How Barack Obama Let Down Progressives

Former President Barack Obama addresses voters one day before the election, in Atlanta [Brandon Bell/Reuters]

By Samantha Grasso

Earlier this week, former president Barack Obama criticized the movement for police abolition, saying on a political Snapchat show that he doubted the marketability of the phrase “defund the police.”

He called it a “snappy slogan,” but cautioned that activists risked losing “a big audience the minute” they used the phrase. Instead, he preferred language that prioritized reforming the police. Missouri Rep.-elect Cori Bush spoke for many disappointed progressives when she tweeted, “With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people … It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.”

Obama’s chiding of activists suggests the former president has traveled far from the position he staked out in his first term in office. He famously followed in the steps of FDR, encouraging progressives with big goals to “go out and make me do it.” But there were signs even then that his attitude toward powerful activism was mixed: He disbanded the grassroots army that elected him and rolled its members into the DNC.

During his second term in office, the nation was riveted by protests in Ferguson, Missouri, responding to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Obama responded by providing more funding to police, for body cameras and training. This approach has become a target of today’s abolitionists, who note that this approach has been relatively ineffective and that putting that money into social services would do more to keep communities safe.

Out of office and free to advocate for whatever he chooses, Obama has doubled down on his former positions, and appears to be impervious to the activists he once hailed. He has in fact devoted considerable energy to undercutting them, breaking up the brief NBA strike over racist policing after the death of George Floyd, for example, drawing ire from the movement for Black lives. “Striking could put pressure on Joe Biden to stop saying that he's going give *more* money to the police,” lawyer and abolitionist Derecka Purnell tweeted at the time. “Obama is taking the pressure off of Biden at the expense of poor, Black people vulnerable to police violence. It's disgusting.”

And if anyone had doubts about the conservatism of the first “organizer in chief,” Obama has made efforts to dispel them through his latest project, the bestselling memoir A Promised Land. He portrays activists as “hecklers” for demanding that he end the “Obama wars” and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” stop deportations and family separations, and ramp up AIDS funding overseas.

In our newsletter today, we’ve spoken with noted scholar and activist Cornel West, who worries that Biden’s presidency will be a “third Obama term,” by which he means another era in which activism slows while inequality and war grind on behind a liberal facade. But given reactions to Obama’s latest moves, activists may have something else in mind.

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