I was struck by two major themes while reading this book. The first theme was that Barack Obama truly, deeply believes in America. He waxes poetic about the documents that outline the structure of our democracy, and how they have been interpreted and applied in various ways.
“My students may have used me as a guide, but they needed no intermediary, for unlike the books of Timothy or Luke, the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution – present themselves as the product of men. We have a record of the Founders’ intentions, I would tell my students, their arguments and their palace intrigues. If we can’t always divine what was in their hearts, we can at least cut through the mist of time and have some sense of the core ideals that motivated their work.”
“They [the founders] didn’t simply design the constitution in the wake of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights – all in the span of a few short yers. As we read these documents, they seem so incredibly right that it’s easy to believe that they are the result of natural law if not divine inspiration”
On Abraham Lincoln and his testing the limits of the Constitution during the Civil War, Obama wrote,
“I like to believe that for Lincoln, it was never a matter of abandoning conviction for the sake of expediency. Rather, it was a matter of maintaining within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas – that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side’ and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.”
The second theme was that this book was written in a much simpler time. The Audacity of Hope was published in 2006, when I was in middle school. This was before the first iPhone was released, when people still used Myspace, and when the subprime mortgage crisis was beginning.
“When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath.”
The parts of American history he mentions here are absolutely horrible aspects of our nation’s past. However, with our current political climate as our vantage point, the idea of a politician telling anyone to take a deep breath feels condescending.
On the topic of globalization and the changing American economy, Obama wrote,
“It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace – private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets – while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations.”
Reading that in 2020 felt like accurate description of reality for many Americans today.
The Audacity of Hope was very informative and well-written. I picked up a lot of things from reading this – context about the history of the senate, a better understanding of what debates about the constitution mean, and an understanding of Obama’s “Why” for getting involved in politics.