Although some have pooh-poohed Obama's Inaugural Address, it rewards thoughtful rereading of its central message and resonate passages. One powerful part speaks to today's TPM/Democracy discussion about Opportunity.

Having acknowledged the power of market capitalism to generate wealth and expand freedom, just-minted President Obama reminded us that socially regulated markets are necessary because "... a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

Indeed, despite the mythical view of America as a land of weak or absent state authority, the nation has grown and flourished best during eras when democratic government, supported by an aroused and engaged citizenry, acted to spread opportunity, to make more families secure, and to stimulate widespread, participatory innovation.

Governmentally provided widespread infrastructure, for instance, was crucial from the start. Around 1800, when the old powers of Europe had postal services that reached only elite metropolises and left out hinterlands, the United States launched a far-flung postal service, using public subsidies to ensure full communication in a nationwide network stretching to the remotest hamlets and the furthest reaches of the westward moving frontier. This enabled commerce and business innovation to spread, and allowed citizens in every state and locality and Congressional district to organize associations and political movements and churches, to petitition and pressure government at every level. Alike, America's commercial and democratic vitality were furthered from the start by publicly subsidized, inclusive infrastructure. And the story continued with publicly supported canals and railways.

Family farms were spread across the country in large part through subsidized public sales open to the many. In turn, widespread ownership and enterprise helped the nation grow and prosper (and the negative example of the slave/serf South only underlined the point by contrast).

And from the time of the Civil War, the federal government encourage a nation-spanning network of land-grant colleges and agriculture experiment stations, speading learning and science to the many and to practical endeavors.

Big U.S. wars especially spread opportunity, because they were fought by masses of citizen soldiers, many of them volunteers, and in the aftermath of each struggle the nation supported those who served with pensions and family benefits. Indeed, after the last great war, returning warriors were also supported with access to post-high school education. The GI Bill of 1944 was the pinnacle of this rendition of America's distinctive social contract, which fuses individual responsibility and community support. The GI Bill was proposed by an otherwise conservative federated voluntary association, the American Legion, and it ended up giving millions of returning soldiers in every place generous public support to attend college, sustain young families, build homes and create businesses or farms.

Nor are veterans' benefits the only way in which the United States has repeatedly achieved its distinctive formula for generous and inclusive social provision. As I detailed in my book The Missing Middle, characteristic features of publicly supported opportunity have come together repeatedly throughout our history -- in the public school movement, in veterans' benefits, in early twentieth-century programs to help mothers and children, in farm programs, and in Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. None of these have been "charitable" or "welfare" programs. All have included both middle class and less privileged beneficiaries in tax-supported programs that became very popular and politically sustainable. The best and most democratically supported U.S. social programs have offered have citizens rewards for past service or helped them prepare for future service to communities and the nation.

The challenge we face now is to recapture and update this deep pattern of socially supported individual opportunity and family security. And it won't be easy, because America has abandoned this path since the 1970s -- during an era of galloping economic disparities, middle class decline, and shameless elite wantonness. Bedevilled by racialized divisions, liberals after the 1960s proved unable to extend social provision to working-aged families, even as employer health insurance constricted and family/work dynamics changed. In recent decades -- not just the past eight years -- American workers find themselves with few or shrinking benefits and protections, and both dual-worker and single-parent families are left to work more hours with virtually no support in crises or predictable life emergencies. Meanwhile,"conservatives" in America have been anything but that; they have used radically rapacious tactics to twist government for the enrichment of the few rather than the encouragement of the many. They have, as Obama repeatedly said in the campaign, left most people entirely on their own in a changing economy and society -- and they have charged us all more in the process.

Now, in 2009, Obama and strengthened Democratic majorities take office at a moment when the chickens of rampant inequality and rapacious selfishness have come home to roost amidst an economic constriction likely to rival the Great Depression. For the first time in half a century, racial divisions are sufficiently politically healed to offer the prospect of the revival of progressive-centrist democracy. Working together, Democrats and well-meaning independents have the chance to engage broad majorities of attentive and engaged citizens, whose idealism and support could prod Congress to strengthen or create public policies that encourage broad social participation in a more inclusive and vibrant capitalism.

To do this requires infrastructural steps such as spreading high-speed internet access to every nook and cranny of our nation, and ensuring that all places (because families still live in places) have good schools and hospitals linked to expert facilities. It means ensuring affordable, portable health care for all; reinforcing pensions and health care for elders; supporting affordable post-high-school eduation for all young people who will, in turn, contribute to the nation. And it also means creating credite and bankruptcy policies that allow people a "second chance" (as Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi argued in their recent Democracy article about Opportunity).

But we should not imagine that crisis itself will be enough to engender good government that rebuilds an inclusive U.S. social contract. Crises do not automatically generate solutions. They can in fact intensify pathologies -- and that could easily be the outcome here.

In Reagan's America, to an unfortunate degree in Clinton's America, and to a truly obscene degree in the regime of Bush II/Cheney, wealthy and connected interests have become addicted to manipulable government for the few. Whatever the rhetoric of conservatives, we have certainly not shrunk U.S. government in recent decades -- instead we have turned it into an expensive hodgepodge of regulatory favors and pay-offs for the privileged. We have discouraged good people from serving in government for the right reasons, and ridiculed those who tried to govern well amidst pathologies.

So Obama faces a bigger challenge than even FDR. The New Dealers and FDR were, in many realms, shaping a powerful federal government for the first time (outside of wartime), but Obama will have to lead efforts to revalidate democratic ideals in government service; and he will have to redirect government toward serving the majority while weaning rapacious elites from accustomed favors and special access and unquestioned subsidies. Resistance will be enormous. The privileged will pressure Obama to bail them out in this "emergency" -- and then they will discover fiscal rectitude in time to deny more generous social provision and broader opportunities to the middle class and the poor. Already tell-tale pundits like the slithery David Brooks are suggesting that Obama's call for sacrifice is not about the rich-like-him paying fair taxes, but about "entitlement reform" -- which is the insider term of art for cutting Social Security and Medicare, giving ordinary working people less. We will be told repeatedly that we "can't afford" Medicare or Social Security or universal health care or efficiency-producing regulatory reforms. But no one in the privileged punditry will say we cannot afford to support their friends.

Furthermore, while sidestepping pressures from the selfish, Obama and all of us who want to move in a better direction will have to become more strategic about public policymaking than liberals have been in recent decades. Even when we start something smaller than is ideally requisite to accomplish all that needs to be done, we must thoughtfully and explicitly structure programs to encourage positive citizen participation, and we should create public financial arrangements that expand to meet greater needs over time. As research by political scientists who study policy feedbacks has shown, Social Security has actually worked this way over time: it has aroused poor and middle class elders to vote, and it encourages social understandings and citizen support to keep it in place over time. Bush II found that out when he tried to privatize Social Security, and for once, even Democrats remained united (they even kept Joe Lieberman in line)!

Looking ahead, for example, if we move to improve support for college access, let's make sure to structure programs to provide visible, direct public support (not hard to understand indirect bank subsidies), and let's reward young people who give back. Ask for service in return for outright grants. And in return for public loans, ask graduates to pay back over many years according to their income levels, with more than a full payback from those who prosper the most after college. In short, and let's say so frankly, the public gives to young people up front, and they give back in kind (in community or military service) or in long-term repayments that replenish/expand public college funding. That way, the nation and the many prosper together -- exactly the point Obama tried to make -- and everyone understands the deal.

The specifics will vary by policy realm. But if we invoke and explain the values of America's time-honored version of the democratic social contract -- the nation supports those who contribute -- we can build increased legitimacy for a revitized, democratic form of U.S. governance. We can begin to repair what has been deformed since the 1970s. And we can mobilize the attentive, broad public support it will take to say no to greedy elites.

If, along the way, radical right-wingers want to complain about progressive taxation or the active use of government power to facilitate inclusive capitalism, so what? Obama and all of us should invoke the right values, build compromises that are broad but not wimpy, and make government work efficiently for the many. We must be prepared to explain, but also to roll over the greedy naysayers who want to prevent this revitalization.

As Obama rightly said in his profound inaugural address, we are NOT proposing any new social contract here. We are proposing to revitalize and update time-honored principles of spreading opportunity and engaging citizens in the world's first mass democracy. The time has come, and not a moment too soon. In this crisis, and in a strong pushback against the deformations of recent years, we public-minded citizens must find a way to revive the social contract for our time, lest American democratic capitalism be only a past memory and not a force for the future of our children and the world.