The Audacity of Hope

These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—a
confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the
circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so
long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a
whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economy
depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. The
legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these
values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and
nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our liberty.
If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of
tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it would be a mistake to assume that
this is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal
values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of
family and the cross-generational obligations that family implies. We value community,
the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the barn or coaching the soccer
team. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and
sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves,
whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And we
value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another:
honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.
In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands—the individualistic and
the communal, autonomy and solidarity—are in tension, and it has been one of the
blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate
these tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent
upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from
an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast
tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually
remake themselves.
But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the
hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and
independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a
frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seen
patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith
calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the
impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to
acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.
When this happens—when liberty is cited in the defense of a company’s decision to
dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new
mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody’s home—we depend on the strength
of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.
Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that
society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to
others. The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowded
theater; your right to practice your religion does not encompass human sacrifice.
Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state’s power to control our