How Obama Really Thinks

How Obama Really Thinks

Feisal G. Mohamed: How Obama Really Thinks

I write fresh from a two-day symposium on pragmatism organized by Gregg Crane of the University of Michigan and my Illinois colleague Gordon Hutner, in which several scholars explored this intellectual tradition closely tied to America?s brief tryst with social democracy. The so-called neo-pragmatists were refreshingly absent from a discussion that revolved largely around such figures as William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams?all of whom, I learned the hard way, must be spoken of in certain circles only with rapturous adoration.

An especially significant contribution was an excerpt from James Kloppenberg?s soon-to-be-released book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition. In his fascinating account, Kloppenberg examines the formative moments in Obama?s intellectual career and shows how pragmatist philosophy finds popular expression in Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope. He seems to leave no stone unturned in his study of Obama?s learning and has an uncanny ability to find James and Dewey lurking beneath many of these stones. (Though in the way of such examinations of influence, suggestive coincidences can sometimes be given overstated significance: I am not entirely persuaded that we should make much of Malia and Sasha?s enrolment in Chicago?s University Lab School, which was founded by Dewey and his wife, Alice, and which counts David Axelrod amongst its civically engaged alumni.)

Most compelling is Kloppenberg?s examination of the Harvard Law Review during Obama?s tenure as an editor and, later, as its president. During that period, 1988-90, the law school was embroiled in heated debates between progressives and an upstart group of conservatives. The Review responded to the conservative doctrine of original intent with emphases on civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, and philosophical pragmatism. Cass Sunstein?s article in the December 1989 issue draws on the thought of James and Dewey in emphasizing the generation of scrutable and amendable legal interpretive principles consonant with the goals of deliberative government.

Particularly significant is an article in this period written by Laurence Tribe, the professor who taught Obama constitutional law and for whom Obama worked as a research assistant during his first year of law school?a rare plum for a first-year law student, reflecting Tribe?s recognition of the young man?s exceptional gifts. That assistantship is acknowledged in an article appearing in the November 1989 issue of the Review in which Tribe claims that all forms of judicial practice, active or restrained, necessarily grow out of and influence existing social and cultural conditions. The insight found fuller expression in Tribe and Michael Dorf?s 1991 book, On Reading the Constitution, where the authors credit Obama and Robert Fischer with the metaphor of constitutional interpretation as ?a conversation? and claim that the two have influenced their thinking ?on virtually every subject discussed in these pages.?

This is precisely the kind of scholarship that provides a necessary counterweight to the racist paranoia fomented in the recent ravings of Dinesh D?Souza. Rather than fables on the oriental origins of Obama?s ideas of governance, Kloppenberg offers careful examination of the president?s years at Occidental College under the tutelage of political scientist Roger Boesche. We find a president whose intellectual formation has led him to view with skepticism the comprehensive doctrines of the political Right and Left and to be?regrettably?suspicious of an activist state setting itself against even the most diseased portions of the body politic. Much as the Left might see Obama?s incremental change as political expediency, Kloppenberg compellingly shows how that approach grows out of long-standing intellectual commitments informed by the legal engagements of pragmatism current in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One is hard-pressed in deciding whether to be less or more dispirited after this revelation.