On Obama and Community

[akirlu]

Eventually I will stop being All Obama All the Time. But not yet.

Mark Schmitt considers Obama's speech, and his religion, as an expression of his core identity as a communitarian.

I hadn't explcitly seen Obama this way before. But for me, a core piece of the appeal of Obama's candidacy is that identity as a builder of community. I have a sort of instinctive tropism for his persistent appeals to community and unity as basis for political change.

Practically all my life, certainly since the time I was first taken out of the home town where I had my first childhood friends, and my extended family, I have been fumbling after community. Long before I had the words for it, long before the concept was fully formed, I was reaching for the sense of people who belonged to me, and belonged to each other. Not only was I yearning for the sense of being part of that buoying network of human connection, but at some really deep level I believed that communities are the basic fonts of creative foment, of political will, and intellectual progress. (Which, come to think of it, may be why I had to give up on libertarianism. It's like grammar -- sentences give words meaning; communities give individual liberties meaning, not vice versa.)

I can't claim to have done nearly so much for building community as Senator Obama, but in my own way, I may be feeling in him a kindred spirit. Rugged individualists will undoubtedly think I'm spouting nonsense at this point.