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I was there at the Obama Democracy Forum in Chicago when the former president laid out his vision for how we might actually start healing our divided democracy. And let me tell you -- seeing Obama in person, now fully embracing his gray-haired elder statesman vibe at 63, was something else. He's still got that same thoughtful presence, but now there's this added weight of experience when he talks about democracy's challenges. What struck me most was how he started by just being... human. Here's the former leader of the free world talking about being a stressed Bears fan (which, as he noted with perfect comic timing, "has not been easy"). But that was exactly his point --we're all more than just our political labels. "I am a 63-year-old African-American man," he said, "but I am also a husband, I am a father, I am a Christian who is constantly wrestling with his doubts about organized religion, I am a writer, I'm a Bears fan.” The energy in the room shifted when he brought up those corporate responses to George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. You could feel people nodding when he called out how companies rushed to put up ads and host mandatory seminars. "Their intentions are good," he said -- and then, after that characteristic Obama pause: "but I'm not sure I believe that." Then he really dug in: "It's easy to tweet... And it may feel satisfying in the short term. Unfortunately, it actually reinforces the sense that we are inevitably, immutably divided." Four years later, guess what? Those seminars are gone, and what really changed?. His breakdown of how we ended up so divided was razor-sharp. It's not just politics, he noted (though that's messy enough). The economy went haywire, creating this massive gap between college grads and everyone else. Rich folks started sending their kids to private schools, so they're not even running into "regular folks" at Little League games anymore. Churches, unions, civic organizations -- all those places where different people used to actually meet and talk? They're falling apart. The media part hit hard too: "Media companies have figured out that there's a profit in playing to the extremes." Now every election feels like "mortal combat" where compromise is seen as betrayal. We're stuck in what Obama calls a "doom loop": gridlock leads to more extreme positions, wilder rhetoric, and everyone thinking the other side is cheating.
The room got especially quiet when he shared a story about the young advocate who opened up to him about the pressure of online activism. She admitted she often takes harder positions than she actually believes in because that's what gets followers and donations.
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Try to moderate your stance or suggest a compromise? Watch your influence tank as you get labeled a sellout, he noted. Looking around, you could see a lot of young activists in the audience really feeling that one. He took us back through history, explaining how "for most of our history our democracy was built on top of a deeply entrenched caste system, formal and informal, based on race and gender and class and sexual orientation." When marginalized groups started demanding their seat at the table, they weren't just asking for resources. They brought "new issues born of their unique experiences that could not just be resolved by giving them a bigger slice of the pie.” This led to what Obama called "the great political sorting," starting with Southern white voters switching from Democratic to Republican parties. Add in economic changes that "massively increase inequality and widen the divide between rural and urban communities," and you've got a recipe for our current crisis. The gathering was framed around pluralism, and lots of folks on the dais admitted they had to look it up. It’s not a world that rolls off the tongue. The core idea is that having many different perspectives and ways of life makes society stronger and richer, not weaker. Obama wasn't just diagnosing problems. He was sharing what he's learned about fixing them. His vision of pluralism isn't about singing "Kumbaya" (his word, not mine). Instead, it's about the nitty-gritty work of building coalitions that include "not only the woke but also for the waking." That line got quite a few knowing laughs. He emphasized that real change happens when people actually work together -- like when "a mosque and a synagogue join forces to help victims of a natural disaster." That's where trust actually builds -- not in PowerPoint presentations about unconscious bias. One of the most powerful moments came when Obama talked about his negotiations as president with people who "made it pretty clear they didn't think I should be president. Legally. Normally." But he emphasized that "as long as we're clear about our core principles, as long as we know what our North Star is, we have to be open to other people's experiences and believe that by listening to these people and building relationships and understanding what their fears are, we might actually bring some of them -- not all of them, but some of them -- along with us.” He referenced Dr. Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, where King "scolded those who counsel patience and seem more worried about social disruption than rank injustice." But Obama noted that King, like Gandhi and Mandela, "understood if you want to create lasting change, you have to find ways to practice addition rather than subtraction.” As I left the gathering, what stuck with me was how Obama framed this challenge for everyday Americans. It's not about being perfect allies or agreeing on everything. As he put it, it's about "framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in, in terms of we and not just us and them.”
In that room in Chicago, watching Obama wrestle with these ideas, it felt like he was giving us a roadmap -- not an easy one, but maybe the only one that actually leads somewhere better. The question now is whether we're willing to take those first steps, even when the path seems hardest.