Obama has also, to be fair, engaged in more Normal 50-Something American Male throwbacks such as showing up for jury duty before being sent home for the day, and dancing like an awkward dad. And in keeping with ex-presidents before him, he launched a charitable foundation stocked with uber-wealthy financiers—one of them is named, I shit you not, J. Kevin Poorman.Despite all that activity, Obama's been glaringly absent from the public stage in the Trump era, leaning into the Responsible Norm that former presidents shouldn't critique their successors. On Tuesday, however, he gave the most significant speech of his post-presidency, the keynote address at an annual tribute to freedom fighter and former South African President Nelson Mandela, one of Obama's personal heroes. It was a sweeping review of world history and the benefits and perils of globalization, as well as a denunciation of the authoritarian forces that have bubbled up all over the world, including in the United States.The only problem with the speech—mellifluous, grandiose, hopeful, and intellectual, as many of Obama's other speeches have been—was the world in which he delivered it. What was intended as a love letter to democracy, a thinly-veiled warning to beware the Donald Trumps and Vladimir Putins of the world, a paean to tolerance and the promise of technocratic capitalism, instead read like a laundry list of all the ways Obama, and democracy, had failed America. The message wasn't bad; the problem was the messenger. A proper survey of the powers that have damaged the world would include the inescapable truth that Obama and other liberals are partly to blame for the shape we're in.
This starts strong before veering off the deep end. Yes, checks and balances and a strong judiciary are key. But that judiciary might include another check on Trump in the form of Justice Merrick Garland if Obama hadn't caved in the face of unprecedented Republican obstruction—a refusal to even hold hearings on the man's nomination to replace Antonin Scalia—in 2016. Instead, he could and should have called the GOP's bluff and seated Garland anyway. Yes, the Constitution requires the advice and consent of the Senate, but the Senate wasn't willing to do either. Why not force the issue and let the legal system he has so much faith in decide?Democracy depends on strong institutions and it’s about minority rights and checks and balances, and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and a free press, and the right to protest and petition the government, and an independent judiciary, and everybody having to follow the law. And yes, democracy can be messy, and it can be slow, and it can be frustrating. I know, I promise. But the efficiency that’s offered by an autocrat, that’s a false promise. Don’t take that one, because it leads invariably to more consolidation of wealth at the top and power at the top, and it makes it easier to conceal corruption and abuse. For all its imperfections, real democracy best upholds the idea that government exists to serve the individual and not the other way around. And it is the only form of government that has the possibility of making that idea real.