Image via Twitter / Rapoport Law Offices
Former President Barack Obama at an event in Chicago Tuesday night compared today’s political climate under President Donald Trump to Nazi Germany.
He said that if citizens and lawmakers become complacent and neglect to tend to the “garden of democracy,” they risk American society falling apart like it did in Germany in the 1930’s.
"You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we've seen societies where that happens," Obama said at the Economic Club of Chicago.
"Now, presume there was a ballroom here in Vienna in the late 1920s or '30s that looked and seemed as if it, filled with the music and art and literature that was emerging, would continue into perpetuity. And then 60 million people died. An entire world was plunged into chaos," Obama went on.
"So you got to pay attention – and vote," he warned.
He said today amid economic and cultural "disruption," "nothing feels solid," and that people as a result are looking for "simple answers ... some way of reasserting our superiority over somebody else."
"That’s a recipe for people wanting to find security somewhere," said Obama. "And sadly there is something I think in all of us that looks for simple answers when we're agitated … And far too often what we look for is some way of reasserting our superiority over somebody else. So we look to trials or sectarianism or nationalism or whatever '-ism' that makes us feel like we’re more important."
He said that the "good news" is that there are competing narratives, including "pluralism, tolerance, democracy and rule of law, human rights, freedom for the press, [and] freedom of religion."
"That narrative I think is a more powerful narrative," Obama said.
He cautioned for people not to "take for granted" the institutions of democracy, which are "reversible," he argued.
He also discussed how the press, though it often drove him “nuts,” is “vital, and that, as president, part of my job was to make sure that that was maintained."
While he didn’t mention Trump by name, Obama's remarks were received as thinly veiled criticisms of the President, who endorses a foreign policy of "America first" and often comes to blows with the press.
Obama at another event in Chicago on Tuesday took the opportunity to thank himself for the current economic growth under President Trump, MRCTV reported.
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