For those it really reached, Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric had two revelatory effects. One was his power to conjure up an ideal America that listeners could recognize and believe in. The other was his ability to convey a living idea of duty to other citizens and the country. In his voice, that duty was not a debt to be paid grudgingly or a tragic sacrifice, but a gift we had the power to give, a connection that strengthened us when we acknowledged and honored it. The listeners I'm talking about are a generation--mine--shaped by experience as post-traditional and fragmented as the new president's own life. We wanted, sometimes without knowing it, a way to believe in America as being, like us, an amalgam of inheritance and choice, a product of experiment and hope. If you want to remember how unreachable these ideas were for progressive politicians for at least half a generation, look back to the campaign speeches of Al Gore and John Kerry, and see whether you can find language there that could tie Obama's shoelaces. The country he proposed to govern today is the one he helped his supporters to rediscover in our minds over the last 18 months.

That country is the ethereal, emotion-charged community of the imagination, which Obama called up so readily, and of the movement that grew up around him. Now the question is whether and how we can build it in the America where we already live, in all our smaller but more indubitably real communities. What do all those places have to do with Barack Obama's America?

BARACK OBAMA'S AMERICA
In my original Democracy piece, I wrote about how community has changed as Americans have become more individualistic without losing their hunger for connection and belonging, and speculated about how new versions of community will interact with President Obama's politics. (I am probably going to need to write or pronounce "President Obama" several thousand times over the next few days, just to keep from spontaneously combusting.) In this post, I'm going to get to that argument, but first I want to do two other things. First, I'll say a little about the idea of the American community that the President voiced in his inaugural address. Second is to connect this to the community that sprang up in the Obama campaign: a dispersed and maybe transient community, but one that says something about community and politics generally. Then I'll sketch the Democracy argument and say a few more things about community in Obama's America. First, the speech: the words he chose for his first half-hour as President. I agree with the standard observation that, without naming Bush (presidents never name their predecessors in inaugural addresses: it would be like mentioning an ex in a wedding ceremony), Obama repudiated his presidency point for point. He replaced foreign-policy swagger with a calmer promise of solidarity with struggling people, which put first responsibility on their own efforts and elevated American principle, example, and intelligence over raw muscle. He promised to "restore science to its rightful place," an electric moment for those who thought Ben Franklin's country might have given up on the Enlightenment. He rejected "the choice between our safety and our ideals," which has helped power a whole constitutional vision of presidential supremacy, and when he announced that the country had chosen hope over fear, you had a pretty good idea who he meant with that fear stuff. He even placed "curiosity" among the perennial virtues, along with courage and patriotism. It's quite possibly the first time that word has landed in an inaugural address, and it's a good virtue for an age of uncertainty. It is also the quality the 43rd president most signally lacked.

But here are two less obvious and more interesting facts. First, the subtler music that ran through the address was all about adulthood. It was time "to set aside childish things," to take on a "new era of responsibility," to move beyond "petty grievances" and "false promises," to look reality in the face, know what it requires of us, and save the world for the generations after us. Second, that is almost exactly what George W. Bush said when he accepted the Republican Party's nomination in 2000: he promised a "responsibility era" in which his generation would show that it had not wasted its talent and opportunity, but instead had "grown up before we grew old." This is a new theme in major presidential speeches. Important presidents have called for various versions of national maturation since the beginning of the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan all did. They meant very different things by, from admitting that we needed a big and powerful government to admitting that we needed to throw off the one we had built. But those presidents did not make adulthood personal, so much as national and metaphoric: for Obama and Bush, it is a matter not just of a country's historical development, but of people being grown-ups. What brought these two men, opposites in so many things and certainly in their literary and rhetorical sensibilities, to the same idea?

I'd begin with the Obama campaign. As a participant (I volunteered in two primaries and the general, for a total of about ten days of canvassing) and an observer (I wrote about the campaign and had many students five to ten years younger than I am who threw themselves into it), I experienced it as a generational earthquake. The numbers are already something. After decades of playing Godot, voters in their twenties showed up and supported the Democrat by two to one. In his most surprising wins, such
as Indiana and North Carolina, Obama won the youth vote - 74 percent
of it in NC - and lost all other age groups. Young voters gave him an eight million vote majority, about the same as his overall margin. Subtract the kids, and the country just might be reflecting John McCain's choice of inaugural poet.

But despite the text-messaging and Facebook pages, this was no Rock the Vote popularity contest. It was a youth insurgency demanding adulthood in the White House. Call it speaking grown-up to power. We who began voting after Bill Clinton took office have aged amid his Peter Pan fecklessness, George W. Bush's blinkered rigidity, and the
depressing nihilism of Karl Rove's tactics-is-everything merger of campaigning and governance. As war, deficits, climate change, and financial collapse gathered into a brooding permanent crisis, it got harder and harder to believe that these self-serving characters were the adults. This is key to the difference between what Bush's adulthood talk meant and what Obama's means. Bush was taking a side in the baby-boomer fight between perennially self-indulgent children of the sixties who will go their graves mistrusting grown-ups on principle and those who, alienated or burned by that flamboyant period, decided they needed to become the radicals' idea of adults: rigid, spuriously infallible, and pious about tradition and, yep, community. (I know these are stereotypes, and I apologize to the tens of millions of my elders who live their lives beyond them; but for the last sixteen years, we have been governed by first one stereotype, then another, so they are somewhat imprinted, not to say seared, on our impressionable young minds.)

It is true, as critics never tired of pointing out, that the Obama campaign was very much about Barack Obama. This was Bill Kristol's strategy during the period when he desperately trying to press Obama into a boomer-war box by casting him as a narcissist. But Barack Obama seemed to us to be entirely about America. For the first time most of us could remember, that gave us a way to be about America, too. This is the meaning of "We are the people we've been waiting for": we are the grown-ups, and if no one else will save the country, we will. Melodramatic as it must seem, I would hazard that every young Obama volunteer, and a lot of young voters, felt this way. (Again, I know I'm using the first-person plural a lot here. I was there, and other people were with me, so grammar dictates it; but you can get off the train anytime, no offense.) Obama's adulthood language today struck me as completely fitting his campaign and what we've seen of his personality, and as totally consonant with what many of us who were so moved by his candidacy were hoping to help it accomplish.

Whatever that is, it's not neither Bush's caricatured rigidity nor Bill Clinton's self-involvement. Individualism and community, freedom and integrity, innovation and tradition, are tired oppositions for us. You can't rally us to one or the other, but you can interest us in integrating them - which is what we were already trying to do in our own lives, by the way. We can be frivolous and self-involved, but friendship is one of our arts. We are instinctively ironic, but when we find something worth believing in, whether a movement or a person, we cherish it. Raised amid ads and images, we enjoy style, but lionize competence and ability. We like fun, but we treasure productivity. With wide-open choice from early in life, many of us are more religious than our parents (I'm not) or choose more traditional lives in other ways (I have). This is an easy generation to underestimate, but its promise is formidable, and near its core is the wish to be good.

We don't know yet what this version of adulthood means for politics. Still in our twenties and early thirties, we hardly know what it means for adulthood. But this election showed that we have rejected the Reagan-era myth of self-reliance, with no certainty about what will replace it. We know we need a country that works, and we are willing to be the people it needs. My guess is that this is what many of us heard Obama addressing today: a call to put America among the things we'll believe in and work for, not just in the heady promise of his campaign, but now that it's time to govern.

COMMUNITY IN THE U.S. (THESE DAYS)
Now to the original Democracy piece, on community life in the America where this is all going to happen. Here's what I argued has been happening. Americans have both asked communities to do more and withdrawn into themselves, making the country more communitarian and more libertarian, all at once. Some of this change is rooted in the politics of the Bush Administration, which has leaned on the language and symbolism of community but asked little in the way of civic engagement. Some of it, though, reflects much deeper changes, beyond anything Tocqueville foresaw or presidents can control. Americans have embraced stronger forms of individuality and self-realization, and they have begun seeking out communities that help to fulfill these goals. The very nature of community in America has changed.

Communities are being asked to step up and do work that, not so long ago, would have belonged to government. This is true in the bipartisan embrace of faith-based social services. It is true of lawmaking: Ever more Americans live in housing developments, where homeowners' associations take the place of local government. Even in political rhetoric, the last two presidents have studded their major addresses with the language of community, service, character, and personal responsibility, emphasizing the role of families and religious institutions in American life and eschewing traditional talk of national purpose or greatness. (The glaring exception is George W. Bush's dramatic portrayal of a global anti-terror campaign as a national mission, but that is both sharply divergent from his approach to domestic politics.) The public's trust in institutions maps these changes, as Americans put their faith in local and civic rather than national and political institutions. Polls find that religious organizations, "small business," and the military (a volunteer organization) enjoy far and away the highest levels of public trust, while Congress and the presidency come in near the bottom.

At the same time, there is evidence that Americans are withdrawing, both into their own lives and into communities of the like-minded. For all the quibbles it produced, Robert Putnam's conclusion in Bowling Alone stands: Recent decades have devastated traditional social networks that were often cross-class and quasi-civic. A 2006 study found that between 1985 and 2004, Americans reported the average number of people with whom they can "discuss important issues" falling from three to two, with a quarter saying they have no one with whom to discuss such issues and 80 percent saying they turn only to family members. These networks are weakest among poorer and less educated people. So is the share of those who say they more or less trust others.

As for like-mindedness, the most striking piece of evidence is journalist Bill Bishop's (author or The Big Sort) discovery that between the very close presidential election of 1976 and that of 2004, the share of American counties with landslides (a spread of 20 points or more) rose from 38 percent to over 60 percent. Bishop speculates that this political segregation results from sorting along subtler cultural lines, as mobile Americans choose neighbors like themselves. In turn, party affiliation comes to be less about policy and more about cultural style and identity-reinforcing issues like abortion and guns. Other trends bespeak the same pattern. The local and voluntary organizations that Americans tend to trust (religious groups, small business, public schools in certain communities) are those they share with people like themselves, while the political and impersonal ones they mistrust lump them together with strangers. The emergence of civic brokers of politics, like megapreacher Rick Warren, marks an effort to bypass traditional sources of information in favor of judgments filtered by the like-minded and culturally similar.

We are becoming more communitarian toward those who resemble us, substituting voluntary associations for politics in addressing social problems and drawing on like-minded communities rather than national sources in making political decisions. But we are also more likely to feel disconnected from the fates of those we consider different from us, and skeptical of institutions that tie us too strongly to them. And we are more likely to be alone.

COMMUNITY AND POLITICS
The shape of our politics may be in some ways a symptom of this situation. But it could also be a cause, as Bush's presidency has seized on and amplified these insular trends. Karl Rove's politics of divisive cultural symbolism and mistrust of culturally different "elites" seized on the underlying changes and made them more politically salient. The administration's indifference to civic obligation even after September 11 produced no unifying counterpoint to balkanized culture.

The Obama-McCain contest was mixed on this front. The two candidates were, in their partisan fields, the ones most identified with the idea of a national civic identity that might bridge subcultures. Their victories bespoke an appetite for a unifying politics, suggesting that even if Americans do not trust or identify with the institutions that tie them together across party and cultural lines, they hunger for versions of those institutions that could sustain their loyalty. Yet the general election brought inter-community hostility and mistrust back to the fore - ironically, since one might expect the general, rather than partisan primaries, to be the place where unifying ideas get most traction. Instead, the red-meat culture-war rhetoric of the Republican Convention and the electrically divided response to Sarah Palin revivified us-and-them cultural issues.

The switch from civic-minded primaries to a culturally divided general election raises the troubling possibility that, although Americans avidly wish for a more unifying national politics, they cannot coalesce around a political idea that would in fact unify them. Differences in attitudes, priorities, and styles may be so strong, and so habitually important in forming political judgments, that either party can produce its own vision of national community, but neither can persuade the other's partisans to share it. That would be an especially tragic situation, in which the very situation that voters wish to change restricts their power to overcome it.

So, what will the changing shape of American community mean for the next president? Part of the answer depends on what he makes of it - whether he takes it as given, as the Bush Administration has mostly done, or he challenges it by tapping the appetite for a stronger sense of shared civic community.

There are reasons to take it as given. Cultural division could present a serious barrier to ambitious initiatives. A national health-care program, for example, could falter on the perception that the wrong kinds of people - the other kinds of Americans - would benefit too much, or contribute too little, a kind of argument that is nearly always available absent a background feeling of solidarity. The same goes for a national-service program or a draft of the kind that another war might require. There are things that people simply will not do for others with whom they have only a weak feeling of common fate, and if paying taxes is one, dying may certainly be another. It might be smarter to try to develop initiatives that don't ask too much of civic spirit and instead draw on traditional ideas of self-reliance. Social Security got some of its political traction because it came dressed as a guaranteed savings account, not a solidaristic entitlement program. Linking new programs to personal effort is one approach, exemplified by income supports for the working poor and college loans or grants tied to academic performance. Another approach is to concentrate help on areas seen as beyond the control of the individual: catastrophic health insurance and early-childhood education, for instance.

But there is another strategy: to use governing as an opportunity to build an electoral majority and a policy program out of the president's own image of national community. Nothing about today's cultural division necessarily dooms a national-service program or universal health care, and either, if successful, might strengthen a feeling of common fate among citizens. So might taking on energy independence and research into renewable fuels as a national mission, along the lines of the Apollo program. If politics can contribute to balkanized community, it can also contribute to changing it. Creating experiences of shared effort, such as national service, can affect participants' attitudes beyond those experiences and make them open to broader visions of national community.

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUALISM
There is, however, another way of looking at the whole question. Those inclined to take politics seriously might find it obvious that we should worry about homogenous communities and thin, fractious national identity. Maybe so, but it is also helpful to consider why American community has been developing as it has and how the changes are connected with good things about our national life.

The wish to be among people one feels comfortable with is hardly selfish and narcissistic - or, certainly, it is not only that. Rather, it is of a piece with a much larger development, and a good one. Americans since World War II have asked more of their private lives than ever before: not just survival and basic security, but self-improvement, self-expression, and a sense of a meaningful life. Civic culture flourished in the early twentieth century not least because there was not much else to do, and there was considerable need to get out of the house or tenement.

But Americans have recently sought to enrich the experience of staying in the house, or the office. The ideal of marriage is increasingly of a highly personal and complex fit with one's own personality, as it already is and as one wishes it to be. The same goes for the ideal of a career. On the consumer side, economic life increasingly includes a complex of self-improving and life-enriching techniques and technologies, from mood-altering drugs to psychotherapy, Lasik surgery to diet books. It is no surprise that Americans have asked similar things of their communities. Where once a sturdy house and neighbors who did not fight too loudly might have seemed enough, now people seek places to live where their values and identities make sense to others, and find reinforcement. What self-sorting Americans embrace in the new forms of community is more important to them than the traditional kinds of community they are leaving behind.

These changes in personal goals redound to larger ideas about freedom and the American polity, sometimes in positive ways. The Supreme Court's ruling for a constitutional right to same-sex intimacy is in one respect a political expression of a much more widespread idea: that personal identity is important enough that people can demand respect for it. The same idea underlies the much broader trend toward openness and tolerance around sexual identity, almost indisputably the biggest piece of moral progress in the last ten years of American life.

The emphasis on personal identity also contributes to a subtler but significant loosening of the terms of racial identity politics. The last generation of racial politics was obsessed with group authenticity, the question of who was "really" whatever the identity at issue was. The obsession extended from college campuses to media to the 2002 Newark mayoral election in which the black incumbent, Sharpe James, attacked the black challenger, Corey Booker, as, in effect, a white man and a Jew. (Booker lost, then won in 2006.) One of the reasons Barack Obama's candidacy has stirred so much excitement among younger voters is that both his biography and his language, particularly in his instant-classic Philadelphia speech on race, express a complex reality in which individuals combine diverse strands of experience, some inherited, others chosen. These changes have a downside for solidarity, of course: witness the remarkable poll earlier this year that found barely half of black Americans consider themselves part of a unified race, because of the extent of African-American diversity. But solidarity, too, has a downside. Mandatory identity is a psychological and political burden, and the power to opt out in favor of one's own particular self is a gain in freedom, whatever else it is.

As Americans have become more individualistic and placed more value on personal fulfillment, they have rejected forms of community that constrain those goals, and looked for neighborhoods, groups, and friendships that reinforce them. The old idea of community - geographic, racial, and civic - was of non-optional membership. Today's versions is all about options: we create ties with what moves us. That's particularly convenient for people who already have a lot of choices and don't need much support from the old, mandatory types of community - neighbors, family, or government acting on a strong idea of civic bonds. It's harder for those who start with fewer advantages, or have bad luck, and need a hand at a time when no one is moved to extend one.

This is the long way around to saying that the Obama campaign has been about politics for the kinds of people we are now, the kind that would build the communities we live in. No wonder he won (it is easy to say in hindsight, though it often seemed far from clear that he would). Now the question is what kind of mutual responsibility Americans are willing to acknowledge for one another. It's an easy word to use; but the distance from taking care of one's own child to committing to a version of the country, with faraway fellow citizens and remote future generations, is a vast one. When Obama calls for "responsibility," do we hear him asking us to make health care and good education rights rather than privileges? - easy things to say, but which would require immense commitment of resources and political will to make real. Is our sense of responsibility enough to acknowledge the inequalities and injuries around race that remain a scarring injustice, even after the breathtaking fact of Obama's election? Enough to address the stunning level of imprisonment among Americans, most dramatically black men, asking what it says about us and how we can change it? Enough to believe that constitutional rights are at the heart of our arrangements, not luxuries that we can roll back if they become inconvenient? Enough to roll back the double gorge of public debt and fossil energy that may give the next generation, or even mine, an impossible inheritance? Time will tell, but only we will decide - we and everyone else, for better and worse, whom we don't have the choice to live without. That's how it is with communities.