Former President Barack Obama had some harsh words this week for “wokeness” and liberal “cancel culture,” saying the two lack any sort of meaningful purpose outside of being merely judgmental and self-serving.
“This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly,” the former president said Tuesday during an appearance at Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
He continued, arguing that “wokeness” poses a real “danger,” particularly to younger people.
“There is this sense sometimes of ‘the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough,’” Obama said.
He then offered the following example: “Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb. Then, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was? I called you out. I’m gonna get on TV,'” Obama said. “‘Watch my show. Watch Grown-ish. You know, that’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”
Watch President @BarackObama make an excellent point about call-out culture. pic.twitter.com/P6mw9aLWTQ
— ATTN: (@attn) October 30, 2019
He is absolutely correct. Where I keep getting tripped up is the part where I try to reconcile Obama’s remarks this week with the fact that he was also the “cancel culture” president, who rather famously relied on his vice president to negotiate with congressional Republicans because Obama, personally, seemed incapable of compromise or extending any sort of latitude to his political opponents.
PJ Media’s Jim Treacher has the same hang-up as me.
“Man, [Obama] must’ve hated the president we had before Trump,” Treacher writes. “That guy was always talking about ‘getting in their faces’ and ‘punching back twice as hard.’ He thought anybody who disagreed with him was just ‘clinging to their guns and religion.’ He was judgmental as hell about a plumber who asked him a question he wasn’t prepared to answer without embarrassing himself. Past Obama was not at all the sort of person Present Obama is describing here.”
He adds, “But hey, it’s still good advice for young people. If you wait long enough, eventually Obama will say something true by accident.”
Yes, I have difficulty looking past the part where the man doling out wisdom this week about the virtues of compromise and the toxicity of judgmentalism is the same man who referenced The Untouchable during the 2008 presidential election, saying of his political enemies: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” But you have to accept the truth wherever you find it. Obama is not wrong to warn of the dangers of “wokeness,” and I guess I should just be happy he is saying it. It just would have been nice if Dr. Frankenstein realized what he was doing before he helped bring this monster to life.
