Reading Obama Part 2

In the evocative final sentence of the first chapter of Dreams from My Father, Obama writes wistfully about his mother's and his grandparents' aspirations for themselves and their nation. When they came to realize that their dreams were unfulfilled, when they understood the gap that still separated their hopes from their experience, Obama writes that he came to occupy "the place where their dreams had been." Even after he decided that their universalist vision of human brotherhood was no more than a "useful fiction," the aspirations that his family projected on him continued to shape his own ambitions as decisively as did his own disillusionment. In the process of reaching a mature understanding of himself and the political world he would inhabit, Obama had to contend with persistent ambivalence. Although the glittering idea of a universal principle of justice retained its seductive allure, gnawing doubts, prompted by his experience and confirmed by his education, whispered that it might be no more than an illusion.

EADERS ENTERING OBAMA'S BOOKS find themselves in a landscape that seems at first very different from the jagged contours and jarring conflicts between universalism and particularism, timelessness and historicism, science and hermeneutics. Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope appear to occupy a different world because they are directed less toward academic philosophers or social scientists than toward the much wider audience of American citizens. But Obama has been paying attention. To a striking degree, his sensibility has been shaped by the developments in American academic culture since the 1960s outlined in chapter 2, and in this chapter I want to demonstrate that underappreciated connection. Remember that Obama was trained in two of America's leading colleges, Occidental and Columbia. He earned his law degree at one of its leading law schools, Harvard, then taught law for more than a decade at another top-flight institution, the University of Chicago Law School.

In his books Obama never explicitly addresses his education or his teaching. It isn't necessary. His writing clearly reflects his experiences as a student and as a professor in turbulent times, and his books manifest his serious engagement with the life of the mind. As anyone reading this (or any other) book can attest, reading is not the most dramatic of human practices, and Obama the writer prefers flesh-and-blood characterizations to discourses on civic republicanism, philosophical pragmatism, the discourse ethics of deliberative democracy, and antifoundationalism. Yet as I hope readers of this book will also attest, reading can alter the way a person looks at the world. Obama's worldview emerged not only from his family, his friends, and his colleagues in the sharp-elbowed worlds of community organizing and electoral politics, decisive as those surely were. His worldview was also shaped by the debates that rocked the campuses where he studied and taught, debates about ideas as well as politics. Much as he might need to mask it on the campaign trail, where he demonstrates his impressive skill as a politician, his books make clear that Barack Obama is also very much an intellectual.

Of Obama's two principal books, many people prefer Dreams from My Father, a meditation on Obama's personal identity and the problems of race and cultural diversity in America. Much has been written on those issues already, and for good reason. To understand Obama's ideas about American culture and politics, however, his personal story must be placed in the framework provided by The Audacity of Hope, a book in which one can identify the echoes of earlier and more recent voices in the traditions of American political thought. Particularly important are his discussions of the Constitution, antebellum American democracy, Lincoln and the Civil War, and the reform movements of the Progressive, New Deal, and civil rights eras. From his well-informed and sophisticated analysis of those issues emerges a particular conception of democracy.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who studied and taught constitutional law, Obama writes incisively about the United States Constitution. Near the end of Dreams from My Father, he describes the law as the record of "a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience." Given that Tribe and Dorf had attributed to Obama and Robert Fisher their conception of the Constitution as a conversation, the first part of that phrase should come as no surprise, but the second hints at the differences between Obama's writing and the wooden prose that deadens much legal discourse. In The Audacity of Hope Obama's argument is less lyrical but even more provocative. Against those conservatives who invoked the idea of the founders' so-called original intent, a set of determinate meanings that are said to limit what legislatures and judges can legitimately do, Obama points outaccurately-that the Constitution resulted from a series of compromises made necessary by the depth of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention and during the process of ratification. Moreover, Obama correctly observes that the decision to leave the document open to amendment testified to the framers' realization that the nation's Constitution would have to change, albeit slowly, with American culture in order to survive.

The failure to provide a mechanism for such alterations, the framers understood, had doomed earlier republics to failure as we can see now that it doomed later republics, such as the first several republics proclaimed in France when they proved incapable of adapting to changed circumstances. Obama quotes a crucial passage from Madison concerning the value and the necessity of open-mindedness in democracy. Reflecting on the process of reaching provisional agreement at the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote, "No man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth." Everyone remained "open to the force of argument." That passage expresses Obama's understanding of democracy as deliberation.

Madison himself, although often credited with having framed the Constitution, did not get the Constitution he wanted. His own position on crucial issues such as the Senate and the authority of the executive changed not only during the convention itself but also during the debates over ratification, particularly when be became convinced by his friend Jefferson that the Anti-Federalists were right about the strategic necessity, and perhaps even the desirability, of a Bill of Rights. The Audacity of'Hope contains no footnotes, and Obama rarely mentions the scholars whose work has shaped his ideas. It seems clear from his discussion of Madison and the Constitution, however, that he rejects claims about original intent and also sees beyond the 1950s-era obsession with Madison's so-called realist pluralism. Many scholars in the 1950s argued that Madison wisely abandoned aspirations to political ideals and settled instead for an institutional structure that would merely facilitate and accommodate the clash of competing interests. That interpretation served to justify the political moderation of the post-World War II era. Although that view still appeals to many scholars, including those on the right who praise Madison's prudence and those on the left who accuse him of selling out democratic ideals, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Recent historians of Madison and the Constitution, such as Jack Rakove and Lance Banning, legal scholars such as Harvard's Michelman and Tribe, Yale's Akhil Amar and Obama's longtime Chicago colleague Sunstein, and Supreme Court Justices such as Stephen Breyer, have all demonstrated why the ideal and the practice of democratic deliberation proved at least as important for the acceptance and durability of the Constitution as did the checks and balances built into the new nation's institutional architecture.

Madison's comment about remaining "open to the force of argument," for example, served as the epigraph for one of Sunstein's many books, The Partial Constitu tion (1993). Although it may be that Obama is a careful student of Madison, it seems more likely that he has been attentive to the transformation of scholarly debate concerning the Constitution. Sunstein's book offers a more ambitious, and much more fully fleshed out, version of the arguments Tribe and Dorf advanced in On Reading the Constitution, the argument they attributed to Obama and Robert Fisher that the Constitution is best understood as a conversation. Sunstein's book is replete with discussions of Wood and civic republicanism, Dewey and participatory democracy, and the usefulness of Putnam's philosophical pragmatism for constitutional law.

The older, conspiratorial view of the Constitution as the product of scheming elites out to dupe the unsuspecting and virtuous masses, an interpretation that originated with Charles Beard a century ago, still makes compelling drama; it persists among many historians committed to the idea that the deck was stacked against "the people" by "the interests" from the beginning. But the record of the debates in the Constitutional Convention and afterwards is much more complex. Neither the neo-Beardian conspiracy theory nor the sepia-tinted portraits of the founders trotted out by conservatives eager to preserve the status quo captures the dynamic process of writing and ratifying the Constitution.

Madison himself went into the Constitutional Convention self-consciously committed to constructing a democracy, and he came away from the ratification process convinced that the result, despite his misgivings about it, was the best that could be attained through a democratic process. In his first speech to the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued that a federal government, because it would "expand the sphere" of representatives' horizons beyond their local preoccupations to the needs of the entire nation, "was the only defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government." Notice Madison's use of the terms "democracy" and "democratic" in that sentence. The familiar notion that Madison envisioned a republic rather than a democracy is widespread, but it is false. He did envision a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy, and the elaborate checks and balances of the federal framework appealed to him in part for that reason. But his preference for representative democracy hardly makes him an antidemocrat. Other contemporaries who shared that preference included Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, two thinkers often contrasted to Madison but with whom he had much more in common from the 1770s through the 1820s than is usually recognized.

Madison aligned himself with those who opposed the idea that delegates, either to the Constitutional Convention or later to the United States Congress, should be bound by instructions from their constituents. His position derived from his faith in a particular form of representative democracy, not his distrust of its potential. He believed that the process of deliberation, if it remained open-ended, could produce results different from, and superior to, any of the ideas that representatives brought with them to an assembly. As Sunstein emphasized in The Partial Constitution, and as Madison's own letters after the convention confirm, Madison had experienced in Philadelphia the creative potential of deliberation, a potential short-circuited by demands that representatives must follow precisely the preexisting preferences of those who sent them. It is true that many Anti-Federalists cherished a different conception of democracy from that embraced by Madison, Jefferson, and Paine. Many Anti-Federalists distrusted the idea of delegating authority to those they elected to serve in a distant assembly. But their vision of democracy is as difficult to translate into a national framework as their critics at the time contended, and the preference for a federalist form of government did not necessarily make its champions opponents of ordinary citizens. Some Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris, did distrust the people and did seek to limit their influence. Madison's commitment to the Constitution, by contrast, like that of his chief ally in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, sprang from his deep desire to see democracy survive.

In his description of the Constitution and the way it was constructed, Obama shows his familiarity with one of the most important developments in American scholarship since the 1970s, during the years since Wood and other historians sparked the republican revival and legal scholars such as Michelman and Sunstein brought it to law schools. Not only constitutional lawyers but also political theorists are now rediscovering what Madison, Jefferson, and Paine already knew: representative democracy is not a bastardized or second-best version but instead a distinctive variant of democracy that values persuasion over the rigid, unyielding defense of preferences or interests. Representative democracy is designed to substitute the dynamic process of making reasoned arguments for the simple tallying of votes dictated by constituents' preferences. In Obama's words, not only did the size of the new nation mean that "an Athenian model of democracy was out of the question" and that "the direct democracy of the New England town meeting" was "unmanageable." It was not just practicality that dictated representation.

The process of deliberation, particularly when it brought together people with diverse backgrounds, convictions, and aspirations, made possible a metamorphosis unavailable through any other form of decision making. People who saw the world through very different lenses could help each other see more clearly. Just as Madison defended the value of delegates' willingness to change their minds and yield to the force of the better argument, so Obama explicitly echoes the arguments of Madison and, strikingly, of Alexander Hamilton in Federalist number 70 concerning the importance of encouraging the "jarring of parties" because such differences of opinion could "promote deliberation and circumspection." Obama does not explicitly invoke Wood's Creation of the American Republic or other examples of the republican synthesis he first encountered at Occidental and then again in law school. Nor does he cite the prize-winning work of histo rians Banning and Rakove concerning the impossibility of locating a single original meaning in the swirling debates and resulting compromises that yielded the Constitution. He does not cite the writings of his law school professors Minow, Michelman, or Tribe, nor the articles by HLR contributors Sunstein and Gardbaum. Obama does point out, however, that scholars now agree that the Constitution was "cobbled together" from heated debates and emerged "not as the result of principle but as the result of power and passion." The ideas of Madison were never identical to those of Hamilton, those of Morris never those of Wilson, and so on. No unitary meaning or intent can be found. Instead the Constitution shows traces of competing arguments drawn from sources including the Bible, the English common law, Scottish philosophy, civic republican traditions, and the Enlightenment idea of natural rights.

Obama the law professor concedes that such a conception of the founding appeals to him because it encourages us to emphasize the contingency of the original document and to appreciate the contingencies that lie beneath our own invocations of high principle. His constitutionalism fits neatly into the historicist framework that was displacing older verities in the academic communities of Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, and Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s. Such historicism, he writes, might free us to "assert our own values unencumbered by fidelity to the stodgy traditions of a distant past." In other words, it might tempt us to proclaim that constitutional interpre tation is a question of shifting conventions or changing paradigms. When it comes to the Constitution, we might conclude it's turtles all the way down. But Obama admits that such freedom makes him uneasy. He describes it as "the freedom of the relativist, the rule breaker," or "the apostate," and he concedes that "such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied." Caught between the pressures of Kuhn and Geertz, on the one hand, and the persistent yearning for Rawls's stable principles of justice, on the other, where can Obama turn?

He can, and he does, turn to philosophical pragmatism and to American history. What we need, he suggests, is a "shift in metaphors," a willingness to see "our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had." Madison did not give us a "fixed blueprint." Instead he provided a framework that cannot resolve all our differences but offers only "a way by which we argue about our future." The institutional machinery of the Constitution was intended, Obama argues, not to solve our problems once and for all but "to force us into a conversation." The Constitution gave birth to "a 'deliberative democracy' in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent." It would be hard to find in James or Dewey, in Bernstein or Putnam, a clearer statement of the conceptual and historical connections between philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy in the American political tradition.

Obama's arguments about American democracy rest on a solid scholarly foundation. Sunstein argued in the HLR article "Interpreting Statues" that Madison envisioned the clashing of arguments in American legislatures as a uniquely productive process, a process whereby representatives found their own convictions, and those of their constituents, challenged and changed. Madison sought, as the historian Marvin Meyers argued decades ago in a brilliant essay cited by Sunstein, not merely stability but new understandings of the common good, understandings unavailable to any individual but emerging from the processes of contestation and deliberation. In Obama's formulation of this crucial point, the founders wanted above all to avoid "all forms of absolute authority," and the most perilous moments for the new nation occurred when that fallibilism was threatened by attempts to freeze the dynamic process of democratic deliberation by stifling debate. Through this process of making arguments, encountering objections, rethinking our positions, forging compromises, and testing our ideas against a resistant reality in which our schemes succeed or fail, Obama concludes, we learn "to examine our motives and our interests constantly." We learn, in short, that "both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible."

Neither Madison nor Jefferson, neither James nor Dewey, neither Putnam nor Bernstein could have said it better. Balancing the historicism of cutting-edge constitutional scholarship against his lingering desire for some thing more substantial than quicksand (or a tower of turtles), Obama makes use of the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism: we should debate our differences, and test provisional interpretations of principle, not by measuring proposals against unchanging dogmas but through trial and error, by trying to solve problems creatively and then democratically deliberating, yet again, on the consequences of our experiments. "We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn," even if we realize that "we have betrayed them more often than we remember." Despite everything, we affirm the principle. Our democratic values, deliberation and truth testing, constitute the American people as a nation developing over time. Our commitments to freedom and equality are "our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people." As individuals and as a nation, we are constituted by the values we cherish, the principles we seek to realize, and the democratic process whereby we attempt to reach those goals.

But we must not pretend that the meaning of those shared principles has ever been anything but contested. As the pragmatists James and Dewey insisted repeatedly, and as more recent philosophical pragmatists have confirmed, democratic principles should not be confused with unchanging dogmas. They must remain subject to criticism and revision. In Obama's words, "our values must be tested against fact and experience." Freedom and equality had one set of meanings in the agrarian settlements of the seventeenth century, another set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they are destined to have new meanings for every generation. That is the challenge of democracy, and that is the reason why the philosophy of pragmatism is uniquely suited to democratic decision making. When our understandings no longer conform to the facts of lived experience, as has been the case over and over in American history, it is time for critical inquiry and substantive change. Ritual invocations of earlier nostrums, as if such formulas could help solve problems earlier generations could not have imagined, deflect attention from the hard work of democracy.

The need for such hard work derives, at least in part, from the deeply flawed institutional structures put in place by the Constitution. Although subject to amendment, the Constitution nevertheless erected formidable barriers in the way of those who would alter the framework of American governance. Of all the flaws, the most serious was the founders' failure to address the outrageous practice of slavery. In Obama's words, the generation of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison bequeathed to their successors "a form of government unique in its genius yet blind to the whip and the chain." A second antidemocratic feature of the "great compromise" between the North and the slaveholding South was the provision for electing two senators from each state. That arrangement has given those chosen to represent small, sparsely populated states-then Rhode Island and Delaware, now Vermont and Wyoming equal power with the most populous. In 1790 Virginia had ten times the population of Rhode Island; California now has more than seventy times the population of Wyoming. Madison-himself a Virginian opposed this feature of the Constitution because of its antidemocratic quality, as does Obama. From the beginning, the Senate has tended to resist change more vigorously than has the more representative House of Representatives.

The way in which the structure of the Constitution has facilitated some forms of change and blocked others remains as clear as ever in the twenty-first century. Although only slightly more than a year into his first presidential term as I write, Obama has demonstrated already the depth and the perils of his commitment to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy, particularly in his handling of the protracted debate over health care. His flexibility and his willingness to compromise infuriated some of his supporters on the left, and the refusal of his intransigent Republican opponents caused many observers to mock the president's repeated appeals to negotiation, bipartisanship, and creative compromise. As savvy pundits left and right pointed out repeatedly, it takes two to compromise, and efforts to negotiate are futile when the other side shows no interest. But Obama's steadfast insistence that he was open to suggestions, that he was willing to meet with his adversaries and consider their ideas, and his repeated invitations to Republicans to propose alternatives served a purpose that few commentators seemed to notice as the debate wore on. He was displaying, over and over, with a patience that outraged his allies and bewildered his foes, an iron fortitude that his critics mistook for weakness. In The Audacity of Hope and in many of his speeches since he wrote that book, Obama has acknowledged that Americans are deeply divided on the issue of health care. Even those who agreed that our system does not work disagreed bitterly about how to fix it. Obama pointed out that calls for a single-payer plan, a comprehensive, government-run program patterned on national health care systems firmly entrenched elsewhere (such as the plan I made good use of while I was living in England in 2008-2009), had no chance in the United States. Such proposals diverged too dramatically from the traditions and practices to which Americans are accustomed. Americans happy with their doctors and their insurance plans, he promised repeatedly, should be able to keep them. In The Audacity of Hope he proposed trying out multiple options, notably what he called "insurance pools," taking advantage of the nation's federal structure to conduct a controlled experiment in the states. After evaluating the results, the nation could opt for the most successful solution available.

That proposal, advanced several years before Obama was elected president, suggests one way to frame the outcome of the lengthy negotiations in 2009-2010 that culminated in the passage of health care reform legislation. Thanks to Republican Mitt Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, the commonwealth had been conducting for several years an experiment in state-mandated health insurance, with encouraging results. Obama was careful not to replicate his predecessor Bill Clinton's mistake of declaring too early-and too dogmatically-what must be done to solve the problem of health care. He let the debate proceed, at times it seemed interminably, while his supporters shrieked and his foes gloated. The plan Congress eventually adopted in March 2010 the plan Obama worked tirelessly in the final months to enact-more closely resembles the Massachusetts model than any of the other options under consideration. If that model did not suit Republicans in the House or Senate in 2009-2010, not long ago it appealed to one of the most prominent Republican governors and one of the leading candidates for his party's presidential nomination in 2008.

When paroxysms of anger, even threats of violence, followed the passage of health care reform, many Americans expressed surprise. But given the intensity of public disagreement on the issue, that response might have been expected. It also suggested the reasons for, and perhaps even confirmed the wisdom of, Obama's strategy. Rather than proclaiming himself from the outset a champion of the single-payer model, Medicare for all, or at the very least the public option that I and many others considered an attractive solution, Obama instead waited patiently until the deliberative process had run its course and the House and Senate had hammered out their misshapen, unlovely bills. In his State of the Union Address, he pointedly chided Republicans for failing to offer their own ideas and invited their proposals. He later convened a much ballyhooed day-long summit to give Republicans a chance to explain their objections and present alternatives. When those overtures were greeted with even more strident refusals, it became apparent that Obama's sustained efforts to encourage, and to engage in, deliberation as a way to identify a common good had been categorically rejected. At that point he threw himself into the battle.

The result of the protracted congressional debate over health care reform resembles most of the earlier landmarks in American social legislation. Like Social Security in 1935 and voting rights, Medicare, and Medicaid in 1965, the health care reform measure of 2010 is a product of the sausage factory that we call representative democracy. Obviously far from perfect, it will need to be revised as its flaws become clear. It might also be the best bill Obama could have gotten through Congress. As a student of American history, Obama knows that the election of 2008, although historic because it put him in the White House and gave his party a majority in the House and the Senate, was hardly a landslide. The political scientist William Galston, a veteran of Clinton's White House, has pointed out that Obama's own electoral majority of 7 percent was only 1 percent greater than Clinton's in 1992, and Obama was running at the time of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Democrats held sixty seats in the Senate-at least until Massachusetts, in a special election to replace Ted Kennedy after his death, bewilderingly elected an almost unknown Republican (a pickup truck owner and former model named Scott Brown) in place of the longtime champion of health care reform. By contrast, when Roosevelt began his second term in of fice, Democrats held seventy-nine seats in the Senate, the Republicans only sixteen. When Lyndon Johnson pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress, Democrats held sixty-eight seats in the Senate and a 295-140 majority in the House. Moreover, in the 1930s and 1960s both parties were far less ideologically homogeneous than they are now: more than half the Republicans in the House and more than 40 percent in the Senate voted for Medicare.

People who used to complain about the lack of coherent ideology in American party politics have gotten their wish. Some, like the columnist David Broder, are not sure they like the result. More than three quarters of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans now accept the label conservative. Democrats are less unified: 40 percent identify themselves as liberals, another 40 percent as moderates, and 20 percent as conservatives. Comparing the current political situation with those of the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s makes clear, as does the difficulty Democratic congressional leaders faced in rounding up the votes to pass the final version of the bill, that Democrats were hardly in a position to dictate the terms of debate. As has happened repeatedly in American history, even a measure that incorporated many concessions to its opponents barely squeaked into law. It seems unlikely that Republicans will be able to fulfill their promise of repealing a package almost certain to win adherents as quickly as Social Security and Medicare did. Even so, as Obama noted in The Audacity of'Hope, in a democracy "no law is ever final, no battle truly finished," which is why philo sophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy go hand in hand. Principled partisans of pragmatism and democracy are committed to debate, experimentation, and the critical reassessment of results.

For that reason no straight lines run from philosophical pragmatism or deliberative democracy to Obama's positions, strategies, or policies or any others. One of the characteristic features of pragmatism, in fact, has been the incessant disagreements among its adherents. James had been dead only a few years when his legacy was invoked by Randolph Bourne to criticize the endorsement of Wilson's foreign policy by Dewey and by James's students Lippmann, Croly, and DuBois. Every major debate in American politics in the last century has seen selfproclaimed heirs of James or Dewey lining up on opposite sides, usually on multiple sides. Getting pragmatism right does not dictate a certain political position, although the connection between philosophical pragmatism and an experimental, democratic approach to politics is hard to deny. But the forms experimentation and democracy should take are not only appropriate subjects for debate. Wrangling over such questions is what a commitment to pragmatism and democracy means. Obama has demonstrated such a commitment himself, and spirited debates about all aspects of his presidency, from its overall thrust to its tactical maneuvers, are not only bound to continue whatever he does, they are fully consistent with the conception of democracy he has outlined and embraced.

Critics of pragmatism have often faulted the philoso phy because it cannot provide a formula for political action. Although the critique persists, it seems to me rooted in a misconception of what pragmatism can and cannot do. As James explained in the first book explicitly devoted to the philosophy, Pragmatism, it is "a method" that "stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method" and its "genetic theory of what is meant by truth." James and his followers have worked hard to explain that theory of truth, and they have offered different answers. James's foes caricatured his position from the start. They claimed that he was calling true whatever is "convenient" or "pleasant" to believe. To the contrary, James insisted that pragmatists like everyone else are constrained to believe "what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands." Thus, "our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies." Labeling the complaint that pragmatists endorsed wishful thinking "an impudent slander," James summed up his position in these words: "Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else feels himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations?"

When even such explicit replies to his critics proved unavailing, James wrote another book, The Meaning of Truth, to establish that, as he put it bluntly, "an experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true." Pragmatist philosophers have tried from the beginning to balance their opposition to dogma with their commitment to experimentation and tough-minded, sustained, critical analysis of the results of those experiments. James thought individuals should be free to conduct such experiments for themselves whenever the evidence is inconclusive, as in the domain of religious belief. But as a method for determining what experiments society should try, and how the results should be evaluated, pragmatists from James and Dewey to Bernstein and Putnam have recommended democracy.

I want to emphasize that I am not trying to establish a necessary connection between philosophical pragmatism and Obama's politics. The former does not entail the latter. I am arguing instead from Obama's writings back to the philosophy of pragmatism in order to show the congruence between antifoundationalism, historicism, experimentalism, and democracy in his way of thinking. Dissatisfied with universalism yet uneasy with particularity, Obama found fruitful methods in philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy. Searching for guidance about the traditions he could tap to advance his ideals of freedom and equality, he turned to American history. What did he find there?

The animating ideal of the new nation, Obama writes, was "ordered liberty." This phrase derives from the seventeenth-century founders of the New England colonies, and it can be traced forward through the American Revolution to the Whigs and then the Republicans of the 1850s. Many Americans now associate another phrase originating with the Puritans, "a city upon a hill," with Ronald Reagan, as did Republican Party vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. The phrase actually dates from John Winthrop's sermon onboard the ship that brought the first Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Winthrop was referring to the settlers' vow to look after each other in the wilderness, and thereby to transform, by virtue of their exemplary Christian brotherhood, the culture of selfishness they were leaving behind them. Of course Winthrop's fellow Christians also saw fit to embrace the institution of slavery, keeping as slaves both Indians and Africans, a fact that should alert us to the distance separating their sensibilities from our own.

During the years between the Puritans' arrival in North America and the decade of the 1780s, Obama observes, Americans embraced an ideal of "ordered liberty" patterned on the Puritans' model. They pioneered a particular kind of democracy premised on what he calls "a certain humility" and "a rejection of absolute truth." Although the Puritans surely cherished the absolute truth of their Christianity, the institutions they put in place in New England towns enabled them to govern themselves. Those institutions had the unintended effect of destabilizing hierarchical authority in the public sphere and empowering the people. Instead of truth descending from on high, it would bubble up from the unruly deliberations of citizens gathering together in meeting houses to decide for them selves on issues of public concern. The early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrestled with how they could prevent dissent from corroding their common commitments.

Growing dissatisfaction with Winthrop's coercive solution to that problem eventually burst into emigration. Renegade bands of Puritans led by Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker established communities in Rhode Island and Connecticut self-consciously organized around embryonic versions of democracy. There they institutionalized less restrictive practices oriented toward what Rawls would eventually call overlapping consensus. Those who gathered on an island in Narragansett Bay in March 1642, near today's Newport, constituted themselves as "a DEMOCRACIE, or Popular Government," and resolved to create "Just Lawes, by which they will be regulated, and to depute from among themselves such Ministers as shall see them faithfully executed between Man and Man." These New England town meetings, as Tocqueville's New England informants later explained to him, were the "cradle of democracy."

As the first generation of Puritans and equally contentious colonists up and down the Atlantic seaboard experimented with diverse forms of self-government, they gradually accumulated the experience that enabled them to forge different varieties of more or less democratic government during the 1770s and 1780s. As the colonists wrangled with each other in public forums ranging from the town and county to the state and eventually the nation, they slowly and unsteadily developed an unusual degree of competence in the tricky business of making, administering, and altering their own laws. That experience of democracy both required and bolstered the "humility" that comes from knowing that one's own convictions are not always shared by one's neighbors. Moreover, whether one is in the majority or the minority, the awareness that circumstances change and majorities are fleeting also necessitates a rejection of absolute truth at least de facto, and at least in the political sphere. The experience of having to accept the results of elections, as unpalatable as those results might be (and were, at various times, for prominent figures ranging from Winthrop to Madison, both of whom experienced electoral defeat), can help individuals appreciate the power and, at least occasionally, the value of other points of view. From that awareness can-not must, but can-arise a degree of toleration that makes differences acceptable even when they still seem undesirable. That was the sensibility demonstrated so clearly not only in Madison's writings in the 1780s but in his behavior from the revolution through the 1820s, a long period during which he showed himself both a champion of high democratic principles and a cagy partisan operative, the architect of the political party that coalesced around Jefferson and against Hamilton.

Many Americans still prefer the comforting fable of founders who discovered unchanging Truth and distilled it into the Constitution. Others prefer the rousing tale of a noble people duped and disempowered from the start by the duplicitous architects of the Constitution. The record of Americans' squabbles in the early national period, however, shows that neither picture is accurate. Americans from different regions and states did not trust each other very much, and they were not sure their Constitution embodied any principles they should defend when their opponents were in power. They grudgingly agreed to put their faith in the possibility that provisional agreements might emerge through the unpredictable, agonistic experience of democratic contestation and compromise.

Only through that discursive process, as Madison observed, as Tocqueville confirmed in the 1830s, and as Obama clearly understands, did Americans come to know-or rather to create-what they called a common good. They understood that the ideal of a common good appeared and then receded along the horizon. It did not exist before they argued about it, and it changed shape as they tried to implement it. In Obama's words, the framers set up "a community in which a common culture, a common faith, and a well-developed set of civic virtues" enabled citizens to contain the inevitable "contention and strife" on which democracy depends. By experiencing such struggles, he concludes, Americans learned that the individual's "self-interest" is "inextricably linked to the interests of others." Although Obama does not make the point himself, that was just what Madison proposedrepeatedly-in his contributions to the Constitutional Convention and in his essays in the Federalist, not only in numbers 51 and 57 but also in his most often cited but too seldom read essay, Federalist number 10. There Madison explained why deliberation matters.

Because Federalist number 10 is reputed to provide evidence for Madison's hardheaded calculations and his acceptance of the inevitable role of factions, less attention has been paid to the purpose Madison thought such conflicts serve. Like the countless Americans who wrote and rewrote local and state constitutions during the 1770s and 1780s, Madison referred repeatedly to advancing "the public good" and the "good of the whole" as the aim of the Constitution and the result of debates among the people's representatives. And Madison was not alone. Because of our tendency to turn Alexander Hamilton into the champion of centralized authority he later became, it is easy to forget that he was able to ally with Madison to write the Federalist because the two shared enough ideas to blur their disagreements. It was Hamilton, as Obama notes, who wrote that "the jarring of parties" and diverse opinions could "promote deliberation and circumspection." Like the passage from Madison that Obama quotes in Audacity, this passage from Hamilton's Federalist number 70 figures prominently in Sunstein's Partial Constitution, where he uses it to illustrate, as Obama does, the potential fruitfulness of diversity and debate.

Writing several decades later, Tocqueville likewise emphasized the liveliness of disagreements as a distinguishing feature of American public life in Democracy in America. Tocqueville learned a lot from traveling across the new nation, but the most important of his sources were three self-conscious champions of the idea of "ordered liberty" emphasized by Obama, the New Englanders John Quincy Adams, Josiah Quincy, and Jared Sparks. At the heart of Tocqueville's Democracy lay a cluster of arguments about ordered liberty that he took from these informants. Tocqueville stressed Americans' willingness to participate voluntarily in community activities, not because they were uniquely virtuous but because they discerned the meaning of what he called "self-interest properly understood." From experience they learned to see their own individual interests in relation to the interests of their neighbors, and vice versa. Obama the community organizer turned professor of constitutional law has a solid grasp of the dynamics of American democracy. He knows the process whereby individual interests can become transformed into something larger. He learned the theory from Wood and the civic republican revival; he saw-and for several years helped shape-the practice in the far south side of Chicago.

Obama is bewitched by neither the chimerical consensus of Louis Hartz's projected liberal tradition of the 1950s, in which America was defined simply by the universal reverence for property, nor by the shrill originalism of some recent prominent jurists. Instead Obama prefers Tocqueville because he realizes that Americans have always sought a variety of goals consistent with their very different ideals and aspirations. Democracy means squabbling about differences, reaching tentative agreements, then immediately resuming debate. Obama understands that disagreement is more American than apple pie. The hallmarks of early national American political culture, as sketched in The Audacity of Hope, mirror those that appeared in the articles published in the HLR in the early 1990s and updated in the Saguaro seminars a few years later: civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, communitarianism, and, in the forced practice of experimentation, at least the bare outlines of the philosophical pragmatism that took another century to develop.

Obama also sees something many of his most enthusiastic supporters on the left have trouble accepting: the willingness to endure acceptable compromises instead of demanding decisive victory over one's opponents has been a recurring feature of American democratic culture. Tocqueville never tired of contrasting that characteristic to the fatal unwillingness of his fellow French citizens to reach accommodations with each other. Tocqueville explained the success of American democracy by inverting the lessons of France's failure. Whereas the French Revolution foundered on the civil wars that erupted between monarchists and republicans, between champions of the old regime and the new, and between Enlightenment fundamentalists intolerant of religion and Catholics who remained equally intolerant of atheism, Tocqueville marveled at the willingness displayed by Americans of different backgrounds to find common ground. Or at least to tolerate their differences. From a variety of experiences ranging from barn raisings to service on juries, Americans were learning to learn from each other. From the perspec tive of Tocqueville, born into an aristocratic family but bewitched by the magic of democratic equality, that transformation both demanded and further developed an ethical sensibility that recognized the legitimacy of difference and the productive potential of disagreement.

In a similar vein, Obama observes that he became committed to American politics, and to running for elective office, because he believes that something lies beyond the undeniable cynicism and partisanship that prompts so much unpalatable political maneuvering. His inoculation against that cynicism has been tested again and again. Almost immediately after he was elected president, it was tested by the stupefying corruption of his state's chief executive, who apparently sought to sell to the highest bidder Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. It has been tested since his inauguration by Republicans steadfastly resisting his attempts to forge bipartisan agreements and by his fellow Democrats who want him to ram their victory and the less than overwhelming majorities Democrats enjoy in Congress-down their opponents' throats. Obama's rejection of cynicism and his wariness of partisanship have been among the defining features of his political career, and he knows that they have become more difficult to sustain amidst what he calls the "industry of insult" that now drowns out more moderate voices. Obama accounts for his continuing allegiance to civility by invoking 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."

Appropriately enough for someone who has lived and worked on the south side of Chicago, in neighborhoods not that far southeast of Jane Addams's Hull House, Obama's reference to "that which binds us together" echoes the almost identical words that Addams wrote to explain the settlement house movement in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). Using a phrase she attributed to the founder of the English settlement house movement, Addams professed her belief "that the things which make men alike are finer and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily transcend the less essential differences of race, language, creed, and tradition." Addams, like Tocqueville, derived her cultural cosmopolitanism from her democratic ideal. "Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal." Because "the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has peculiar value," the value added by expanding the appreciation of individuals for those unlike themselves. Obama's fondness for this formulation has become even clearer since his election as president. He used it in his Cairo address to the Islamic world and in his Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo, and it is a staple of the message he takes to meetings around the United States. For him it captures the heart of democracy.

Hull House inspired a generation of well-to-do native born women to live and work with recent immigrants from a wide range of different cultures. Since the 1960s critics have maligned and satirized the efforts of such progressive reformers, both men and women, because beneath their language of uplift and harmony many skeptics see schemes of cultural imperialism and social control. Some progressives did participate in efforts to enforce racial segregation, restrict immigration, and prohibit the sale of alcohol, but the progressives were a diverse coalition that also included democratic socialists and the founders of the NAACP. Some commentators sagely contrast the supposedly elitist progressives and the supposedly democratic populists, a distinction almost always made to the detriment of the former that neglects the continuity in central aspects of the groups' agendas. Finding veiled, sinister impulses beneath the efforts of those involved in settlements or in the social gospel-concerted efforts to ameliorate conditions of urban poverty seems to me difficult to do. Settlement house workers such as Addams, whatever else they achieved, did at least begin the process of transforming middle-class attitudes toward cultural diversity and urban poverty, helping to make the former more acceptable and the latter a scandal. If Obama is right in "Why Organize," then perhaps social activists such as Alinsky's community organizers should draw as heavily on Jane Addams's empathy as they do to John L. Lewis's intransigence.

If Obama only indirectly refers to the ideas and example of Jane Addams in The Audacity of Hope, he much more explicitly invokes the progressives' ideas of graduated taxation and government regulation of the economy. These two ideas, embraced by Democrats from the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 through the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, have been largely repudiated since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In recent decades a bipartisan consensus has formed about the desirability of lowering taxes and around the theory disproved by the catastrophic recession that began in 2008-that state regulation of the economy is less efficient than reliance on free markets. There is also widespread agreement among economists, whether they applaud or deprecate the fact, concerning one of the consequences of deregulating the economy and reducing taxes on the wealthy: the gap separating the richest from the poorest Americans has grown dramatically in recent decades.

That gap separating the wealthiest Americans not only from those at the bottom but from those in the middle of the range of income distribution shrank from the New Deal until the oil crisis of 1974. It shrank not by accident or through simple economic growth but because of four deliberate strategies: (1) progressive taxation, (2) economic regulation, (3) support for unionization, and (4) massive investment in higher education. In the aftermath of Reagan's election in 1980, all those strategies have been deemed inconsistent with American principles. At least partly as a consequence, inequality has soared to levels unseen at least since the late nineteenth century and perhaps unprecedented in American history.

Like the progressives and New Dealers before him and like the founders of the American republic before them-Obama sees such increasing economic inequality as inimical to democracy. His critique of inequality in The Audacity of Hope might seem to place him at the edge of twenty-first-century American political debate, but it descends from a long tradition. Although the great champions of independence John Adams and Thomas Jefferson grew to disagree with each other about many things, they never wavered from their conviction that the American experiment with self-government would succeed only if the nation's citizens remained roughly equal in their economic standing. For that reason both opposed the standard European practices of primogeniture and entail. Both saw that such techniques, which provided for passing down estates and fortunes intact to first-born sons, had enabled European aristocrats to consolidate their wealth and their power at the expense of everyone else. Adams and Jefferson agreed that democracy could survive in the United States only if the nation prevented the emergence and persistence of extremes of wealth and poverty such as those of the old world.

Both Adams and Jefferson distrusted Alexander Hamilton's schemes for consolidating the power of bankers because both valued producers of wealth-whether farmers or artisans over those who, in Adams's phrase, only "moved money around." In a long-forgotten letter to Jefferson, Adams described banking as an "infinity of successive felonious larcenies." Given that the financial sector's share of the United States economy has increased dramatically in recent years, perhaps the time has come to resurrect this observation. Coming from the pen of contemporary conservatives' favorite founder, Adams's words ought to figure in debates about regulating the financial sector. Whatever the reasons behind investment banks' dramatic increase in revenues, ever-increasingly inequality, as Adams and Jefferson agreed, is disastrous for democracy. First steps toward Rawls's ideal of a "propertyowning democracy" were taken in early America, and the new nation continued in that direction thanks to the ideas of Adams, Jefferson, and other members of their generation who ensured that the United States would never permit a hereditary aristocracy to develop. Progressives and New Dealers contributed the ideas of a minimum wage, graduated taxation, economic regulation, collective bargaining, and expanded access to higher education in order to update that original American commitment to economic equality-at least relative to the nations of Europe.

Obama also explicitly endorses the judgment of the quintessential progressive lawyer, the "people's attorney" Louis Brandeis. "In a democracy," Brandeis wrote, "the most important office is the office of citizen" because democracy requires all individuals to see beyond their narrow personal interest and attend to the common good. Obama's approach to economic and political reform essentially extends that of the progressive reformers who sought to rein in corporate power by various means. Brandeis wanted to attack "bigness" directly, through antimonopoly measures. Others preferred the "Wisconsin idea" of nonpartisan public servants engaging in research to identify problems and mobilize public resources to address them. From that orientation emerged the independent regulatory agency. The idea of a body operating in the interest of consumers originated in the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. It was reborn in Wisconsin in the 1910s, then exported to other states and the federal government.

Progressive reformers adopted a wide range of strategies, but in the economic realm they built on that idea of regulation in the public interest until the retrenchment of government in the 1920s. Herbert Hoover's "associative state," which effectively empowered business and enriched businessmen at the expense of government authority, contributed to the skewed income distribution that helped cause the catastrophic Great Depression by reducing the buying power of most Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt, after initially resisting the progressives' approach, resurrected it in the New Deal. In Obama's words, the Social Security Act of 1935 was "the centerpiece of the new welfare state, a safety net that would lift almost half of all senior citizens out of poverty, provide unemployment insurance for those who had lost their jobs, and provide modest welfare payments to the disabled and the elderly poor." Although it was full of holes, the Social Security Act represented a beginning, and as it expanded it has provided much wider coverage, particularly for senior citizens. That process of gradual expansion and consolidation might provide a model for health care reform in the coming decades.

Roosevelt proposed a more dramatic expansion of the New Deal when he laid out his plan for a more generous scheme of social provision in his second bill of rights, a program he announced in his State of the Union Address in 1944. In The Audacity of Hope, when Obama listed the concerns that animated citizens he met while preparing to run for the United States Senate in 2002, he outlined essentially the same program on which Roosevelt campaigned for reelection almost six decades before: a living wage, health insurance, good schools, safety from criminals at home and enemies abroad, a clean environment, "time with their kids," and "a chance to retire with some dignity and respect." Like Roosevelt, Obama judged those hopes modest and, for a nation as rich as America, achievable. Roosevelt died before he had the chance to fight for those programs at the end of World War II. Many historians doubt he would have made the effort, or that he would have succeeded had he tried. But he did achieve such goals in the GI Bill, and extending its provisions for all Americans seems to me a struggle he might have thought worth waging had he lived out his fourth term in office. Obama's friend Sunstein has recently made an ambitious and convincing case for that conjecture in his book The Second Bill of Rights, an account consistent with Obama's own observations in The Audacity of'Hope concerning FDR and the New Deal.

Obama has no illusions about the mid-twentiethcentury Democratic Party. He understands it harbored and humored vicious southern racists who weighed every initiative against their overriding commitment to preserving the South's regime of white supremacy. He knows that the Democratic Party coalition was held together by inspiring ideals "a vision of fair wages and benefits" and hard-nosed calculations "patronage and public works"and above all by "an ever-rising standard of living." Although Obama applauds the achievements of the New Deal, he acknowledges its limitations and not only its failure to tackle institutionalized racism. In the 1930s Roosevelt was denounced as too timid by Dewey, Niebuhr, and their allies on the radical left, who criticized him for failing to make America socialist when he had the chance. Conservatives have denounced him ever since for doing just that. Rejecting both of those exaggerated characterizations, Obama credits the New Deal for achieving what was politically possible. His interpretation faithfully echoes and updates Carl Degler's still persuasive account, in Out of Our Past, which was the interpretation of the New Deal to which Boesche first exposed Obama at Occidental. According to Degler and other historians who share this judgment, including William Leuchtenburg and, more recently, David M. Kennedy, Roosevelt brought to the United States lasting measures such as the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance, assistance for the disabled, and regulation of the failed banking system, all of which prevented the nation's economy from slipping further into chaos. As Obama observes correctly, the New Deal addressed the scandal of child labor, established the forty-hour workweek and the minimum wage, and provided unprecedented support for unionization.

Such steps were intended, in the words of Roosevelt that Obama endorses, to ensure "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear." Although accomplishing all that took not just a couple of years but most of Roosevelt's four terms in office, and necessitated very skillful negotiating with adversaries within as well as outside his own party, the accomplishments of the New Deal nevertheless fell far short of Roosevelt's ultimate goals, the second bill of rights, on which he campaigned successfully for reelection in 1944. These programs, however, did establish a precedent the legitimacy of social provision which enabled later generations to extend those principles and expand the range of Americans covered by those programs. Obama reports in The Audacity of Hope that he carried with him similar aspirations as he entered the United States Senate.

Since the autumn of 2008 Obama has repeatedly emphasized the responsibility of the federal government to return to its earlier practice of regulating the American financial sector It has become clear to many observers although some disagree-that the bipartisan mania for deregulation during the 1990s helped usher in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Obama has pledged to address the problems caused by that deregulation, and he has brought Sunstein, Tribe, and others to Washington to help spearhead the effort. But it is far from clear whether Obama's words will translate into renewed and effective government oversight of the financial sector in the interest of American consumers. After all, other central figures in his administration, including Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, helped facilitate some of the changes now considered toxic during the years they served in the Clinton administration. Neither Geithner nor Summers has indicated that he has changed his mind about the steps that were taken in the 1990s.

It is not yet clear what principles of political economy Obama deems appropriate for the United States now that the pressures of globalization have made it impossible for Americans to escape economic pressures exerted by nations and corporations around the world. How he intends to translate the endorsements of progressive and New Deal policies in The Audacity of Hope into a new set of Democratic policies remains murky. Has he considered the bold vision he encountered in his courses with Roberto Unger, a radically decentralized economy in which public funding of private initiatives empowers the creative potential of ordinary citizens? Or have the economic advisers Obama has brought into his administration fulfilled the prophesy of Frank Davis? Having been "trained," in other words, has he now been yanked by the chain of power back from the commitment to economic democracy proclaimed in The Audacity of'Hope to the tepid economic centrism of Democratic Party insiders since the 1980s? It is too soon to say, but the early indications sug gest there may be reason for concern. Will Obama resist, or will he succumb to a vision of political economy that places the interests of investment bankers over those of unemployed job seekers? His long-term legacy will depend on the answer.

It is even less clear what levers Obama thinks can be pulled to address the yawning gulf between the ever-richer rich and not only the poorest Americans but also the middle class that has been growing relatively poorer for the last thirty years. If Obama envisions a strategy for moving in the direction of Roosevelt's vision of a second bill of rights, or of either Rawls's or Unger's version of a property-owning democracy, or of directly addressing the problems of poverty that he described so vividly in his account of Chicago's far south side in Dreams from My Father, he has not yet revealed it. Merely rolling back his Republican predecessors' tax cuts for the wealthy, even though that suggestion was enough to spark controversy during the campaign of 2008, may prove inadequate unless it is accompanied by other measures such as a genuinely robust, and enormously expensive, jobs program. If the big banks were deemed too big to fail, as Obama's erstwhile ally Cornel West has observed, why shouldn't we say the same thing about unemployed American citizens floundering in the absence of work? If the founders were right to believe-as did progressives, New Dealers, and champions of the Great Society, and as Obama himself wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he believes as well-that democracy requires at least rough economic equality, then the United States for several decades has been slipping further and further away from one of its central animating principles. Whatever Obama's political economy proves to be, his diagnosis of the problems of financial malfeasance and his initial proposals for its solution in The Audacity of Hope echo those of the progressives and New Dealers who constructed the regulatory apparatus that has been largely dismantled since 1980. Whether he attempts to live up to that commitment will prove one of the defining features of his presidency.

Unlike most of his colleagues in the Democratic Party, however, Obama has also acknowledged that regulation can fail, or go too far. In one of the most striking passages in The Audacity of Hope, he credits the Reagan revolution with removing some constraints that had ceased to serve a purpose but persisted only because of inertia and dogma. Distinctive among Democrats in recent decades, Obama criticizes members of his own party who have allowed themselves to be boxed in by their automatic opposition to all Republican Party initiatives. As a result Democrats often resist using market principles even when they are the appropriate tool for solving some social problems. Obama concedes that even the firmest of progressive principles yield only rough guidelines, not recipes or rule books. Like many of his teachers at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School, and like his colleague Sunstein in particular, Obama sees in the philosophy of pragmatism an escape from ideological straitjackets of multiple hues and a warrant for experimenting with different policies to see what works.

As I have noted, an important conceptual difference separates philosophical pragmatism, which emphasizes experimentation on principle as a way of testing provisional truths, from a vulgar pragmatism that bends before every breeze and has no principles to compromise. Philosophical pragmatists admit uncertainty, proclaim fallibilism, and welcome diverse points of view. For that reason, it can be hard to distinguish in practice between philosophical pragmatists willing to experiment and vulgar pragmatists who compromise for the sake of compromise, who seek accommodation merely to avoid conflict rather than to achieve results. In The Audacity of'Hope, Obama makes clear that he understands the distinction. Only the historical record will show whether it remains equally clear in the Obama presidency.

Obama's criticism of one particular feature of the growing economic inequality in the United States is also a clear echo reverberating from the Progressive Era. When he notes in The Audacity of'Hope that the pay of chief executive officers in America skyrocketed from 42 times the pay of the average worker in 1980 to 262 times in 2005 and by the time he was elected in 2008 it had become nearly 50 percent higher than that and when he calls for renewed attention to economic regulation in the interest of the common good, he is invoking themes from earlier in the twentieth century. He notes that the purchasing power of average American workers remained flat between 1971 and 2001, almost certainly the longest period of stagnation in American history and a fact surprisingly little known and little discussed in public debate. During that period, the income of the best-paid Americans (the top hundredth of 1 percent) soared by nearly 500 percent. Wealth distribution is far more unequal now than it was in the 1970s, Obama observes accurately, which means that "levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age" of the late nineteenth century. It was that problem that populists and progressive reformers set out to address. In The Audacity of'Hope, as he did in the 2008 electoral campaign, Obama endorses the view of the fabulously wealthy Warren Buffet, who has pointed out that when he pays a smaller fraction of his income in taxes than does his secretary, the United States faces a serious problem of fairness. Even before the current recession Obama wrote that "our safety net is broken," and when he calls for equalizing the shares paid by the rich and the not so rich to fix that problem of unfairness, he is not importing ideas of socialism. Instead he is speaking a venerable American vernacular of egalitarianism, the language of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; of Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, and Woodrow Wilson; and of John Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

Obama points out bluntly that there are no economic laws driving the increase in CEO compensation in recent decades. People in those positions worked just as hard before 1980. In nations where they are paid a fraction as much, they appear to work just as hard-and just as effectively, if not more effectively than in the United States. Obama insists instead that the change has been cultural and that it will be reversed only when we return to earlier American ideas of justice as fairness. To make the point in The Audacity of Hope, Obama does not invoke Rawls's difference principle, which holds that inequalities must benefit the least advantaged, even though it would provide a sturdy argument for his case. Instead he invokes his mother's insistence on empathy, her advice that he should imagine himself in the position of those he was tempted to bully as a child. From his essay "Why Organize" through the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stressed the importance, for citizens in a democracy, of seeing the world from the perspective of those who lack privileges many Americans take for granted.

Americans who profess to be untroubled by the nation's growing inequality, Obama writes in The Audacity of'Hope, need just such reminders about the old-fashioned and only recently unfashionable virtues of sympathy and empathy. Strikingly, when the first opportunity came for Obama to nominate a justice for the Supreme Court, he singled out the importance of empathy as an indispensable characteristic. Equally strikingly, that emphasis came under attack when it was discovered that his nominee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, had acknowledged that her status as a Latina born in Puerto Rico gives her a particular outlook on the world. Obama has demonstrated his own awareness of the cultural particularity of all experience; seen in that light, Sotomayor's comment seemed uncontroversial, even banal. In his books Obama contrasts his experience as a man with a white mother and a black father to the experiences of both whites and blacks. "I can't help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage," he writes in The Audacity of Hope, "forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives." But to those for whom the principle of neutrality represents the royal road to Truth, the observations that all experience is particular and historical, not universal, and that all knowledge is perspectival and partial, not objective, are not only unfamiliar but deeply troubling. Fortunately for Sotomayor, her sophisticated understanding of her positionality could be hushed up because her record as a judge could be shown to demonstrate that her background and sense of self had not "skewed" her decisions. Only then could she sail through her Senate hearings and be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

Obama's insistence that justice as fairness should be considered in economic terms rather than merely as equal treatment before the law is hardly a novel position. Nor is it un-American, despite charges sparked by his brief exchange during the campaign with the fleetingly famous "Joe the Plumber." Instead, as I have noted, such concerns have surfaced repeatedly in American history from the eighteenth century until the present. Insistence that successful democratic government requires not only political equality but at least rough economic equality has been a persistent feature of American political thought and practice ever since the Puritans' strictures against excessive wealth. Contemporaries who hearken back to a simpler time of firmer principles might want to ponder the Puritans' strict sumptuary laws, the rules they used to guard against excessive consumption or displays of wealth as signs of sinful indulgence.

Of course not all Americans in the seventeenth or eighteenth century commanded equal resources. A great gulf separated landowner and successful attorney John Adams from landless servants, although it might be worth noting that a large gap also separated Adams himself from his shoemaker father. An even greater gulf separated Jefferson and Madison from poor farmers in Virginia, and it is obvious that an enormous chasm separated southern planters from their slaves. But unlike more recent conservatives, who make a virtue of inequality and claim that authentic Americans should see it as a spur to industry and productivity, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Americans worried obsessively about the problem of great wealth because they feared it was inimical to democracy. They believed that an America marked by enormous fortunes would become an America too similar to the monarchies of Europe to remain a democracy.

Challenging inequality, far from manifesting a "socialist" or otherwise un-American propensity, instead de scends in a direct line from the deepest and richest traditions of American culture. From the days when John Winthrop urged his fellow Puritans to "abridge ourselves of our superfluities" so that every member of the community could have enough to survive, the impulse to ensure that wealth is shared fairly is a fundamental American value that has only recently-and in increasingly brazen terms been decried. It is also, as Winthrop did not hesitate to point out, the central message of the Christian scriptures. To pretend otherwise, which has been one of the most shrill and insistent claims of many selfproclaimed American traditionalists in recent decades, is to ignore not only the Beatitudes but also a central feature of American political and intellectual history that dates back to the early seventeenth century. It was hatred of the privileges accompanying great wealth that motivated many Europeans to emigrate to America in the first place. Anxiety about the consequences of enormous fortunes for popular government has animated American political movements ever since the 1770s, when the first American patriots challenged the prerogatives of wealthy British merchants and aristocrats whom they sent scurrying back to Britain or north to Canada. No citizen of the United States need apologize for criticizing inequality; it is instead the defense of inequality as beneficial that betrays the traditional American ideal of equality.

Obama also speaks the language of the social gospel, one of the most vigorous of the strands in the progressive reform coalition. In The Audacity of'Hope, he criticizes his fellow Democrats for turning away from America's rich religious traditions in terms similar to those he used in his 2006 Washington address to Jim Wallis's conference "Building a Covenant for a New America." In The Audacity of'Hope, Obama recounts his own decision to join the Chicago congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the fiery preacher whose stinging criticism of American racism was to cause Obama such trouble in the spring of 2008. Neither Obama's mother nor her parents were churchgoers. His years in the primarily Islamic nation of Indonesia, where he spent two years in a public school and two more in a Catholic school, did not leave any imprint of either Muslim or Christian religious traditions. His first sustained engagement with organized religion came when he worked with the Catholic-sponsored Developing Communities Project in Chicago after graduating from Columbia. Although he reports being attracted to the idea that Christ had preached a social gospel and worked with the poor, Obama himself remained cool to the idea of religious faith. In Chicago he respected the dedication of the Catholics working in neighborhoods surrounding the grim Altgeld Gardens housing project, where he learned the ropes as a community organizer, and he was more puzzled than chastened when a black Baptist pastor told him that allying with Catholics placed him "on the wrong side of the battle."

From Obama's perspective at the time, all the rival religious doctrines seemed equally and excessively dogmatic. He realized that he was "a heretic," or perhaps not even that: "for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt." In the early stages of his work in Chicago, Obama was whipsawed between the cynicism of Gerald Kellman, the secular Jewish radical who hired him as an organizer (and who later converted to Catholicism himself), and his own distaste for the rivalry between the Catholic and Protestant congregations that had trouble working together on behalf of Chicago's poor. Obama dismissed the ideal of Christian fellowship as just another illusion, another spell to be broken. But slowly he began to change his mind.

Obama describes a meeting at which a few members of the Altgeld community reflected on the deep sadness they felt when they contrasted the memories of their own childhoods, poor but joyous, to the joyless mood of the children they knew. According to Wilbur, a janitor and self-appointed lay deacon in the Catholic parish of St. Catherine's, such children never smiled. Instead they seemed "worried all the time, mad about something. They got nothing they trust." Other residents chimed in. Before the meeting a woman named Mary, one of the few whites in the neighborhood, had asked Obama what motivated him to work in the community. For her, for Wilbur, and for their fellow Catholics, the passion to take Christ's message to the poor sprang from their faith. When she asked why Obama was there, he could muster no good answer. But after the meeting closed with a simple prayer for "the courage to turn things around," something inside him clicked. In the presence of others forging community from their shared anxieties and aspirations, Obama reports that he sensed "a feeling of witness, of frustration and hope," which passed through the gathering and at the end "hovered in the air, static and palpable." He sought out Mary and told her, "I don't think our reasons are all that different." Under the pressure of changing conditions, his perspective was shifting.

If Obama's own personal experience of community in Chicago gradually altered his attitude toward religious faith, firsthand experiences of the consequences of the absence of community made an even deeper impression. The random violence of gangs and a sobering encounter with armed and trigger-happy teenagers prompted his own epiphany: whereas even as a disaffected teen he had felt tied to a social order that enabled and forced him to discipline his "unruly maleness," to internalize the empathy and the guilt that restrained his impulses, the youths of Chicago's far south side lacked just those ties. They had "shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt," and as a result they were breaking away from the rest of the community and forming another clan, "speaking a different tongue, living by a different code." He saw in their eyes the same deadness Wilbur saw: such youths "just don't care." Understanding their contempt for the norms he had taken for granted made Obama realize, for the first time, that he was now afraid and why he had reason to be.

As he struggled to connect with the communities of the far south side and deploy their resources against the gangs' nihilism, Obama was told that he might have better luck if he had a "church home" of his own. But he was not tempted. His skepticism was deeply rooted. He suspected that even the older church-going blacks by now understood, as he did, the hollowness of the dreams that had prompted them to join the civil rights movement. They thought then that they had "marched for a higher purpose." They had mobilized "for rights and for principles and for all God's children." Eventually, though, they must have "realized that power was unyielding and principles unstable." At that moment, feeling enlightened by his own certainty of their disillusionment, he thought they must have understood that nothing had changed and that nothing would change. The enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, persisting in residential and educational segregation and limited economic opportunity, continued to constrain the life chances of almost all African Americans. Briefly sharing the pessimism he projected onto black Chicagoans, Obama began worrying that the only freedom available was the freedom of escape. His own frustration, coupled with a yearning for some sense of accomplishment, prompted Obama himself to begin thinking about swapping community organizing for law school. He could and would return, he told himself, equipped with the expertise he lacked. He would be in a better position to get results when he brought back the Promethean fire of the law.

During the three years he spent working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama became acquainted with more and more ministers and priests, more and more church-based social activists. Many of them earned his grudging admiration. Some were corrupt, others laughably inept, but most seemed genuinely committed to serving their congregations. Still he remained "a reluctant skeptic," unsure of his motives, "wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won." While he was thinking about law school, Obama decided to investigate Trinity United Church of Christ, the church of Jeremiah Wright, a successful pastor recommended to him by several colleagues as a possible ally and resource. Belonging to a black Protestant congregation might not only slake his thirst for purpose, as he described it to Wallis's conference in Washington in the summer of 2006, it might also strengthen his ties to the black Chicagoans he was trying to organize. When they first met, Wright told Obama that some observers considered his church too radical and others thought it too moderate, some too bourgeois and others too working class. Obama was impressed by Wright's straightforward embrace of the traditions of black Christianity and his deliberate attempt to blend Christian and African elements in his church services. Obama read the "Black Value System" adopted by the Trinity congregation and liked what he saw. Its commitment to Christian activism and its emphasis on community, family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and respect resonated with his own maturing values-and with those his mother had worked so diligently to infuse in her young son.

Obama attended services at Trinity on a Sunday when Wright preached a sermon entitled "The Audacity to Hope." The message pierced Obama's armor of uncertainty. Listening to Wright, Obama writes, he felt for the first time the desire to surrender himself to a divine power that could help him, as it seemed others in the church had been helped, to recover from the knowledge that they had reached "a spiritual dead end," that they had been "cut off from themselves," that on their own they could not escape the desperation enveloping their communities. The black church embodied centuries of struggle, Obama realized, and Trinity seemed to him "a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world." As a child, Wright explained in his sermon, he had failed to understand the point of religion himself. Not until he learned about the vertical dimension of his relation to God did the horizontal dimension of social service make sense. One member of the congregation that Sunday could feel pieces of a puzzle fitting into place. As the Trinity church service concluded, through tears that surprised him Obama "felt God's spirit beckoning me."

Obama links his own odyssey as a religious seeker to those of other Americans who have embraced religious traditions as adults. He notes that nearly all Americans consider themselves in some sense religious, a fact that bewilders secular Europeans and distinguishes the United States from the nations of Western Europe perhaps more decisively than any other feature of contemporary American culture. In discussions after I delivered preliminary versions of this analysis of Obama's books to audiences in British and European universities and civic groups from late 2008 through early 2010, I almost always encountered the same assertion: Obama must have converted to Christianity simply in order to make himself more palatable to the American electorate. Although plausible, this hypothesis seems to me unconvincing. First, although it might have helped Obama to have a "church home" had he continued working in Chicago, he was already expecting to leave for law school in a few months. Second, Obama must have known that joining Jeremiah Wright's congregation would carry risks as well as potential rewards for an ambitious public servant perhaps already contemplating electoral politics. Third, given his lifelong distrust of organized religion and his contempt for expedient conversions, it seems to me likelier that Obama converted from conviction than for strategic purposes. Perhaps his motives cannot be unwrapped; perhaps one reason need not rule out others.

Obama himself makes no attempt to disentangle the various strands that led to his decision to join Wright's congregation. Instead he merely relates his experience at Trinity. In the spirit of William James's Varieties of'Reli- gious Experience, Obama's conversion narrative rests on no metaphysical or theological foundation but only on his own felt experience. That is enough. It may be true that many devoutly religious American voters are not yet prepared to send an atheist to the White House. Obama's books as well as his speeches, however, indicate that his faith rests on a mature, well-considered commitment to African American traditions of Christianity rather than a desire simply to please religious voters. As he expressed it for those attending Wallis's 2006 "Building a Covenant" conference, his Christian faith has guided his own values and beliefs.

It is no surprise that people without religious faith are skeptical about those who profess such faith. When Obama casually observed, at a crucial moment during the primary elections for the Democratic Party nomination in the spring of 2008, that some Americans "cling to" religion as an anchor against cultural change and economic reform, some observers saw in his remarks evidence that, beneath the veneer, he too remains an agnostic. But his explanation of his comments, like his account of own conversion in Dreams from My Father, instead distinguished between religious traditions as a refuge against a changing world and as an inspiration for engaging with it.

The significance of that difference may not matter or may seem strained to atheists and fundamentalist Christians certain of the truth of their own very different convictions. But it is hardly a trivial distinction. Obama's self description as "Christian and skeptic" grows from a hardy strain of nondogmatic Christian political and social activism. That tradition originates in the Gospels, descends through bands of medieval friars, and has persisted for centuries among religious and lay Christians who seek neither glory nor glamour but only to do God's will, as they understand it, by serving the poor in a spirit of humility. It bears a striking resemblance to the form of religiosity that Lincoln expressed in the final years of his life, as Obama himself has noted. Rather than maligning communities of faith, Obama's comment about clinging to religion expressed the bewilderment shared by most progressives that so many Americans whose economic situations continue to deteriorate direct their anger against enemies (such as defenders of the right to abortion, gay marriage, and gun control) who exercise no real power over their lives instead of mobilizing against economic arrangements sustained by a plutocracy that wields real power quietly. The New Deal coalition fractured in the 1970s not only because of cultural fissures but because the American economy began to sag, and working-class whites began seeking explanations for their declining prospects. As the culture wars dating from those years have dragged on, Democrats have been unable to build from conditions of economic stagnation an electoral coalition as hardy as Roosevelt's, a vigorous movement animated by what Obama terms "economic populism."

Obama's off-the-cuff comment about people clinging to religion, based on his shrewd understanding of his party's conundrum, was spun by pundits into a denunciation of religion inconsistent with his own Christian faith and practice and his earlier expositions of his view of the relation between politics and religion. The charge stuck because of a much deeper and more significant rift among Americans professing religious belief. The very gulf to which Obama pointed in his Washington address now threatened to swallow his candidacy.

The gulf now separating the social and political as well as theological beliefs of liberal, often highly educated, and frequently affluent Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from their more conservative and frequently less affluent coreligionists, and especially from evangelical Protestants, has continued to widen. Because of that divide, many believers on the left now have more in common with each other than they do with other members of their own denominations, with whom they disagree on many controversial questions. To many traditionalists, such progressives like Obama himself-hardly seem to be religious at all, because so much of what they embrace varies so starkly from those values that culturally conservative Americans cherish. Given that wider context, it was not difficult for his critics to portray Obama's frustration with his political difficulties as opposition to religion itself, at least religion as members of many American denominations understand it. American history (like every nation's history) is distinctive for many reasons, but the presence of multiple religious traditions, none of which can plausibly claim official status, is surely among the most striking features of the United States, as Obama understands. Inasmuch as the recent cross-denominational split dividing liberals from conservatives erodes that long-standing tradition of religious pluralism, it threatens to weaken Americans' toleration of diversity and reinforce the polarization that Obama, like Robert Putnam and other students of civil society, considers so debilitating, and that impedes the operation of Rawls's overlapping consensus.

The risks attached to Obama's choice of Jeremiah Wright's church became clear later in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Had Obama not delivered his memorable speech on race in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, his candidacy might well have gone down on the shoals of Wright's hard-edged anger. To me and to many Americans, Wright's rage over American race relations seemed understandable and entirely justified. To us, Obama's repudiation of his pastor suggested that he might be pandering to American Pollyannas who pretend the nation's race problem has been solved. But after rereading and reflecting on it, I have changed my mind about Obama's speech. It provides one of the clearest expositions of his attitude toward the contingency and partiality of cultural values. In his illuminating, blow-by-blow account of Obama's path to the presidency, his campaign manager David Plouffe confirms what others said at the time. For his Philadelphia speech Obama did not need the assistance of his speech writer Jon Favreau, and not only because Obama remained the "best writer in the campaign," in Plouffe's words. Obama told Plouffe, "I already know what I want to say in this speech. I've been thinking about it for twenty years." It shows.

Obama began his already classic address by taking a leaf from Wright's own book, noting accurately that some Americans considered him too black to run for president while others considered him not black enough. He acknowledged that he is not African American but the child of a black African father and a white American mother. He explained that he understands the difference. He also made clear that he understands the reasons why so many African Americans share Wright's anger about the continuing consequences of slavery for blacks in the United States. Blacks typically experience inferior schools, encounter greater obstacles to employment and affluence, and confront persistent racism that poisons even the lives of many blacks who manage to succeed economically. Nothing in Obama's Philadelphia speech soft-peddles those stark facts. But instead of freezing that reality and authorizing that perception, Obama contextualized it.

He shifted his focus from the lives and perceptions of African Americans, perceptions grounded in generations of painful experience, to the resentments of white Americans. He pointed out that most whites have been struggling economically for decades. As they watched a few blacks rise to positions of prominence, they resented the government programs that they had been told, ever since Reagan's election as governor of California, were responsible for their own stagnating conditions. Such whites were angry too, and they had grown accustomed to directing that anger against blacks. From their point of view, many African Americans lived irresponsibly and took unfair advantage of welfare and affirmative action programs.

In his Philadelphia speech, Obama acknowledged the gulf dividing the experience of blacks and whites in America. He also acknowledged the reasons why they saw each other as they did. Different realities had shaped their different perceptions. In other words, he was practicing the perspectivalism and cultural interpretivism he had learned in school. But rather than preaching such principles to his audience, he characteristically personalized that cultural division and brought it to life. Although he disagreed with Jeremiah Wright's "incendiary language," he could not disown the pastor who had awakened his Christian faith, married him and baptized his children, and "been like family to me." Nor could Obama disown his white grandmother, even though she had expressed a fear of black men who passed her on the street and sometimes used "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." She loved him "as much as she loves anything in the world," and his love for her was equally unconditional. His own bonds to his black pastor and his white grandmother, just as much as his occasional unhappiness with their ways of thinking, talking, and acting, encapsulated the complexity of American race relations. They were both right, and they were both wrong. Americans had to learn to see both sides, as decision makers in any conflict had to do. Americans had to suspend judgment, even though they wanted passionately to accuse, to hate, to renounce. They had to understand, as Obama himself had learned to understand, that resolving conflicts requires, first, resisting the temptation to state one's beliefs dogmatically; second, seeing the situation from the point of view of one's adversary; and third, empathizing across differences in order to find common ground.

Obama's sharpest criticism of Wright revealed one more dimension of his sensibility. The two agreed on the history of American race relations. Obama indicted slavery and elaborated on its enduring legacy of hatred and injustice. But he could not accept Wright's judgment that America was perpetually locked in the stranglehold of Jim Crow. Wright spoke "as if America was static," as if the tragic problems of the past would persist inevitably and indefinitely into the future. Instead the "true genius of the nation," Obama insisted, "is that America can change." From his high school days in Honolulu to his presidential campaign, Obama had wrestled with the world-weary advice of well-meaning friends and political radicals who assured him that racism would remain as bad as it had always been. He never bought it. As a teenager Obama could not share his black friends' comments about "white folks" without thinking about the love of his mother and her parents. When his education continued in college and law school, he learned another set of reasons to doubt the cynics. He learned that the United States has been changing from the moment the nation ratified its Constitution. That commitment to change is written into the nation's DNA. When Wright froze American racism into a fixed feature of the national culture, he was betraying two principles Obama embraced: democracy and historicism.

After the Philadelphia speech, some of Obama's critics on the left excoriated him for abandoning Wright. Obery Hendricks, Jr., wrote that Obama subjected Wright to "a humiliating public betrayal." He compared the ostracizing of Wright to white supremacists' gruesome 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, as brutal and sadistic an example of human cruelty as the American historical record contains. Clarence Thomas, when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, accused those opposing his confirmation of engineering a "high-tech lynching." Thomas went on to be confirmed, but this time, according to Hendricks, the term fit: as a result of the media frenzy fed by Obama's speech, Wright suffered "social death." Others on the left accused Obama of equating blacks' and whites' resentments, as though centuries of suffering under slavery and Jim Crow were somehow balanced by the frustrations felt by whites in recent decades.

Obama's critics on the right, by contrast, charged that he had excused Wright's anti-Americanism and thrown America under the bus. From conservatives' perspective, Obama had it backwards. When he urged struggling whites to direct their resentments against "a corporate culture rife with inside dealing" and "short-term greed," a political culture "dominated by lobbyists and special interests," and "economic policies that favor the few over the many," he was blaming the free-enterprise system for problems that American conservatives thought only a capitalist system untainted by government intrusions could solve. In other words, both the Left and the Right wanted Obama to endorse their own diagnosis of America's ills; neither side was willing to give an inch. The dogmatic statement of beliefs, the rejection of opponents' perspectives, and the denial of empathy across the racial divide characterized some of the most strident responses to Obama's speech from Left and Right alike.

Obama closed his Philadelphia speech with a little story about a young white woman named Ashley. When his South Carolina volunteers were explaining why they had joined the Obama campaign, Ashley told the story of her mother, who had to file for bankruptcy after she was diagnosed with cancer when Ashley was nine. Ashley assured her mother she loved mustard and relish sandwiches, the cheapest food available, so they could survive until her mother could return to work. Ashley said she had volunteered for Obama because she wanted a health care system that would help other children and their parents. Others in the room gave their reasons and endorsed their favorite causes, until finally they came to an older black man who didn't point to any particular issue or even mention Obama himself. In Obama's words, "He simply says to everyone in the room, 'I am here because of Ashley."' Obama conceded that such human connections are not enough. They will not improve health care or the economy or education. But "that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man," he concluded, "is where we start."

When Obama told Plouffe he had been working on the Philadelphia speech for twenty years, he was right. Placing the speech in the context of arguments drawn from civic republicanism and communitarianism, from dis course ethics and deliberative democracy, from historicism and Rawls's overlapping consensus, from Geertz's hermeneutics and the neopragmatists' emphasis on fallibilism, it is easy to see in the speech most of the principal components of Obama's worldview. If he did not convince all his critics and he certainly did not the speech did enable him to express his deep-seated commitments to listening, respecting those who disagree, and valuing empathy as a necessary if not sufficient condition for democratic politics. In the poignant story of "that young white girl and that old black man," Obama encapsulated central features of his sensibility and of his campaign.

Obama's religious conversion had enabled him to put together several forms of realism, and it is not surprising that commentators have noted the Augustinian or Niebuhrian quality of his Christianity. From his Indonesian stepfather, Obama learned that the world is a cruel, unyielding place in which individuals survive by playing the cards they are dealt. From his grandfather's friend Frank Davis, he learned that for blacks the fact of racism cannot be avoided no matter how hard one tries. From his mentors and his associates in Chicago organizing, he learned that the secret to politics is power. From Wright, he learned that Christianity is a fighting faith, a source of resolution that can stiffen backbones in the face of enduring hatred. Christian love, Obama came to understand, requires more than his mother's and grandfather's gauzy, wistful dreams of human brotherhood. It requires instead a commitment to justice that is deep enough-fierce enough to enable one to withstand resistance without abandoning hope. "I'm skinny, but I'm tough," Obama is fond of telling crowds. That toughness manifests itself in an imperturbability that some critics find eerie and others maddening. It can surely be traced to the hard knocks of his childhood, the steady diet of rebuffs and failures he experienced in Chicago organizing, and the matter-of- factness of his friends on the far south side and his relatives in Kenya, whose firsthand knowledge of the world's injustice did not break their spirit. Important as all those influences have been, Dreams from My Father shows that Obama's steeliness in the face of opposition comes just as powerfully from the resources of African American Christianity, a tradition that has sustained people suffering from and struggling against forms of evil far deeper than those he has had to confront in his own life.

In light of his own religious faith as well as his sense of the spirituality of the American public, Obama has stressed repeatedly his bewilderment that so many of his fellow Democrats refuse to talk about religion. That refusal, he writes in The Audacity of'Hope, not only has left such Democrats vulnerable to cultural conservatives' charges of Godlessness, it has also robbed his party of one of the most valuable resources available in public life. "I think Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values," Obama writes. "It is the language of values that people use to map their world. It is what can inspire them to take action, and move them beyond their isolation." Like the overwhelming majority of Americans out side the small subculture of academic life, Obama locates the foundation of his own moral principles in his religious faith, implausible or problematical as that feature of his sensibility may be to many academics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Obama has never suggested that he thinks religion provides the only foundation for an ethical life. In his inaugural address he went out of his way, when listing the various religious traditions that attract large numbers of Americans, to include "nonbelievers." To some that seems momentous, to others a trivial gesture. To others it shows simply the cagey Obama's awareness that most of his colleagues in the academic world do not share the religious faith that he, along with most Americans, claims to embrace. But viewed within the broader framework of Obama's ideas, and particularly in light of his discussion of religion and the need to create an overlapping consensus through public debate, it is hardly surprising that Obama has repeatedly urged Americans to tolerate those with different beliefs. He believes that spirit of toleration should extend in both directions, from the religious to the nonreligious and vice versa.

Obama himself has faced head-on the challenge of discussing the implications of his beliefs for politics. He reiterates in The Audacity of'Hope his conviction that "shared values" ought to be "at the heart of our politics." In that spirit he aggressively disputes a familiar distinction, which dates from the era of the Cold War, between what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative and positive liberty. Obama echoes instead the arguments that Dewey made repeatedly from the 1890s through the 1940s, arguments that seem less familiar in twenty-first-century American and European academic debates than they were in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, during the years before they were banished by analytic philosophers. Obama contends that "freedom from," or negative liberty, makes no sense in the absence of "freedom to," or positive liberty, which he describes as "the ideal of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunity." Formal freedom is meaningless unless individuals possess the resources, both economic and cultural, that enable them to make use of their freedom.

This formulation clearly hearkens back to the republican understanding of freedom shared by Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, emphasized by Tocqueville, and updated by Brandeis, Addams, and Dewey in the era of progressive reform. From this point of view, freedom has never been a matter of simply being left alone to do whatever one wants to do. It has always been a question of disciplining impulses according to ethical principles and considering the demands of the common good. Ronald Reagan opened a new era in American history when he invited Americans to ask whether they were better off, as individuals, than they were four years earlier, and to vote accordingly. Although William McKinley's "full-dinnerpail" campaign in 1896 offered a similar promise of personal prosperity, and some Republican candidates in the 1920s had followed his lead, the unvarnished appeal to economic self-interest has been somewhat rare in American politics. No eighteenth-century candidate for office would have considered such an appeal to individual selfinterest; it was inconsistent with the civic virtue required for republican government, and it eroded the self-sacrifice citizens were expected to show. All the founders' appeals were couched in terms of the public good, which was understood to transcend the desires or the well-being of any single individual.

In Obama's effort to shift American public discourse away from obsessive concern with freedom from government, famously defined by Reagan as "the problem" of American life rather than a means to its solution, Obama knows he is trying to resuscitate a much older way of thinking about politics. His invocations of the public good have roots that stretch much more deeply into American history than do the strident appeals to individual selfinterest that have become almost reflexive across the political spectrum in the last three decades. The American Revolution emerged from a constellation of ideas with religious and ethical as well as political and economic dimensions. Although Americans who flatten that rich body of ideas by emphasizing only the right to make and spend money sometimes call themselves conservatives, they show limited understanding of the complexity of their nation's founding ideals.

Also echoing that persistent American tradition of civic republicanism are the following words from The Audacity of Hope: "Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends." Obama insists that Americans value "community," "patriotism," "a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts." Finally, he writes, "we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion." A similar litany punctuated Obama's acceptance speech the night of the election and his inaugural address, and it seems safe to predict that he will continue to repeat this message as he attempts to reorient the Democratic Party toward the values of empathy and reciprocity, two of the central animating norms of American democratic culture. The reformist traditions Obama has inherited, ranging from the antebellum crusade against slavery through the progressive, New Deal, and civil rights movements, all grounded their arguments on calls to community and the Christian ideal of brotherhood. In her brilliant study of contemporary American political culture, Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen identifies self-sacrifice as an indispensable and seldom acknowledged characteristic of democratic citizenship. Like Obama's implicit argument in Dreams from My Father, Allen's case rests firmly on Ellison's Invisible Man. Only by fusing individual responsibility-the willingness to sacrifice-with the aspiration to equality can democracy's potential be realized and the principle affirmed. If contemporary Democrats hope to inspire a new wave of challenges to injustice and inequality, once again with an emphasis on economic reform as well as civil rights, they are neglecting the strongest weapons in the American cultural arsenal if they ignore the rich heritage of earlier progressive activists who called for justice on the basis of principles at the heart of America's religious as well as civic traditions.

Among the signature features of Obama's books is his self-consciousness. He realizes that the idealism of the preceding sentences, at least for some readers, might sound too much like the Boy Scout handbook. So he spices such words, drawn from the communitarian recipe file, with directness. He concedes that balancing individualism and community has never been easy. He admits that we have to keep in mind both the importance of cherished values and the potential danger of rigid ideologies. As he puts it, in a phrase that would evoke a nod of assent from James or Dewey, "Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question." Obama's voting record, both in Illinois and in the U.S. Senate, shows clearly that he is a man of the left. But his books make it equally clear that he is flexible in his application of his convictions to particular problems. He is a principled partisan of democracy and pragmatism in the tradition of James and Dewey. He believes in the founders' ideals of equality and liberty. But he believes that achieving those goals requires working to forge agreement about forms of democratic experimentation, and he believes that those experiments must be fol lowed by the critical assessment of results. Instead of the rigid stands some of his ardent supporters on the left demand, he prefers the pragmatists' counsel of dynamic, flexible responses to a dynamic, recalcitrant reality.

That willingness to compromise, that commitment to fallibilism and experimentation, does not reveal a lack of conviction. Instead it evinces a particular kind of conviction, the conviction of a democrat committed to forging agreement rather than deepening disagreements. Whereas many radicals as well as many conservatives believe that they possess the truth and that their opponents are evil as well as misguided, Obama accepts different political perspectives as a normal and healthy sign of a vibrant culture. When he says, as he did in his health care address of September 13, 2009, that "I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility," and when he praises Gandhi "because he ended up doing so much and changing the world just by the power of his ethics," he is deliberately signaling a different conception of politics than that to which most Americans have grown accustomed in recent years.

Obama also embraces a more complex and nuanced conception of democracy. He understands that even virtue can veer into vice. Self-reliance and independence can morph into selfishness and license, ambition into greed, patriotism into jingoism, faith into self-righteousness, and charity into paternalism. Finding the right balance, Obama acknowledges, requires care, the courage to experiment, and the willingness to listen, a quality increasingly rare in our ever more acrimonious polity. Obama reasons that our critics can sometimes help us see our excesses more clearly than we can see them ourselves. They can show us how our plans collide with "countervailing values" cherished with equal fervor by other Americans. In The Audacity of'Hope, Obama offers as an illustration his own experience shepherding through the Illinois legislature a modified bill on capital punishment that eventually earned unanimous approval, then he immediately concedes that such compromises often prove elusive. The first year of his presidency proved the point.

Obama is a shrewd and an unusually well-informed observer of American political life and the so-called culture wars of recent decades. He knows that many searching studies of contemporary American public life, including those written by journalist E. J. Dionne, sociologist Alan Wolfe, and political scientist Morris Fiorina, have reached a similar conclusion: Americans are much less divided on most so-called wedge issues than members of the fringes of both parties claim. In poll after poll, study after study, social scientists have found that the vast majority of Americans, over 80 percent in many instances, cluster toward the middle on questions such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and immigration restriction. Whereas activists in both parties have forced their candidates to embrace positions at opposite ends of the spectrum on these hot-button issues as litmus tests of their ideological purity, the bulk of the American electorate lies between the poles. To use the title of E. J. Dionne's penetrating study, that dynamic explains why Americans hate politics. Both parties continue to feed voters false choices, stark, less nuanced positions than those held by most citizens. According to Dionne, Wolfe, Fiorina, and others who have studied recent polling data or conducted such studies themselves, Americans are willing to allow individuals a surprising degree of latitude to make their own decisions on many controversial issues, and they do not think of themselves as lacking convictions as a result. Their toleration does not mean Americans do not hold firm positions themselves; it certainly does not mean there is consensus. The disagreements are real. It means only that most Americans are more willing to accept the existence of diverse opinions, and a wider variation of practices, than journalists' shallow and sensation-driven coverage of extremists' melodramatic posturing suggests. Whereas opinion polls yield clear evidence of greater tolerance, and even a surprising degree of overlapping consensus on many divisive issues, public debate is dominated by those who are well paid to enflame passions and snuff out sparks of civility.

Obama has shown that he shares the widespread American value of toleration. He laments the developments that have prompted Left and Right to become "mirror images of each other," telling stories of "conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal." He sees that activists' reliance on such hyperbole serves "not to persuade the other side" but only "to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes." He is willing to tolerate disagreement and diverse ways of life as a central and, on balance, enriching feature of a pluralistic culture of democracy. He is not naive about the reasons for the coarsening of public discourse. To the press, "civility is boring." He also understands the costs of that coarsening. The "amplification of conflict" exaggerates differences to such a degree that one's opponents appear not merely wrongheaded but demonic, which renders all their positions illegitimate and all their preferences contemptible. That downward spiral steadily erodes the potential for overlapping consensus, "the basis for thoughtful compromise," and even threatens "an agreed-upon standard for judging the truth." Among the most unsettling consequences of antifoundationalist particularism, perspectivalism, and historicism has been the embrace by some conservatives (and some liberals) of the belief that all facts can be spun to fit the desired conclusion. If all evidence is tainted, then perspectivalism provides a warrant for doubting any results of scientific inquiry inconsistent with one's political or social ideology. Obama remains committed to treating his adversaries with a degree of respect that his supporters find worrisome and his foes spineless. But he also insists, as did New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that although everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, no one is entitled to his or her own facts.

There are limits to Obama's broad-mindedness, but they are not always what either his allies or his foes expect. To cite one example, he adopts an unusual position concerning urban black culture. On the one hand, like most Democrats he emphasizes attacking the problem of poverty directly. But he insists that as valuable as an increase in the earned income tax credit and a higher minimum wage might be, empowerment also requires responsibility, honesty, and a willingness to work. Words that some Democratic politicians have been wary of pronouncing in recent decades, words such as faithfulness and integrity, words that I and other commentators such as William Galston have identified with the virtues of liberalism, recur in Obama's writings and his speeches. In his stark portrait of teenagers with nothing to lose because they care about nothing, he shows that the absence of community can be as devastating and dangerous as the presence of community can be enriching. Obama's emphasis on community grew from his education, but it also grew from his harrowing experiences in Chicago housing projects and from the inspiration he derived from the religious congregations he came to know. He can face the fact that gang members' nihilism has devastating consequences, a conviction shared by urban black civic and religious leaders and by southern and southwestern evangelicals, without being paralyzed by fear that such criticism will be denounced as racist.

Obama's approach to the problems facing impoverished women, white and black, is also distinctive. On the one hand, Obama advocates the full agenda of secondwave feminism: better job training, universal access to affordable and high-quality child care, and, perhaps above all, flexible work schedules. This is the program laid out by many feminists, including pragmatist scholars Joan Williams and Nancy Fraser. Obama uses the work of Amelia Tyagi and Elizabeth Warren (the latter of whom he brought into his administration to oversee the Troubled Assets Recovery Program) to demonstrate that women are working not to increase their families' discretionary incomes but to invest in their children's future. With more than 70 percent of mothers working outside the home, and members of the middle as well as working classes squeezed by flat incomes and quadrupling health care bills, it is time to stop pretending that Ward and June Cleaver remain the norm for American family life. More often now in the realm of myth than in reality do American women tend the home while most men, even though they are working ever longer hours, bring home with a single paycheck what used to be called, in a phrase that now seems quaint, "a family wage."

On the other hand, Obama also issues a bold call for reorienting male sensibilities and reinvigorating family life, a summons he bolsters by explaining why he has found his wife Michelle's rock-solid family such an inspiration. Her father suffered from multiple sclerosis from age thirty. Despite the enormous effort required by everyone involved, he kept working as he and his family struggled through the thirty-five years of steady deterioration that marked the rest of his life. After decades of criticism leveled by black and white radicals against prominent members of the black bourgeoisie who have lamented the instability of black family life, positions such as Obama's have been unpopular on the left. In the face of defenses of free expression made by cynical entrepreneurs who exploit that freedom to stoke a culture of violence and misogyny, adopting the stance on the importance of intact families that Obama has taken in both of his books appears to some commentators to be conservative.

Perhaps that response explains why it has become difficult for many Democrats, black as well as white, to take a stand against the hip culture of celebrity, money, guns, drugs, and hypersexuality that Obama considers so destructive, particularly, if hardly exclusively, of African American urban life. Obama's words have antagonized some Americans who think of themselves as being on the left, whites as well as blacks, who see in his critiques proof that he is too middle class, or not black enough, or too much "the town scold," as he puts it himself, to speak for African Americans. In his books Obama acknowledges that criticism but defies it. Instead he insists that Democrats are making a fatal error if they allow the importance of family life, like the role of religion, to be considered the issue of a single party. Both black and white working-class voters have been put off by the failure of Democratic Party politicians to acknowledge the cultural cost of America's unraveling families. Perhaps because Obama lacked the stability he cherishes in his wife's family, and perhaps because he saw firsthand the consequences of fractured families in Chicago's far south side, he speaks and writes passionately about the importance of family life.

That observation brings me to the final issue I want to address, race and ethnicity. Obama admits that many people see his prominence as an indication the United States has become, as he puts it in The Audacity of'Hope, a "postracial" society. He notes that demographic projections indicate how quickly the rest of the nation is likely to follow California in becoming "majority minority." The predominance of Americans who claim European ancestry is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Incisive scholars have been writing about this phenomenon for a couple of decades now. Literary scholars such as Werner Sollors and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sociologists such as Mary Waters, political scientists such as Michael Walzer and Jennifer Hochschild, philosophers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, and historians such as David Hollinger and Ronald Takaki are just a few of the many writers who have probed the significance of these demographic and cultural changes.