What Barack Obama’s DNC speech was actually about

During his 2024 Democratic National Convention address on Tuesday night, former President Barack Obama made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump. But his speech was more than just a partisan broadside: It was a philosophical brief in defense of liberalism, a kind of first-principles moral argument that no other major convention speaker offered.

Liberal, in this context, does not refer to the term’s use in partisan American politics. It refers instead to the centuries-old philosophical tradition that sees politics as fundamentally oriented around the values of freedom and equality. Government, for liberals, exists to enable people to live according to their own vision for their lives; it has no business telling people what god to worship or giving certain groups of people more rights than others.

Obama was a thoroughly liberal president, and Trump a thoroughly illiberal one. This clearly troubled Obama — troubled him so much, in fact, that he dedicated this most high-profile speech to explaining why Trump must be defeated not just politically but also philosophically. 

The stakes of 2024, according to Barack Obama

Obama is hardly the first person to declare Trump a mortal enemy of liberalism. Ever since 2016, there’s been a library’s worth of books published on liberalism’s Trump-induced crisis and how it ought to be resolved.

Some of Obama’s remarks followed this literature rather closely. Like many, Obama sees Trump’s divisive political style as opposed to liberalism’s core principle of equality: that all citizens deserve to be treated equally, each free to pursue a good life in the way they see fit (as long as they don’t hurt others in doing so).

Trump, Obama says, draws an elemental distinction “between the real Americans, who of course support [Trump], and the outsiders who don’t.” And that Trump and his allies believe “one group’s gain is another group’s loss,” and that “freedom means the powerful can do pretty much whatever they please.”

This, Obama says, is wrong. It’s wrong not just for Democrats and progressives, but for Americans — citizens of a country whose very existence grew out of liberal thought. The Harris campaign, in his telling, is tapping into a fundamental liberal impulse that permeates the American body politic.

“The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” Obama said. “We want something that’s better. We want to be better. And the joy and excitement surrounding this campaign tells us that we’re not alone.”

Living this liberal vision, for Obama, means accepting the diversity inherent to a large society made up of people with all sorts of beliefs and worldviews: recognizing that “our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.” It means understanding “true freedom” as something that gives all of us the right “to make decisions about our own life [and] requires us to recognize that other people have the right to make decisions that are different than ours.” And it means seeing democracy as more than “just a bunch of abstract principles and a bunch of dusty laws in a book somewhere,” but rather “the values we live by.”

This, to be clear, is not a case that Trump is un-American and thus will definitely lose: Obama took great pains to emphasize that the race was still close and could go either way. Rather, Obama is saying that what Trump stands for contradicts many of the values that Americans claim to hold dear — our core sense of what our country is about and what it stands for. That America’s truest identity is liberal, and that this identity can transcend those things that divide us.

I want to agree with that. But as I argue in my recent book, there is a deeply illiberal strain in American politics — an ideology born out of the essential contradiction between America’s state liberal ideals and the reality of chattel slavery at its founding.

This tradition, like Trump, rejects core liberal-democratic ideals about equality. It is no more and no less American than our loftier stated ideals; both represent authentic aspects of America’s identity, and both have triumphed at different times throughout our country’s history.

The question, then, is not whether American liberalism can reassert its naturally dominant place. It is whether the America that Obama believes in will triumph in this round of a centuries-old struggle against an authoritarian twin.