Barack Obama began his career as an advanced thinker about citizenship. He was not only a community organizer but a theorist of community organizing, a member of Robert Putnam’s “Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America,” and an eloquent defender of the idea that voluntary public work is an essential solution to our most serious problems. He made that case particularly strongly, and to strong applause, during the 2008 election, saying at one point that “service and … active citizenship … will be a central cause of my presidency.” (See a full list of his commitments to active citizenship here.)

But once Obama entered the White House, the citizenship theme was lost. It was lost in rhetoric as the President began to talk about “I” instead of “we.” More important, it was lost in substance. With the exception of expanding AmeriCorps, the administration did little to strengthen the role of citizens in governance and in rebuilding America. It offered nothing comparable to the WPA or CCC of the New Deal. On the contrary, deep and long-lasting trends of civic dis-empowerment continued. Juries are disappearing from criminal justice;  education is governed by tests, not by citizens discussing priorities. I don’t mainly blame the president for these trends because I think the organizations and individuals concerned with active citizenship–including myself–have been ineffective. But I do think the lack of a tangible connection between citizens and government has been at the core of Obama’s struggles.

Last night, in Charlotte, the president forcefully reintroduced the citizenship theme. I will end with that section of the speech so that you can judge it for yourself. In my view, it was helpful but far from sufficient. Given how most people envision “good citizenship” today, these paragraphs are consistent with a very thin theory. They could imply that good citizens care enough about other people to vote for fair economic policies (i.e., for Democrats over Republicans), and also care for the children, employees, and other vulnerable people around them. Missing is any sense that we can collectively govern the country and rebuild it.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — (cheers, applause) — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.

We believe that when a CEO pays his autoworkers enough to buy the cars that they build, the whole company does better. (Cheers, applause.)

We believe that when a family can no longer be tricked into signing a mortgage they can’t afford, that family’s protected, but so is the value of other people’s homes — (cheers, applause) — and so is the entire economy. (Applause.)

We believe the little girl who’s offered an escape from poverty by a great teacher or a grant for college could become the next Steve Jobs or the scientist who cures cancer or the president of the United States — (cheers, applause) — and it is in our power to give her that chance. (Cheers, applause.)

We know that churches and charities can often make more of a difference than a poverty program alone. We don’t want handouts for people who refuse to help themselves, and we certainly don’t want bailouts for banks that break the rules. (Cheers, applause.)

We don’t think the government can solve all of our problems, but we don’t think the government is the source of all of our problems — (cheers, applause) — any more than our welfare recipients or corporations or unions or immigrants or gays or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles — (cheers, applause) — because — because America, we understand that this democracy is ours.

We, the people — (cheers) — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense. (Cheers, applause.)

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together — (cheers, applause) — through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.

So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. (Cheers, applause.) My fellow citizens — you were the change. (Cheers, applause.)

(en route to Chicago) I spoke over the weekend at the Barack Obama and American Democracy conference. For that purpose, I had re-read an essay that Obama published in 1988 in the journal Illinois Issues, entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City.”

My own basic framework: politics is at its best when diverse people discuss values and goals in settings that are moderated and structured but open-ended: not designed to achieve particular outcomes. Those same people should not just talk but also work, their action informing their talk and vice-versa. “Work” includes registering people to vote, tutoring kids, and building playgrounds but also administering programs, starting businesses, reporting news, and conducting research (among many other activities). In the process of talking and working, people form relationships that are themselves civic assets.

Although this trifecta of talk, work, and relationship-building is somewhat rare in the population as a whole, it is the goal and heart of a whole range of initiatives that include broad-based community organizing, collaborative governance, citizen journalism, service-learning, federal service programs, civic environmentalism, and many more. I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with those initiatives as a scholar/observer, formal evaluator, and/or board member for 20 years.

This was also the world of Barack and Michelle Obama, who were well known and respected leaders throughout those fields. Barack Obama had been personally involved in broad-based community organizing (as an organizer for the Gamaliel network in Chicago) and civic education. He had been trained by the inventor of asset-based community development, John McKnight, who wrote his recommendation letter for Harvard Law School. He had then served on several important boards or commissions in the field. He was one of only two politicians on Harvard’s “Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America” (founded by Robert Putnam to study and address the decline in social capital) and served Demos (a think tank that works on democratic reform) as a board member. Both he and his wife, Michelle Obama, were deeply involved with one AmeriCorps program that exemplifies combining work with deliberation, Public Allies (he as a member of the national board; she as director of its Chicago office) and with the civilian service movement in general. Michelle Obama had also worked on engaged university issues as Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. I had a privileging of meeting with her through Campus Compact, the national network of engaged universities.

Barack Obama summarized his view well in the 1988 article. He posed the question as “how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America”? He argued that neither electoral empowerment (winning City Hall) nor economic self-sufficiency would work alone.

This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone.  …  In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.

Neither electoral nor purely economic strategies could address core problems if fundamental assets (people and capital) were leaving industrial cities. But community organizing could reveal and leverage the hidden assets still present in the inner city, the “internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”  In doing so, Obama wrote, organizing “enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively—the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.” For organizers like Obama himself, the process “teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people.”

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama movingly embraced his community organizer’s heritage, but his administration has generally (not completely) failed to honor that in practice. I have told that story before and repeat it–in a slightly different version–below the fold.

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For all the billions of bytes devoted to criticizing Barack Obama’s economic strategies (Why wasn’t the stimulus bigger? Why didn’t he get the debt limit raised earlier?), there seems to be hardly any discussion of a much more significant question: Why hasn’t any major industrialized democracy employed a Keynesian response to the Great Recession?

The economic argument for a Keynesian stimulus says that typical recessions are driven by weak demand and confidence. Governments can help by borrowing and spending temporarily. An argument from justice says that human needs rise acutely in recessions; governments can assist by spending wisely. And a political argument says that people want the state to do something now even if it has to borrow. In fact, one might fear that democratically elected governments would always borrow and spend (regardless of the merits of that policy) and so would grow in every crisis until they became tyrannies.*

Instead, we see the European democracies cutting their budgets in a time of recession or near-recession. President Obama won the passage of a stimulus package, but it was equivalent to less than 6% of GDP, one third of it was devoted to tax cuts, it was largely offset by cuts in local and state spending, and after less than two years, the opposition won an election vowing to repeal it. This Brookings report describes the stimulus policies of the US, China, Spain, and Saudi Arabia as “large.” They mean relative to other countries. There were also “modest” stimulus packages in a few other democracies, such as Germany (3.4% of GDP; two-third devoted to tax cuts) and Canada. I believe all of these were short-lived.

Here are three possible explanations for the lack of Keynesian policies in almost all advanced democracies–or, to put it another way, three reasons why Barack Obama, despite engineering an inadequate recovery package, strikes Kevin Drum (who is a Keynesian) as the best or second-best leader in the whole world today.

1. The Keynesian theory is wrong, and leaders are wisely rejecting it. This Wikipedia article provides a sample of that position plus rebuttals. I don’t buy it because the Keynesian theory makes sense to me and because various influentials (the president of the World Bank, the Chancellor of the UK, the head of China’s Central Bank, and the President of the United States) explicitly recommended stimulus policies. By the way, here’s a primer in rap form on the substance of Keynesianism:

2. Political systems are manipulated by economic interests (corporations and wealthy individuals) that don’t want governments borrowing now and taxing them later. That could certainly be the case, but it raises some interesting questions: How is it that such different democratic systems have all become more susceptible to wealthy interests over time? (Mobility of capital, perhaps?) Also, how do these special interests coordinate their efforts to make them effective? Many corporations actually benefit from stimulus policies. Low taxation is in the interest of wealthy people, but they all share that interest. Game theory predicts that no individuals will actively lobby against a stimulus if they bear the cost of the lobbying but share the benefits.

3. Voters have lost trust in government and so don’t believe that a stimulus will work. Actually, the lack of trust is a fact, demonstrated by consistent survey data. But we could ask whether distrust makes leaders leery of stimulus policies. A second questions is where that lack of trust comes from. Some would say that the special interests noted in #2 have deliberately delegitimized governments through propaganda: Fox, Murdoch, Mediaset. But note that other special interests have explicitly advocated stimulus: Goldman Sachs, for example. I think it’s more likely that a) governments have performed badly and b) the fundamental shift toward individualism and choice in the 1960s biased people against hierarchical organizations.

If you’re a Keynesian, you should work to reelect President Obama (who’s your best available ally) and try to figure out what deep, structural factors explain global resistance to Keynesianism today.

* I thought I could quote Hayek to this effect, but he doesn’t specifically target Keynesian stimulus policies in the Road to Serfdom, and Keynes, intriguingly, wrote to Hayek to thank him for a “grand book.” Keynes said, “Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in a deeply moved agreement.”

Right now, everyone on the left seems to want to criticize President Obama’s leadership or else rise to his defense–yielding a vast flow of commentary. (See, for example, Drew Westen, Matt Miller, or Tom Philips for the prosecution; Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait for the defense.) We know things are going badly: the economy barely sputtering along, the 2012 election in doubt, the political system reaching depths beneath satire’s reach, and public opinion pretty strongly against any federal activism that might help. I think the interesting questions are:

1. Could pursuing different policies in 2009-10 have substantially changed the situation today?
2. Could the administration alter the situation now with substantially different policy proposals or legislative strategies?
3. Could the president change public opinion by talking differently?

There are two reasonable sides to each of these questions, but for what it’s worth, my answers would be: no, no, and no. We now know that the US economy shrank by 5.1 percent from 2007-9 and unemployment doubled. The recovery was going to be hard and slow, and Obama took office well before a cyclical rebound was possible. (In contrast, FDR won the presidency after three years of depression, once the economy had already begun to turn the corner.) I am enough of a Keynesian to think that a gigantic stimulus might have helped, but that was not in the cards. Also, the money would have to be well spent or the political backlash would have been tremendous. A modestly larger stimulus could have mitigated suffering, but we would be in the same “macro” situation as we are now.

In 2011, even a relatively modest stimulus might prevent a double dip. So we should do that! But proposing or requesting a stimulus does not cause one to pass Congress. Indeed, the chances of its passing are near zero. So if there is an underlying strategy behind the many calls for tougher or better rhetoric, it must be the hope of changing public opinion in time for the 2012 elections.

That strategy raises the much-debated question of whether presidential rhetoric can change public opinion on matters as deeply rooted as basic trust in government. I see no examples of success. As has been widely noted, the public throughout FDRs administration favored spending cuts to balance the federal budget, and he even opted for that policy in 1937. Substantial economic growth from 1932-6 made him a popular president, and his social innovations were good–as is Obama’s health care reform. But FDR did not persuade Americans to be Keynesians. Since then, trust in government has eroded slowly but profoundly, making Keynes’ case even harder.

Two additional challenges stood in Obama’s way: substantial public money had to be spent on bailouts (very bad for public trust), and the 2010 electorate was bound to be smaller and more Republican than the 2008 electorate, because it was an off-year election. Given this combination of factors, I think no other rhetoric, narrative, strategy, or bargaining posture would have made a whole lot of difference. One of the most remarkable facts about today’s political situation is the president’s relatively high approval rating, a surprising asset for an incumbent in such terrible times.

I could certainly endorse criticisms of particular bargaining decisions and particular rhetorical choices. On the other hand, if “everyone’s basically had it with the president,” then let me say that my anger is directed elsewhere. The list includes corrupt kleptocrats, Congressional partisans who don’t care about collateral damage, and liberal pundits and opinion-leaders who reacted so tepidly to the legislative achievements of 2009-10 that they probably reduced Democratic turnout that November. I can’t prove that booing the health care plan caused the 2010 electoral shellacking, any more than I can prove that the president’s sometimes centrist rhetoric has hurt the progressive cause. But my instinct tells me the biggest fault was not his.

The main line of criticism seems to be: the administration’s legislative agenda should have been, and should remain, much more ambitious, and bolder rhetoric would persuade the public to support it. My view was and remains: the political system is broken, little can be expected from it, and the public doesn’t help because they–understandably–have no faith in better policy. As I wrote in a Democratic Strategist article:

Americans’ distrust of government is deep and poses a fundamental obstacle to progressive reform. …. When only six percent of Americans trust the government to have created any jobs by spending almost one trillion of their dollars, the problem is much deeper than Fox News or the communications strategy of the White House. The underlying relationship between people and their government is fundamentally broken.

Candidate Barack Obama seemed to understand that rhetoric could not change this situation, but engaging the public in the substance of governance would begin to restore the relationship. His administration’s failure to do that has been a deep disappointment to me, but that is an entirely different critique from the one being discussed today.

Since the 2008 election, I have been privileged to spend seven or eight days in meetings with predominantly African American scholars or activists, talking about politics and Black issues.

It’s said that wherever there are two Jews, there are three opinions. That is true of most communities, at least when the political discussion is healthy, and it is certainly true of politically active Black Americans. There is much healthy disagreement. Nevertheless, I will offer a few tentative generalizations.

Obama is a widely seen as a challenge. The administration has not forthrightly addressed issues of particular significance to African Americans, such as the incarceration industry, workplace discrimination, police profiling, or teen violence. I am not sure why: it could be that the president is leery of alienating independent White voters, or it could be that his administration is not sure what to do about these problems. Or maybe they think that the Race to the Top education reform was the best response to the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Even though the president does relatively little to address the specific issues of African Americans, some loud White voices are accusing him of hating White people–as if to send a warning. Obama is increasingly controversial in Black America, too (see Lupe Fiasco, Cornel West, and others), but African American organizations are still leery of putting him in a tight spot by pressing on issues like incarceration and racial discrimination. He is, after all, the best defense now against disastrous policies. He is beset by maniacal enemies–like the people in my town who stand outside our post office with pictures of Barack Obama in a Hitler mustache, advocating for him to be removed from office as mentally incompetent under the 25th Amendment. With this going on, who wants to criticize the president for giving way too easily in budget negotiations? Nevertheless, Black groups would probably put more pressure on a White Democratic president, and they might get more action from a Democrat who was more worried about Black votes. One final irony: the flow of progressive money to the Obama campaign apparatus in 2008 caused older, community-based, Black-led political organizations to take a financial hit, which was then compounded by the recession. So the infrastructure is weaker than it was before the Obama era.

African American scholars and leaders of organizations are socioeconomically diverse, and some are relatively privileged. Yet many have deeper and more pervasive connections to people who are seriously suffering than comparable White scholars and leaders would have. In any group, some people bear private traumas. But in a group of African American leaders, the issues on the official agenda are also personal. Some participants have lost their own sibling or parents to murder. The intensity of concern is much deeper; the level of detachment, much less. Yet an inimitable, wry, worldly sense of humor often emerges to keep the intensity under some control.

The deepest irony or paradox is the combination, which everyone recognizes, of astounding progress on some fronts and disastrous setbacks on others. Today, Black scholars and leaders can gather in halls of power and privilege, connected not only by similar skin color but by personal networks to the president of the United States, the heads of major foundations and universities, and rich and influential celebrities. (Here is Cheryl Contee, who was at the meeting with me, reporting on her meeting with the president the day before.) That status was unthinkable 30 years ago. Yet the number of young Black men killed in a single year in any of our large cities is greater than all our deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan since those wars began. Where do we go from here?