Obama on Trump and the Radical Republicans, 2018

Barack Obama's speech this past Friday was an important one, Former President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the ‘state of our democracy’ 09/07/2018 (Obama's speech begins around 8:04 in this video):

USA Today provides the full transcript (Read transcript of former President Obama's speech, blasting President Trump 09/07/2018)

It's an important speech because he is the former President and because he is such a widely respected figure within the Democratic Party and beyond. And because he explicitly condemns Trump and today's Republican Party for what they are, radical threats to liberal democracy. This struck me as an especially important clarifying moment:

We're supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we're sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

This was also an important, quotable statement, "over the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party."

And he elaborated:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outsized influence over our politics; systemically attacked voting rights to make it harder for the young people, the minorities, and the poor to vote.

Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could. Cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans. Embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

Rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America's debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic President. None of this is conservative. I don't mean to pretend I'm channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that's not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party.

It's not conservative. It sure isn't normal. It's radical. It's a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters, even when it hurts the country. It's a vision that says the few who can afford a high-priced lobbyist and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

And, yes, it's in the video and the transcript:

The point [George] Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class. [my emphasis]

Don't expect to hear that phrase "ruling class" from Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer! Obama even said that NOT having such a "permanent ruling class" is "essential to American democracy."

I'm also going to take a deep breath here and say I like Obama's image of American history. If you were discussing it with him in an academic forum, he would probably agree that what he is doing in a speech like that is presenting a narrative of American history that highlights the development of democracy and human rights.

I wish I could say that was a cliche narrative. But these days, it's not really. Because the Democratic Party is unwilling to defend its own Democratic (and democratic) symbolism prior to 1860. And on the left and center-left, the Whig narrative in which monarchist Alexander Hamilton and plutoratic-minded John Quincy Adams are the heroes of democracy has become dominant at the expense of other democratic traditions in early and antebellum American history.

That is partially because the left and center-left are very aware of the disgraceful histories of slavery and the Indian Wars, and that's a good and necessary thing. As time pushes forward, it becomes harder for Americans to look at the pre-Civil War United States and see something familiar. And most Democrats are too timid to express any admiration for the guerrilla fighter ("terrorist!") John Brown, who is the only well-known white public figure prior to the Civil War who had attitudes toward equal rights for blacks and women that were pretty much like those considered democratic norms now.

But Obama described the development of democracy by holding up the slave-owner and Indian-fighter George Washington as quoted above as an example of responsible democratic governance and leadership and an opponent of a "ruling class". And quoted the slaveowner and Indian-fighter Thomas Jefferson (though not by name) in the Delaration of Independence, invoking the American Revolution as an important democratic development that should still inform and and inspire defenders of democracy today.

This is a sensible way of looking at democratic history, both in terms of political symbolism and historical analysis. And it's the kind of framing that the Democratic Party needs to use on a wider scale. Leaving the symbolism of the Revolution and the Constitution to be mangled by the Republicans is just nuts. (Trump's thing about Andrew Jackson being a prime example.)

As Charlie Pierce wrote of the speech in his appreciative analysis of it, "Yes, toward the end he got back into how there are people of good will on both sides who are drowned out by the noise of our politics. Low, high, you know the spiel." And he explained, "He could say nothing else because that hope is his entire political raison d'être. This is the way it is with Barack Obama."

This doesn't mean that I didn't have to resist the urge to bite my arm several times listening the long speech.

Because Obama steps on his own better messages when he starts singing the praise of Bipartisanship and "common ground". Even though he included in this speech an excellent description of the real existing Republican Party's version of the kind of bipartisanship they will accept:

And that doesn't mean, by the way, abandoning our principles or caving to bad policy in the interests of maintaining some phony version of "civility." That seems to be, by the way, the definition of civility offered by too many Republicans: We will be polite as long as we get a hundred percent of what we want and you don't call us out on the various ways that we're sticking it to people. And we'll click our tongues and issue vague statements of disappointment when the President does something outrageous, but we won't actually do anything about it. That's not civility. That's abdicating your responsibilities.

Although the fighting passages will get more play in the media, and I'm happy about that, most of his talk about "common ground" steps on or even contradicts those fighting messages. Because that passage just quoted is the reason that his Presidential model of Bipartisanship and Grand Bargains was such a flat-out failure. No, that doesn't mean his whole Administration was failure. It means that his no-red-America-no-blue-America paradigm isn't founded in reality.

In that connection, this passage for me was a real WTF moment:

So if you don't like what's going on right now – and you shouldn't – do not complain. Don't hashtag. Don't get anxious. Don't retreat. Don't binge on whatever it is you're bingeing on. Don't lose yourself in ironic detachment. Don't put your head in the sand. Don't boo. Vote.

Don't boo?!? I get his point that without mobilizing votes, those things in themselves won't change government in the way that is needed. Do not complain? Do not hashtag? Please. I know he's making a standard community-organizer motivational appeal here to focus his audience on taking the action he's advocating. But that doesn't just step on but stomps on the activist message he tries to convey in other parts of the speech.

It will be a great day when Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer can give a speech like that without mentioning the word "deficit." Obama rightly called out the Republicans' hypocrisy on deficit spending and deficit taxing. Republican politicians don't care about the deficit and neither do their voters. The thing is, nobody cares about the deficit outside of the mainstream talking heads who appears on Morning Joe and economists who are more concerned about professional respectability that actual public policy in the real world.

Also, yes, Obama is Obama, so he's always going to say things like this:

And it also means appreciating that progress does not happen all at once, but when you put your shoulder to the wheel, if you're willing to fight for it, things do get better. And let me tell you something, particularly young people here. Better is good. I used to have to tell my young staff this all the time in the White House. Better is good. That's the history of progress in this country. Not perfect. Better. The Civil Rights Act didn't end racism, but it made things better. Social Security didn't eliminate all poverty for seniors, but it made things better for millions of people.

Do not let people tell you the fight's not worth it because you won't get everything that you want. The idea that, well, you know there's racism in America so I'm not going to bother voting. No point. That makes no sense. You can make it better. Better's always worth fighting for. [my emphasis]

There no point in trying to quibble about the specific words there, because they are on an abstract level not connected to pending controversies. Here the tone is the important thing, the idea being that anyone who suggests that a compromise might be a bad one or that right now is not the time to surrender to the opposition is a naif who doesn't understand the Real World. This is his way of poo-pooing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

But, gosh, look at this! Another passage that got a lot of coverage says:

So Democrats aren't just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they're running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate debt-free. [my emphasis]

He didn't go so far as to say he endorses Medicare For All or free college. But he's only talking about them because progressives like Bernie Sanders pushed for them, campaigned on them, and exposed the ideas to a wide enough public that they became popular with a signiicant number of voters.

If your a strict political careerist, platitudes like "better is good" or "better's always worth fighting for" are useful excuses. But they are unlikely to inspire militant commitment to ideas that aren't already widely accepted.

I won't go into detail here, but Obama's political legacy also needs to be carefully evaluated in understanding why we wound up with the Orange Clown in the White House backed in his destructive policies by a fanaticized Republican Party. A good starting point would be the Grand Bargain he made a centerpiece of his Prsidential strategy. It involved repeated attempts by Obama himself to convince Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. That was not a strategy of better is good. It was very much a position of worse is better.

The conservative Heinrich Brüning (German Chancellor 1930–32) was better than Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. The reactionary Paul von Hindenburg was better than Adolf Hitler as President. Which is why the Social Democratic Party supported Hindurburg in the final round of the 1932 election over Hitler. But Brüning's disastrous Herbert Hoover economic policies had a great deal to do with Hitler's becoming Chancellor in January 1933. A position for which President Hindenburg accepted him.

In thoses cases, better was not good enough.

Very importantly, Obama's Administration had a solemn obligation under the Torture Convention to seriously legally investigate and prosecute the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration. They didn't. Giving that kind of de facto immunity to Presidential crimes has the problem I described in a post in 2008 (Why the Obama Justice Department has to prosecute the torture perpetrators 11/25/2008):

It's precisely because the Cheney-Bush administration broke the law extensively while preserving the basic governmental structure that makes prosecutions even more necessary in our present case. What's the point in having a rule of law if the Executive can arbitrarily set it aside? And what's the deterrence for the next set of Cheneys and Roves if there are no legal consequences for the criminal acts of the current administration?

Cheney and Bush created a real-life template for who an American government can use an authoritarian political party to establish a truly lawless Presidential government. The next set of Roves and Cheneys that come to power need to think that if they are ordered to implement similar lawless actions, that the law may very well catch up to them.

If the guilty participants in this administration don't experience direct legal consequences, i.e., prosecution and legal punishment, for what they did, then the Cheney authoritarian model has worked. Next time around, it's just a matter of finding the right combination of voter suppression, fear, de facto control of the media and suppression of real dissent to make it permanent.

Cheney's idea of democracy was articulated back in 1949 by East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht, as he explained to his Party comrades in 1949 what kind of government they were founding in the new "German Democratic Republic": "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)

Not prosecuting known major crimes from this [Cheney-Bush] administration would validate the Cheney-Ulbricht approach to governance. And that would definitely not be a good thing.

Because, as Dark Lord Cheney himself said at a reception in Poland for Auschwitz survivors in 2006,, presumably with no irony intended, "Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." (Vice President's Remarks at Reception for Survivors of Auschwitz George W. Bush White House Archives 01/26/2005)