Comments on Obama's Speech

A great part of Obama's speech last night:

The people I’ve met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can’t solve all our problems – and we don’t expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance.

But we also believe that we have a larger responsibility to one another as Americans – that America is a place – that America is the place – where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s the America we believe in. That’s the America I know.

This is not altogether different from the rationale behind the New Deal, the philosophy of shared responsibility that gave us the Golden Age of shared prosperity (albeit shared mostly among white men). FDR (with apologies to regular readers who may have seen me highlight this quote too many times already):

In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.

This is also a break from the recent past. Clinton conditioned public action on whether people "worked hard and played by the rules." So progressives had to prove that people were doing that. The best we seemed to do was enact social policy that motivates people to "work hard." But these times call for much more ambition.

This frame could serve a progressive agenda well, I think. The central question it raises is not what "they" are doing to fulfill their end of the social bargain, but what "we" are doing for our part. Is our nation ensuring that "no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours"? Is there a basic level of security for all Americans? This is the debate that we need to have about poverty and inequality. We can talk about "opportunity" and "security" all we like but unless the questions are about what we are doing, I don't think we'll have the conversations we want.

Moreover, this vision is rooted in a belief in national solidarity and fraternity. People who work to undermine our common bonds, in our politics and in the economy, don't share this belief. That's why this part of the speech was unsettling.

I trust the American people to realize that while we don’t need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren’t liberal values or conservative values – they’re American values.

Leaving aside the questionable and unnecessary attack on "big government." On the one hand it's probably smart to connect these values with the American creed, but couldn't he have just said that these are both liberal and American values? That progressive values are American values? As it is, he's implying that conservatives share these values. And they don't. Many of them don't believe that Americans are brothers and sisters. They hate liberals, resent minorities, and flout their responsibility to the public. Those don't sound like American values to me.