Grandpa, Where Were You When the Vibes Shifted?
Vinson Cunningham's "Great Expectations" and a Eulogy for an Era
Before I get to the topic, I mentioned a while back that I’d be speaking at the 2025 Lutheran Ethicists’ Gathering on the topic of worship and political polarization. The registration for the event is now open. You can join in person in Chicago or online from anywhere. I’d love for you to join me! As a conference speaker I am, if nothing else, conscientious. In case it needs to be said of the following, it concerns the history of my engagement in electoral politics that I pursue strictly as a private citizen and not in an office of any church I have served or the denomination of which I am a part. We live in a malevolent information environment, so I try to ensure that if my preaching ever alienates or scandalizes, it’s because of Jesus and not some dumb thing I got hyped about on the internet. And if the post is just too long, you can just read my review of Great Expectations here now.
Great Expectations
At the beginning of last week, I spent a brief moment imagining that we might end up thinking of this period of American political history not as the “Trump years” but as the “Long Obama era.” Much as the former man had dominated everyone’s attention from 2015 onward, it was possible that he could have ended up as a setback in a larger trajectory. Obama had not only won convincingly twice and made a significant contribution to the architecture of the welfare state by dramatically expanding public and subsidized health insurance. But he’d revived the sad sunset career of Joe Biden and his presidency saw the debut of Kamala Harris on the national stage. Biden had complemented Obama’s policy gains by doing a bigger stimulus, making unprecedented (if still small by world standards) investment in carbon-free energy, and engaging in serious industrial policy targeted at communities and demographics that had been, as the saying goes, “left behind.” Harris was at least planning to try to expand this economic project into systems of child and elder care.
That is, to put it mildly, not how it worked out. The postmortems were swift and brutal and mostly unconvincing. A 6-point-something percent swing in the national vote and a sweep of the contested states is what I believe is called an “overdetermined outcome,” an effect of every cause and none of them. This did not stop the most smug leftists on the internet from ascribing it to their personal pet peeves (read Sam Kriss, who knows as much about American politics as I do about daily cocaine use but is the best stylist of this lot, for a well-phrased syllabus of such errors).
I won’t rehash the arguments1, but where the smug contrarians were correct is that the Democratic Party itself had come to the end of an era, its rhetoric exhausted, its affect vague but not broad, its meritocratic leadership disconnected from the country it sought to lead, its professional and scholarly outriders too given to a “noble savage” depiction of what were demeaningly called “marginalized groups,” its elected leaders unable to get attention with a bomb threat or to impose any discipline or rationality on the grant-funded advocacy organizations they mistook for grassroots movements. Kamala Harris was neither a bad candidate nor a good one; she was a replacement-level Democrat (who arguably ran an above-replacement campaign, if you count the much-diminished swing in the contested states) nurturing her party’s habitual blend of piety and panic when Democrats needed something much, maybe impossibly, better.
And those looking backward saw this, correctly, as the end of the Obama coalition. Fractional changes to the policies, rhetoric, and demographics of his election campaigns and terms in office won’t be enough. Things will have to be rethought from the ground up.
As it happened, my editors at the Christian Century chose election day to post my review of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations. The novel follows a low-level campaign staffer from the day Obama announced his primary campaign in 2007 to election day 2008. The staffer, who narrates the story, is not especially interested in politics, which appears in the novel less as a realm of its own demands and passions and more as a canvas for the social, aesthetic, and religious impulses of the people who participate in it. I wrote the review in the late spring and didn’t know how it would land so deep in the political season. But the timing worked, I think. The lede felt prescient, anyway, at least to me:
To paraphrase an online saying: you’re not nostalgic for Obama’s first campaign, you’re nostalgic for the age you were during Obama’s first campaign… For many people, it was the first time they engaged in politics. For progressives who came of age during the Bush years, it was the first time they engaged in politics out of anything other than fear, anger, or hostility. For many, young and old, it was probably the last.
I loved the book and I encourage you to read the whole review (the kicker is good, though I say it myself). And in this last twilight of Obama’s America, it had me thinking of the beginning. The novel’s narrator describes feeling “experimental” as he hears the candidate’s maiden speech. I knew the feeling. The optimism and excitement Cunningham describes were all too real. I don’t know if he took the words of, for example, a Black Pentecostal pastor at a high-dollar fundraiser verbatim from a real conversation, but I heard the same sentiments about a “God moment” and so forth in Englewood at the time. People felt good to be a part of it, rather than fearful or desperate. Here’s a moment I pulled up from the recesses after driving through northern Indiana this spring: before the 2008 Indiana primary, the campaign sent volunteers to canvass Gary. I was walking blocks with two others, a white male professional in his fifties and a similarly-aged black woman who was head of a major Chicago city department. In this impoverished neighborhood, a man on the street said to us “If Obama can get black and white people to go to Gary together, I’ll vote for him.”
One heard those sorts of things in those days and it made people hopeful for the mighty, diverse, flawed country of which they were citizens. Obama used the rhetoric of both patriotism and Christianity better than any politician I’ve ever seen. And the fact that he said things about race and history that no politician of his stature had, or indeed could have, said before allowed those of us who cared about it to round “unprecedented” and “inspiring” up to “sufficient” and, less plausibly still, “efficacious.”
Leaving the agonies and compromises of actual governing out of it, I can only consider this moment, running from roughly the 2006 midterms (when Tim Walz won his first race for Congress) through Obama’s re-election, a high point in the rhetoric and self-conception of American liberalism. It was, certainly by the standards of anything we’ve seen since, confident, expansive, un-anxious about its internal diversity, vibrant at the grassroots and elite levels alike.2 In 2012, during a painfully slow recovery from a bad recession, Obama carried Iowa by a larger margin than Trump carried Texas in 2020.
Problems too big for the Boss
It is widely acknowledged that something changed in American public discourse, particularly but not exclusively among liberals and leftists, during the second Obama term and through Trump’s first term. This is shorthanded as a rise of “identity politics” or, if you need it nonhanded, “wokeness.” But it included a shift in thinking about economic policy, migration, climate, and much else besides. While this shift is often discussed (typically for the purpose of lamenting it), I haven’t seen anyone really try to explain it.
So here’s what I saw at the time, as someone who was in the demographic and who did plenty of real-time writing and preaching about it. There were two major vectors of liberal/left pessimism during the later Obama years. The first was a poor economic recovery and a hideous overhang from the housing market collapse. Obama’s own choices made this at least marginally worse, as he invited Republicans to hold the federal budget hostage through the debt ceiling and agreed to significant austerity at a time when an expansive policy would have been better. This inaugurated years of crisis governing, and it probably helped spark the Occupy movement and, later, the Sanders campaign (leaving all other complaints about Obama aside, there’s no way Bernie gets any traction in 2016 if employment and incomes had recovered faster from their 2008-2009 trough).
The second, and I think under-discussed, vector of pessimism was the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The event itself is highly contested and I don’t want to get into that here. But apart from the immediate provocations (leaving a corpse on the street for hours, indifference running to hostility from local authorities on investigating the matter), the episode ended up uncovering a whole local law enforcement system that effectively operated by letters of marque on Black citizens. This was in a Justice Department report that came out some time after the fact, though in the interim it had become clear even to people like me who followed along from mostly-white suburbs that this was common practice all over the place.3
It became much harder to default to the high-Obama-era rhetoric of transcending and reconciling the wounds of American history as the stories rolled from Ferguson all the way to Mother Emanuel. During this period I re-read Notes of a Native Son and read The Fire Next Time and other essays for the first time.3 Having first encountered them in a period of relative, if uneasy, racial quiet (from the perspective of a white liberal), they struck me with new force in a moment when the America they described seemed as enduring as ever. I lectured a student in preaching class who had talked about the Michael Brown case in his sermon about the dangers of the rhetoric of premature, unaccountable reconciliation.
This was shortly after the peak of birtherism, whose energies needed somewhere to go when the birth certificate was released and the policy-focused Romney campaign failed. Racialized and frankly “othering” attacks on Obama and his coalition became more prominent as fiscal policy stasis set in. In statistical aggregates, one might point to some alleviation of racial inequality during the Obama years, at least in some areas. But at the level of political debate, we seemed to have taken a step backwards, and in those areas of American life seemingly untouched by the Fourteenth Amendment, let alone presidential speeches and big-bore policy change, everything seemed to go on much as it had for decades or longer.
As this mood of pessimism lengthened and deepened in the years to come, one saw a reaction that criticized the left-liberal portrait of American racial hierarchy as an ahistorical, almost demonic essence. And this criticism is fair. But the pessimism came about for entirely legitimate reasons. I do not mean to make Barack Obama, the person, out to be a victim. But to this day it is under-appreciated by commentators left, right, and center, how radicalizing it was to watch him be attacked not for his policy choices but for not being a real citizen. If Barack Obama, Harvard Law grad and family man, Lincoln enthusiast and Scripture-quoter, winner of the first back-to-back Democratic Party popular-vote majorities since Franklin Roosevelt, can be treated like a subject of the Jim Crow South, when will it ever end? There’s a lot to be said, good and bad, about the historiography that informed things like The 1619 Project, but the total inertia in the face of the Ferguson revelations and the deranged campaign against the first Black president’s citizenship certainly invited a historical explanation beyond “some people have bad racial views.”
That’s not to excuse any foolishness, excess, or misdirection on the part of the liberal intelligentsia in the years that followed. The misbegotten “intersectional” emphasis of the 2016 Clinton campaign, chasing a youth vote that it lost in 2008 and had no real grasp on, was one such morbid symptom. But for anyone who felt that the post-Ferguson revelations were unduly ignored and the post-birther political discourse was devastatingly retrograde, nothing much happened in those years to mitigate their (our) pessimism. The Access Hollywood tape, the hastily-imposed travel ban (and airport occupation, which has disappeared from our historical memory as far as I can tell), the Women’s March and the responses to it, a literal torch-wielding white supremacist march and rally that claimed a life, the child separation policy and much else all made a return to Obama’s U2-and-Springsteen soundtracked liberal uplift feel impossible.4 “Imperfect and uneven but continual progress” became a harder sell than “stubbornly enduring evil” as a frame for American history and culture. And the result was an anomaly: a Democratic Party that had become more heavily college-educated and more tenuously connected to its “working class” and diverse base, all while shifting to the left on basically every issue.
Of the consequences of this shift—the leftward race of the 2020 Democratic primary contenders, the evolution of pre-Musk Twitter into a hothouse of progressive opinions that died outside of it, the failures of governance in Democratic jurisdictions, the backfiring plans to eliminate eighth-grade algebra or the SAT on “equity” grounds, the swift rise and sudden disappearance of “Latinx,” etc. etc.—more than enough has been said. A lot of people, myself included, had badly mistaken intuitions about how things would play out until we were forced to learn from an unforgiving reality. For a crucial few days after the Dobbs decision was leaked, there was a push to replace “pro-choice” with “pro-decision” because, I guess, “choice” was a white-coded term (I really didn’t get this one) and to refuse to talk about “women” at all in the context of abortion law. The people at the commanding heights of liberal politics, media, and advocacy took one look at those proposals and said “nope.” I knew that something had changed when I gingerly suggested, during a local organizing event, that the phrase “white Christian nationalism” may be a way of whistling past the graveyard, because “Christian nationalist” positions have real purchase in Black and Latino communities too, and no one disagreed.
In Democratic politics and in the liberal intelligentsia, an awkward truce had broken out. People would be allowed to step away from the political failures and rhetorical excesses of the previous few years without anyone admitting error. And by the time Biden dropped out in July, everyone seemed to have grasped without anyone having to say it that the party had badly outkicked its coverage and would need to run a very different campaign. Hence Kamala Harris’s debut as a history-making candidate who spent no time at all dwelling on her gender, and as little time as she possibly could on her racial and ethnic identities. Her election, unlike Obama’s, would not be spoken of as the vindication of America’s inherent yearning for greater inclusion, as the arc of the moral universe reaching a glorious, long-awaited but ultimately pre-determined point. No one would be either surprised or impressed to see White and Black canvassers on any street in America together for Harris. Or, for that matter, for her opponent. Maybe that’s what progress looked like.
“Change We Can Believe In”
Earlier this year, I was at a church conference where the featured speaker went off script and riffed on ethnic differences. He told an appalling joke about Mexicans (spinning it as praise for their family values), imitated the speech patterns and “mosey” of some Black people he knew, speculated on the causes of divergence in northern and southern Black IQ scores, and made himself the hero of every story of cross-racial communication and understanding. This would have been shocking ten years before (though maybe not twenty, I don’t know) but it suddenly made me nostalgic for the brief period when even accomplished retired white men might have felt an invisible impulse to think twice and then think again before doing any of those things. Or maybe that’s an illusion, and there are parts of our public culture that were altogether untouched by the “upheaval” and “racial reckoning” of 2015-2021. It was the ease of the performance that struck me—the genially held sense of superiority and centrality, the sunny heedlessness of anyone else’s experience or perspective. Inhibition is not always bad, even when you can’t articulate or justify it in the moment. The people who interrogated that stance in the world were right, and those who were questioned on it by and large don’t have much to complain about.
But I guess this is the fruit of having tried to do with inhibition and taboo what could not be accomplished through “hope and change.” Great Expectations is not sentimental or nostalgic about Obama, though neither is it a poison-pen letter to a disappointing pop liberalism. But, perhaps because it’s an essentially open and generous novel, it made me miss the openness and generosity of Obama’s rhetoric. The novel, like the candidate, gambles on the idea that historical trauma and unbreakable patterns are parts of any story, but only parts. They exist in and through the ingenious bustle of the mind, the internal clash of values, the constant challenge of integrating the work we do and the people we do it with into our understanding of ourselves and the world.
Obama’s relatively non-divisive God-talk and relatively non-kitschy patriotism-talk demonstrated skills many of us have simply lost. Even as a work of pastiche, it represents a civic and religious culture that doesn’t seem to exist any more. A lot of the churchgoers Obama appealed to in 2008 are dead or no longer interested in church, of course. But we haven’t come up with anything else, either on the stump or on the page. There is a reaction in the direction of smallness. It’s a still-emerging but surprisingly coherent program of less trade, less migration, less growth, more expensive toasters to bring back toaster-assembling jobs, skipping a major technological revolution in favor of creating a hydrocarbon autarky—all of it replicating the moral austerity of “woke progressivism” in a different set of issues. It’s a program that appears to be triumphant, perhaps even to be riding its own world-historical arc toward permanent dominance. But such appearances are short-lived, and all of it will inevitably prompt its own counter-reactions. For now, though, there’s nothing on the left to catch the pieces after the duct-tape-and-baling-wire contraption of the Harris campaign fell apart. New experiments will have to be made.
We can write and read about the ironies of 2024 or last summer’s fad for polyamory or dissect the psychology of tradwife content, but all of it is vamping until someone figures out how to communicate hope in a larger sphere than our therapy sessions or our sex lives. We can’t gain what we don’t want, and we can’t want what we don’t imagine. I take the truth of that to be more or less mathematical. So I’ll add something more theological: what we want for others, even for our enemies and opponents, is what we most truly will for ourselves.
Except in a footnote: In 2020, I mistakenly assumed that Biden’s nomination represented capitulation to policy centrism, and that his election would just try to restore the Clinton-Obama personnel with all of its modest ambitions. That turned out to be very far from the truth. Biden absorbed all the critiques of the populists and progressives, freezing finance and tech executives out of policy roles and leaning on the Warren-Sanders wing for staff instead. Where Obama went too small on stimulus, Biden decided to go big. Where Obama was unwilling or unable to try real industrial policy, Biden poured tons of infrastructure money and grants for factories into the rust belt. Not content to just deliver for the metros that elected him, Biden’s administration also put money into rural broadband and insurance premium support. And all of it came with benefits for unions and lots of social-policy riders stapled on. It was the most determinedly progressive administration in my lifetime, and while its horizons were constrained, it was as ambitious as it could be within those horizons—something that could not be said of either Obama or Clinton. I really thought this would be a winning political strategy (“deliverism”). It hardly matters that the Sam Krisses and Freddie de Boers and Ruy Texeiras of the discourse didn’t notice or care that any of this happened, though it says something about the lack of incentives Democrats have to appeal to the left intelligentsia. What matters is that the voters didn’t reward them for any of it.
If George W. Bush’s administration hadn’t been such a shipwreck, I suspect he would be viewed with a similar nostalgia by Republicans. “Compassionate conservatism” was a good brand, his domestic policy mix was pretty savvy, and he marked the last real attempt of Republicans to be a party for everyone.
You can read what I wrote about the Justice Department’s report at the time if you’re curious.
It is worth noting here that one (also under-discussed) aspect of the identitarian vibe shift in Obama’s second term was that he imposed a severe immigration enforcement regime for an essentially political reason—to gain credibility for a grand immigration bargain with Republicans—that didn’t pan out. This was an understandably embittering experience for advocates in this area and made enforcement-first policies very difficult for Democrats to embrace, even as doing so became a political necessity.