Former president Barack Obama spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently about the state of democracy, and how he never thought the Republican Party would veer as far off the path as they did with the Trump era.
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“I think we have to worry,” he said, “when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago.”
Obama admitted to Cooper that even after Donald Trump was elected to the presidency in 2016, he expected that there would be enough “guard rails” in place with the “Republican establishment” to stop Trump from getting too far out of hand.
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But as we saw over the course of four years and counting, that was simply not the case. Just about everything Trump said and did faced very little resistance from Republicans in power, particularly at a federal level.
Cooper pointed out how that changed, briefly, after Trump’s lies about election fraud, generally either accepted for pushed by his fellow Republicans, resulted in the Capitol riot on January 6.
“And then poof, suddenly everybody was back in line,” Obama added. “The reason for that is because the base believed it. And the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch and nobody stood up and said ‘Stop. This is enough. This is not true.’”
The former president also shared concerns about the future of democracy in the United States, pointing to other countries that previously had functioning democracies but let them fall “in a series of steps.”
“My hope is that the tides will turn,” he said. “But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”
Obama’s warnings about democracy have been shared by many folks online, but some took issue with the idea that Republicans weren’t always on the path to what the modern-day party has become.
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The TV show Nightline was specifically invented to take down Jimmy Carter by spinning up the mighty poutrage wurlitzer, turning what should have been a tense behind-the-scenes diplomatic event into a 24×7 festival of carefully disguised partisanism. It was the model for CNN.
— Mataliandy
Pfizer (@mataliandy) June 8, 2021
But now that everyone can see plainly what they’ve become, and that voter suppression efforts are being enacted across the country, the question still lingers—what’s being done about it?
*First Published: June 9, 2021, 6:26 am
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