But if we focus mainly on Obama’s palpable urgency about the damage a second Trump term threatens, we risk overlooking the former president’s deeper — and, in a way, even more grave — warning, and the source of its true force and power.
It’s that one of the most dire threats to self-rule is the very act of losing sight of the idea that this self-rule — in whatever form and historical context it exists — is itself something worth preserving, worth cherishing, worth fighting for.
Political oratory delivered under extreme national duress has historically drawn urgency from variations of this warning — for two and a half millennia. In his magisterial history of political thought, philosopher Alan Ryan draws a line from Pericles’ funeral oration, delivered over 400 years B.C., to the Gettysburg Address 157 years ago, noting they are the “greatest defenses ever” of the “ethos of a democratic society.”
Pericles spoke to Athenians enduring unexpected suffering during the Peloponnesian War, and President Abraham Lincoln spoke to Civil War-battered Northerners. But both speeches “praise their country’s founders as well as the dead,” and both “praise the polity and society for which they died.”
Above all, as Ryan recounts, both speeches sought to ignite in their listeners the conviction that they live under “a unique polity” whose “way of life should survive.”
The core of Obama’s scathing indictment of Trump is that in this regard, the current president is utterly devoid of any concern for, or recognition of, the value of our polity and way of life.
Obama’s indictment of Trump
As Obama noted, Trump does not harbor any sense of obligation to act in the interests of all the American people, and doesn’t feel “reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”
This, Obama added, has led Trump to unleash law enforcement on peaceful protesters, attack the media as the “enemy” rather than respecting its institutional role, and cast aside science and empiricism in favor of treating the presidency as “one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”
“Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t,” Obama said, reciting the consequences: Over 170,000 dead from the coronavirus, and an economic catastrophe on top of already-soaring inequality due to Trump’s continued embrace of GOP plutocracy.
But beyond those immediate consequences, allowing Trump to triumph threatens the very underpinnings of our democratic system:
Any chance of success depends entirely on the outcome of this election. This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win.
Obama’s reading of American history has long been a familiar one: that despite our unspeakable sins and atrocities, our country has continued to show itself as fundamentally redeemable, through ordinary people’s perpetual struggle to realize the founding ideals, which established a “North Star” to guide that struggle in the face of extraordinary odds. In his speech, Obama again offered this reading.
But in some ways the speech represented a departure. While Obama’s reading allows that periods of progress are often followed by backlash and reaction, the overall continued direction hasn’t been in doubt. Until now: As Jonathan Chait notes, Obama depicts Trump as potentially lying outside this cycle, by “warning that American democracy may not survive his immediate successor.”
This is a fear that Obama has privately harbored since 2016, Ryan Lizza reports. Now it’s laid bare.
A deeper wellspring of urgency
But the source of Obama’s urgency taps another wellspring as well: the fear that we ourselves will not sufficiently attend to the notion that our “unique polity” and “way of life” are worth preserving, and that this is the ultimate existential threat to them, because this is what leaves us vulnerable to Trump’s degradations.
In his speech, Obama addresses this, naturally enough, by saying people should vote because electing Joe Biden will bring immediate improvements. Biden won’t just respect our democracy and treat all Americans as worthy of respect, unlike Trump. He will also bring science to bear on the pandemic, continue expanding health care, and initiate robust government action to save the economy and make it more equitable.
But Obama knows this isn’t enough. Because, as he put it, people have good reason for doubting that the system can actually deliver, from White factory workers who have seen jobs shipped overseas (a nod to those tempted by Trump’s critique of globalization) to Black mothers who justifiably believe government isn’t working for them “at all” (a nod to deep systemic racism).
So Obama reminded Americans that some of our ancestors — particularly African Americans — faced far worse conditions, yet persevered anyway. And he cited all the energy of young people in fighting against climate change and police brutality, urged them to continue, and added this:
Earlier generations had to be persuaded that everyone has equal worth. For you, it’s a given — a conviction. And what I want you to know is that for all its messiness and frustrations, your system of self-government can be harnessed to help you realize those convictions.You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You’re the missing ingredient — the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.
One might point out that all this doesn’t reckon with the role of the modern Democratic Party (not to mention the Obama presidency) and the failures of liberal democracy itself in feeding the conviction that the system can’t deliver and isn’t worth fighting to preserve. And the pressure is on Biden to demonstrate that his agenda and leadership are worthy grounds for resisting that conviction.
But the true nature of Obama’s warning runs as follows: The threat we face isn’t just the possibility of a Trump win; it’s that very conviction, which itself renders that outcome more alarmingly plausible.
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