You can smell it in the air. A deep sense of betrayal among Democratic voters.
An underlying realization that the Democratic party’s politburo — Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and their courtiers of elected official and consultant sycophants — sold voters a bill of goods: the gaslighting of the public on President Biden’s decrepitude; the false idol of the Kamala Harris “campaign of joy” as a smart last-minute stand-in; and the repeated cowering to the far left whose wokeness and moral condescension turns off most voters.
In a just world, one might expect a formal no-confidence vote on this leadership failure.
After all, this is the kind of recall we see with Western European heads of state, in House speakership races, and soon, in Canada. That recall may not happen, but the undeniable trouncing may signal the end of what we can call the Obama Era.
Simply put, the Obama Era is characterized by a set of ideas and tactics directly linked to the Democrats’ loss. The first is the “Demography is Destiny” delusion — a kind of manifest destiny of the left, adopted in the second Obama term, that promises an ever-diversifying electorate would inexorably vote Democratic and must therefore be patronized with cartoonish appeals to identity and big government wardship.
This proved to be not only deeply un-American but politically foolish.
Upon taking office, Biden mandated race preferences and DEI rules across 90 different federal agencies — what leading race theorist Coleman Hughes refers to as the neo-racism of the left.
Open borders were supposed to buy Hispanic votes. Green New Deal wars on oil and gas industries that most of the big players on the global stage would reject were supposed to buy young voters.
Validating the rhetoric of pro-Hamas activists was supposed to buy votes in Dearborn and the anti-Israel and often antisemitic left.
Democrats ignored all the polls warning against these identity politics which never had broad voter support — including among black and brown Americans. But it was too late to turn back.
This post-modern religion had spawned the second pillar of the Obama Era: a new industry of NGOs, consultants, activist groups, foundations and donors, public unions, and the increasingly politicized state and city bureaucracies in Democratic-run cities underwritten with gobs of COVID-relief and federal taxpayer dollars.
They were what writer Michael Lind refers to as the Shadow Government — for whom the liturgy of identity politics became the central organizing principle to expand organizational bloat, fundraise, and earn social credit scores within the party.
This spawning bureaucracy had a profound and often underestimated reach by foisting critical race and gender ideologies in federal and state agencies (e.g. prioritizing COVID checks on the basis of race), in public schools across the country and, ultimately, into a multi-billion dollar DEI industrial complex in corporate America.
However, now much of this second pillar of the Obama Era is now likely to fall to constitutional challenges unlikely to withstand equal protection challenges, widespread public disaffection with the underlying ideology, and the Trump administration’s DOGE scalpel.
The third pillar of the Obama Era is the massive cancel culture and accompanying online authoritarianism.
Former New York Times reporter David Samuels chronicles how the Obama White House conceived and perfected the strategy of using affiliate left-wing public intellectuals to sell often false or misleading narratives to mainstream news and political elites on, say, the deeply defective Iranian nuclear deal, and then to quell dissent with cancel tactics.
Samuels describes an Orwellian machinery spinning an “invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the [Obama] White House.”
This success of this machinery ultimately led today to 70% of voters distrusting the mainstream news media after profound breaches of professional responsibility on Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and much else.
“As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent,” writes Samuels.
The mainstream media has been its own worst enemy as this third pillar of the Obama Era also appears to self-destruct.
Finally, Israel’s stunning success in decapitating Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s arc of terror has laid ridicule to Obama’s second-term central policy goal of Iranian appeasement bought with pallets of cash from the US and an exhortation that secular Arab states must “share the neighborhood” with this imperial, neo-Nazi regime.
That, together with Obama’s red-line bluff on Syria’s chemical gas use, his backing down to Putin on the annexation of Crimea, Biden’s buffoonish Afghanistan withdrawal, and demonstrably counterproductive if not cynical efforts to undermine Israel’s successful campaign against the terrorists, has all left the Democrats looking weak and incompetent not just to voters but the world’s worst actors.
Barack Obama was an immensely talented and often inspiring historic figure with his campaign of hope and change. But the political and cultural offspring of his White House that even he himself was often unable to contain, has helped lead the party to a truly dark and defeated corner.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
