President Obama's Communitarian Promise

President Obama and Dr. Amitai Etzioni

Nine years ago I found the Communitarian Network and discovered the philosophy behind the new behavior laws passed in Seattle. I say "discovered" because until the night I found Etzioni, I had never heard the term once. Not once during my entire lifetime of education in American public schools, US Army schools for dependents overseas and American colleges had I ever heard the term communitarianism.

I scored in the top 1% nationally on the Political Science portion of the GED at Renton Vo Tech in 1982, and, I can assure you, the term was not anywhere on that exam. Nobody knew it. My dad had never heard of it, my friends and family had never heard of it. It can't be found in any PS encylopedias published before the 1990s. For this reason, most Americans I tried to explain it to thought I had made it up as part of some grand, insane delusion I was experiencing.

IF there was such a thing as communitarianism and IF it was such a powerful idea that would change the face of America forever, then SOMEBODY else would have been talking about it. It was impossible to even consider that I, a complete nobody with zero credentials, no PhD, no good job at CNN or even the local newspaper, could be the only one who knew about a major world philosophy being quietly introduced across the globe that would destroy individual freedom and eliminate the nations that protect it. It just was too ridiculous of an idea to bother indulging me, and few people I know have ever read any of my ACL writings, even to this day.

But, and here's the real kicker, many people I know have completely embraced communitarian values! I am hearing more communitarian double-speak every day, and it's beyond bizarre to listen to it. I am beginning to wonder seriously about my choice to remain in the US and to reject the new requirements for global citizenship here where I was born with the right and the responsibility to resist tyranny. Now I can plainly see it, my countrymen will turn on me next time for not wearing the new shackles we all have to volunteer to wear under my grandious, insane delusion that there is a whole new system of government called communitarianism.

The ACL and this blog are getting a lot of search hits for "Obama communitarian" lately. So I took a little stroll through the first 7-8 pages of google returns. Along the way I found this publication by students at Delaware County Community College: The Communitarian http://thecommunitarian.org/editorial.html. Isn't the National Association of Scholar's initiative on communitarianism (referenced on the ACL homepage) called No More Delawares?

As if we needed further proof that in some sectors of our society it is REAL, the following quotes prove that some people do know Obama's real politics and some people do discuss it frequently among themselves. The rest of us common folk can only describe it as change we can believe in.

Communitarian Network Letter #8
http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/ACommunitarianLetter8.html

“That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper… we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our ‘intellectual and moral strength.’” Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention

Conservatism is Dead: Long Live Liberalism? (Part III)
by Amitai Etzioni, Posted July 16, 2008

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amitai-etzioni/conservatism-is-dead-long_b_113096.html
"Obama draws heavily on -- and contributes much to -- a little known social philosophy known as communitarianism. It is centered around the importance of community, the common good, and service."

Obama the Communitarian
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/01/20/obama-the-communitarian.aspx

"Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His latest book, The Future of Liberalism (Knopf), will be published in early February.

"Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama's language mixed liberal themes of hope and purpose with a communitarian emphasis on duty and responsibility. In his inaugural address, the latter language was so loud that the former could barely be heard."

The Dangers of Obama’s Communitarian Service Program,
Phil Orenstein • December 8, 2008
http://democracy-project.com/?p=3334

"In the coming four years we will witness a growing mobocracy with more of these Wal-Mart moments, if these communitarian service programs and the creeping Marxism behind them aren’t nipped at the root, before they multiply."

Communitarianism v. Libertarianism
By Scott Winship - January 22, 2009, 1:03PM

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/22/communitarianism_v_libertarianism/

"This is the essence of the social contract, and President Obama's rhetoric to date indicates that he intuitively grasps the intricate connections between communitarian and libertarian values. It will be exciting to see whether he manages to translate this rhetoric into a workable set of policies that can command broad public support."

Citizens, Not Americans
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/01/20/citizens-not-americans-the-metaphysics-of-barack-obama-s-inaugural-address.aspx

"Linda Hirshman is a former professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Brandeis University, and the author, most recently, of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.

"There are two kinds of participants in the American Republic: citizens and Americans. They parallel precisely Isaiah Berlin's powerful, defining essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." Citizens achieve positive liberty, freedom to. Americans enjoy negative liberty, freedom from. Almost nothing Barack Obama says is accidental. He chose "citizens," not "Americans."

"Now Barack Obama, no dummy, is offering not just political change, but metaphysical change."

And what's this from CBSnews last summer?

Can Democrats Claim The Alaskan Frontier?
by Charles Wohlforth, The New Republic: Chances Of Obama Breaking The Democrats’ Dry Spell Are Better Than Ever, July 23, 2008
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/23/opinion/main4286673.shtml

"Obama's communitarian values also seem too far out of sync with Alaska's independent, self-reliant voters (unless he starts offering free government money to everyone, which always seems to work here)."

Here's how they discuss it in American law schools:

The Hierarchical-Communitarian Worldview
October 8, 2008 | Posted by: Alan R. Madry
Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog
http://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2008/10/08/the-hierarchical-communitarian-worldview/

"One thing that most fascinated me about Dan Kahan’s findings (as reported in his Boden Lecture here on Monday) was the lack of people appearing in the quadrant (on his “group-grid” framework) that would be characterized as hierarchical and communitarian (the flip of that, also apparently lacking, would be individualistic egalitarians–more on that later). The gap is striking since hierarchical communitarians are heavily represented in history among philosophers and theologians. Plato and Aristotle would both be hierarchical communitarians, as would Aquinas (pictured above) and other of the Church fathers. Further afield, in China we’d find Confucius and his dialectics and in India, Manu and the dharma shastra."

Is Obama going to introduce a full national turn to Keynes' economic ideology?

The New Republic
A Man for All Seasons by John B. Judis
The misunderstood John Maynard Keynes.
Post Date Wednesday, February 04, 2009
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=b5f61f74-dde6-43ea-a433-9feb0f752c3b

"When the economy goes south, one name invariably surfaces on the lips of pundits and economists: John Maynard Keynes. That is because the twentieth century's greatest economist is generally associated with the idea that markets require government intervention in order to function properly. During boom times, when the market seems to be working, no one has any use for Keynes's skepticism toward unrestrained capitalism. But, during recessions--when the economy grinds to a halt and Washington suddenly looks like the only thing that can save it--Keynes invariably enjoys a revival. The current economic crisis, our country's worst since the Great Depression, is no exception. Everyone, it seems, has spent the past months rediscovering Keynes."

Everyone huh?

What does John Maynard Keynes have in common with Dr. Amitai Etzioni, the founder of Communitarianism and President Obama's behind-the-scenes guru? Fabian socialism.

"Keynes scorned these "catastrophists" in the Labour Party. He also despised Soviet communism. And he had a low opinion of Marx's economics. "My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran," Keynes wrote Bernard Shaw in 1934. But he was sympathetic to the Fabian socialism of Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, which had influenced the Labour Party." {ibid}