The Audacity of Hope: Ideas on Reclaiming the American Dream

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Barack Obama’s lucid imaginative and prescient of America’s place on the planet and name for a brand new sort of politics that builds upon our shared understandings as Individuals, based mostly on his years within the Senate
 
“In our lowdown, dispiriting period, Obama’s expertise for proposing humane, smart options with uplifting, elegant prose does fill one with hope.”—Michael Kazin, The Washington Submit
 
In July 2004, 4 years earlier than his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic Nationwide Conference with an handle that spoke to Individuals throughout the political spectrum. One phrase specifically anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all of the discord and battle to be present in our historical past as a nation, we now have at all times been guided by a dogged optimism sooner or later, or what Obama known as “the audacity of hope.”

The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama’s name for a distinct model of politics—a politics for these weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “limitless conflict of armies” we see in congress and on the marketing campaign path; a politics rooted within the religion, inclusiveness, and the Aristocracy of spirit on the coronary heart of “our inconceivable experiment in democracy.” He explores these forces—from the concern of shedding to the perpetual want to boost cash to the facility of the media—that may stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He additionally writes, with shocking intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, searching for to steadiness the calls for of public service and household life, and his personal deepening spiritual dedication.

On the coronary heart of this ebook is Barack Obama’s imaginative and prescient of how we will transfer past our divisions to deal with concrete issues. He examines the rising financial insecurity of American households, the racial and spiritual tensions throughout the physique politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism to pandemic—that collect past our shores. And he grapples with the function that religion performs in a democracy—the place it’s critical and the place it mustn’t ever intrude. Underlying his tales is a vigorous seek for connection: the inspiration for a radically hopeful political consensus.

Solely by returning to the ideas that gave beginning to our Structure, Obama says, can Individuals restore a political course of that’s damaged, and restore to working order a authorities that has fallen dangerously out of contact with tens of millions of odd Individuals. These Individuals are on the market, he writes—“ready for Republicans and Democrats to meet up with them.”