Former President Barack Obama zeroed in on the Left’s streak of intentional intolerance again this week.
“Democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, maybe they’ll change ours. You can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start,” he said in a speech on Tuesday. “And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you, because they are white or they are male, somehow there is no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”
The definition of “identity politics” varies, but Obama is clearly targeting the popular progressive notion that a person’s membership in a dominant or “privileged” identity group (Caucasian, cisgender, male) strips their opinions on topics like race and gender of validity. It’s a toxic strain of thought that has influenced efforts to censor or attack nonprogressive voices on college campuses and in the media, making it a strong undercurrent in our broader culture of political division as well.
And given his assertion that democracy can’t work effectively if we “just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start,” that’s what seems to be weighing on Obama’s mind. The Left’s role in making conversations between well-meaning ideological opposites increasingly rare is hard to ignore, and Obama is wise to confront it as a leader in liberal politics.
And confronting those attitudes is something he’s been doing since the end of his presidency. “Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too,” Obama said at a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2015. He’s since reiterated those sentiments in commencement addresses and media interviews.
Here’s a strong tweet from conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro on Obama’s most recent remarks.
When I say precisely the same thing in precisely the same words I am called an emissary of white supremacism by Leftists who will cheer it because Obama said it https://t.co/Y3NEC3kQ3I
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 17, 2018
This time, Obama’s critique comes as some anti-Trump Democrats (and Republicans) are arguing it’s moral to publicly harass and deny service to high-profile supporters of the president. The former president’s unlikely leadership on this matter is valuable, but also only as valuable as the Left sees it.
