The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

We can try to slow globalization, but we can’t stop it.

It’s tough to “buy American” when a video game sold by a U.S. company has been developed by Japanese software engineers and packaged in Mexico. U.S. Border Patrol agents can’t interdict the services of a call center in India, or stop an electrical engineer in Prague from sending his work via email to a company in Dubuque. When it comes to trade, there are few borders left.

If the guiding philosophy behind the traditional system of social insurance could be described as “We’re all in it together,” the philosophy behind the Ownership Society seems to be “You’re on your own.”

Americans believe in work—not just as a means of supporting themselves but as a means of giving their lives purpose and direction, order and dignity. The old welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, too often failed to honor this core value, which helps explain not only its unpopularity with the public but also why it often isolated the very people it was supposed to help.

National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM)

NASIOM=nauseam. Absolutely, abbreviate it "IOM"!

To further drive down costs, we would require that insurers and providers who participate in Medicare, Medicaid, or the new health plans have electronic claims, electronic records, and up-to-date patient error reporting systems—all of which would dramatically cut down on administrative costs, and the number of medical errors and adverse events (which in turn would reduce costly medical malpractice lawsuits). This simple step alone could cut overall health-care costs by up to 10 percent, with some experts pointing to even greater savings. With the money we save through increased preventive care and lower administrative and malpractice costs, we would provide a subsidy to low-income families who wanted to purchase the model plan through their state pool, and immediately mandate coverage for all uninsured children.

The point is that if we commit ourselves to making sure everybody has decent health care, there are ways to accomplish it without breaking the federal treasury or resorting to rationing. If we want Americans to accept the rigors of globalization, then we will need to make that commitment.

work harder than the people of any other wealthy nation. We are willing to tolerate more economic instability and are willing to take more personal risks to get ahead. But we can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance—and if we know that our families have some net beneath which they cannot fall. That’s a bargain with the American people worth making.

once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We’ve lost that balance in Washington, I think.

But their success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them—that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.

Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal damnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary. She remembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out of any nickel that they could. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education.

for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct,

She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both. Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.

My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father—by my knowledge of his achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger toward him. But it was my mother’s fundamental faith—in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of this brief life we’ve each been given—that channeled those ambitions. It was in search of confirmation of her values that I studied political philosophy, looking for both a language and systems of action that could help build community and make justice real. And it was in search of some practical application of those values that I accepted work after college as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago that were trying to cope with joblessness, drugs, and hopelessness in their midst.

came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.

I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities.

You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away—because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and so avoid joining a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosity has often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem is rhetorical: Scrub language of all religious content and we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.

“the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s “I Have a Dream” speech without reference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten-point plan. They are also rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness—the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well as the despair and self-destructiveness among those at the bottom of the social ladder. Solving

feels somebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to punish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in his heart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair.

I think we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help ensure that every child is loved and cherished. But I also think faith can fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and the sense of reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

I am suggesting that if we progressives shed some of our own biases, we might recognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country.

We need to take faith seriously not simply to block the religious right but to engage all persons of faith in the larger project of American renewal.

it wasn’t these students of the Enlightenment who proved to be the most effective champions of a separation between church and state. Rather, it was Baptists like Reverend John Leland and other evangelicals who provided the popular support needed to get these provisions ratified. They did so because they were outsiders; because their style of exuberant worship appealed to the lower classes; because their evangelization of all comers—including slaves—threatened the established order; because they were no respecters of rank and privilege; and because they were consistently persecuted and disdained by the dominant Anglican Church in the South and the Congregationalist orders of the North.

Reverend Leland, “It is error alone, that stands in need of government to support it; truth can and will do better without…it.”

Jefferson and Leland’s formula for religious freedom worked.

Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes.

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason.

Politics is hardly a science, and it too infrequently depends on reason.

Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible.

So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true—as individuals or communities of faith—will be true for us alone.

Allowing the use of school property for meetings by voluntary student prayer groups should not be a threat, any more than its use by the high school Republican Club should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and hence merit carefully tailored support.

As a general rule, I am more prone to listen to those who are as outraged by the indecency of homelessness as they are by the indecency of music videos.

And we need to recognize that sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about who makes the final determination—whether we need the coercive arm of the state to enforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience and evolving norms.

it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned long before the hurricane struck.

A group of young men insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of black people.

I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in the temperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think it not only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to complete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.

spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business.

Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company. Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the effort.

what characterizes this new generation of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When a friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office decided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black firm—he wanted it to become the top firm, period.

More minorities may be living the American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.

Recently, the Chicago Police Department installed permanent cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison, bathing each block in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn’t complain; flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They’re just one more reminder of what everybody knows—that the community’s immune system has broken down almost entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite the best efforts of folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is wasting away.

Government could kick-start a transformation of circumstances for these men by working with private-sector contractors to hire and train ex-felons on projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps, or laying the broadband lines needed to thrust entire communities into the Internet age. Such programs would cost money, of course—although, given the annual cost of incarcerating an inmate, any drop in recidivism would help the program pay for itself.

died, a new cohort of Latino elected officials, affiliated with Richard M. Daley and remnants of the old Chicago political machine, came onto the scene, men and women less interested in high-minded principles and rainbow coalitions than in translating growing political power into contracts and jobs.