From the Arkansas Advocate:
Although the country is more divided and democracy is more unstable than he’s seen in his lifetime, former President Barack Obama said young people give him hope for the future.
Obama shared his thoughts Monday on democracy, civic engagement and understanding others during the inaugural conversation of Building Bridges, a new lecture series hosted by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art focused on “meeting in the middle with curiosity, courage, and care,” according to a press release.
After speaking with hundreds of Arkansas students about civic engagement, the former Democratic president spoke to around 700 people who packed into the Heartland Whole Health Institute’s ballroom on Crystal Bridges’ Bentonville campus.
Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year, museum board chair Olivia Walton, who moderated the lecture, asked about the American spirit. Obama described the country as an “eternally youthful” and “forward-looking nation” where each person can pursue their dreams and there’s a sense of working together to build the country up.
“The last element, and I mentioned this to the young people that I was speaking to today, of the American spirit is each successive generation deciding we can remake this,” he said. “There’s a process of self-invention that is uniquely American.”
After noting his concern that the country is losing some of those elements, Obama rejected the notion that patriotism means you can’t criticize the country.
“The reason I think patriotism got politicized is that both the left and the right sometimes got confused in thinking that it was not possible to take an honest look at America’s flaws and be critical of it and still love it and that’s a mistake,” he said. “It is a great expression of love for this country to say that we have not always been perfect, and the reason that we have kept getting better is because we had a bunch of people who said this isn’t as good as we can be, but the ideals were there.”
The first and only African American to hold the nation’s highest office, Obama served two terms after being elected the 44th president of the United States in 2008. Since leaving office, Obama said he didn’t expect to see the legitimacy of an election and the peaceful transfer of power challenged. He’s also been surprised by how the politicization of the Justice Department and the military has been encouraged.
“You don’t have your military involved in partisan politics,” he said. “Its loyalty is to the Constitution. Its loyalty is not to any party and it is not to any president.”
Obama said it’s concerning to see how people have been willing to overlook the erosion of norms and values in part because of fear of being punished by the state.
“The reason I think that we have found ourselves in a position where we have folks in power who are not abiding as much as I would like with these norms and rules does have to do with underlying divisions in our society that had been building up for some time,” he said.
There are several reasons for this, Obama said, including political rules, like gerrymandering, that encourage political polarization. Social media has compounded the issue by giving people with the most extreme views the most attention, he said. The country has also lost genuine communities where it’s possible to learn that people are complicated and have nuanced views on issues.
“This undermines the part of American exceptionalism that I mentioned earlier about us being joiners and us just constantly interacting with people and being in public spaces and getting to know each other and telling each other stories so that we understood each other and gave each other the benefit of the doubt,” Obama said. “That’s what we’ve lost.”
This can’t be solved simply by fixing political rules or electing one party over another, he said. Civic habits underlying these issues need to be addressed.
One step in that direction will be the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago next year. The space will be a community hub with exhibits, a library and programming to help “train the next generation of leaders,” Obama said.
“The center, it is explicit about championing democracy,” he said. “All our programming, all our displays argue and insist that for all its flaws, it is the best system we got.”
Several Democratic state lawmakers who attended Monday’s lecture said they were inspired by the former president’s speech, including Rep. Tippi McCullough of Little Rock who said she felt “a sense of relief” that the country will get through hard times. Rep. Denise Ennett of Little Rock said she liked how Obama emphasized the importance of leading for everybody, not for one side.
“I love that he reveres democracy in a time when nobody reveres it at all,” Ennett said.
For his part, Obama said young people give him hope because of their energy, insights and their natural instincts toward including people and being interested in others even if they’re not exactly like them.
“I am hopeful as long as young people don’t succumb to cynicism or despair because if they believe in their future, they will lift us all up,” he said.
