If you haven’t read Barack Obama’s commencement address at Knox College from earlier this month, you should. It’s not only one of the best speeches I’ve seen since, well, Obama’s DNC address last July, it’s also one of those rare speeches that’s actually important.
David Kusnet, Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter in the early ’90s, wrote an item for The New Republic this week on Obama’s address, explaining that all Obama did was “make the best case for liberal politics in recent memory, with a panoramic view of American history that made public investment in job training and new technologies sound like the logical descendents of the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the abolitionists, and the American Revolution.” After reading the speech for myself, I don’t think Kusnet’s description is hyperbolic.
There are some tremendous arguments and observations in Obama’s speech, but one of the more important themes was a wholesale condemnation of what Bush and the GOP call the “Ownership Society.”
Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government — divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.
In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it — Social Darwinism — every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford — tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job — life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty — pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!”
But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political stability.
And so if we do nothing in the face of globalization, more people will continue to lose their health care. Fewer kids will be able to afford the diploma you’re about to receive.
More companies like United Airlines won’t be able to provide pensions for their employees. And those Maytag workers will be joined in the unemployment line by any worker whose skills can be bought and sold on the global market.
So today I’m here to tell you what most of you already know. This is not us — the option that I just mentioned. Doing nothing. It’s not how our story ends — not in this country. America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes.
It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before.
So let’s dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let’s imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.
The point of Obama’s historical observations was to note how the nation confronted the problems of its era, but also to highlight the common thread that tied those challenges together: Americans succeeded (against slavery, against the injustices of the industrial age, against the depression, against fascism) when we chose to act collectively, and “we rose together.”
As Kusnet noted, “Told this way, American history is an inspiring account of challenges confronted and conquered. Accepting injustices isn’t merely immoral; it is passive, cowardly, and un-American — or, as Obama put it more felicitously, ‘This is not us.'” And yet, it also just so happens to be the moral underpinnings of the Republican vision for America.
The difference between Reagan and Obama, of course, is that the Gipper, like George W. Bush today, found heroism only in individual endeavors or in war, not in collective action to solve social problems here at home. By attributing heroic dimensions to the taming of the robber barons, the founding of the public school system, and the organizing of the labor movement, Obama makes progressivism patriotic — and a worthy way for ambitious individuals to find their “place in history.”
I’ve heard from a few people that Obama’s staff has been circulating the speech around the Hill, soliciting feedback and gauging responses. In truth, they’re probably sending it around to give talking points to the rest of the party. It’s sound advice.