Barack Obama ventured down from Olympus last week to criticize President Trump’s reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and claimed he would never have acted so divisively in the wake of a national tragedy.
What rubbish.
In fact, he was at the center of the two seminal events that led us to our nation’s unstable political state: his election and the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
By electing Obama, Democrats viewed themselves as having expiated America’s original sin of racism. For Democrats, Obama’s election was not simply the choice of a Democrat over a Republican. It was a religious act of moral redemption. And Democrats were the agents of this moral redemption. They were not mere activists; they were saviors.
Obama encouraged this thinking, regularly flattering Democrats as the agents of bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice. They were the ones they’d been waiting for. The ones on the right side of history. The campaign speeches in front of Greek columns and Berlin monuments had all the trappings of a religious revival, with spellbound viewers watching Obama as a godhead.
Obama’s campaign and election created an entire generation of Democrats for whom politics was not about the mundane business of ordering our national, state, and local affairs, but rather a redemptive, religious crusade to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.
In 2016, having redeemed the nation from its original sins of racism and slavery, Democrats set forth to redeem the nation from another great sin: sexism. Remember how Hillary’s campaign held its election night party in a convention hall with a glass ceiling?
But America spurned the salvation Democrats offered.
For Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s defeat was not merely about the loss of political power. It was the rejection of the redemption from sexism that her election would have provided and the repudiation of the redemption the Democrats had delivered by electing Obama.
Democrats have never recovered from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat.
Like spurned religious prophets, if Democrats could not redeem the masses, they would curse the masses. Democrats seething from their rejection now saw the United States as irredeemable. Inevitably, they viewed the Republicans who had thwarted their redemption of America as fascists, Nazis, and bigots who threatened the democratic foundations of the Republic.
Since November 2016, progressives’ mission has been to tear the United States down as a morally bankrupt, hopelessly flawed nation—a nation beyond the salvation they offered—while maintaining their sense of moral superiority.
Within weeks of the 2016 election, Democratic activists had organized the “Resistance,” an obvious nod to the French Resistance against the Nazis in World War II. Progressives launched and embraced the 1619 Project, whose thesis was that America was a nation whose very foundation was a sin, the sin of slavery. Progressives built the Black Lives Matter movement, postulating that American law enforcement is structurally, irreparably racist. Progressives embraced the trans movement as a mechanism to highlight the bigoted, retrograde views of their opponents. And, most recently, progressives turned on Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, as a modern manifestation of all of America’s sins: racist white settler-colonialism.
These movements offered Democrats the opportunity to highlight America’s fundamentally sinful nature and a path to keeping progressives’ savior complex alive. BLM, the 1619 Project, and the trans movement—all of these gave progressives new civil rights movements to champion to continue chasing the high of moral superiority they felt when they elected Obama and were denied by Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
Democrats’ impulse to chase the high of self-righteousness fused with two additional forces to get us where we are today: a generation of overeducated, under-skilled elites desperate for importance and meaning in their unsatisfying daily existence and the full flowering of social media, offering activists easy opportunities to broadcast their moral superiority and the evil of those who stood in the way of their moral crusades.
The base voters of the Ocasio-Cortezes and Mamdanis, the Obama generation of Democrats, represent the climactic merger of these forces. Highly educated individuals who are poorer and less influential than they think they should be now seek personal validation by being better than other people. So they have latched onto any moral crusade on offer—from Black Lives Matter to transgender issues to the latest righteous crusade, Israel-bashing and “freeing” Palestine.
They might have a boatload of student debt and few marketable skills, but they are operating on a higher and more important plane, fighting for justice and solving the world’s most pressing ills while avoiding their own.
Social media became ubiquitous just as the Obama generation was coming of age, amplifying the opportunities for activists to present their moral superiority to the world. How many otherwise anonymous protesters thrill to the videos of themselves screaming into bullhorns going viral? Everyone knows perfectly well that when Johanna King-Slutsky, the spokeswoman for the Columbia protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall in 2023 over Gaza, gave a press conference demanding “humanitarian aid” for the occupiers, she was having the time of her life.
Progressives have replaced real accomplishment—getting a productive job, raising a family, and being part of a community—with the politics of salvation. Rather than doing the hard work of holding a steady job and quietly contributing to society, progressive activists watch the biopic of their heroic, righteous deeds playing in their heads and on social media.
Suffused with self-righteousness and convinced its opponents are fascists, Nazis, and irredeemable bigots, the progressive movement was primed to take a darker turn. It is no surprise that unstable people whom Democrats have convinced that Republicans are modern-day Nazis commit violent acts and expect to be remembered and rewarded by history for them. And it is no surprise that progressive activists would celebrate the assassination of a conservative like Charlie Kirk, tarred as a Nazi, tormentor of transsexuals, and white supremacist. Even after Kirk’s assassination, Ocasio-Cortez justified her vote against a House resolution honoring Kirk by saying, “We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was … His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant, uneducated, and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
Until Democrats deradicalize their activist Obama generation, until they treat politics as a means of ordering our affairs and not as an avenue to personal, spiritual, and national redemption, the risk of violence is real and deadly. The burden is on progressive Democrats—in politics, media, and the academy—to tame the forces they have loosed upon the nation.