Obama on Trump: « I guess I would not have expected someone who has complete disdain for ordinary people to be able to get attention and then the following from those very same people » ⁦ @TheAtlantic⁩ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/why-obama-fears-for-our-democracy/617087/

« I assume the best in people, not because I’m naive but because this is how I choose to operate in the world, because I think the world would be better if more people operated that way »

« I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story. Without this common narrative, democracy becomes very tough »

« If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis. »

«America as an experiment is genuinely important not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. We don’t know yet if that can hold»