Barack Obama looms large, but less.
Since 2009, we have been engaged in a cosmic battle over whether the 21st century will belong to Obama’s multiracial, tolerant America, or to the menacing anti-Obama reaction of Donald Trump, which seeks to stuff a half-century of civic, cultural and human rights advances back into a bottle and hurl it into oblivion.
The light is changing. At long last it’s the Republicans who are emerging from Obama’s shadow while Democrats struggle to find a path.
Both 2024 presidential candidates are byproducts of Obama’s presidency. One was publicly humiliated by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A famously raging narcissist, the victim of Obama’s black-tie barbs, ever eager for revenge, found a movement of angry white men to empower him.
The other candidate, Obama’s loyal lieutenant, is said to have felt slighted — a common vice presidential complaint— during his eight years working for the younger, more magnetic, man. The campaign to push the current old and unvigorous president aside is hampered by that past. If Obama, at once the Democratic Party’s most commanding and unifying figure, were to make such a plea to President Joe Biden, many fear it would only summon the older man’s resentments and backfire.
Thanks, Obama?
It’s hard to believe that the Republican Party would have grown quite so vicious, quite so quickly, without the galvanizing presence of the Black president who inspired witch-doctor memes, racist email chains and the full-blown pathologies of millions of white Americans, including Obama’s Republican successor in the White House, who channeled their racial anxieties into witless conspiracy tales of an alien among us.
Things are different now. The movement around Trump has matured and streamlined. Trump is no longer surrounded by the ham-handed C-Team of Republican politics — apparatchiks and has-beens who couldn’t land a job in a competent Republican administration.
Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook compiled by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is not the slapdash Trumpism of 2016, which mixed fakery, jingoism, racism and old-school Republican nostrums. The MAGA gang knows what it wants — an authoritarian ethno-religious state under a tight, Trumpist fist — and it has every reason to believe it can be achieved with the help of a compliant judiciary.
In effect, Republicans have moved beyond their fear of Obama. They’re no longer reactive; they are on a forward, militant march. They feel confident turning not just on trans kids and feminists and immigrants who had once hoped to find safety and affirmation in Obama’s America, but on universities and public school systems and entire cities.
Democrats are now the reactive party. While MAGA pursues a massive reengineering of American civic and political culture, Democratic policies appear largely beside the point. The GOP abolishment of abortion rights is properly understood as a prelude to the loss of other rights — including the right to feel like an equal citizen in a Democratic republic. Democrats are no longer scrambling to save the Affordable Care Act or student loan forgiveness. The party is scrambling to salvage democracy itself. The fight will take all the party can summon. Obama, and much, much more.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy.
