Obama offered his trademark: a hopeful series of solutions. He encouraged “an inclusive market-based system,” criticizing both “unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism,” and socialism. He emphasized the role of youth, and the need for free speech and open democracies. He also chided opponents of white-nationalist regimes across the world. Taking familiar jabs at identity politics, the former president said that liberals can’t beat their opponents if they dismiss them out of concern that “because they’re white, or because they’re male, that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling—that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.” [...]
His prescription for the world’s economic state, which continues to see a robust recovery from the last recession, didn’t address why even in that recovery the forces of populism and racism still appear to be on the advance. It was flawed given the setting, too. His praise of a global, liberal, market-based economic framework is an incomplete take on the life and philosophy of Mandela, who led a Marxist party that might now be best described as social democratic, and whose major postapartheid challenge was unlocking the vast reserves of wealth held by a minority elite. Obama’s recommendations were in conflict with the words of Madiba himself, who said in a 1996 address: “We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image.” [...]
In speeches like these, Obama often tries to play the role of a moderator attempting to set the terms of debate so that sides can reach each other in good faith. But this is a romantic view, and it does nothing to counter the obvious disregard Trumpism has for dialogue, mutual empathy, or facts. Nor is it supported by the real histories of freedom, struggle, and movement in both South Africa and the United States. South Africa’s black people overthrew their oppressors, and while careful debate was certainly a critical part of the process, so were shame, dispossession, and outright violence. Indeed, Mandela himself helped lead an armed sabotage campaign against the Afrikaner government, and later refused to pledge to renounce violence in order to secure an early release from prison.
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