Hannah Arendt characterized politics as a realm of "speech-acts," in which words are close enough to deeds so that the words aren't evasive or empty and the deeds aren't mindless or brutal.

In April our national orchestra of high-minded opinion presented President Obama's oration on the deficit as a great speech-act. A chorus of pundits rejoiced that he'd exposed the hypocrisies of Rep. Paul Ryan and other Republican deficit hawks-cum-rollback artists. The orchestra oomph-pah-pah'd its way through its familiar medley, "This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds." After all, it's only an orchestra, not a politically organized force.

I couldn't help feeling -- and warning here, in virtually the same words you're reading now -- that most of what Obama said he stood for was about to be eviscerated by a bought-and-paid-for Congress whose members' words have become so divorced from deeds that brutality has entered the congressional arena itself, as in the Tea Party disruptions of congressional town-hall meetings, not to mention in Tuscon.

The only justifiable answer to what Obama himself called the "hostage takers" in a rare moment of pique would be an electorate that hasn't just been entertained by him in what, in retrospect, was his year-long Michael Jackson concert of 2007-2008, but one that has been educated and mobilized by a truth-telling Great Communicator.

I credit Obama with elevating racial politics. I've never expected him to slay the dragons of the American casino-financed, corporate-welfare, consumer-defrauding juggernaut single-handedly, especially given the damage done by fanatical Republican strategists determined to "starve the beast" of government. But there remains a standard of truth-telling leadership -- the kind that would educate and mobilize a body politic against its hostage takers. It's a standard that Obama has conspicuously failed to meet. Instead, he's been an "Ivy neo-liberal," with grace notes that I and others began worrying about even before his election.

So, what now?

The American people are always ultimately alone. Popular sovereignty is like that. The more piously that its would-be leaders invoke "the American people," the less likely they're offering what true leadership would.

When congressional "leaders" (who only follow) and governors such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker and their paymasters becine the most energetic initiators of politics, words such as Obama's become empty beyond parody, and others' deeds become brutal. As W. B. Yeats foresaw it, in words of his own that sounded frighteningly like speech-acts when he wrote them and sound that way again now:

Things fall apart;
The center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

No oration by Obama last April, no sit-down involving Joe Biden, Erskine Bowles, Alan "The Clown" Simpson, and the naked emperors of our bought-and-paid-for Congress, was going to stop the corporate-welfare queens, foreign investors, casino financiers, consumer-marketers, their lobbyists and front groups, and Murdoch-like journalism (which, I argued in Dissent last week, is part of the blood-dimmed tide), from eviscerating Obama's vision of America.

There's a pedagogical challenge here. At Yale I've been teaching a seminar, "Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy," for juniors and seniors who wonder what it takes to sustain a civic-republican public sphere, one where individuals discover their highest and best selves by giving something of themselves, partly through speech-acts, to the common good.

Civic republicans do that, not in a spirit of saintly self-denial, but out of enlightened self interest that enlarges them as they master the disciplines and graces of reason-giving for their positions. Those arts and disciplines of deliberative democracy enable them to listen to others' reasons; extend trust cannily to others in ways that elicit and reinforce others' trust in return; and reach decisions with others that everyone can count on everyone else to respect. That's often called "the rule of law," but it involves much more than law alone. When it works as I'm suggesting, it gets us beyond shouting, threatening, and holding public processes and virtues hostage to ideological absolutes.

So, what does it take to sustain such a public sphere, especially when crashers like Murdoch or Tea Party Republicans twist public reason-giving to demonize opponents and sow fear and rage? It takes truth-telling leadership and deep political organization. These ingredients stimulate individuals to commit themselves to democracy by habit, disposition, and heart, even when not intellectually.

Not all citizens do this; not even necessarily a majority; but in a healthy democracy, enough people do it to set a tone and common standards to which others feel answerable when challenged. A liberal capitalist republic like ours depends on a critical mass of citizens' upholding such public virtues and beliefs, because neither the liberal state nor capitalist markets nourish or defend them.

The liberal state is committed foremost to defend private rights and interests, often against the state itself. And with good reason. Markets, meanwhile, focus and intensify the side of all of us that seeks gain; and with good reason again. But somehow, therefore, citizen leaders of a liberal-capitalist republic have to be nurtured and trained in some public virtues all the more intensively by non-state, non-market institutions in what we call civil society.

Leadership such Lincoln's, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt's, and Harry Truman's is an essential stimulant, but ultimately it's civil-society institutions and mentors that nurture citizen-leaders -- in old liberal-arts colleges, new community colleges, and state universities, in immigrant settlement houses, labor unions, inner-city as well as suburban churches, Little Leagues and soccer leagues. Those institutions have to be more than just safety valves for participants' pent-up yearnings and anger. They have to be wellsprings, drawing from sources of dignity and faith that states and markets don't supply.

Is any of this still plausible? I've been asking my former students how they see it now, a few years out of college. One, who took my seminar in 2004, became a journalist for a few years, and is now in law school, framed the challenge this way while a senior:

"A set of practices, habits, customs and beliefs must be considered basic to the practice of a functioning democracy," he wrote. "The rules of democratic engagement must be inculcated in a republic's citizens.... Unlike the Constitution, though, such subtle understandings and habits cannot be codified. The ethos of a republic is at once its most inscrutable and important attribute."

That's a good lens through which to understand my question to my other former students now that they're out in the world. One of them who has worked in community organizing and politics, and is now studying corporate management in order to understand what he's been up against, wrote me:

"I continue to admire your call for a civic-republican renaissance, but I fail to see from whence it will arise....[T]here must be an ideological challenge - if not outright resistance - to business as usual in America today.

"I know that when you say 'civic-republican,' you mean to endow it with real substance having to do with the very guts of what this country is about, but I sometimes feel that, when you write it, most of your readers end up defanging the concept because they cannot trace the history underlying it, as you seek to do.

"Whether 'the left' calls itself 'the left' or something else, neither Obama nor Yale's grand strategists will escape the ubiquitous power of corporate capitalism without an ideological counterweight,... and I'm not sure the idea of civic republicanism contains the motivating force we need.

"At the same time, I hesitate to treat either our President of my fellow students solely as victims of their circumstances. There are choices that our President has made, to tamp down the organizing structures he helped build up, that seem to have been made for political expediency rather than long-term strategy, let alone democratic revival.

"The same point about making choices is true of many Yalies, and their instructors -- I would dishonor the dozens of friends who have turned down lucrative jobs to do the hard work of social change if I did not acknowledge that each of us still has the power, through our own work, to make it easier or harder for social transformation to occur.

"We can dive into the dark undercurrents, or we can swim against them. And even if President Obama can't turn the tide himself, I would give him more credit if he was tossing the rest of us a few life-jackets."

Still another of my former students, who worked for a congressman in his home state and on Capitol Hill for a few years after graduation before going to law school and then into corporate law, wrote me, "I'm a bit skeptical that the American people were ever woven into a well-functioning republic of the sort you discuss, but I'm generally on board with your assessment that America suffers from a deficit in civic republicanism.

"I don't know where to go from making this diagnosis to taking steps to cure what ails the republic.... I think that 'corporate capitalism' is here to stay and I think the best, and only, solution is to regulate the excesses of the market.

"Any movement that premises its existence on forming a counterweight to corporate capitalism is dead on arrival," he continued. "I would bet that as Obama's agenda grinds
to a halt, there will be more readers like [another student] and myself who are casting about only for the diagnosis but also more and more for a suggested cure."

I understand these reservations, and I share some of them. In our seminar, we consider in some depth the possibility that "the public" is a fiction or phantom, as Walter Lippmann argued in the 1920s. He thought that the only solution was to rely on noble experts -- in effect, a benevolent dictatorship -- who might be ratified by the public from time to time but would displace parliamentarians almost completely when it comes to setting monetary and fiscal policy, not to mention environmental and social policy.

The dubious performances of what the late journalist David Halberstam called "the best and the brightest" during the Vietnam era, and since, remind us that experts are often the last to know. Insulating expertise from politics is necessary and desirable up to a point, but it's no substitute for the kind of politics Arendt envisioned. The Federal Reserve, a pale legacy of the "expert" approach to public decision-making, has given us ideologues such as Alan Greenspan and, more recently, hapless neo-liberals.

When one of the students cited wrote that corporate capitalism is here to stay and that any movement promising a counterweight to it is dead on arrival, I answered him that, political movements or no, corporate capitalism isn't here to stay because it's going to implode.

The more one learns about corporate law and jurisprudence, the more one is likely to conclude that while corporations are impressive engines of economic development, they're also engines of social disruption and degradation, sometimes wrenching and abrupt, sometimes subtle and inexorable. As democratic decision-makers, for-profit corporations are as fictional and useless as homo economicus. They tend to institutionalize illegitimate and, ultimately, unsustainable ways of organizing human affairs.

That this will implode is nothing to gloat about. It may well drag a lot of humanity and the planet down with it. But neither is this grounds for fatalism, mysticism, or despair. Every reform or alternative movement that has hewed a stone of hope out of the mountain of despair (Martin Luther King) has faced insuperable, unconquerable odds. That was true of the anti-Communist dissidents in Eastern Europe; of Gandhi and his followers in British imperial India; of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

The best book I've read about confronting such odds is Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, which recounts and assesses and theorizes a little about these unlikely yet triumphant (and least, relatively triumphant) movements. Their "citizen-leaders" all began as nothing, going up against massive public unresponsiveness, looking to many like little more than fools or saintly martyrs to others' indifference.

Against such dim prospects and the ones my students quite rightly also discern, a
humanist (or a Christian) has to keep looking for the transformative potential that, history shows, has often emerged from coordinated human speech-acts that pulled societies back from disasters.

That's easy to say, and harder to demonstrate. I've never met a conservative who could convincingly reconcile his or her yearning for communities of cultural depth and moral order with his or her obedience to every whim and riptide of the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut that is destroying all that such conservatives claim to cherish. And I've never met a conservative who can reconcile American patriotism with anything that that global juggernaut now represents.

But I would turn the tables on neo-liberals and fatalists, too, by challenging them to acknowledge that doing nothing, or putting band-aids on suppurating limbs, or spinning justifications for the unjustifiable, as so many Ivy League graduates (including, apparently, Obama) have been socialized and trained to do -- is worse, because it entails complicity in the destruction, however elegant their complicity's trappings.

We're all complicit, of course -- me by certifying future spin-doctors at Yale. But we have to keep talking about this, and I'll have more to say about liberal education's role in it another time.

Meanwhile, let's follow and support next week's recall-election efforts in Wisconsin, which are sure to be reported well by John Nichols for The Nation. And let's take some civic-republican heart from observations like this one, sent to me yesterday by R. R. Reno, editor of the conservative religious journal, First Things:

"Globalization has whipsawed the social contract in America, shifting very significantly winners and losers, and with it the basis for national prosperity and the funding of the common good. The problem, I think, is that the Left often believes in the theoretical and political instruments used to grapple with the challenges of the shift a century ago, while the Right is tempted simply to deny that we face any problem that the market cannot miraculously solve, which amounts to denying that we face any social or political problems at all.

"I'm a Republican," Reno concludes, "but a patriot first, and that means I very much want Obama to be a Lincoln."

Obama has failed to find his inner Lincoln. But someone else will, and in the meantime it's up to the rest of us to find our civic-republican selves and start building a better politics with others who are doing that, too.