Obama: US ‘dangerously close’ to moving toward autocracy

Former President Obama warned on Tuesday the current political climate isn’t “consistent” with American democracy.

“It is consistent with autocracies,” Obama told a crowd in Hartford, Conn., where he spoke about the growing threat posed under the Trump administration, according to Connecticut Public Radio. 

“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” he added. 

The former president was in conversation with Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor who writes a daily newsletter on Substack, “Letters from an American.” 

“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,” Obama told Richardson earlier in the conversation.

However, his rebuke wasn’t just aimed at the White House, but to the Republican Party. 

“In 2020, one person won the election, and it wasn’t the guy complaining about it. And that’s just a fact, just like my inauguration had more people. I say that, by the way, not because — I don’t care, but facts are important,” Obama said. 

“In one of our major political parties, you have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true but will pretend like it is,” Obama said. “And that is dangerous.”

Obama maintained he’s still “optimistic” about the country’s future, even amid turmoil and public outrage, as exhibited last weekend during “No Kings” protests across the country.

“I’m still the ‘hope’ guy. I guess the thing when I’m talking to young people that they need to hear the most is, it is important to be impatient with injustice and cruelty, and there’s a healthy outrage we should be exhibiting in terms of what’s currently happening both here and around the world,” Obama said.

“But if you want to deliver on change, then it’s a game of addition, not subtraction. You have to find ways to make common ground with people who don’t agree with you on everything but agree with you on some things.”