is entitled to freedom and security: or more precisely, to the freedom of an unlimited security and the security of an unlimited freedom? Apparently not the “tribal” peoples of the Pakistani frontier, among whom the shadowy operatives of Al-Qaeda have taken refuge.  Lahore’s News cites official figures of 687 civilians and 14 Al Qaeda leaders killed in some 60 U.S. drone strikes since January 2009, an approximately 50 to 1 ratio. As Sven Lindqvist shows in his magisterial work, The History of Bombing, the ever-increasing technological mastery and dread terror of air war was a fundamental prerequisite of modern, colonial power. Its simultaneously protective and destructive capacity enabled a double spatial and ethical displacement according to which liberal-democratic society separated the boundless violence it enacted from the boundless freedom it arrogated for itself. As much as Obama and McCain (or Bush) might be convenient foils for all those characteristic efforts to distinguish good from bad U.S. nationalism (that is, the civic from the racial, the horizontal from the vertical, the patriotic from the jingoistic, the democratic from the statist), one feature appears constant: to make (American) history, one still needs the will to declare enemies and the stomach to make victims.

My point is definitively not that there are not contradictory strands within U.S. political culture; there clearly are. The problem is that powerful, centralizing state institutions have been largely structured by a “bi-partisan” agreement over the boundaries and terms of their contention, especially in the domains of national security and so-called foreign policy. But we must ask: in what ethical universe can the eminently foreseeable destruction of civilian non-combatants, who must be bombed in order to be saved, be justified? Is this in fact “realism,” or a philosophical standpoint according to which some human lives are simply less valuable, and therefore expendable? I have no doubt that Barack Hussein Obama of Honolulu, Jakarta, Nairobi and Chicago’s South Side would categorically reject such a standpoint. At the same time, President Obama of the United States has become “part of the mechanism that recommends it.”

Being part of “the mechanism that recommends it” is how the recently deceased Robert McNamara described his own dire contribution to the history of U.S. air war, and at the same time belatedly acknowledged a deeply criminal complicity. Yet, somehow, the liberal belief that its forms of killing are not murder, and that force can be applied with thoughtful, prophylactic discretion, refuses to die. Afghanistan (like Vietnam) has always been the liberal’s (preferred) war. Unless it is rethought, I am afraid that an Obama presidency and the hopeful alternatives it recommends to the disastrous rightward drift of U.S. social, economic and foreign policy of the past thirty years, will come to very little, but rather, as King put it, once again “add cynicism to the process of death.” To prevent such an eventuality, a more insurgent and less teleological conception of our better history is required: the moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but power concedes nothing without a demand.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Slowly, some humanists are recovering from a professionally sanctioned amnesia about the original mission and scope of our field.  The current enterprise of the humanities began as the core curriculum of the first modern university, established by the Humboldt brothers in Berlin in 1810, to prepare republican citizens. For the first time in European history, future professionals would have to interpret the dangerously unstable and exciting world that followed from the French Revolution. They studied history, languages, and philosophy as disciplines that acknowledge cultural differences and that suggest the power of art to achieve freedom through imagination and through disinterested pleasure. Today, humanists continue to interpret arts and culture in classrooms, scholarly publications, and in institutions devoted to conserving and promoting creative practices.  But the founding mission of civic education is shrouded under the assumption that art is inconsistent with practical concerns. Universities and art schools teach us to worry whenever instrumentality is mentioned, for fear that questions of usefulness will vitiate the free and disinterested quality of aesthetic experience.

For a while, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted that pall of concern about the concrete effects of art, through his massive WPA program of national recovery that built roads, schools, and also supported artists from a range of modalities and ideological persuasions. Too little is known about their work in light of the recovery, as if their art was discounted for collaborating with government programs.  But now is the time for a revision of artistic contributions to democratic and economic development, for factoring in the constructive work that creative arts do in reframing paradigms and in breaking bad habits. Formalist art theory, in opposition to instrumentalism, underlines the defamiliarizing quality of good prose, poems, and paintings. For formalists, art doesn’t promote programs; instead it interrupts expectations. In doing so, art revives the perception of people and things we had learned to overlook.  It rekindles a love for the world. Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.”

In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education. We humanists can join artists as cultural agents who promote creativity and interpretation as resources for social development. The objective is not a partisan victory but the formation of “thick” civic subjects who are alive to the world and exercise the free judgment that we learn, as Kant taught us, through developing a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Democracy depends on sturdy and resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, non-authoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression.

Aesthetic education, Friedrich Schiller explained to the Humboldt brothers who turned the advice into an academic institution, is a necessary part of civic development. Schiller’s program for modern citizenship is The Aesthetic Education of Man (1759). He wrote the Letters to open dead-ends in politics through art that wrests freedom from contradiction.  Sentimental, tormented art like Schiller’s, unlike Goethe’s naïve genius, can be taught; it thrives in the very distance from nature where poets have freedom to maneuver. Freedom’s dependence on self-consciousness, and the promise of a new spontaneity based on reflection, became the themes of Schiller’s pedagogy. It turned Kant’s lessons about the differences between beauty and the sublime, love and respect, nature and artistic genius, into a progression of before and after aesthetic education. Yet the sometimes delayed social effects of an aesthetic education can rush skeptics to conclude that one thing has little to do with another. But hasty conclusions misprise the gradual process of subject formation.

While defensive humanists worry about subjecting art to practical uses, I used to worry about the ethical dimension of the work we do. Sometimes I’d get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher’s chain of thought that thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questioning why these mattered. The times that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder out loud why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that genre, or motif, or formal property of literature. They did not doubt that preparing for a teaching career in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege.  But what good does it do in the world? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother’s attention to her children?  Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when they sense that the same barbs that bother us will prick their own conscience if they are lucky enough to land a job?

Yes, we can, I’m relieved to say, now that President Obama has refreshed the memory of FDR’s creative years along with hopes for increased attention to arts education. Among the inspirations have been Schiller, Hannah Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s aesthetics, Antonio Gramsci, Antanas Mockus, Augusto Boal, and countless other cultural agents. Teaching about art and training a disposition to engage and admire creativity can make their contributions visible in ways that turn lessons into opportunities (read: obligations) to work constructively in the world. I’ll say why, very briefly.

At the beginning of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt jokes that of course he never wrote in that genre.  He didn’t have to, because he wrote indirectly, on aesthetics, as the most certain way to get to politics. For one thing, with the French Revolution as a backdrop for his 1790 Critique of Judgment, indirection was prudent for a cautious man.  But caution and care also encouraged Kant to build a theory of the public sphere from the buy-in of individual citizens.  This was not an appeal to the “general will” that Arendt recoils from in the French and in the Bolshevik revolutions, but a foundation in particular subjectivity that could be trained toward agreement with other subjects through exercising the faculty of judgment. Judgment is an innate faculty, like reason and imagination, but one that went almost undetected or flaccid from under-use during long centuries of pre-modern authoritarianism. Subjects of a king, devotees of a church, serfs, slaves, and students of classical curricula don’t need to exercise judgment because they don’t make choices.  But the intellectual freedom that the Enlightenment defends makes choice possible and therefore an obligation. For the first time in Western history, Arendt says, common people need to develop their faculty of judgment.  And the training program is none other than aesthetic education. Because they are free from interest, subjective observations regarding beauty and the sublime depend on a faculty that has nothing to do with reason, or morality, or any pre-established concept of right or wrong, good or bad. An aesthetic judgment is a second order response to pleasure or displeasure: after we register the immediate feeling, we judge if the feeling is free of interest; in that case we imagine that others might share the same pleasure because it does not depend on concerns that may affect us differentially.  Through aesthetic judgment, subjectivity makes a bridge to other subjects and promotes a shared sense of freely acknowledged value. This “common sense,” Kant’s clever resignification of everyday wisdom in every man, is enabled through aesthetics and becomes the foundation for a public sphere.

Kant kept free of too much involvement; he preferred to observe, not to engage with the world. His student Friedrich Schiller would insist that aesthetics demands hands-on achievement of form, not only the judgment of existing objects. The modern subject is an agent in creating a cultural and political environment, so that arts education was practically a redundant and urgent project for Schiller. In ways that I only intuit and hope to develop soon, Schiller is an inspiration for Antonio Gramsci, a fellow traveler of the cultural agents I most admire.

Take Antanas Mockus, for example. In 1995, the newly elected mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, proposed a bold program of “Cultural Agency.” Simply stated, he put culture to work in a city so violent and corrupt for over a decade that it was the one place in the Americas banned to tourists by airport advisories. What could be done in a place so troubled that investments of money and force would have magnified, not mitigated, the disaster?  If civic spirit had worn so thin it would not sustain a body politic that could take fiscal cures or demand security, the first prescription was to revive the spirit through art, antics, and accountability. First a philosopher and then a public servant, Mayor Mockus made theory yield practices that would themselves yield more reflection. He sidestepped conventional sites of struggle that stayed stuck between fear and opportunism. Like Gramsci, Mockus refused to wait for better conditions and instead promoted a “passive revolution” through the power of culture. Gramsci’s response to unbeatable odds makes him something of a patron saint for cultural agency. Using culture as the wedge to open up necessary civil conditions for decent politics and economic growth, workers would get beyond economistic deadlocks and move toward the goal of emancipation.

For Mockus, civility was goal enough, and getting there became an experiment that mixed fun with function (imagine combining Schiller’s playful education for self-made subjects with Kant’s appeal to inter-subjective judgment inspired by aesthetics).  For example, the municipality’s inspired staff hired pantomime artists to make spectacles of good and bad performances at traffic lights. Suddenly, skeptical subjects became an interactive public of spectators.  The mayor’s team printed thousands of laminated cards with a green thumb-up on one side and red thumb-down on the other, for drivers to flash in judgment of their fellows.  Vaccination against violence was one city-wide performance-therapy against the “epidemic” that had become a cliché for aggression. Arts programs in schools, rock concerts in parks, a monthly “ciclovía” that closed streets to traffic and opened them to bikers and walkers have, among other civic games and alongside rigorous educational programs, helped to revive the metropolis.

Citizens soon paid their taxes, often above what they owed in order to support a particular library, or park, or senior program. Between 1993 and 2003, the end of Mockus’s second term, one stunning indicator of change is the rate of homicide, reduced by sixty-five percent. Today, Bogotá feels the strain of migrants who flee zones of conflict for this newfound haven. As they overload the city’s systems, planners suggest that migration might slow down if cultural agency stepped up in still troubled areas of the country.

Throughout the Americas, culture is a vehicle for agency.  Photographers are teaching visual literacy and whetting young appetites for other arts and sciences. In theater, improvisations foster collaboration and find dramatic outlets for frustration while rehearsing roles that rise to daunting challenges.  Without the “Teatro campesino,” César Chávez could not have organized the United Farm Workers’ Union. Perhaps the most far-reaching case is Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.” The multiplier effect of his lessons in listening to disadvantaged social actors and encouraging them to take the stage resulted, for example, in his two-term election to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro.  There, he promoted legislation suggested by audiences and actors in marginal neighborhoods; thirteen laws passed, and several were adopted at the national level. Alongside these artist-activists are many others. Musicians, dancers, poets, painters, of the past and at present, do not yet figure as subjects of many academic studies, but they might inspire the kind of creative reflection that amounts to a civic contribution.

In Bogotá, no one asks what “cultural agency” means.  The concept resonates with a variety of public practices that link creativity with social contributions. But elsewhere the term can beg definition. Maybe this shows a lack of activity, but I suspect that activity is almost everywhere. What we lack instead is perspective on the family resemblances among a variety of repertoires and remixes. Recognizing these resemblances, promoting replication of artful interventions can be on our professional agendas as humanists through at least two standard professional approaches to the arts: we highlight particular creative practices, and we give those practices a theoretical spin.

The first value added by humanists follows from simply noting and commenting on examples of arts that build society. Drawing attention to undervalued creative practices offers them as models to inspire variations and choices for research projects.  Research begins by locating or formulating a topic; we choose which text, phenomenon, or practice, which perspective or approach, merits extended consideration in a scholarly essay. Allow me to mention my own choice as a literary critic. Instead of focusing on popular cultural studies topics such as violence, necrophilia, consumerism, or abuse of human rights, I chose to focus a book and course on “Bilingual Aesthetics” to reframe bilingualism, from the barely tolerated transitional condition of minorities and immigrants, to an intellectual and emotional advance over monolingualism.

Cultural agency is an invitation to notice “felicitous” engagements as well as frustrating performances. And since the approach privileges the surprise of ingenious responses to difficult challenges, it can sustain the attention of humanists trained to value art for producing uncommon effects.  Alongside the end-game of critique, humanist agents can play the gambit of reflecting on an inexhaustible range of creative moves and on their immediate or delayed effects. In the end, results will be important, as talented administrators like Mockus maintain. He developed innovative, often indirect, measures for changing attitudes of youth and mature citizens, before and after experimenting with particular cultural programs. Among his fans, artists and teachers may be cured of an allergy to numbers.

I, for one, was also cured of sleepless worries about what art has to do with ethics and social development.  With FDR as an exemplary leader and model for new civic investments in the arts, I know that new investments along with more attention to interpretation will channel the power of arts from mere contestation to engagement.  Alongside that engagement young humanists can pursue a passion for literature, hopeful that their faculty of free judgment and their creative engagement with their own students will amount to the bricks and the mortar to rebuild a strong civil society.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Obama calls upon Americans to “give our all to a difficult task” and “carry forth a precious gift” of increasingly inclusive liberty, equality, and happiness.  We are empowered to do so by meeting new challenges with reaffirmations of old truths that “have been the quiet force of progress”: “honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.”  In perfect harmony, God and American democracy call us to continue a long and difficult tradition imagined as a journey “up the path” of progress.

This song is old. But is it true?  What are the implications of framing the virtues for progress as a “quiet force”?  What is gained and lost by imagining progress singularly as upward movement?  When God and America sing in perfect harmony, how is our hearing enabled and disabled? How might such rhetoric shape the precious gift and our capacity to carry it?  These are difficult questions—especially when all these motifs converge toward a “unity of purpose over conflict and discord” that may not invite the asking. Fortunately, Obama’s own paths provide contrapuntal motifs that enable us to inquire further.

In Obama’s presidential election victory speech, the virtues were more a noisy force than a quiet one.  106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, daughter of slaves, had heard them: “At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot….She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham.” And she probably heard Obama reference the noisy and discordant virtues so vital to “our better history” in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention when he conjured up Martin Luther King, Jr.: “‘We cannot walk alone,’ the preacher cried. ‘And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.’”  In Obama’s earlier speeches, the vital quiet virtues were given voice, yet they occurred in the mix of feisty ones as well, and the louder more turbulent enactments of the virtues he names were expressed in the examples he employed.  The courageous hard workers in New Orleans and on 9/11 co-exist with those exercising similar virtues in struggles against congenital defects of the practices and the promises of American democracy.

These noisier agonistic virtues were entwined with a different image of democracy’s journey and how we must carry it forth.  In an Inaugural Address that affirms old truths as the “quiet force of progress,” tradition appears as an upward path.  It is a long and difficult ladder to climb for both individuals and the nation, but its course is that of an advance set by the founding and enduring spirit of our better history.  The central responsibility is not to be led off course by the new challenges.  However, in the context of political contestation and a preacher’s cry in the acceptance speech, the promise of the American spirit is evoked in a more complex manner: the steady witness and advance of old truths is powerfully juxtaposed with a force for turning. Here the origin is both employed and subject to fundamental critique that transforms old truths in ways which involve yet exceed “inclusion.”  Thus “the American promise makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.”

When MLK, Jr. cries we cannot turn back, he calls us beyond the cowardice that would not advance, and the cowardice that would interpret advance only in terms of extending the long-seen truths.  Do not turn back from the turning point: march forth around the scary bend (beyond white supremacy, narrow capitalism, and imperialism) toward a polity that is better but cannot yet be seen, because it does not yet exist.  The tradition of democratic freedom and equality is a turning, because the movement beyond patterns of subjugation simultaneously involves enactments of new modes of tending to each other, new values, practices, and promises.  When Obama’s election speech echoes King’s cry that the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice, he proclaims a faith that there is enough in our inheritance to spur and enable a responsive and creative people to negotiate the next turn.  At the same time, insofar as this arc is long, the present trajectory of the old truths must be profoundly distant from true democracy or the beloved community.  Hence, tending well to tradition must also involve repeated enactments of what those who are rigidly attached to old truths will view as heresy.

Nothing about this is easy. Yet it is precisely in the tensions of this intersection—between quiet and loud, conciliation and contestation, conservative and radical—that we might best fashion judgments conducive to turnings that bear the gifts of the democratic promise.

In recognition that the gravitas of this responsibility requires all to bear it, Obama’s acceptance speech emphasized—as did his campaign—that “it’s about you.” “Change happens…because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.”  As in his election speech, he repeatedly narrated his march to victory as “your victory”: a victory that came from grassroots organizing which compelled him, in turn, to call people to “join in the work of remaking this nation the only way its been done in America…block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”   Animating his call, “yes we can,” was a sense of a “we” whose maturity resides precisely in the tensional double-responsibility of citizenship: joining across negotiated differences to do the public work of building the commonwealth, and rising up to contest and transform dominant strands of our inheritance that perpetuate subjugation.  Without the latter responsibility, citizenship becomes functionary and blind.  Without the former responsibility, citizenship becomes a battle with no vision, no accountability, no hope for a coming community that would be better.  Receiving and giving the gift of our inheritance requires forming a “we” in the double responsibility that animates a “yes we can.”

I am deeply sympathetic when George Shulman and Lawrie Balfour’s contributions call Obama to deepen this double responsibility.  Yet I worry that Obama is trending away.  His Inaugural Address quiets the demos and accents more than ever only one dimension of the virtues of citizenship.  In Obama’s One Hundred Days speech, the demos is not mentioned at all, as Harry Boyte insightfully notes in his May 3, 2009 op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, on Obama’s shift from “we” to “I.”  This is not so surprising: a demos that is wholly reduced to quiet virtues will be little more than a cog servicing leadership that drives America up the path of dubious progress.

In Dreams of My Father, Obama tells a profound story of moving counter to dominant Ivy League lines of progress to work with poor people of color in Chicago. His account is deeply indebted to the receptive prophetic tradition exemplified by civil rights activists like Ella Baker, Septima Clarke, Bob Moses, and Dorothy Cotton, who turned the democratic promise in better directions by moving their lives against many expressions of old truths and dominant articulations of “progress.”  Moving in counter-currents away from the flow toward whiteness, capitals, and capital, they led a broad organizing movement toward poor black people in the rural south.  They sat at the foot of sharecroppers and on front porches—and listened.  And quite literally, they listened people into being. They listened people into becoming the most profound turners of the democratic promise this nation has ever seen, for they changed the imaginary of progress itself.

Perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for the need for this change in our understanding of progress was James Baldwin, when he wrote:

One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state.  If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung.  When one slips, one slips back not a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is….The Negro tells us where the bottom is:  because he is there…where…we must not fall.

This notion of progress, Baldwin claimed, generated fear, hatred, and vitiated the possibility of democracy.  The civil rights organizers in the early 1960s enacted America’s most profound turn of the democratic promise because they realized that advancing this promise meant moving down the ladder of progress, cultivating the virtues and capacities for this movement, in order to participate in bending the arc of the universe toward justice. Baldwin conceived of this as messy, struggling—yet the only hopeful—love. This turning the ladder on its head, toward our better histories yet to come—could it be called democratic and Jewish and Christian?  Recall that on Jacob’s ladder, so inspirational for the Black church, a double movement of the earthly toward heaven and the holy toward earth is definitive.  This two-directional movement is crucial to Jacob’s tardy and difficult recognition that: “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!”   Similarly, in John 1:15, Christ evokes this double movement when he proclaims:  “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

Yet this resonance of the secular and the sacred is not a convergence, and it invites more questioning than it suppresses.  For just as Jacob wrestled with angels, our turns toward the better promises we inherit have resulted from messy struggles in which religious and nonreligious traditions have called each other to account.  History suggests that when Nation and God speak harmoniously for upward progress, something bad is often underway.

We should not focus on Obama—though we should support his efforts when they are good and be a thorn in his side when they are not.  Rather, our task now is to enact the many shapes, scales, modes, tensions, and powers of a demos—a beloved community—that is still unseen but better.  Minus this, the tensional “ethic of responsibility” for which Shulman rightly hopes is extraordinarily unlikely.  The hope of the democratic promise, and the hope for the Obama who has evoked it better than most leaders of late, is there: in the quiet and feisty virtues of a we that can.  Yes.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

The power of rising expectations, of imagination unleashed, of hope for something better than the politics of division and war and fear—all of it is in the air and on the move. Combined with serious and abiding global crises—economic, financial, military, environmental—it announces a unique moment to re-imagine and reignite a push toward fundamental change. It’s a moment to shed some of the burdens and baggage of the past, a time to reach beyond the walls and entanglements we know too well, a time to restore the basic propositions and values of a more authentic, vibrant, and participatory democracy.

When Obama intoned, “This is our moment. This is our time…Yes we can,” we needed to ask, of course, “yes, we can…what?”

For me, the answer involves returning to my roots as an antiwar organizer and civil rights activist, my roots as a teacher who believes that schools and classrooms, at their best, are powered by the engines of enlightenment and freedom. The promise of education is always tied up with the radical proposition that we can change our lives right now, today, and that together we can change the world.  It is a promise with particular resonance and urgency in a democratic society, for democracy assumes the necessity of continual and dynamic revitalization, and demands, then, regeneration as its lifeblood.

Unfortunately, the dominant frames, controlling discourses, and common metaphors that have powerfully shaped our choices and set the terms and limits of our discussion about schools and reform for so long are narrowing and constraining. In the contested space of schools and education reform, and in this particular moment, educators, parents, theorists, and citizens should press to change the dominant discourse of education, a controlling metaphor that posits education as a commodity rather than a right and a journey, and imagines schools as little factories cranking out products. The metaphor leads rather easily to imagining school closings and privatizing the public space as natural, relentless standardized testing as sensible—this is, after all, what the true-believers call “reform.” Michelle Rhee, CEO of Washington D.C. schools (it’s a business, remember), warranted a cover story in Time in early December, called “How to Fix America’s Schools.” The pivotal paragraph praised her for making more changes in a year and a half on the job than other school leaders, “even reform-minded ones,” make in five: closing 21 schools (15 percent of the total), and firing 100 central office personnel, 270 teachers, and 36 principals. These are all policy moves that are held, on faith, to stand for improvement.  Not a word on kids’ learning or engagement with school, not even a nod at evidence that might connect these moves with student progress, not a mention of getting greater resources into this starving system, nor parent involvement, and so on.  But of course evidence is always the enemy of dogma, and this is faith-based, fact-free school policy at its purest.

In this metaphoric straightjacket, school learning becomes a commodity traded at the market like boots or hammers. Unlike boots or hammers, the value of which is inherently satisfying and understood directly, the value and use of school learning is elusive and indirect—hence, students are asked to accept its unspecified worth on faith and must always be motivated and rewarded externally. The value of school learning, we’re assured, has been calculated precisely by wise and accomplished people, and these masters know better than anyone what’s best for the kids and for the world. The payoff is way down the line, but it’s surely there, somewhere, over the rainbow. “Take this medicine,” students are told repeatedly, day after tedious day, “It’s good for you.” Refuse the bitter pill, and go stand in the corner—where all the other losers are assembled.

Schools serve society; society is reflected in its schools. And in the modern world we see some differences as well as interesting similarities and noteworthy overlapping goals across systems. School leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa, for example, all agreed that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other—we all want the kids to do well. Practically all schools want their students to study hard and do their homework. Furthermore, schools in the old Soviet Union and fascist Germany produced some excellent scientists and athletes and musicians and so on. They also produced obedience and conformity, moral blindness and easy agreement, obtuse patriotism and a willingness to follow orders right into the furnaces. In a democracy one would expect something different—and this takes us back to first principles: democracy is based on a common faith in the value of every human being, and that means that what the wisest and most privileged parents want for their kid is exactly what the community wants for all of its children.

Our schools too often teach indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and the need to submit to certified authority. What, after all, are the lessons of report cards, grades, and the endless batteries of tests that play the part of autopsies rather than diagnostics? Don’t trust yourself; seek approval from your betters. And what is the point of the established schedule and the set fifty-minute periods, the uniform desks all in a row, the exhaustive use of time with no room to breath and certainly no space to dream or wonder or wander or drift or reflect or imagine or just be bored? You are not important and unique; be only malleable and productive in terms established by a higher authority.

The school-as-factory metaphor is more than an outdated image; worse, it is a model that betrays the central demands of democracy. Those of us who want to work for a more robust and participatory democracy must struggle against this metaphor and reaffirm the basic proposition that in a democracy life is geared toward and powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each the one and only who will ever tread the earth, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force; each born free and equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience, each deserving, then, a community of solidarity, a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. This core value is the heart of the matter, and it must express itself explicitly and implicitly in education as in every other aspect of associative living.

A democracy, theoretically at least, would build schools to fit children, not the other way around. We would not bend and break children until they fit as cogs in a mindlessly menacing machine, automatons without the ability to think clearly or feel deeply. We would resist—because we do not want the schools to train a nation of sheep—the forceful imposition of standardized ways of seeing and knowing. In a robust and functional democracy we would expect schools to reflect the principle that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

This expectation has huge implications for educational policy: racial segregation is wrong, class separation unjust, disparate funding immoral. There is no justification in a democracy for casting students out of school, none for categorical thinking in terms of potential or performance. There is no rationale for the existence of a well-funded school for wealthy white kids and a dilapidated, poorly-resourced school for poor immigrant kids or the descendants of an enslaved people. That reality—this savage inequality—offends the foundational idea that each person is equal, and reflects instead the reactionary idea that some of us are more deserving and more valuable than others. It expresses, as well, a simple but cruel message we send to children through our social policy and priorities: Choose the Right Parents! If you choose parents with money, access, social connection, and privilege, your choices and your chances will expand; if not, sorry, you’re on your own.

The democratic injunction has big implications for curriculum and teaching as well, for what is taught and how. We want our students to be able to think for themselves in a democracy, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own.  We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I?  How in the world did I get here, and where in the world am I going?  What in the world are my choices?  How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue the answers wherever they might take them.  We refuse obedience and conformity in favor of teaching initiative, courage, imagination, creativity, and more. These qualities cannot be delivered in top-down ways, but must be modeled and nourished, encouraged and defended.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop the capacity to name the world for themselves, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  This kind of education is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. We must invite students to ask serious questions: What’s the evidence? How do we know? Whose viewpoint is privileged and whose is left out? What are the alternatives, the connections, the resistance, the patterns, the causes? Where are things headed? Why? Who cares?

Teaching and organizing—at their best—are each powered by a common faith: when I knock on the door of a stranger in a public housing project, when I look out at my students, I assume the full humanity of each. I see hopes and dreams, aspirations and needs, experiences and intentions that must somehow be accounted for and valued.  I encounter citizens, not consumers, unruly sparks of meaning-making energy, not a mess of deficits. This is the evidence of things not seen, the starting point for teachers and organizers in any democratic society.

We should focus our collective efforts on schooling for a participatory democracy, on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in our shared public life. Such a democracy requires that people actually make the decisions that affect their lives; such a democracy requires dialogue—each one speaking with the hope of being heard, and each one listening with the possibility of being changed. Such a democracy requires a democratic school that would be generously supported, abundant with resources and materials of all kinds; it would be small, numbering no more than a few hundred students. In this school, participatory democracy could be enacted, practiced, and embodied; it would be a workshop for discovery and surprise, a laboratory for inquiry and experimentation. And the curriculum would unfold in endless pursuit of an inexhaustible question: what knowledge and experience is of most value?

Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators, and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but to change all that they find before them. Educators, students, and citizens might press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance, an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes, and an end to “savage inequalities” and the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of background or economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, thoughtful, fully-qualified and generously compensated teachers.

This is our ongoing expression of and commitment to free inquiry and participation, access and equity, thought and independent judgment, and full recognition of the humanity of each in the company of all. The struggle continues.

[Editor's note: Portions of this essay appeared at the Huffington Post, and an extended version appears in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review.]

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Grant Park, Chicago, November 4, 2008. It was a human river in full flood, people flowing into the gathering stream, moving, churning, surging happily forward, spilling over the shifting banks without incident and then effortlessly remaking the shore. There were children of all ages in hand or tucked into strollers and backpacks, buoyant parents delighted to let them stay up late, just this one night, in order to witness this precious and perhaps fragile moment. “Eighty years from now I want her to tell her grandchildren she was here,” a young man said to me as he posed for a picture with his infant daughter. “She’s a part of history, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

What had been unimaginable a year, a month, even a day before had become inevitable, and on this special night and in this specific place, unforgettable—an African-American president, a community organizer in the White House, a generational shift at last. We sang and we danced, and the enchanted night sparkled in reply. We felt ourselves to be a brand-new shimmering galaxy, a little bit of heaven on earth.

The crowd was diverse in a thousand ways. I saw a newborn wrapped tight on his mother’s chest pushed up next to a small old woman smiling broadly from her wheelchair, waving an American flag in wide arcs above her head. I saw a young black police officer with a gold earring joined in a circle dance with two gray-haired white women.

We had stopped by my brother’s to watch the early returns. He and his partner are life-long Democratic Party stalwarts, and, with their friends, they had spent the weekends of the past year phone-banking and canvassing for Barack Obama in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. He had called me a week before to assure me that Obama had Indiana in his grasp, and that everyone he spoke to was breaking that way. When I’d asked where he was calling from, he said “Starbucks.” “Get the hell out of Starbucks,” I said, but he’d in fact been everywhere, and he was right.

We were tied to multiple screens: every precinct in those three battlegrounds was taken personally, every vote a distinct and intimate victory or defeat. Everyone was a little ecstatic.

We moved on to a gathering at the home of long-time radicals and peace and justice activists as the outcome was becoming clear. There was joy here, too, and a sense that this was not the end of anything, but rather a new beginning, an opening of sorts—rising expectations and expanding imaginations, but with lots of work to do tomorrow, and the next day and the next. The mood was more a sigh of relief, less an inclination to dance in the streets.

But we couldn’t resist, and before John McCain had conceded we decided that dancing in the streets was exactly what was needed, so we headed for the door with friends in tow: a young historian from the Netherlands visiting for a few days of jaw-dropping Chicago experiences, a brilliant twenty-six year old cartoonist collaborating with me on a graphic novel about teaching, and an accomplished Zimbabwean scholar whose irrepressible excitement poured steadily into his cell-phone, connecting Grant Park to the world.

I’d been a part of large crowds before this—demonstrations and rallies, sporting events and the fabulously extravagant Taste of Chicago, also held in Grant Park—but every one of them had been edged with tension or anger or demand or performance, characterized by fighting or drunkenness or gluttony or narcissism. Grant Park, 2008, was different. This was a huge mobilization sharing a deep sense of unity and satisfaction and relief—closing a door on eight years of fear and loathing, war and divisiveness. It was oddly serene and sober, and, while there was rejoicing, there was no crowing. The dominant tone was a soft purring as folks felt themselves going gently over the moon.

We saw more friends every step of the way, and we stopped for kisses and hugs and group cell phone photos, the spirit spilling seamlessly over to strangers, with more hugs, more photos. I surprised myself each time I burst into tears: first, just seeing the animated convergence grow and grow and then keep on growing; next, when I ran into two African-American high school kids I knew, their video-cams in hand, filming a curriculum project called “Searching for Democracy;” finally, standing on the exact spot where forty years ago, at the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention, I was beaten bloody by Chicago cops and hauled off to jail. I corralled two young police officers—a black woman and a Latino man—to pose with me while a friend took photos. We all had tears in our eyes.

When President-Elect Barack Obama stepped onto the Grant Park stage at the south edge of the park, the exultation rose up anew, as if for the first time. This was the moment, this was our time:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible…tonight is your answer…It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

There was a simple straightforwardness to his talk, an authenticity even in his acknowledgements and thank-yous that felt somehow brand new. And there was a deep bow to the reality that every community organizer knows well:

For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century….The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you—we as a people will get there.

There were echoes here of Amilcar Cabral, the anti-colonial African leader, insisting that the people’s movement must tell no lies and claim no easy victories, and reverberations of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hopeful insistence that the arc of history bends toward justice, and that with effort and sacrifice we can achieve our freedom dreams. Everyone there also heard the hard reverberations of the legacy of slavery and the struggle for abolition and equality. Everyone saw a new symbol of change. And everyone felt that our imaginations, our initiatives, our creative juices would flow more freely now, that future accomplishments were newly possible. That night we remembered King’s insistent evocation of “the fierce urgency of now” and his final question: “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?”

During the heat of the primary battle, when Senator Obama was asked which candidate he thought Martin Luther King, Jr. would support, he responded without hesitation—Reverend King would not likely endorse any of us, he’d said, because he’d be in the streets building a movement for justice. That’s a community organizer’s answer and a good place to begin again.

Barack Obama looked positively Lincolnesque that night, standing tall in front of our starry sky and our vast blue-black lake, but I’m an entirely untrustworthy witness: after all, I was in the park breathing all that rarified air. It’s wonderful to breathe in the good air, to breathe out the bad air, and then just to keep on breathing—wonderful and refreshing. It’s great to feel the energy of rising expectations, to hear the sounds of heavy chains dropping from our minds, to see the shining faces of hope everywhere. It’s a moment to embrace, a moment to hold onto in tough times, and perhaps that’s why we found it so difficult to leave the park that night—this was a world in microcosm that we longed to live in. But leave the park we did, and with a renewed urgency to get busy transforming ourselves, linking up to change the world.

Here we enter the necessary if unglamorous world of organizing, of reframing debates and dialogues at every level, of animating and rebirthing our immanent frames, of challenging the insistent dogma of commonsense, of beginning political education, of enacting self-change and making a movement from the bottom up. Through what may be the most participatory national campaign in the country’s history, a new generation has learned the tools of campaigning, community organizing, political discourse, and civic debate. Their experiences ought now to be turned toward mobilizing others to insist on the changes they had hoped for and imagined. There is something stirring.

But we must remind ourselves that Lyndon Johnson, the most effective politician of his generation, the leader who passed the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Black Reconstruction, was never involved in the Black Freedom Movement, and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never a labor leader. Abraham Lincoln didn’t belong to an abolitionist political party, and yet reality forced upon him the opportunity to free an enslaved people. Each of these famous and effective presidents, in fact, responded to grassroots movements—and to reality itself—to do the right thing when it mattered.

It’s to movements on the ground that we turn as we think beyond this election or the next and consider the problems and possibilities of building a future dramatically and decisively different from today. We must agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights and a sustainable world, link the demands that animate us—for peace and education and universal health care and lifetime guarantees of income, against war and incarceration and surveillance—and learn to build a new society through our collective self-transformations and everyday struggles. We must seek ways to become real actors and authentic subjects in our own history. Every demand we are inclined to press on government, then, should be matched by an equally forceful demand pressed upon ourselves.

If we want a foreign policy based on justice, for example, we ought to get busy organizing a robust anti-imperialist peace movement; if we want to end the death penalty we’d better get smart about changing the dominant narrative concerning crime and punishment. In my next post, I will argue that, above all, we should focus our collective efforts on demanding education reform and reframing schools as sites for participatory democracy, for the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in our shared public life.

We are not allowed to sit quietly in a democracy awaiting salvation from above. We are equal, and we all need to speak out and act up, for the truth is that Barack Obama cannot save us—though, with hard work and some luck, we just might save Barack Obama.

[Editor's note: An extended version of this essay appears in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review.]

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Abstractions are important, but when they are too far detached from the mulch of things they become pabulum. If the abstractions are firmly rooted in Tradition, it becomes harder to both question them and show that they belong to another age that makes little sense in our time. Obama’s speeches are glorious. They are a joy to listen to and to read later. He is able to dig deep into the rich rhetorical tradition of the Christian world and of the Founding Fathers, and to articulate a call for awakening that is powerful. But how far is it from our world, from our time? There is an anachronistic edge not only in the cadence, but also in the logic—nothing here about the desertion of populations by the government, the allowance of the few to dominate the wealth produced by the many, and the turn to violence when other means wither in the quiver. Ethical systems cannot be built upon each other without any consideration of social transformations. It is not language alone that we must attend to, but even more so to the social context of the language.

Celebrations of “American character” and of the “God-given promise that all are equal” are emotive, powerful symbols of an age that is now no longer with us. Ours is the age of the jobless economy, where character and equality removed from structural impedimenta are cruel sentiments. In 1976, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Milton Friedman for, among other things, his pioneering work on the “natural rate of unemployment.” Friedman argued that if the economy neared full employment, prices would rise and create the inflationary condition for social disaster. For which reason, he argued, it is a good thing for the government to manipulate monetary policy to maintain a certain section of the population outside the workforce. This is just what U.S. monetary policy is all about, keeping a substantial section of the population away from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment numbers.

Around the time when Friedman’s ribbon was pinned to his tuxedo lapel, the American workforce underwent a dramatic shift: developments in communication and transportation, as well as new regimes of trade policy, allowed firms to disarticulate production to various points of the planet, taking advantage of lower wage costs to increase their profits. Rather than invest in the aging U.S. industrial sector, capital fled to the U.S.-Mexico border, to East Asia, and to other places, building factories in “export processing zones” that took advantage of under-organized (mainly female) migrant workers. The U.S. economy entered the phase of jobless growth, where the Gross Domestic Product grew as a result of the dramatic increase in the financial sector (a sparse employer), and the demise of industrial production produced mass joblessness at a scale not known for decades.

In 1976, only half of the high school graduates went to college, and for those who did not, the job situation was bleak. It would continue to be abysmal for their lifetime, as full-time union wage jobs declined and the minimum wage stagnated below 1973 levels. Because of this, the tragedy of the civil rights struggle was that it won just when privatization, the demise of social welfare and globalization eviscerated the chance for people of color to enjoy the statutory equality that they had just won. It was in this period that the Urban League ruefully reported, “More blacks have lost jobs through industrial decline than through job discrimination.” Globalization and NAFTA hurt these millions of Americans in ways that have not been fully appreciated by the intellectual elites. For those left out, refuge in the abstractions of “American character” and the “God-given promise that all are equal” is essential for their psychosocial well-being, but they are insufficient as a program for social development. When the politically-crafted economy is wedded to joblessness and the “natural rate of unemployment,” the promise of equality is cruel beyond measure. Anachronistic abstractions drawn from the elite Founding Fathers helps with morale, but it does not conform to the needs of the multitude, and to the multitude’s common sense.

A new set of civic virtues that are consonant with our reality would need to acknowledge that our current politically-defined economy has created disposable people—those who are in the criminal justice system (7.2 million), those who live in the forsaken “inner city” slums, those who have been unemployed for so long that they have abandoned the system entirely. Children among the disposable class who are not incredibly self-driven are cast off into proto-jails (with metal detectors and standardized tests, forms of surveillance that prepare them for prison and the low-end service sector). The “common good” that binds the citizenry together has been broken, with the peoples of the gated community and those of the slums driven asunder to the point where their reconciliation is near impossible. The first gets chills to hear talk of character and noble ideas; the second is comforted, but is also told in the same breath that they must take “personal responsibility” for their ills, and that they must throw away the cold Popeyes Chicken and turn off the television to move their children from the ranks of the disposed. Meanwhile, the Food and Culture industries are granted dispensations from taxation and from regulations in order to pollute society with the very things that the elect warn the population against. Here again is the cruel illusion, as the disposable are told that the only things that give them comfort are bad for them. Nothing else is on offer: no hope of structural reform. There is no new ethic in what Obama has to offer as yet, no new civic religion that confronts the constraints of our time. There is hope, because, without the promise of hope, reality would be unbearable. Obama has reaffirmed the necessity of hope, but as yet there is no new covenant. If that does not come, then bewilderment.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

American exceptionalism has been dealt a body-blow. I want to suggest, however, that the variant of exceptionalism that was upset by the Bush era was only a vertical model, and that a horizontal image has not only survived, but is flourishing—perhaps, in fact, finding ultimate expression in the personage of Barack Obama as the official representation of the body politic.

Traditionally, there have been two distinct, coexistent images of American exceptionalism—one vertical, and one horizontal. The vertical model envisions America as the pinnacle of a global hierarchy, the privileged “city upon a hill” over an otherwise flat or downward-sloping world. The horizontal model pictures America as being, instead, a consummation, the “melting pot” where the peoples of the world meet, intermingle, and are ennobled by virtue of constituting collective humanity within morally important national borders. In the first picture, America is separate from the world of nations, and in the second, America has subsumed the world of peoples.

The tropes coexist and are mutually constitutive. Indeed, the vertical picture relies on the notion of a national tradition of Judeo-Christianity, and on the idol of the Revolution as a moment of rupture with world history which marks the beginning of a teleology of justice. But also, in part, it relies on the horizontal picture itself, just as the horizontal image invests importance in the national borders in part on the premises of the vertical model. They are, in complex ways, interdependent, but their sources of confirmation are separate. The vertical model, a hierarchical image, is confirmed in the world of nations, by the maintenance of an image of America in a position of dominance. The horizontal model is confirmed in the world of peoples, where still-particularized Others are pitted against notionally de-particularized, democratically humanistic Americans. That is: where the vertical model finds confirmation in, say, American-led “coalitions of the willing” (as long as they are American-led) the horizontal model is confirmed by the very idea of (ethnically marked) Islamic fundamentalism.

So, while many have claimed that the Bush era has ushered in a decline of American exceptionalism, I want to suggest that it is only the vertical model which has been upset. The sure sense of dominance in a global hierarchy was interrupted by the terrorists attacks of 9/11, reasserted through entrance into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but continually shaken thereafter as foreign policy outcomes, as well as images of America being reflected back from without, made America’s position as transcendent “top dog” increasingly implausible. The political culture that allowed America to be judged by the standards of other nations—and found lacking—was one which severely damaged the vertical picture of exceptionalism.

And that vertical diminishment, iterated in, for example, Dick Morris’s claim that Obama “repealed the Declaration of Independence” during his European tour (a conviction doubled when he bowed to the leader of another state), is now deeply felt—if one can gauge by the number of times it seems to have been repeated across cable news and (particularly right-wing) online media.

Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric has frequently confirmed the view that his administration is deliberately dismantling the vertical model; he seems to aim for a stance which (either in fact or appearance) is one of pragmatic world-engagement. For example, his campaign speech last summer in Berlin was riddled with gestures that move away from a position insisting on American preeminence, such as his claim that “there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world.” And though his speech on the subject of globalization and global problems has often been more tempered at home, the general direction, I think, is the same. Vertical exceptionalism has been dealt a body-blow; sooner expect Obama to speak of a world with many “cities upon hills” (to which, perhaps, “torches of liberty” have been passed) than the American nation as a lordly, lonely city upon one.

The horizontal image, however, has not only survived, but flourishes—perhaps, in fact, finding ultimate expression in the personage of Barack Obama as the official representation of the body politic. Horizontal exceptionalism, after all, is about the consummation of cultures. It is, in short, the exceptionalism by which Americanization is synonymous with universalization. And it was given new wings in Obama’s Inaugural Address:

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

If what I’m calling “vertical exceptionalism” posited an America that was a shining city upon a hill against a world of assumedly un-American darkness, can this new horizontal version, now shorn of some of its vertical underpinnings, instead both recognize and engage with a world which has, partly through the workings of all the variants of exceptionalism, actually become increasingly Americanized? And—this is the real question, as America enters what appears to be a new era of engagement—can it do so without repeating the mistake of the past: assuming that, because Americanization is supposed to be merely a form of universalization, it is benign?

The above passage from the Inaugural Address implies an American role in “revealing” the world’s “common humanity;” I wonder whether the form of that revelation might yet be a violence against particularities, violence still rationalizable in the terms of horizontal exceptionalism because those particularities (Islam, Chinese-style mixed economic forms, racialized solidarities) obstruct American-style “universal” democratic humanism, and hence are particularities in which the cultures of people obstruct “our common humanity.” Barack Obama has named his tradition: a patchwork heritage, in which tribal lines dissolve, the subject of which was the mainstay of his recent address in Cairo.

Still, it’s too soon to say how Obama’s idea of heritage will convert to global destiny.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Back in the fall of 2008, I talked to alumni of Amherst College in San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and spoke about theories of the American presidencies, leaning a lot on the work of a Yale professor named Steven Skowronek. In The Politics Presidents Make, he argued that presidencies exist within two timeframes: a cyclical timeframe which adheres more or less to the scheme of critical elections, and what he calls “secular time.” The latter has to do with the historical development of the United States—a tiny, fragile, vulnerable country that, through the exploitation of slaves and immigrant labor, the destruction of Native Americans, and the great good luck of rich natural resources, as well as the hard work and genius of many good people, evolved into an imperial power during the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. This expansion occurred with an accompanying extraordinary growth of military, bureaucracy, and the centralization of power. The immense web of laws and regulations, the growth of the welfare state, and the recession of the European powers as a result of WWII enabled the United States to become the great global power of the twentieth century.

In the last part of that century we overextended ourselves in many ways, as all empires do. The intensified power of the great, organized interests—since the advent of neo-liberalism, the immense corporations—created a large permanent national government joined at the hip with private powers. Globalization has been the result of that neo-liberalism, and helped transform the United States into the debtor nation that it now is. This development, coupled with an increasingly polarized political climate that was in part brought about by that very growth, and that has been exacerbated by the emergence of new forms of electronic media, has increasingly diminished the ability of presidents over this secular time to fundamentally shift the direction of government. As Theodore Lowi, a teacher of both Skowronek and myself, argued in a book called The Personal President, presidents must act immediately to fulfill their campaign pledges while they have a window of opportunity, and that over the past century that window of opportunity has grown more and more narrow, so that what a president now does in the earliest days of his or her administration largely is all that he or she will be able to do.  Moreover, as things continue to get worse for the majority, during their campaigns presidents must promise more than they can deliver. They are helpless giants, in a sense, buffeted by forces beyond their control, unable to respond to an increasingly deep crisis brought about in part by the very success of the country in becoming what it is.

The question back in the fall, when we imagined Obama might be elected, was, how much time would he have to enact his agenda? That is, given the depth of our problems, what would he be able to do, how much patience would the American people have, and how much support would he be able to garner from the Congress? (This is of course a different question, because the gap between what the public wants and what the members of Congress want have rarely been larger than they are now.)

What does any of this have to do with the question of this symposium? When Obama said, “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.  These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,” he was of course evoking the idea of American exceptionalism, a claim that we are possessed of distinctive values that, in times of crisis, come to the fore, and then inspire us to save our sorry asses.

Presidents are compelled to use the language of exceptionalism in two important ways. If our presidents are to be believed, we are always doing something New and something Great. We have had, in the past eighty years, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the New Nixon, Morning in America, A Thousand Points of Light, a New Covenant, a Bridge to Tomorrow, and Compassionate Conservatism, and now we have a New Foundation. These slogans are made to do a lot of work, in that they suggest another word that became the brand of the Obama campaign last year: change. This rhetoric reflects an interesting fact: while it is common for us to claim that there is no real progressivism in the United States anymore, the truth is that both ruling parties for the past eighty years have had to envelop themselves in a rhetoric of progressive change or transformation in order to be credible with the American people, who are deeply addicted to Newness and Greatness.

At the same time, and indeed as a part of the rhetoric of exceptionalism, presidents constantly invoke the Constitution as the rock upon which this church of America is built. The Constitution, whether you believe it to be a living document (Justice Breyer) or a dead one (Justice Scalia), is the ultimate foundation upon which all renewal is supposed to take place. No one can question it, especially the core of it, though many are incredibly inventive in interpreting it.

Obama has thus far followed pretty much the same pattern as all modern presidents, though he is far more competent than his predecessor. In terms of the length of Lowi’s window of opportunity, Obama has been remarkably successful at enacting key parts of his agenda early on, while sustaining a continued high level of popularity with the American people. And his presidency effectively began early, given the collapse of the Bush administration in the interim between the election and the inauguration. But the enactment of the stimulus package, the successful extension of TARP monies, the credit reform, and the beginning of the health program have created a sense of momentum that has so far served Obama’s administration well. Moreover, most of Obama’s initiatives on foreign policy have been embraced, so far, at least, by the public. In part, all of this early success is due to the weakened condition of the GOP in Congress and nationally, but it is also a testimony to the political skills of Obama and his team of advisors.

But despite these advances, the language of his Inaugural Address demanded much more than Obama has been able to produce. Our crisis is not simply one of spirit: the United States is facing a decline, as is inevitable for imperial powers, and how that decline is to be addressed needs to be at the heart of this presidency. And in this regard, Obama is little different than George Bush in the two arenas of power that matter most: economic policy and national security policy.

Let me stipulate—I think the offenses against the Constitution in so many of the actions taken by the Bush administration were outrageous, and indeed, I would judge them to warrant criminal trials. But I also find it telling that President Obama is trying to prevent the serious investigation of these alleged crimes. And I find it equally telling that he is trying to figure out a way to evade the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus by suggesting that the indefinite detention of some of the Gitmo prisoners—some who cannot go on trial because the evidence was tainted as a result of torturous interrogation—may need to continue to be policy. Moreover, I have noticed that we now have members of the Obama administration suggesting that we may need to continue our occupation of Iraq for up to ten more years, and that we need to build a Green Zone-like American Embassy in Kabul. While couched in much softer rhetoric, and with more diplomatic approaches to the Arab world than his fundamentalist Christian predecessor, Obama has not separated himself from President Bush’s policy, especially Bush’s second term policy, when it became clearer that, as they say, the jig was up, and the cover-up of these policies had to be coupled with a dismantling of the worst abuses.

On the domestic side of the ledger, while the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court signals a mild willingness to begin to constrain corporate abuses of power, the larger frame again indicates as much continuity with the Bush administration as departure. Banks too big to fail, cooperation with health insurance giants, a TARP fund that gives to the rich and steals from the rest of us, no real relief for those who were victimized by subprime mortgages, none of these abuses of capitalism are being attacked for what they are.

Why is it that there are these key continuities in crucial areas of policy, some of which Obama vehemently opposed when he was running for president, and continues to oppose at the level of rhetoric? After all, he is supposedly constrained by the Constitution, compelled, if he is to obey the law himself, to dismantle these illegal security policies. And while the rape of the Treasury (I was fascinated to learn the term “moral hazard” during the free fall of last autumn) may not be unconstitutional, or even necessarily illegal, it does go hand in hand with the need to prop up a financial system that is almost completely beyond the control of a supposedly democratic state.

But here’s the thing. Since World War II, every president has violated the Constitution in matters consequential enough to result, if one were to be a stickler at all, in impeachment. Truman seized the steel mills, Eisenhower secretly threatened nuclear war against the Chinese, and JFK ordered assassinations. LBJ was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon for Watergate, and I suspect that a condition for Nixon stepping down was the pardon Ford issued. Reagan had the Iran-contra affair, and Clinton overstepped Congress in going to war in the Balkans. Bush—well, we’ve been there.

Notice that the serious offenses are all connected to foreign policy. But they are also connected with the politics of the Cold War, and then the politics of globalization. In all cases, presidents felt frustrated either by statutory constraints, or by the slowness of Congress to approve, or by the need to wave bloody flags in order to get Congress to move. What am I suggesting?

We believe in the Constitution, and we believe in the special fate of America. But we’ve not necessarily been well served by either belief during the past half-century. Obama, if he is to be the great president his ardent supporters want him to be, may well need to imitate another great leader from the past. We need to look for a leader who has managed the decline of an imperial power, without destroying the world. I am referring to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who spoke the truth and led the Russian people past a system of government that no longer could be imagined to serve them. Too expensive, too corrupt, falling from its own weight, bankrupt financially, foolishly nationalistic—that country was the most dangerous country in the world at the time, as much because of its delusions as because of its destructive power.

The United States, of course, is not the same as the Soviet Union was. Empires decline on their own timetables and in their own ways. American renewal in the Obama years may involve a new rhetoric of unity, may involve a vast rebuilding of our infrastructure in more environmentally sound ways, and may involve a renewed resolve to secure the United States against the terror that lurks in a way that doesn’t shame us. But, and this is a big but, if we do not learn to live more humble lives, in diminished circumstances, and replace our foolish dreams of a return to the American century past, we will suffer a lot more than we will if we finally face the truth about the damage we have done to ourselves, the obsolete character of our governing institutions, and the failure of democracy that we have suffered in order to acquire this strange empire we are now losing. As Obama also said in his speech, it is time to put away childish things.

Such a task calls for a great leader, one who will be willing to engage in the sort of sacrifice that Obama, for all his gifts, has not yet shown himself willing to make. Putting away childish things means growing up. Growing up means speaking first, sticking your neck out, saying what is true and just regardless of the consequences for yourself. Obama, I fear, has yet to grow up.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

One of the most important elements of Obama’s pragmatism is the sense that “hope” can only be “realistic” if it wishes to be more than wishful thinking and whistling in the dark, just as much as “realism” without “hope” leads principally nowhere, but merely brutally affirms whatever is and only strengthens the powers that be. This may sound trivial, a platitude, but it is not. After all, the least one can say of any truism is that it has, well, truth to it. And, in matters political—but, perhaps, not only there—insight into the paradoxical, some would say aporetic, relationship between the ideal and the real holds the key to all. It all depends on what one gives prevalence, when and where and how. No political calculation can do this trick (and keep idealism from turning into “naïve idealism” or realism into “bitter realism”), nor is instinct its sound alternative. The expression “deep pragmatism” captures nicely what is at work and required here. So much for the truism.

But where does “deep pragmatism” originate and from where does it draw its strength? It has been noted that Obama in his inspirational rhetoric and overall view of the political and policies draws much less on the legacy of the civil rights movement, of Martin Luther King Jr., not to mention Malcolm X (of whom he speaks admiringly, yet with certain reservations, in Dreams From My Father), with their insistence on human dignity and the overcoming of victimization, than he does on the thought of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It is Niebuhr, together with Saint Augustine and, less often, Paul Tillich and some of the so-called liberation theologians, who shape Obama’s subtle take on the intermingling of the religious and the public, the theological and the political, and, especially, on their intrinsic limits and potential pitfalls.

True enough, as an adolescent Obama had quenched his thirst for understanding his place in the complicated ethnic and racial landscape of the United States by reading Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, Du Bois, and Malcolm X—a list to which he would add Toni Morrison as well as the multivolume biography by Taylor Branch of Dr. King and the civil rights struggles—but it is clear that none of these authors would come to determine his overall take on political things at its deepest and most pragmatic level. Niebuhr, perhaps more than anyone else, did.

In an interview with David Brooks in April 2007, Obama gave an interesting impromptu response:

[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away…the sense that we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.

Where does this leave the dimension of “depth” of which I spoke earlier? In what sense can religion—and especially “Christian Realism,” as Niebuhr defines it—give perspective to a public domain that, under the conditions of secular modernity (or modern secularity), seems premised on a principle of neutrality or methodological atheism, guided as it is by what Charles Taylor, in his recent book A Secular Age, calls an “immanent frame” of thought? To what extent can a religious realism, not just respect, back up and orient the cultural sensibilities and practical responsibilities that mark our time at its most critical junctures? Further, in what way can it guide us through the dangers of the present post-Cold War world, whose global economic and political, military and ecological, conflicts and challenges are increasingly unpredictable? As long as the necessary international institutional instruments for conflict resolution are either not yet in place or not functioning as they should and were expected to, what ought to be the guidelines and the operative principles, if not the “blueprint,” for a “progressive” presidency as it must, finally, seek to put political liberalism on a firmer footing, precisely by exposing it to wider and especially deeper horizons than the “immanent frame” is ready to acknowledge?

These questions are largely absent from the otherwise impressive volume Change For America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44^th President. Timothy Garton Ash discusses the “worldwide conceptual cacophony” concerning the term “liberalism,” suggesting that its “vital, never-ending debate is not just over its indispensable ingredients, but also over their form, proportion and relation to one another,” and claims that Obama has begun restoring “the thing,” while continuing to shun its name (which, he adds, has become a pejorative term in the United States since the Reagan years and now seems to connote something like the “unholy marriage of big government and fornication”).

It has been rightly noted by Paul Allen that “Obama’s liberalism is not that of the perennial separation of church and state,” but that it is, instead, “born of the public implications of Christian faith, a recognition of the moral limits of the state and the individual.” The resulting conception, far from being an amalgam of irreconcilable strands of thought and everything but a “confused theology,” yields a coherent position which parts ways with secular humanism and its institutional and dispositional equivalents in political and cultural matters (so-called liberalism and progressive modernism being among them), just as it keeps its distance from the dictates and mindset of the Religious Right, from the perverse mixture of American exceptionalism and cynical realism of so-called neoconservatism that influenced the George W. Bush administration, and even from the alternative ideology, still in the making, that has been attributed to the “Millennial Youth” or “Generation We” who were among his staunchest supporters. Again, there is a deeper sense of the tragic or, as Niebuhr preferred to say, “ironic” fate of American history that is steeped, in part, in the Biblical idea of original sin even though it is elaborated in more heterodox terms as well, and that espouses a thorough pragmatism in the adjustment of ideas and theories—including those of theology—to the factual givens of the world of political and international affairs. In this sense, Obama’s political theology steers clear of all moralism and that, precisely, is its “realism.” In Allan’s words:

Thanks to Niebuhr, Obama has thought about the human condition, in terms of our shared nature and sin, categories that most liberals have rebuked since before the 1960s….Obama is positioned to give the conservative idea of self-sacrifice a liberal moral meaning it has not held since John F. Kennedy. When Obama said last year that he would tell Americans, “Not what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to know,” he was warming up an electorate for Niebuhr-like realism….Obama knows that liberalism cannot thrive on an ever-expanding laundry list of human rights and victimhood.

Yet it is doubtful that Obama should be seen as restoring liberalism as a value per se, rather than as set of policies to which, he feels, we have good—pragmatic—reason to adhere or, when needed, return.  And “self-sacrifice” is hardly the sole (or most important) value around which his deep pragmatism revolves in the end. A host of other motifs and motivations come to mind, but what is important is the way—and the spirit—in which they are invoked and put to work.

When confronted with skeptical reactions to the whole business of holding office at the state or national level, Obama writes, he would appeal to:

Another tradition of politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.

It is a tradition based on common sense as much as one that reminds us of the insights of progressive liberalism and the social gospel. If there is a lack of agonistics in Obama’s conception of the political, it might, indeed, be found in his observation, based on travelling his state, of “just how modest people’s hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class.” It is his conviction of there being a “collective conscience” and a “common set of values that bind us together despite our differences,” indeed, “a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work.” All of them reference a “shared language” that, he is aware, has suffered under the onslaughts of the most unrelenting trends of our age: “globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars.” In the face of such pressures, what is needed is “a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” In other words, a new search for—and defense of—”the common good.”

What matters, however, is not that Obama was the sole candidate to invoke this other tradition in explicit terms, but that he related to it differently, just as he allowed its avowed simplicity to accrue other elements and meanings from other traditions (including religious ones). And these modes of relating to the past—its tragedies, ironies, accomplishments, and hopes—are what make his political thinking and operative style deep, but also broad and versatile, even adaptable, that is to say, pragmatic. It was no accident that, during the last campaign for the Democratic nomination and then the general election, Obama seemed to be the only candidate who was able and willing to learn and grow. The others were merely “grasping for anything that would stick.”

As Martin E. Marty, the well-known Chicago theologian and eminence grise of the history of American religion, as well as the main editor of the famous “Fundamentalism” project, noted in his contribution to the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, Niebuhr’s conception was based on the insight that realism in and by itself leads to cynicism. Only a “realistic hope” and “hopeful realism,” Marty recalls, could, in this view, serve as “a caution against utopianism, naïve idealism, the claiming or bragging of rights.” Niebuhr’s trademark was to caution against overstating America’s role in the world, reminding his readers that one always uses evil to prevent the greater evil (and, hence, confirms the inescapable fact of human sinfulness). This insight, however, led Niebuhr to an insistence on humility, not on Christian “pessimism,” which would have all too easily become an excuse for irresponsibility.

An often cited passage from Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History underscores this view:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Niebuhr saw the tension between individualism and the need for communality, the place of American power in the world and the need to restrain it. His witnessing of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, Nazi death camps, and Soviet repression led him to the conclusion that, as a much-cited epigraph has it, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

And while there have been—blissfully—only been a few reports about what and how Obama prays, we might get close to his mindset in such private moments by reminding ourselves of the upshot of the prayer, the so-called “Serenity Prayer,” which Niebuhr claimed he authored (even though this was recently contested):

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
And the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

This may not be what most of us would be able to say or pray most of the time, nor may there be any simple translation of such lines into terms that would neutralize or dispense with the religious idioms and the undeniable orthodoxy its particular phrasing here implies. But there may well be parallel motivational utterances, like this one neither true nor false, which have the same vital origin and similar dispositional affect and effect. And if prayer, as Emerson says in “Self-Reliance,” is “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view” (rather than the craving of “a particular commodity” or “a means to effect a private end”—all of which would be “vicious,” “meanness,” and “theft”), then it is hard to see how any politics, much less a theological politics or political theology, could ever do without it.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter, entitled "Small Miracles": The Deep Pragmatism of Obama's Political Theology, from the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Exploring the Post-Secular, co-edited by Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, and John Torpey.]