Former president Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Obama 2024 Democracy Forum Thursday evening in Chicago. This year’s theme was “pluralism”.
In classic Obama style, he illustrated the concept with simple examples, like a church and a mosque agreeing to share a parking lot. The type of “pluralism” that seemed most appealing, however, was that of divergent political factions that can “form coalitions, compete for support, and elect representatives who will then negotiate and compromise and, hopefully, advance our interests.
He still doesn’t understand why his eight years in office resulted in Trump’s rise to power.
He carefully avoided pronouncing the name of the president-elect, but the presence of Donald Trump hovered over the entire event like a particularly grotesque balloon during a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Obama’s remarks celebrating how thriving liberal democracies are supposed to work, in the context of the return to power of the man who tried to steal the last electionsclearly remind us that in the United States of America today, the machinery does not exactly operate in perfect order.
Obama’s characteristic rhetorical virtues were on full display. He was a professor of constitutional law before becoming a politician, and he still seems to be one. At the same time, he possessed a unique talent as a political communicator. He knows how to convey a complex set of ideas in a digestible and engaging way.
But there was a huge gaping hole at the center of his speech. He still doesn’t understand why his eight years in office resulted in Trump’s rise to power. Despite his considerable talents, his centrist liberalism is fundamentally ill-suited to the historical moment in which he currently finds himself. And his speech in Chicago offered only more of the same.
In Obama’s account of America’s experience with political pluralism, the system worked quite well in the 20th century, but not all was well beneath the surface.
“Democracy,” he said, “was built on a deep-rooted caste system – formal and informal, based on race, gender, class and sexual orientation. » One at a time, diverse marginalized and underrepresented groups were given a “seat at the table.” When this happened, pluralism became much more difficult, because the political conflicts revealed by this enrichment of our democracy were deeper than the old “struggles over roads and taxes.” But if pluralism is now more difficult, he suggested, it has become all the more urgent.
The word “inequality” appeared exactly twice in the nearly 5,000 words of Obama’s speech. One reference was too vague to make it clear who exactly was “unequal” to whom. The other specifies that he is thinking of the inequalities between “urban” and “rural” populations and between “knowledge workers” and those who work with their hands.
These are certainly real forms of economic imbalance. But the income gap between a city office worker and a rural worker is a rounding error on the scale of inequality between each of those people and, say, Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank , whose annual salary is in the tens of millions. , and whose net worth appears to be over a billion. To put this figure into perspective, if we imagine an immortal vampire crossing the ocean with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow earning the exact equivalent of a thousand dollars every day since then, the vampire would only have today ‘today only about 194 million dollars. (As one of the sponsors of the Obama Democracy Forum, the Capital One logo regularly appeared on graphics in the lower third of the livestream.)
It goes without saying that the small number of Americans with this kind of wealth have extremely concentrated power in the economic realm, where they can gain or lose power over the lives of large numbers of employees by purchasing and by selling businesses, as well as political influence far greater than that of ordinary citizens.
The word “inequality” appeared exactly twice in the nearly 5,000 words of Obama’s speech.
This type of inequality, however, seems to completely escape Obama’s sphere of concern. Even the use of the word “class” in the phrase “race, gender, class, and sexual orientation” is very telling. The type of centrist liberalism represented by Obama views social justice as ensuring that the best and brightest members of each demographic group have an equal chance to rise to the top of society, where they can become CEOs themselves, or become politicians and participate. in the process, he rhapsodized earlier, that bright and competent technocrats “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
When “class” is just one more item on this list of identity characteristics, it is clear that he is talking about ensuring that particularly bright and deserving individuals from working-class backgrounds can rise to the top. He is not interested in giving the working class as a whole more structural power in our economy or society.
In other words, it’s the same old centrism.
Obama’s version of “pluralism” has always been an integral part of his message. He first gained national prominence with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he spoke charismatically about how we should resist pundits’ efforts to “carve our country up into red states and blue states.” » rather than seeing us as simply the United States. His message has always been anti-polarization.
As president, Obama secured a progressive form of health care reform through Congress – the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” – but this reform preserved fundamental injustices in the system.
Many Americans stay at jobs they hate for fear of losing their employer health insurance. Others have no insurance at all, sometimes leading to terrible consequences, such as diabetics dying when they try to ration their insulin. And even those lucky enough to be insured often face a bureaucratic nightmare when they have medical emergencies.
For-profit insurance companies have a vested interest in “delaying, denying and defending” their customers’ claims. That phrase is the title of a 2010 book about the industry by Rutgers law professor Jay Feinman. And the words “delay,” “deny” and “submit” were allegedly written on bullet casings found at the scene where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in New York the day before Obama’s speech. If you want to know whether Obamacare reforms were enough to quell ordinary Americans’ anger toward our health care system, look no further than the online reactions to this shocking act of violence.
During Obama’s eight years in office, America’s wars in the Middle East progressed slowly. This was a crucial factor in the rise of Trump, who successfully presented himself (deceptively) as “anti-war.” And on the economic front, Obama continued George W. Bush’s policy of bailing out “too big to fail” banks while leaving homeowners who lost their homes in the 2008 crash underwater. oversaw eight years of rising economic inequality.
He is not interested in giving the working class as a whole more structural power in our economy or society. In other words, it’s the same old centrism.
Those eight years saw flashes of left-wing populist outrage like Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ first campaign. However, these were easily defeated by the powers that be, from the NYPD clearing out Zuccotti Park protesters to the Democratic Party suppressing the Sanders insurrection. And in the end, all that populist energy had nowhere to go but Trump.
Obama’s liberalism is far more concerned with breaking glass ceilings for deserving fighters than with raising the threshold of material security for all. And this is exactly the kind of liberalism that failed the first time – so spectacularly that a grotesque pseudo-populist demagogue was Obama’s immediate successor.
Now Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, is running out of time in his presidency, and Trump is returning to power, this time with much greater support from the working class. Meanwhile, many Americans are so desperate to fix their society through politics that they are willing to applaud an assassin who murdered a healthcare CEO in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan.
We urgently need a far better response to the current crisis than anything offered by the dominant faction of the Democratic Party. And the first step is to stop listening to Barack Obama.