CHICAGO—In a speech at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, former President Barack Obama advocated pluralism to an audience of Democrats still reeling from the party’s losses in this election cycle.
“In a democracy, power comes from forging alliances and building coalitions and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke, but also for the waking,” the former president said at the Obama Foundation forum in Chicago on Dec. 5.
The speech mixed calls for pragmatism among the former president’s political allies with appeals to identity, nested within the big theme of pluralism in a democracy Obama said was “built on a deeply entrenched caste system.”
Obama discussed the concept in relation to the U.S. Constitution, describing that founding document as “a rulebook for practicing pluralism.”
He also discussed the outcome of November’s vote before a sympathetic audience in the city where he first rose to prominence, saying the country that had delivered the presidency and narrow House and Senate majorities to the GOP was “split down the middle.”
Obama said a few of his friends had questioned the pluralism focus in light of the election results.
“As far as they were concerned, the election proved that democracy’s pretty far down on people’s priority list,” he said. “I understood their skepticism.
“It’s easy to give democracy lip service when it delivers the outcomes we want. It’s when we don’t get what we want that our commitment to democracy is tested.”
The aftermath of Trump’s victory in 2016 was marked by a partisan dispute over alleged Russian interference tipping the balance of that election. Four years after an outcome that many Democrats and media figures characterized as illegitimate, Trump contested the results of the 2020 presidential election in the midst of an unprecedented COVID-19 response and involved a large increase in mail-in voting compared to past contests.
In 2024, Trump won the popular vote and gained more support among black, Asian, and Hispanic voters compared to 2020, with a full 54 percent of Hispanic men voting for Trump this year, according to exit polling from Edison Research.
Themes of identity were threaded through the former president’s Thursday evening reflections.
America’s political system, Obama said, had appeared more harmonious after World War II than it does today—partly thanks to the country’s global industrial dominance—more because of “who it left out.”
It “excluded or severely limited big chunks of the population from the corridors of power,” based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, the former president said.
While Obama reiterated many progressive concerns, he called on progressive activists to take a more welcoming approach.
“Purity tests are not a recipe for long-term success,” the former president said.
Other speakers at the Obama Foundation’s Democracy Forum included actor Ryan Reynolds and Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior advisor to Obama during his presidency.
