In the twenty-two months since leaving the White House, Barack Obama has kept quiet. He broke his silence on Friday in a speech at the University of Illinois, making it clear he believes the country is in crisis, having strayed from our values, and urgently needs to get back on track:
“I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are. Just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

Obama painted a picture of “fitful progress, uneven progress” throughout American history, as our country moved nearer our ideals, while describing “a darker aspect to the American story.”

Each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because it helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments.

It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

The former president reminded students of the financial crisis at the time he took office and the progress he made in setting things right – but the fear remained.

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people, who once felt solidly middle class, still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and gotten Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day.

And these challenges get people worried. And it frays our civic trust. And it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them, especially those communities outside our big urban centers.

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history, with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time.

He continued, “And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work.” The old playbook falls flat. When, however, “the better angels of our nature” are eclipsed, things go awry.

But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all.

He indicted the Congress of the United States for its failures:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics. Systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, the minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi or my birth certificate, rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change, embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president. None of this is conservative.

I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country. It’s a vision that says the few who can afford high-price lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

He denounced the lack of checks and balances, passage of $1.5 trillion tax cuts for the richest Americans with resulting skyrocketing deficits, carte blanche to polluters and dishonest lenders, repudiation of the global climate change agreement, eroding our relationships with allies, cozying up with Russia, and sabotaging the Affordable Healthcare Act. He also criticizes, in passing, the infamous Anonymous op-ed:

In a healthy democracy, there’s some checks and balances on this kind of behavior, this kind of inconsistency, but right now there’s nothing.

Republicans who know better in Congress, and they’re there, they’re quoted saying, yes, we know this is kind of crazy, are still bending over backwards to shield this behavior from scrutiny or accountability or consequence, seem utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work. And, by the way, the claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check. I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work.

These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable. They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House. And then saying, don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 percent. That’s not how things are supposed to work.

This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.

Finally, Obama urged his listeners to participate in the political process  – and, especially, to vote – to change the country’s direction:

Thirty minutes, 30 minutes of your time, is democracy worth that? We have been through much darker times than these and some how each generation of American’s carried us through to the other side. Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something but by leading that movement for change themselves.

And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.

The complete speech, annotated by Amber Phillips, is available at the Washington Post.