Obama’s democracy forum speech proved his era in politics his over

Former President Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2024 Obama Democracy Forum on Thursday night in Chicago. This year’s theme was “pluralism.” 

In classic Obama style, he illustrated the concept with homey examples like a church and a mosque agreeing to share a parking lot. The kind of “pluralism” that seemed to most interest him, though, was that of divergent political factions that can “form coalitions, compete for support and elect representatives who will then go and negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.” 

He studiously avoided saying the name of the president-elect, but the presence of Donald Trump hung over the whole event like a particularly grotesque balloon at a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Obama’s remarks celebrating the way flourishing liberal democracies are supposed to work, in the context of the return to power of the man who tried to steal the last election, are a vivid reminder that in the United States of America today, the machinery isn’t exactly humming along in perfect order.

Obama’s characteristic rhetorical virtues were on full display. He was a constitutional law professor before he was a politician, and he still sounds like one. At the same time, he was a once-in-a-generation talent as a political communicator. He knows how to convey a complex set of ideas in a digestible and appealing way. 

But there was a massive gaping hole at the center of his speech. He still doesn’t understand why his eight years in power culminated in the rise of Trump. Despite his considerable talents, his brand of centrist liberalism is fundamentally inadequate to the historical moment in which he now finds himself. And his speech in Chicago offered nothing but more of the same.

In Obama’s telling of the story of America’s experiment in political pluralism, the system worked pretty smoothly in the 20th century, but all wasn’t well beneath the surface. 

“Democracy,” he said, “was built on top of a deeply entrenched caste system — formal and informal, based on race and gender and class and sexual orientation.” One at a time, various marginalized and underrepresented groups got a “seat at the table.” When this happened, pluralism became far more difficult, because the political conflicts exposed by this enriching of our democracy went deeper than the old “fights about roads and taxes.” But if pluralism is now more challenging, he suggested, it’s therefore become that much more urgent.

The word “inequality” appeared exactly twice in the nearly 5,000 words of Obama’s speech. One reference was too vague for it to be clear who exactly was “unequal” to whom. The other specified that he was thinking of the inequalities between “urban” and “rural” populations and “knowledge workers” and those who work with their hands. 

These are certainly real forms of economic imbalance. But the income gap between an office worker in a city and a rural manual laborer is a rounding error on the scale of the inequality between any of these people and, say, Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank, whose annual salary is in the tens of millions, and whose net worth seems to hover over a billion. To put that number in perspective, if we imagine an immortal vampire crossing the ocean with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow earning the exact equivalent of one thousand dollars every day since then, the vampire would have only about $194 million today. (As one of the Obama Democracy Forum’s sponsors, the Capital One logo regularly appeared on the livestream’s lower-third graphics.)

It should go without saying that the small number of Americans with that kind of wealth have a tremendously concentrated amount of power in the economic domain, where they can gain or forfeit power over the lives of vast numbers of employees by buying and selling companies, as well as far more political influence than ordinary citizens. 

This kind of inequality, though, seems to be entirely outside of Obama’s sphere of concern. Even the use of the word “class” in the phrase “race and gender and class and sexual orientation” is highly telling. The kind of centrist liberalism represented by Obama sees social justice in terms of making sure that the best and brightest members of each demographic group have an equal shot at rising to the top of society, where they can become CEOs themselves, or become politicians and participate in the process he rhapsodized about earlier, whereby bright and competent technocrats “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.” 

When “class” is simply one more item on this list of identity characteristics, it’s clear that he’s talking about making sure that particularly bright and deserving individuals from working-class backgrounds can rise to the top. He’s not interested in giving the working class as a whole more structural power in our economy or our society. 

In other words, this is the same old centrism. 

Obama’s version of “pluralism” has always been integral to his message. He first came to national prominence with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he charismatically spoke about how we should resist the efforts of pundits to “slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States” rather than seeing us simply as the United States. His message has always been anti-polarization.

As president, Obama did get an incremental form of health care reform through Congress — the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” — but it was one that preserved the fundamental injustices of the system. 

Many Americans stay in jobs they hate for fear of losing their employer health insurance. Others don’t have insurance at all, which sometimes leads to grisly outcomes like diabetics dying when they try to ration out their insulin. And even those lucky enough to be insured often are often faced with a bureaucratic nightmare when they have medical emergencies. 

For-profit insurance companies have every incentive to “Delay, Deny and Defend” when clients make claims. This phrase is the title of a 2010 book on the industry by Rutgers law professor Jay Feinman. And the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” were reportedly written on the casings of the bullets found at scene where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in New York the day before Obama’s speech. If you want an indication of whether the reforms in Obamacare were sufficient to allay ordinary Americans’ anger about our health care system, look no further than the online reactions to that shocking act of violence. 

During Obama’s eight years in power, America’s wars in the Middle East ground slowly onward. This was a crucial factor in the rise of Trump, who was able to (deceptively) market himself 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 houses in the 2008 crash underwater. He oversaw eight years of mounting economic inequality. 

Those eight years saw flashes of left-wing populist outrage like Occupy Wall Street and the first Bernie Sanders campaign. These were handily defeated by the powers-that-be, though, from the NYPD clearing the protesters from Zuccotti Park to the Democratic Party quelling the Sanders insurgency. And at the end of the day there was nowhere for all that populist energy to go but Trump. 

Obama’s liberalism is far more concerned with shattering glass ceilings for deserving strivers than raising the floor of material security for everyone. And that’s 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 the clock on his presidency, and Trump is returning to power, this time with far more working-class support. Meanwhile, more than a few Americans have despaired so thoroughly of fixing our society through politics that they’re willing to cheer for an assassin murdering a health care CEO in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan. 

We urgently need a far better response to the current crisis than anything the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is offering. And the first step is to stop listening to Barack Obama.