Francis Wilkinson
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 multi-racial, 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, variously sotto voce or primal screamy, 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?
American politics is in desperate straits, but there is still a certain flow to events, if not a precise logic. 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.
That anti-Obama crusade, victorious in 2016, was racially and culturally homogenous but ideologically incoherent. Misogyny, racial hierarchy and anti-immigrant rage combined with Trump’s uniquely sprawling corruption to define his presidency. But it lacked an organizing structure beyond cultural catharsis.
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. The aides who were horrified by his Jan. 6 attack on the republic have peeled away to cable television or obscurity. The aides who relished the attempted coup, and who want to see a more vigorous and sustained attack on American democracy and pluralism, are everywhere in ascendance. The distilled, concentrated remains of Trump’s first term is hard stuff.
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. There is more substance now beneath the Trumpist blather. Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee confirms that the time for intra-party or national compromise is over. 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. To co-opt the Somali pirate’s line to Tom Hanks’ anxious boat captain: White authoritarians are the pilot now.
Elon Musk is promising to spend more than $100 million to elect MAGA. Miriam Adelson has pledged tens of millions more. Other reactionary forces, inside and outside the democracy-averse bastions of the tech industry, will be coming forward to place what appears to be a winning bet.
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. (The governor of California seems to understand what’s coming. The governor of New York and mayor of its largest city not so much.)
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 US politics and policy.)