Will Act for Food

Following through on these proposals would make Obama a worthy steward of the American arts, as Roosevelt and Kennedy were. But he is not FDR or JFK, and his times are not their times, and the differences ask him to do more.

The most important of these differences isn't race or age or ethnicity: it's Obama's unique understanding of community. "Dreams From My Father," the coming-of-age memoir that earned him a small but honorable spot in the transnational tradition, follows a self-described "misfit" as he searches for a place where he can thrive. Organizing communities, he comes to find, means "a promise of redemption." Obama developed that theme when he told Wesleyan's class of 2008 that he hoped they would perform public service not because they had a debt to other people—though they did have that debt—but "because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation … Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you'll play in writing the next great chapter in America's story."

What Obama describes here is the ideal of the "Beloved Community"—not as Dr. King used the term, as a society bounded together in peace by Christian fellowship, but the way that, of all people, Randolph Bourne articulated it, and in the very same essay that he introduced the idea of "transnational America." According to Bourne, we express our fullest selves only through working together at a purpose larger than we are: "All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community."

Obama organized his campaign around that principle, trusting people to come together and work from the bottom up to elect him. If he means what he says about bringing the same approach to Washington, where he will draw people together to remake the world, the arts offer him just what he needs. A 2006 report from the NEA shows that participation in the arts correlates strongly to volunteerism, playing sports and contributing in other ways toward something like a Beloved Community. Yet under No Child Left Behind, state and local school officials cut funding for arts education, the most effective way of fostering in children a taste for culture. Obama has talked about sending artists into schools to make up some of this deficit. It should be at the top of his cultural agenda.

Even as education programs could get more kids involved in the arts, Obama seems almost certain to preside over a significant expansion in the number of grown-up artists, too. If his health-care plan gets enacted in anything like its current form, it'll be the government's greatest gift to culture in a generation. The security of Obamacare wouldn't just make it easier for existing artists to focus on creative work, it would swell their ranks, as plenty of part-timers would have less need to keep day jobs for the sake of a dental plan. The only question is whether Obama will see fit to celebrate the passage of a health plan as (among other things) a great day for the arts in America: will a young filmmaker or composer be in the crowd onstage at his signing ceremony?

But if Obama really values American creativity and wants to encourage it wherever it's found, he'll need to be the first president to address how technology has given us new ways to invent and interact. In his new book, "Remix," the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig notes that "just when technology is most encouraging of creativity"—thanks to, say, the suite of digital tools that allow us to make, remake and distribute remixes and mash-ups online—"the law [is] most restrictive." Obama seems to recognize the limits of the current copyright regime, as when he used a less restrictive Creative Commons license to share his Flickr photostream on election night. Lessig hopes this means that the new president will make the appointments and undertake the policy reviews that might lead the government to stop criminalizing a creative impulse shared by many of the young users of the Internet and start encouraging it.

The goal of these reforms wouldn't be to flood the Web with pop-song mashups (though the just-posted Jay-Z/Radiohead mix is amazing). Like a broad-based arts-education initiative and a health-care plan, copyright reform is a way to revive an idea about culture that we lost amid the mass entertainment of the 20th century—namely, that culture is what an active people builds together, not what they're fed by media conglomerates. The term "couch potato" didn't exist in 1916, but Bourne understood how easy it is to turn people into an indolent mass. If the Beloved Community means anything, it's a place where men and women express themselves and cease to be mere passive consumers. Through working together for some greater cause, they realize their fullest individuality—a paradox Whitman would have loved.