In His HBCU Commencement Speech, Barack Obama Reminds Us That The People at the Top Don't Always Know What They're Doing

Earlier today, former President Barack Obama gave a virtual commencement address to a consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Speaking from a home office, he congratulated the graduates, talked with them about economic justice, and discussed racial equality. But let’s not miss his main point: he honed in on the key problem of the American republic, which is the lack of government expertise.

“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump and his top staff have repeatedly rejected the advice of qualified experts, while implementing inconsistent policies that have been so ineffective that the European medical journal Lancet took the bold, unusual step of editorializing against American public health policy.

And, truly, American public health policy during the pandemic has been terrible. President Trump stood up on national television and talked, in all seriousness, about injecting disinfectants into coronavirus patients. He advocated an unproven and eventually discredited drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a coronavirus treatment. As a consequence of the United States’ failure to fully implement basic public health measures like extensive testing and contact tracing, the United States leads the world – by far – in coronavirus deaths. As of this writing, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reports 88,675 confirmed coronavirus deaths in the United States, and the number continues to grow.

Link: Ceremonial Speakers Teach Us Cultural Values

And indeed, as former President Obama pointed out in his speech today, the pandemic has shown us that the people at the top sometimes have no idea what they are doing. Indeed, there is no reason that the United States, the world’s most powerful industrial nation, should lead the world in pandemic deaths.

I have written many times that ceremonial speeches like Obama’s HBCU commencement speech today are not just empty show. While congratulating the graduates, President Obama reminded us of values that many millions of us seem to have forgotten. In particular, he spoke against the idea that people who have no idea what they are doing deserve unlimited respect and obedience. I hope that we were all listening.

Follow-up: President Trump's bad ideas have not greatly harmed his popularity. Why not?

P.S. I clicked on FoxNews.com after writing this. Conspiracy theories and personal attacks against Obama's speech are already starting. What else could they say?