The Kind of Liberal We Need

Today is a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's officially-anointed African-American hero; tomorrow is Inauguration Day for Barack Obama, the first African-American to be elected President of the United States. The confluence of these events is enough to make even grumpy conservatives reflect upon their significance, and they're right to do so. Will tomorrow's events signal the emergence of a truly "post-racial" era in American politics? Will the significance and--perhaps more relevantly--the electoral influence of the morass of racial hate, contempt, resentment, guilt, condescension, bitterness, exclusion, and confusion which dominated and warped American policies for decades (or, as Senator Obama himself suggested, since the country's beginnings) have truly been transcended? Will, in short, tomorrow be the moment that King's dream is finally, or at least nominally, fulfilled?

Well, better bloggers than I can struggle with the whole "post-racial" thing. For me, I'm still wondering about the dream.

The most important thing to note about King's dream is that it changed. It changed as he grew and as his country changed during his lifetime and during his career as the leader of the moral crusade which was the civil rights movement. Ari Kelman notes this change--as embodied in such later sermons he gave, like "The Other America"--and how much of America's popular memory resists that change. Note also, though, that his dream didn't change radically--it merely changed the way much of liberalism changed as the twentieth century progressed, as King's appreciation of what that "freedom" he wanted to hear ring throughout the nation required. Not just the integration of schools, but also better schools; not just the enforcement of voting rights, but better--more inclusive, more egalitarian, more just--options to vote for; not just judging people only by the content of their character, but in making it possible for more people to magnify, explore, refine and extend that character. King was never man thoroughly committed to old-world beliefs about freedom and liberty; no black person raised in the American South in the 1930s could believe that, and certainly not one who went on to attend seminary in the 1940s reading such early Social Gospel thinkers like Walter Rauschenbusch and their critics like Reinhold Niebuhr. But it's undeniable that from 1963 to 1968 his liberalism, his commitment to "freedom," went through a powerful metamorphosis, moving beyond the individualistic and rights-centered orientation of his earlier invocations of the dream of equality, and linking it more firmly to economic justice, collective action, and democratic empowerment. He became, in short, an advocate of a social democratic common good--a liberal who wasn't, strictly speaking, a socialist, but whose vision of, and demand for, a more equal American could easily be compared to such, and was.

Of course, we know from Obama's campaign that just about any talk about "sharing the wealth" in America is going to earn you comparisons to socialist revolutionaries; that is, apparently, how our political culture works. William Galston and Michael Lind had an interesting debate in The Washington Monthly a few years ago, over what liberals should do about the fact that Americans repeatedly embrace "freedom" above all other political values. Galston's argument was that there isn't any problem, so long as liberals would be willing to fight for a more expansive definition of the term--the way King and, before him, FDR did--against the conservative "presumption that government and individual liberty are fundamentally at odds." Michael Lind dissented in part from this, arguing that "freedom," as valuable as it is, can only take liberal politics so far; that in order to make the sort of transformations which FDR and MLK made for the sake of the poor, oppressed, and left behind, it is necessary to move into more explicitly republican, participatory, public interest-type language. This is an argument which will probably never go completely away (see another recent iteration of essentially the same argument over liberalism and the common good, involving Michael Tomasky, Galston, and several others here and here), until and unless our economy completely collapses and the resulting chaos leads us to make our politics more reactionary, or more radical, than the legacy of the Great Depression and WWII has made them to be. We're a pragmatic, individualistic, liberal (in the broadest sense) country, and for better or worse, you can only do so much with that.

Communitarian that I am though, I'm always looking for voices and parties and approaches, whether conservative or progressive (or both!), which can move us away from that reality, however minimally, and towards a political perspective which incorporates the sort of cultural and social sensibility that made, I think, Martin Luther King (and some who might be considered his ideological forerunners, as well as his moral descendants) so important to being liberal in America. And that, of course, leads me to Obama's inauguration tomorrow.

Early on, though I wasn't on the Obama bandwagon, I was struck by his talk of post-partisanship, of service and citizenship. Not that such isn't the sort of boiler-plate we can hear from almost any aspiring politician; of course it is. But he seemed to mean a lot of it, something that became more and more clear to as he struggled through the media fiasco created by the preaching and occasional ranting of his long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I liked that he seemed loathe to distant himself too much from Wright's criticism of America as a nation that allows a pre-occupation with improvement and growth to eclipse a sense of limits and mutual responsibility (themes that King rarely forgot about, as much as he changed over the years); I especially liked--and really, who didn't?--his powerful distillation of the whole controversy into a reading of America that, as I put it, included (rather than avoided) the "conviction that morality and sin and hope and forgiveness are complicatedly caught up in all of our lives," which is exactly the element of civic, even spiritual, seriousness that so many other empty-headed liberal appeals for unity have lacked. All this brought me to feel that Obama's intellectual pragmatism, as much as it may at times lead him to be oblivious to, or even condescending towards, the real passions that ground people in their families and places and beliefs, is a pragmatic sensibility that is more than economic or partisan; it is deep and holistic. He may not be as driven as MLK came to be by social democratic or common-good interpretations of what the dream of liberal freedom means, but I think his is, nonetheless, a liberalism that sees as much of this nation as any president is ever likely to, and genuinely wants to bring what he sees--the people, their problems, and their possibilities--into his thinking and his plans and his goals as well.

Robert Bellah, the grand old theorist of America's civic religion--which, to put it in terribly simple terms, is the conservative assumption that the preservation of certain fundamental (cultural and religious) truths will work to liberal and egalitarian ends--has written a wonderful, thoughtful reflection on the meaning of Obama's election, making two important points. First, that the vision of a common good, in the American political context, whether articulated in a classical republican or a Biblical way (or both, as arguably Obama himself tends to do), is far from a meaningless invocation of "service," but rather a serious and important recurring feature of our culture, saving us from the excesses of our "default individualist tradition." Second, that Obama does descend from the sort of intellectual sketching that this post has been doing, and put real meat on the bones; as Bellah puts it, "If you look at Obama's specific policy concerns you will find the common good at the core of almost all of them....universal health care...[his] jobs program, his environmental program, his foreign policy concerns [--] are all examples of making the common good the focus of politics." Which means, as I read Bellah (and thus Obama), that he appreciates both our polity and the ideals that it is a carrier for, and doesn't get the two of them confused.

In a thoughtful column that is nominally about federal housing policies, but in reality is touching on the hard problem of economic justice in a complex, liberal society like our own, James Polous--himself an avowed conservative--acknowledges that Obama seems to understand the difficulty here; that the simple liberal responses to the problems King came to confront--throw money at it! let the Supreme Court solve it!--just won't do, as King himself also realized. This, as much as Polous may be loathe to admit it, suggests that Obama's aim is get our nation, as a people, as a community, to commit as much as it practically possible to a freedom which is truly common (and which, therefore, will be difficult to construct and even harder to maintain), rather than posit a "nationalized ideology" that everyone will have to sign on to. Here's hoping he can do it. He won't be able to do it alone; hopefully, in time, liberals and conservatives alike will recognize that the change he's aiming for is one we all need.