"Forty years spent wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate--unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land." John Dewey in "From Absolutism to Experimentalism." (1930)
This is a great night. It's a great night for Obama and his supporters, but it is also a great night for all those who believe that there is a deep connection between community and democracy. Obama, community organizer and politician, holds this view. He is in good company. John Dewey, a preeminent American philosopher, social critic, and progressive of the 20th Century, was committed to a similar ideal.
Dewey wrote in The Public and Its Problems (1927):
"The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery....Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself."
On this night (besides celebrating), the night that a progressive, African-American, political leader became a major party's nominee for president, I want to begin to highlight how deeply Obama is rooted in an old American tradition, Progressivism. I am not speaking here of the use of "Progressive" as a mere substitute for "liberal," as has become popular of late. I am speaking about the Progressivism that had its heyday a hundred or so years ago, and perhaps may see a second life in the years to come. Dewey, who was influenced by Jane Addams, an important community organizer in Chicago early in the 20th Century, was one of its major philosophical voices. To continue quoting from The Public and Its Problems .
"[Democracy] is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal, namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements. The ideal of a community presents, however, actual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing elements. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the essence of democracy."
In the next few months, I hope to post on the Daily Kos more about the connections between Obama's politics and American Progressivism.(See "The Internet and the Election: There is Something Happening Here," for a brief preview. http://msa4.wordpress.com/... )