I always thought that the American Promise was for freedom. John Judis clearly thinks otherwise. A quote:
(The speech) fed two other arguments. First, it figured in the liberal or progressive (to use Croly’s term) argument that government has a responsibility to make good on the American promise: through regulating the market, and through providing health insurance and education for all citizens. Second, it figured in Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” argument (that has goes back to the Puritans) that in order to achieve the promise of American life, Americans have to exercise mutual and individual responsibility. People have to be willing to work; parents have to look after their children; corporations cannot behave like brigands. So through this notion of the American promise, Obama united the two historic strands of American liberalism: the older New Deal argument of the 1930s and the “New Democrat” argument of the 1990s.
One America: Finally, Obama invoked his vision of a single America--and he used it not only to put forward the promise of racial reconciliation, but as an attempt to defuse the great social divisions of the last decades over immigration, abortion, gays and guns. And that, too, dovetailed back into the idea of the American promise, which could not be achieved, Obama suggested, if America continued to be rent by incivility and social discord. It was one of the most intellectually elegant speeches I’ve heard. Besides that, I expect that it will do Obama and the Democrats a lot of good in the weeks ahead.
America is indeed divided. There is an America that wants free stuff from other people's labor, energy, and risk-taking, and there is an America that wants freedom and to be left alone by the government, to find its own way through adult life.
We are meant to build our lives, and to live with it. That's what grown-ups do in a free country.
