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Former President Barack Obama made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump in his speech to the 2024 Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night. But his speech was more than just a partisan diatribe: It was a philosophical brief in defense of liberalism, a first-principles moral argument that no other major convention speaker offered.
“Liberalism” here does not refer to the term’s use in American partisan politics. It refers to a centuries-old philosophical tradition that holds that politics is fundamentally guided by the values of freedom and equality. For liberals, government exists to enable people to live their own lives as they see fit; it has no right to tell people what gods to worship or to give some groups more rights than others.
Obama A thoroughly liberal presidentTrump Completely unfreeThis clearly bothered Obama — so much, in fact, that he used this most compelling speech to explain why Trump must be defeated not only politically but philosophically.
What Barack Obama sees as the stakes in 2024
Obama is not the first to declare Trump the mortal enemy of liberalism. Since 2016, countless books have been published about the crisis of liberalism caused by Trump and how to solve it.
Some of Obama’s comments hew closely to this literature. Like many, Obama sees Trump’s divisive style of politics as antithetical to liberalism’s core egalitarian principles: that all citizens should be treated equally and that everyone should be free to pursue the good life as they see fit (as long as they do not harm others in doing so).
Obama said Trump made a fundamental distinction between “real Americans (who support Trump, of course) and outsiders who don’t support Trump.” Trump and his allies believe that “one group’s gain is another group’s loss” and that “freedom means powerful people can do whatever they want.”
“This is wrong,” Obama said. “This is wrong not only for Democrats and progressives, but for Americans — the citizens of this country.” Its existence stems from free thoughtIn his telling, Harris’ campaign is tapping into a fundamental liberal impulse that permeates the American body politic.
“Most of us don’t want to live in a country that’s filled with bitterness and division,” Obama said. “We want things to get better. We want to be better. The joy and the excitement of this campaign tells us that we are not alone.”
For Obama, living out this liberal vision meant embracing the diversity inherent in a society made up of people of all faiths and worldviews: recognizing that “our fellow citizens deserve the same favors that we would want them to give us.” It meant understanding that “true freedom” is one that gives us all “the right to make decisions about our own lives (and) requires us to recognize that others have the right to make decisions different from our own.” It meant seeing democracy as more than “a bunch of abstract principles and a collection of dusty laws in some book” but “the values we live by.”
To be clear, this is not to say that Trump is un-American and therefore bound to lose: Obama is at pains to emphasize that the race remains too close to call. Rather, Obama is saying that Trump’s positions contradict many of the values Americans claim to hold dear — our core understanding of who our country is and what it stands for. America’s truest identity is liberalism, and that identity can transcend the things that divide us.
I would like to agree with this. But when I In my recent book I arguethere is a profound illiberal tendency in American politics – an ideology that stems from the fundamental contradiction between the United States’ national liberal ideals and the reality of slavery at the time of its founding.
This tradition, like Trump, rejects the egalitarian ideals at the heart of liberal democracy. It is neither more American nor less American than our higher ideals; both represent authentic aspects of American identity, and both have triumphed at different times in our nation’s history.
The question, then, is not whether American liberalism can reassert its natural dominance but whether the America in which Obama believes can prevail in this centuries-long struggle against its twin brother, authoritarianism.
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