The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

ethical precepts. And we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.

Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.

Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.

We all agree, for instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to others.

Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world.

I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness. Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values.

if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy lawyering that thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republican governor had decided to institute a moratorium on all executions.

Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about the common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feel about the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no innocent person should end up on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free.

And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have trouble seeing the obvious.

But my fellow legislator’s speech helps underscore one of the differences between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

I value good manners, for example. Every time I meet a kid who speaks clearly and looks me in the eye, who says “yes, sir” and “thank you” and “please” and “excuse me,” I feel more hopeful about the country.

The same goes for competence. Nothing brightens my day more than dealing with somebody, anybody, who takes pride in their work or goes the extra mile—an

(I am convinced—although I have no statistical evidence to back it up—that antitax, antigovernment, antiunion sentiments grow anytime people find themselves standing in line at a government office with only one window open and three or four workers chatting among themselves in full view.) Progressives in particular seem confused on this point, which is why we so often get our clocks cleaned in elections.

in my speech I even suggested that everyone would benefit if parents—heaven forbid—simply turned off the TV and tried to strike up a conversation with their kids.

I offered the further observation that a popular show targeted at teens, in which young people with no visible means of support spend several months getting drunk and jumping naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.”

And yet every parent I know, liberal or conservative, complains about the coarsening of the culture, the promotion of easy materialism and instant gratification, the severing of sexuality from intimacy. They may not want government censorship, but they want those concerns recognized, their experiences validated. When, for fear of appearing censorious, progressive political leaders can’t even acknowledge the problem, those parents start listening to those leaders who will—leaders who may be less sensitive to constitutional constraints.

But the explosion in CEO pay has had little to do with improved performance. In fact, some of the country’s most highly compensated CEOs over the past decade have presided over huge drops in earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, and the underfunding of their workers’ pension funds. What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It’s cultural.

But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage, that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Sometimes only the law can fully vindicate our values, particularly when the rights and opportunities of the powerless in our society are at stake.

Dr. King replied, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.” Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action—a change in values and a change in policy—to promote the kind of society we want.

That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose—this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better—or for the worse.

Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often rewards behavior that we would normally think of as scandalous: fabricating stories, distorting the obvious meaning of what other people say, insulting or generally questioning their motives, poking through their personal affairs in search of damaging information.

Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders—the quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are,

a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained any kind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power,

Whenever she saw even a hint of such behavior in me she would look me square in the eyes and ask, “How do you think that would make you feel?” But it was in my relationship with my grandfather that I think I first internalized the full meaning of empathy. Because my mother’s work took her overseas, I often lived with my grandparents during my high school years, and without a father present in the house, my grandfather bore the brunt of much of my adolescent rebellion.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society.

But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim to speak for those who are struggling—are thereby freed from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are better off.

Union representatives can’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

And yet one of the surprising things about Washington is the amount of time spent arguing not about what the law should be, but rather what the law is.

During the debate surrounding the confirmation of Alberto Gonzalez, I reviewed memos drafted in the attorney general’s office suggesting that techniques like sleep deprivation or repeated suffocation did not constitute torture so long as they did not cause “severe pain” of the sort “accompanying organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”; transcripts that suggested the Geneva Conventions did not apply to “enemy combatants”

The Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster; it is a Senate rule, one that dates back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple: Because all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring proceedings to a halt by exercising his right to unlimited debate and refusing to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk. For as long as he wants.

The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke something called cloture—that is, the cessation of debate.

For almost a century, the filibuster was the South’s weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

With words, with rules, with procedures and precedents—with law—Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in ways that mere violence never could.

The outlines of Madison’s constitutional architecture are so familiar that even schoolchildren can recite them: not only rule of law and representative government, not just a bill of rights, but also the separation of the national government into three coequal branches, a bicameral Congress, and a concept of federalism that preserved authority in state governments, all of it designed to diffuse power, check factions, balance interests, and prevent tyranny by either the few or the many.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

Others, like Justice Breyer, don’t dispute that the original meaning of constitutional provisions matters. But they insist that sometimes the original understanding can take you only so far—that on the truly hard cases, the truly big arguments, we have to take context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account. According to this view, the Founding Fathers and original ratifiers have told us how to think but are no longer around to tell us what to think. We are on our own, and have only our own reason and our judgment to rely on.

They didn’t simply design the Constitution in the wake of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights—all in the span of a few short years.

Ultimately, though, I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.

Finally, anyone looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction has one more problem: The Founders and ratifiers themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece.

Given what we know of this scrum, with all its shifting alliances and occasionally underhanded tactics, it is unrealistic to believe that a judge, two hundred years later, can somehow discern the original intent of the Founders or ratifiers.

Some historians and legal theorists take the argument against strict construction one step further. They conclude that the Constitution itself was largely a happy accident, a document cobbled together not as the result of principle but as the result of power and passion; that we can never hope to discern the Founders’ “original intentions” since the intentions of Jefferson were never those of Hamilton, and those of Hamilton differed greatly from those of Adams; that because the “rules” of the Constitution were contingent on time and place and the ambitions of the men who drafted them, our interpretation of the rules will necessarily reflect the same contingency,

It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature.

a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality,

making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly,