Obama’s Reminder About the Futility of Purity Politics

The late, great journalist Mark Shields often propounded the idea that politics should be about looking for converts rather than punishing heretics. He explained:

The heretics look and say, these people who don’t believe, be damned with them, let them go…We don’t need them. The converts are those who are always kind of reaching out to the other side to bring people in, to enlarge, say, look, we agree on more than we disagree.

I find myself reflecting on Shields’ words a lot these days. America’s increasingly tribal politics have created warped incentivizes. Many people today would rather lock arms with their own side against the “bad people” on the other side than look for ways to reach across the divide and build consensus. And as these divisions intensify, so to does the cost of engaging—or even just occasionally agreeing—with the other side, which outweighs the potential payoff of trying instead to connect with them.

Though both major political parties are susceptible to this, Americans see Democrats as especially guilty of pursuing purity politics—of erecting an array of litmus tests to belong to their group. Consider what has happened in recent years to some of their members who stepped out of line or veered too far to the middle: activist groups threatened primary challenges, even against members who represented battleground or Republican-leaning states or districts.

Moreover, according the party’s own research, swing voters see them as too “preachy” and “judgmental,” too “out of touch” and “elitist,” and too “woke.” In essence, voters think Democrats care more about in-group signaling than meeting people where they are; about keeping their coalition morally pure than trying to include others who may not think exactly the way their base does on every issue.

Such perceptions won’t help Democrats broaden their appeal in swing or Republican-leaning areas, which will make it harder for them to build a durable majority coalition. And one person who is keenly aware of this is the most popular Democratic politician in America today: Barack Obama. Over the past weekend, the former president sat for a wide-ranging podcast interview. While he focused much of his time discussing President Trump and his policies, he made a point of talking to his side, too:

I do think that culturally…we did turn off—I think there was a certain way of talking about issues for Democrats where we sounded like scolds. I have said this before, there was a virtue signaling that made it seem as if ordinary folks, if they did not say things in exactly the right way, or meet this litmus test, that they were being chastised, pushed away.

The truth is, most of us, all of us are complicated, and we have blind spots, and sometimes we say dumb stuff. If you want to create an environment that is welcoming and makes people feel, okay, there’s room for me here, then the message and the story we tell has to be, all right, none of us are perfect, all of us count, we all have good in us that we can tap into, we can all learn from each other. And I think that is something we need to recover.

This is far from the first time Obama has expressed sentiments like this. For years, he has highlighted what he sees as illiberal currents in his party, admonishing Democrats to reflect on whether they are truly committed to producing change in the world—which requires winning over converts—or simply care about signaling to their peers that they’re on the “right side” of the issue of the day and chastising people who are not.

Some of Obama’s earliest such remarks came in 2015 when he was still president. Speaking at a town hall with college students in Iowa, he identified what was at the time a growing trend of intellectual intolerance on campuses across the country—and made clear that he disagreed with it:

It’s not just…folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women.

I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to—anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.

The following year, he delivered the Howard University commencement address, which occurred during the height of a contentious presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Obama told the young people in attendance:

Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.

In his 2017 farewell address, he warned his supporters of the dangers of living in ideological silos, devoid of inconvenient or even offensive opinions:

For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions… And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

By 2019, it was clear that many of these illiberal behaviors had only grown worse, and Obama became more willing to directly call them out. At an event hosted by his foundation, he took aim at “call-out culture” and “wokeness”:

This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically “woke” and all that stuff—you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities…And I think that one danger I see among young people, particularly on college campuses…there is this sense sometimes of, “The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong [pronoun]…then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because, “Man, did you see how woke I was? I called you out…” That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not gonna get that far.

Even after Democrats successfully ousted Trump in 2020, Obama continued warning that they could alienate many Americans with these continued behaviors. In 2022, he said on to the hugely popular Pod Save America podcast that Democrats risked being labeled the party of “buzzkills” by making people think they had to walk on eggshells and never say the wrong thing. And in his 2024 DNC speech, he told his party:

Our politics has become so polarized these days that all of us, across the political spectrum, seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or don’t bother to vote at all…

To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns — and maybe learn something in the process.

Words that seem quite prescient in retrospect.

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Why document Obama’s past statements in such detail? Because it behooves both parties to see how clear and consistent he has been about these things. Though many Republicans have no love for him, hearing these remarks serves as a reminder that plenty of Democrats don’t endorse unreasonable behaviors on their side—and this could perhaps encourage Republicans to more forcefully call them out when they see them on theirs, too.

For the Democrats, tough love can be hard to receive, but it’s often more tolerable when it comes from someone whom people trust and know has their interests at heart. But beyond the moral reasons for heeding Obama’s advice are practical ones, too: their party is still struggling to outrun some of these negative perceptions. And if they hope to build a durable coalition capable of consistently winning national elections, they have no choice but to put aside their judgments of people who don’t see the world exactly the way they do—to stop hunting heretics, and instead begin the hard work of looking for converts.