Let freedom ring

Though my interests and academic approach are not historical, the pull of history is sometimes just too strong to resist.

Thus I found myself in Boston again last weekend, trying to garner as much as I could from local radio and local papers, gleaning from conversations on the street and (okay, perhaps not the best form of research) overheard conversations at the local pubs and coffee shops what the meaning was to be of the events that appeared set to follow.

History was being made and Boston was as good a place from which to view it as any. The city animates Barak Obama's imagination of what America could become with just one more turn of the wheel. From health care policy to the shift to a greener economy; to the degree to which racial, ethnic and religious differences can be transcended in everyday democratic life; to the centrality of education and the arts to human prospering, Obama has been shaped by his years at Harvard and perhaps more so even than by his undergraduate work at Columbia in New York, when typically political values are realized.

In Boston, in a transformational moment in American democratic development, I found much less excitement than I anticipated. Instead, what appeared in the display of its citizens was a distinctive and charming poise, equanimity, easy, quiet, open confidence across and between class, race, ethnicity and gender, and a steady purposefulness. The very qualities that Barak Obama exudes. There might be, I thought, more going on in the subtle force of his leadership than even the most hopeful of his supporters suspected.

The remarkable resilience of democracy

The results, of course, were stunning in their effect upon a nation that very recently appeared to be, as a democracy, near death. Electoral participation rates were falling low enough to claim that governments of the day didn't really enjoy the consent of the people; the president enjoyed the support of only one out of four citizens; the underclass was increasingly disaffected, forlorn, resigning itself to lives that others would have thought impossible in the wealthiest country in the world; an unpopular and democratically unjustified war raged on; the gap in wealth between the well-to-do and the poor was expanding quickly while services for the latter declined; popular culture seemed taken over by the destructive imagination of violence and crude sex; political contestation was becoming increasingly corrupt and corrosive; politicians were advancing their interests by appealing to the least of our intelligence and values. And the list goes on.

Into this moment in history arrived Barak Obama with the best of his generation and with a generation of young people not willing to throw in the towel on the promise of America. With them stood many of the ‘60s generation, whose most formative political event was the assassination of Martin Luther King, finding again that long repressed desires for community and greater justice could be rekindled. No wonder there were so many tears of joy and of catharsis that night, even on the faces of the most hardened journalists.

Of course much is to be done, under the worst sort of conditions. And it is unlikely all of the ills of American democracy will be cured, Obama's intelligence, character and charm notwithstanding. But the potential value of his election for those who wish for a better democracy is inestimable.

Two sorts of freedom

Philosophically, the results may be seen, as some commentators have, as the recovery of a greater degree of communitarianism as a check upon the worst abuses of individualism. But it appears also to relate to a conception of freedom that animated the Americas of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and of Martin Luther King.

For them freedom wasn't just the absence of state "interference"; it required securing first the basic needs that made lives more closely aligned with our potential as human beings. Freedom, for Obama, as it did for the Roosevelts and Dr. King, presumes that conditions of basic justice are met: freedom from crushing poverty, from unjustifiable fear, from treatable illness, from inadequate education, and from the domination of others. These are the sorts of freedom for all that democracy requires if it is to flourish.

It may be - given how much has been squandered in recent years - too late to let such freedom ring fully, but if anyone seems up to the challenge it is President-elect Barak Obama.