Obama Defends Mob Rule
The former president effectively said that mob rule in what he thinks is a good cause is itself desirable and good.
By Conrad Black • August 3, 2020
President Barack Obama’s address at the funeral of Representative John Lewis in Atlanta on Thursday, for the most part, was a moving tribute to a courageous pioneer in the civil rights movement. The total immersion in beatific praise that was accorded to the congressman throughout his prolonged itinerary between his physical death and actual burial was doubtless substantially deserved. (It does not allow for his dismissal of President Trump as “illegitimate,†and other reflections that were unseemly coming from a man so much praised for his graciousness and civility.)
But embedded in Obama’s eloquent eulogy were reflections on the current political condition of the United States that were untrue and could incite unjustified violence. It is certainly right and necessary to credit all those Americans who fought for human rights and took great physical risks, and suffered in many ways as John Lewis did, and to praise them for their courage and for their idealism.
Without the great national achievement of civil rights, the claim of the United States to be a beacon of democracy and racial equality would be a fraud. And it is a part of the just recognition of that achievement that it should not be artificially minimized in service to current political arguments.
This is precisely what the former president was doing when he urged his listeners
to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history with the whirlpool of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again. Bull Connor may be gone. But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans. George Wallace may be gone but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.
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