November 8, 2010
THE UR IN A NUTSHELL:
The Thinker: The president as intellectual and political philosopher. (PETER BERKOWITZ, 11/05/10, WSJ)
[James] Kloppenberg argues that, thanks to the ideas to which Obama was exposed and the moral and intellectual virtues he cultivated during his journey through the American academy—he was a student at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law School and a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School—he became an exemplar, in word and deed, of moderation, balance and accommodation.Mr. Kloppenberg is certainly right to call attention to the effect on Mr. Obama's sensibility of "the developments in American academic culture since the 1960's." And he convincingly shows that Mr. Obama's two books, shorter writings and speeches contain thoughtful and sometimes eloquent variations on "a surprising number of the central themes in the American political tradition, particularly as it has come to be understood in the last half century."
But "Reading Obama" does not explain Mr. Obama's failure, in his first 22 months in office, to find common ground with conservatives and independents; his refusal to slow down and win over a majority before proceeding with large-scale reforms; and his readiness, as president, to vilify those who disagree with his policies and purposes.
According to Mr. Kloppenberg, Mr. Obama's uncommon experience—being the son of a white American woman and black African man, living abroad in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband, spending his teenage years in Hawaii in his white grandparents' home—nurtured a gift for seeing the world from a multiplicity of perspectives and for feeling empathy for a diversity of people. So, contends Mr. Kloppenberg, Mr. Obama was well prepared to absorb the best of what was being taught in philosophy, political theory and law at American universities in the 1980s and 1990s—above all, deliberative democracy and philosophical pragmatism.
Deliberative democracy has its roots in the writings of the philosopher John Rawls and in the recovery of the civic-republican tradition in America by, among others, the historian Gordon Wood. It emphasizes the benefits that come from citizens discussing opinions about politics and crafting compromises to achieve the common good. Philosophical pragmatism, for its part, was elaborated by William James and John Dewey. It was revived in the period in which Mr. Obama came of intellectual age, most notably by the philosopher Richard Rorty. It rejects absolutes and instead, as Mr. Kloppenberg writes, "embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation." Both deliberative democracy and philosophical pragmatism celebrate open-ended conversation as the animating principle of constitutional democracy.
Consider this thesis, and the fact that Mr. Obama has no executive nor meaningful legislative experience, and you can see why he has been content to simply sign whatever Congress hands him. Arguably, the act of providing any sort of leadership at all would have violated this philosophy, which would explain Mr. Obama's disastrous style of "leadership": utter passivity.
