‘Let's not go over the cliff': Obama offers careful warning in rare public appearance
Hartford, Connecticut: Former US president Barack Obama warned on Wednesday (AEST) that the country was 'dangerously close' to allowing its government officials to act in a way 'consistent with autocracies', offering a veiled rebuke of the Trump administration that was delivered with trademark caution.
Appearing before a civic group in Hartford, Connecticut, during a tumultuous stretch for the US both at home and abroad, Obama offered a winding explanation about the dangers facing American democracy. He pointed to an erosion of traditional values like the rule of law, an independent judiciary, the freedom of the press, and the right to protest.
'If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood – and not just my generation, at least since World War II – our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,' he said during a discussion with Heather Cox Richardson, a popular anti-Trump writer and historian.
Democracy, Obama said, requires government workers, judges and lawyers at the US Department of Justice to uphold the Constitution and follow the law.
'It requires them to take that oath seriously, and when that isn't happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy,' he said. 'It is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under [Prime Minister Viktor] Orban.'
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He went on: 'We're not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalising behaviour like that. And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, 'Let's not go over that cliff because it's hard to recover'.'
Yet at a time when the country faces protests, political violence and the possibility of entering another foreign war, Obama kept his remarks to veiled critiques and professorial musings.
He made no mention of the growing speculation that President Donald Trump could order the US to openly enter the escalating war between Israel and Iran by bombing a key Iranian nuclear facility. Nor did he bring up the unusual pressures and threats the Democratic Party has been facing.
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