If the current lineup holds, the Democrats will be represented by a communitarian if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becomes the presidential candidate. Hillary’s communitarian leanings have been long known. They are especially well spelled out in her book It Takes A Village. She also delivered the keynote address at the 1996 meeting of the Communitarian Network, and met frequently with communitarian thinkers, especially William Galston.

Barack Obama showed great familiarity with communitarian ideas and thinkers during a meeting at the home of Susan Ness and Larry Schneider. However, given that this was a private meeting, I considered it inapposite to quote what he said. Luckily, at least for communitarianism, his new book The Audacity of Hope, lays out his communitarian leanings in clear and strong terms:

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and cases, 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 bar 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 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. (Obama, p. 55)

There are many other communitarian passages in the book. The special importance of this one is that it shows that Obama is what is varyingly called a neo or liberal or responsive communitarian. These communitarians (among which I count myself) differ from East Asian or authoritarian communitarians in that the latter see community as trumping individual rights in the name of the greater whole, while neo communitarians see a tension between the common good and rights—which needs to be worked out case by case. But neither trumps the other conclusively. In effect, on this key point the parallelism between the Obama text and the communitarian platform is truly remarkable and very welcome indeed. The response communitarian platform, excerpted here, is very much in accord with Obama on a number of issues:

A communitarian perspective recognizes that the preservation of individual liberty depends on the active maintenance of the institutions of civil society where citizens learn respect for others as well as self-respect; where we acquire a lively sense of our personal and civic responsibilities, along with an appreciation of our own rights and the rights of others; where we develop the skills of self-government as well as the habit of governing ourselves, and learn to serve others– not just self.

(This is a cross-post from PoliticalMavens)