Former President Barack Obama spoke at Hamilton College in upstate New York April 3, delivering his usual mixture of cynical complacency and defense of American and world capitalism. He masquerades as a dedicated reformer and progressive, while embracing the system of oligarchic and corporate domination that threatens humanity with destruction.
His largely student audience applauded Obama enthusiastically. Infants when Obama was first elected, not yet in their teens when he left office, they have little memory of the record of his administration. Compared to the fascist would-be dictator in the White House, Obama’s eight years in power might seem a sharp contrast. Certainly that was the thrust of the ex-president’s presentation last week.
And given the annual cost to attend Hamilton, $86,000 or more in tuition, housing, meals and fees, most students at the private liberal arts college come from the affluent upper-middle class, a social layer which saw its living standards rise during the Obama years and which constitutes the primary social base of the Democratic Party.
What reception Obama would have received at a working class community college in Detroit, Chicago or Milwaukee cannot be determined, since such institutions can’t afford the $450,000 speaker’s fee that the former president now charges for a few hours of his time.
It is worth noting that one of Obama’s first speaking engagements after leaving the White House, for which he was paid $400,000, was to a business conference hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm headed by billionaire Howard Lutnick, who now heads the Department of Commerce for Donald Trump.
Hamilton College President Steven Tepper, who hosted Obama’s appearance, asked him to comment on the present political situation. He said: “It appears that many people in this country have lost not only trust in government, but maybe even more importantly, the relevance of democratic norms that undergird our government. Why has that happened?”
Obama claimed to have “deep differences of opinion” with Trump, not merely over policy issues, but over how those issues were to be resolved. He told the audience:
at least for most of my lifetime, I’d say the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus between Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals around a certain set of rules where we settle our differences. There are some bonds that transcend party, region, or ideology. There was a creed that we all stuck to. That basic notion of American democracy as embodied in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights said all of us count, all of us have dignity, all of us have worth …
There are these freedoms, a freedom of worship and freedom of the press and an assurance that if we go before the law, there will be an impartial process to make decisions. We all stuck to that, more or less.
That “more or less” carries a truckload of meaning. It excuses the anti-communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, the FBI surveillance and disruption of the antiwar and civil rights movements, Nixon’s attempt to overturn the Constitution, the smashing of countless strikes through police violence and injunctions and illegal war after illegal war—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya—as well as countless CIA-backed military coups and mass slaughters.
Most importantly, Obama is claiming that he himself as president “stuck to” the Bill of Rights. Yet his government vastly expanded the illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of the American population and Obama personally approved targets for CIA assassination, including American citizens, at weekly meetings that became referred to as “Terror Tuesdays.”
Obama continued and expanded the anti-democratic measures adopted by George W. Bush following 9/11 in the name of the “War on Terror.” These included the jailing, without due process, of so-called “enemy combatants,” the use of military tribunals, drone assassinations, the retention of the US torture center at Guantanamo, the buildup of the Department of Homeland Security and the Northern Command and mass deportations of immigrants. Some of Obama’s unconstitutional surveillance programs were exposed by Edward Snowden, who was forced to flee to Russia to escape detention in the US.
In 2013, the text of an Obama Justice Department document was leaked to the press, providing the legal argument used by Attorney General Eric Holder to justify the assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Islamic fundamentalist preacher living in Yemen, without trial, conviction or any form of judicial review. The WSWS wrote at the time:
The assertion of the presidential power to unilaterally order the murder of US citizens represents an abrogation of the entire structure of constitutional principles upon which hundreds of years of democratic jurisprudence has rested. With the assertion of that power, the US government moves into new and uncharted territory.
The WSWS analysis went on to note:
Since the publication of the white paper, leading figures in the US political establishment have declared that the asserted power to assassinate includes the power to kill US citizens on US soil. Attorney General Eric Holder declared last month in a letter replying to a question from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president can “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States,” based on an un-reviewable, secret presidential determination that the assassination is warranted by an “extraordinary circumstance.”
Donald Trump and his coterie of fascist lawyers, justifying the illegal “disappearance” of immigrants by presidential decree, could not have put it any better. Significantly, Obama said nothing at all about the most immediate issue on college campuses, the assault on students opposed to Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has led to the arrest and detention of international students or their “self-deportation” to avoid disappearing into the American gulag.
It should also be recalled that when Trump first won the presidency, in the 2016 election, Obama welcomed him cordially to the White House and declared that the entire campaign between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton had been an “intramural scrimmage,” that is, a contest between rivals who are actually part of the same team.
Now Obama claims to be “troubled” by Trump’s actions in retaliating against law firms that defended his opponents, denying press credentials to media outlets viewed as hostile and intimidating universities by cutting off their federal grants. If he had done the same thing to Fox News or to opponents of his Iran nuclear deal, he observed, those now supporting Trump would have been up in arms.
“That’s what happens in other places,” he concluded. “That’s what happens in Russia.” Again, he said nothing about the attack on immigrants—although his own father would today have been a likely target for “disappearance,” as an African student who criticized the depredations of imperialism on that continent.
Obama finished with a paean to American capitalism, which he claimed had played a decisive role in spreading democracy and prosperity throughout the world:
I mean, all of you have grown up in an international order that was largely created by the United States and its allies after World War II. Out of the rubble and the carnage that had destroyed Europe and destroyed much of Asia and it was so shocking that I think people pulled back. And they said, all right, yes, the United States, we’re the most powerful country at this point. A lot of our competitors are destroyed. We were relatively protected because of geography. And so, we’ll set up a rules-based system internationally that allows for freedom of navigation and rules governing trade. And we’re going to have an alliance with Europe, including our former enemies and in Asia, including our former enemies, because even though we are the most powerful country, we know that, having seen what happened in World War II, we’re better off if we can figure out how to get everybody to cooperate…
There were times where we did dumb things and did bully people despite our ideals, or tried to reorganize entire countries in ways that were destined to fail. But overall, this system we set up created the wealthiest, healthiest, most peaceful era in human history.
One has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief at this grotesque distortion of reality. Obama seeks to claim credit for capitalism and American capitalism in particular, for the achievements of science and technology that the profit system is now actively seeking to destroy. He covers up the most fundamental features of world capitalism: the contradiction between world economy and the outmoded nation-state system and the contradiction between the collective labor that produces all wealth and the private accumulation of vast fortunes by a billionaire oligarchy.
And as usual, the ex-president sought to pour cold water on the desire of young people for immediate and radical change. “Usually, history zigs and zags and goes up and down and there are times of conflict and there are times of stupidity and there are times of danger,” he declared. “And progress is slow and it’s hard.”
Obama said his “main message” to young people was “do not get discouraged because you don’t fix everything all at once… don’t get discouraged. I know it’s a little crazy right now, but we’re going to be okay.”
His real fear is not discouragement, but the conscious turn by masses of young people—and working people of all ages—to a revolutionary solution to the intractable problems produced by the crisis and breakdown of capitalism. Against such a revolutionary development, the ex-president offers only complacency and cynicism.