Last week we heard from John Burt, author of Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, on the promise of equality in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. In the piece below, Burt further explores the historical allusions in Obama’s speech, and considers the contingent and expanding ideal of freedom in American history.
President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address expresses optimism about our country’s seeing its way clear to the next step, rather more optimism than Lincoln felt. To see the difference, consider the way Obama juxtaposed three different allusions to speeches of Lincoln about the lessons of the Civil War:
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by the sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.
The first sentence quotes a famous sentence from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In Obama’s version, the blood drawn by the lash of the master and the blood drawn by the sword of the soldier are the (high) price of a lesson by now thoroughly learned. Lincoln’s version is rather darker. What Lincoln said was:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
In saying this, Lincoln imagined that God may have in mind a course of retribution for the United States so severe that the not-yet-ended Civil War will seem only like the first act; furthermore, should this dire fate befall the Union, Lincoln conceded that it will be a fate the Union has richly deserved.
The phrase about how no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free alludes, of course, to Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, and it does capture one of the main lessons of the Civil War. But when Lincoln referred to the same subject in the opening sentences of the Gettysburg Address, he saw the question not as whether a republic divided into slave states and free states could survive (he already knew that that question had a negative answer) but whether any republic that chose to test the proposition that all men are created equal could endure. That is a related but distinct problem and the question it raised was in Lincoln’s mind still an open one.
Finally, the phrase about making ourselves anew alludes to the key paragraph of Lincoln’s December 1862 Annual Message:
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Lincoln here did not just imagine the Republic learning a hard-earned lesson. He imagined the Republic reinventing itself completely, freeing itself from illusions about itself to which it has been enthralled, enslaved. Now the Republic has indeed moved forward together since the Civil War, and President Obama certainly knows as well as anyone else does how messy and slow and partial that progress was.
The point here is not to criticize the optimism of the President’s speech relative to Lincoln’s sterner words but to notice the character of what he learns from Lincoln. For what Obama wishes to emphasize is that the achievement of the Civil War was not only the death of slavery or even the promise of racial equality but a vision of the meaning of the public world. That is why he goes on to allude to two of the most important non-military events of the Lincoln presidency, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and the establishment of the land grant universities. These great works were expressions of a commitment to the public world, to the projects a people engage in together through their government. When we “made ourselves new” we not only developed the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, still among the deepest expression of American values, but also developed these economic and cultural projects as the expression of a common purpose aimed not only at economic development but at making freedom concretely available to all by providing the means to make use of it.
To join Lincoln’s promise of equal citizenship with his program of public development is to link one group of freedoms—the government must not stigmatize kinds of people, and must not allow one kind of person to oppress other kinds—with another group—we come together to advance a freely chosen common purpose, to help a common life to flourish and for freedom to become available as a practical matter to everyone, not merely to those who already are blessed with good fortune. Obama, like Lincoln, understands that the United States is a society, not just an economy, that it is a commonwealth, not just a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, and that even its commitment to economic improvements are ways of realizing an ideal of community.
In arguing that liberation and development are akin to each other, Obama connects Lincoln’s administration to later administrations he admires, arguing, for instance, with Theodore Roosevelt “that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Obama here echoes T. R.’s famous post-Presidential speech in Osawattomie, Kansas, in which he likened the monopoly capitalists of his era to the slaveholders of the antebellum era, and likened the effort to throw off economic oppression to the effort to abolish slavery. Obama’s connection embraces Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as well, noting that “a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”
Obama’s speech rejects the tired distinction between individualism and statism that marks much contemporary rightist thought. What we do together is an expression of our freedom, not the realization of a monolithic government’s power to subject individuals to its will. Indeed, as Obama points out, “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias.” Freedom is a form of relationship; it only happens where people acknowledge each other across lines of difference. The point here is that freedom is never enjoyed by solitaries, any more than marriage is. Freedom is something we share with other people whose freedom matters to us, and what we do together is not only the expression of our freedom but the condition of it. What is more, the protection of individual freedom requires collective action, whether to protect it from external military threats or from exercises of private power that undermine its practical realization.
It is this understanding of the meaning of freedom that underlies the policy proposals Obama alludes to in the latter half of his speech. When he remarks that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” he does not seek to punish the successful to subsidize the unsuccessful but to make possible success to everyone, for he knows that those who are barely making it cannot be said to be free because they have not the means to make use of their freedom. A society whose justice consists in impartially denying the rich and the poor the right to sleep under bridges cannot truly be said to be a free society. This is what Obama means when he says that “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.” In particular, one part of equality is recognizing our common liability to chance, to those strokes of fortune that take away our livelihoods or our health or that prevent us from having a fair run in the race of life. “We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.”
To some, wary of the distinction Isaiah Berlin makes between negative and positive liberty, this sounds like a temptation that might risk democracy. Berlin intended his distinction to separate negative liberty’s prudent and cautious liberalism, what Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear,” from grandiose utopian projects in which citizens lose their autonomy and are absorbed into a faceless and ominous mass. It would be hard to describe any of the finally quite modest exercises of public power Obama imagines as positive liberty in Berlin’s sense, because Obama’s projects are designed to widen the scope of citizenship and to spread the blessings of liberty to stigmatized or disadvantaged groups, not to remake human nature by force in the name of a visionary future so grand that any amount of oppression in its name is justified. But attempts to widen the scope of citizenship have always been criticized as gross attempts to trample individual liberty by those who have a practical stake in inequality. The kind of individual liberty such people brandish is essentially the liberty of the strong to oppress the weak unimpeded. Slaveholders saw emancipation as a threat to freedom, because what freedom meant to them, in Lincoln’s phrase, was that if one man should enslave another man, no third man should object. So even now the loudest cries about dangers to individual liberty come from those with the power to exploit or threaten others, from the big banks and brokerages, from the big corporations, from those who seek, for religious reasons, to impose their sexual mores upon anyone in their power, from anyone with an AR-15, from all of those, in short, who wish to have their way by main force without interference by any other party. That doesn’t really look like freedom to me.
Many of Obama’s policy prescriptions derive from his sense that the ethos of care he invokes is not only an expression of public freedom but also the best way to safeguard it. His environmental policies are rooted in a sense of obligation to our posterity that is not different in kind from his sense of obligation to the vulnerable and unlucky in the present; in both cases public power intervenes to prevent the freedom of others from being foreclosed by exigencies.
Likewise, the foreign policy Obama hints at in his speech expresses an ethos of care for the peoples of the world, but it sees that expression not only as the consequence of our values as a democracy but as the best practical way to ensure the survival of democracy. “[W]e must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice—not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.” That is why Obama celebrates not only the joint effort of the Roosevelt years that defeated fascism, but also the prudence of Truman in turning sworn enemies not only into the surest of friends, but into formidable economic competitors; that Eastern Europe knew that America, as the historian Gaddis Smith has argued, was a better ally to its allies than was the Soviet Union, which would never have allowed its allies to compete with it, turned out to be an important factor in the fall of Communism. In following that policy, idealism served the practical ends of the United States better than any cynicism could have. To see the world as a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, a less-than-zero-sum game in which the powers that be exhaust themselves in a never-ending quest for domination, is to create a world in which democracy cannot survive because in such a world nobody has reason to believe that the democracies mean anything they say; and yet somehow adherents of the Hobbesian view imagine themselves to be endowed with a superior realism. No liberal democracy has ever waged war against another liberal democracy; to remember that is the realpolitik of an enlightened nation.
The most Lincolnian strain in Obama’s speech is his call for the perfection of democracy at home. Our individual freedom, Obama proclaims, “is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.” It is that sense that has guided the still incomplete social transformations in the United States about questions of race and gender, and that has recently enabled us to begin a social transformation about the question of sexual orientation. Obama concedes that whatever ways we seek to realize our ideal of freedom will be imperfect, and that whatever victories we win will be partial. This isn’t just because whatever measures we succeed in passing will have to emerge from the pulling and hauling, the messy compromises, and the calculated ambiguities that always arise in the process of legislative sausage-making. It is also because our ideal of freedom is always a little deeper than what we can put into law, deeper even than what we can put into words. We know that it will always become, but we don’t know yet what it will next ask of us.