Barack by the books

Obama himself went through a period of "devouring" the work of Nietzsche while living in New York. It's difficult to say what Obama might have absorbed from the German philosopher, mostly because Nietzsche himself is so hard to pin down, but one of Obama's favorite instructors at Occidental told Mendell that anyone who immersed themselves in his thought would learn "to call everything into question." Steeped as he was in the history of the civil rights movement (Taylor Branch's history "Parting the Waters" was a seminal book at this time), he couldn't help noticing that some self-styled African-American activists were using the more extreme rhetoric of the '60s primarily to shore up their own power, or else were purists who "preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise." In the 1980s, when Obama was organizing on Chicago's South Side, the pieties of '60s-era leftism -- from identity politics to the idea that, provided with the right social environment, people can be rendered peaceful, industrious and altruistic -- had become a kind of dogma. Alinsky's ruthless demolishing of these and other utopian illusions would have been even more bracing then than it was when "Rules for Radicals" was first published, at the height of the counterculture's idealism.

Bravado aside, the Alinsky model observes some basic rules, such as focusing on concrete, achievable goals, especially at first, so that a demoralized group can build up a sense of its own power. An important Alinsky maxim is "never go outside the experience of your people." This means (among other things) not insisting on reforming a neighborhood's retrograde attitudes on issues such as race, gender, class, capitalism and sexual orientation before you try to get the toxic-waste dump cleaned up.

In "Dreams From My Father," Obama recalls that the organizer who trained him told him to interview neighborhood residents in order to "find out their self-interest. That's why people become involved in organizing -- because they think they'll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I like these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion."

Being willing to cut a deal with the enemy is part of a practical, hardheaded political strategy; as Alinsky wrote, "To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word." An activist I know told me that the strength of the Alinsky-model groups is that "they get things done," but (as a recent arrangement ACORN made with developers in Brooklyn, N.Y., illustrates) they also leave themselves open to charges of selling out.

Despite the "radical" label that made the Clintons' image managers so nervous, Alinsky considered himself to be well within the boundaries of "Judeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition." One book he invariably assigned to his students was Reinhold Niebuhr's "Moral Man and Immoral Society," and Obama has in turn described Niebuhr (to New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks) as "one of my favorite philosophers." Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter were inspired by the work of this 20th century German-American Protestant theologian, and so are some of the "theoconservative" apologists for the war in Iraq, as well as liberal hawks like Peter Beinert, former editor of the New Republic. So broad is Niebuhr's appeal that, as Paul Elie observed last year in an excellent essay on Niebuhr in the Atlantic Monthly, "a well-turned Niebuhr reference is the speechwriter's equivalent of a photo op with Bono."

"Moral Man and Immoral Society," published in 1932, represents the utmost left of the Niebuhrian spectrum; it even evinces some Marxist notions, such as the assumption that capitalism will eventually pass away, echoes of the time when Niebuhr campaigned for the state Senate in New York on the Socialist ticket. As a result of the Second World War, he abandoned the socialism and pacifism of his youth and became the founder of a school of thought known as Christian realism, which provided a theological justification -- grounded in original sin and the concept of a "fallen world" -- for the use of military power to enforce the greater good. This made him beloved of cold warriors. It is this "muscular" Christianity that the Iraq war's early proponents found so useful in arguing that the United States had a moral obligation to use its military might to fight evil abroad.

Critics of the war, however, can just as easily point out that Niebuhr cautioned humility in such matters. Deciding, as George W. Bush did, that America was the righteous agent of God's will on earth would not have sat well with Niebuhr. When Obama made his important 2002 speech at a rally opposing the invasion of Iraq, he said, "I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war." Obama told Brooks that what he'd taken from Niebuhr is "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism."

Perhaps more relevant to Obama than Niebuhr's position on war was his lifelong mission to criticize liberalism from within. "Moral Man and Immoral Society" challenges the progressive creed of its time, the belief that society can be perfected, whether through the adoption of true Christian ethics or through reason and education (or, for that matter, through communism). The book is, in short, a brief against any notion of social engineering. Individuals can learn to be altruistic, Niebuhr allowed, but groups never will. Elites will always defend their power, and human beings have always chosen to "invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior." Furthermore, "political opinions are inevitably rooted in economic interests of some kind or other and only comparatively few citizens can view a problem of social policy without regard to their interest."

Next page: Listening to Abe Lincoln, who incorporated former rivals into his administration