The End of the Long Obama Era

In December of 2016, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and much of their staff gathered to listen to a performance by the cast of the musical Hamilton at the White House. When the actors performed the song “One Last Time,” in which George Washington explains his decision to retire over the objections of Alexander Hamilton, the Democratic audience broke into tears, drawing parallels to the end of Obama’s tenure and viewing the impending Trump administration as the end of an era.

They were eight years too early. November 2016 was merely the beginning of the end.

It is fitting that a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton became the cultural zeitgeist of the Obama administration’s dying days. Hamilton was the founding father who was most skeptical of the idea of democratic self-government, believing in the necessity of unelected institutions to restrain it.

Like Hamilton’s Federalist Party, the Democratic Party (and quite a few nominal Republicans) gave up on the American people, preferring instead to place their faith blindly in powerful institutions. Like the Federalists, they were wrong and found themselves swept away by the tide of history.

Most importantly, just as most Federalists, including John Quincy Adams, made their peace with that reality, more than a few on the left today seem to be reacting to Trump’s re-election not with the horror that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, but with relief.

One of the most promising developments over the last month has been the acceptance by an increasing number of Democrats and left-wingers that there can be no going back. They will need to make their peace with the Trump era.

I predicted this exact outcome several months ago when I suggested that what was at stake in this election was the future direction of both parties. A Harris victory would be a victory for the suburban professional elites who had dominated American politics between 1988 and 2016 by acting as swing voters. It would have sent a message that Democrats could win in alliance with them, while Republicans could not win against them, leading both parties to pander to institutionalist elites.

By contrast, a victory for President Trump would demonstrate that those largely white professionals no longer wielded decisive power, in the process not just empowering conservative supporters of Donald Trump, but also critics within the Democratic coalition.

That is precisely what is happening. Donald Trump’s victory has shifted power within both parties. On the Republican side, it has empowered Donald Trump to stand firm against establishment opposition to his agenda, shifting the balance of power that existed during his first term.

More interesting are the developments on the Democratic side, where Trump’s victory has empowered figures like the Young Turks’ Cenk Uyghur to speak out in favor of working with the new Department of Government Efficiency to attack the entrenched Pentagon bureaucracy. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has flirted with endorsing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s efforts to challenge Big Pharma.

Both developments mark a break with a Democratic Party which under Barack Obama identified with those academic elites who staff bureaucratic institutions, and then under Joe Biden identified the nation itself with institutional bureaucracy. Questioning public health experts became conspiratorial under this Democratic Party, and parents questioning educational officials became domestic terrorists. Questioning the intelligence community, meanwhile, became sedition, and questioning election officials became an “attack on democracy.” To paraphrase South Park, the mantra “Are you questioning my authority?” replaced appeals to the working-class as the class-warfare battle cry of the Democratic party during the Obama and Biden years.

Democrats’ forced introspection is a healthy development for the country. It is difficult to overstate how toxic the identification of the Democratic Party with the bureaucratic class of America’s institutions was for both parties. It corrupted both. With the Democratic Party becoming little more than a deferential bodyguard for whatever decisions these institutions produced, there was no pushback when they embraced dangerous fads such as child gender transition or demonstrated repeated incompetence on everything from national security to basic law and order.

Democrats blindly adopted policies which were not just toxic, but self-evidently mad, not because they appealed to voters or even to many Democrats themselves, but because their “betters” told them to. Their embrace of open borders, child gender transition,  and defund the police were the products not of internal debate, but deference to authority.

As for those institutions, the deference of the Democratic Party to them exacerbated long-standing tendencies toward unaccountability. Agencies such as the CIA and FBI have been prone to seeing themselves as the true defenders of the nation for decades, treating elected officials as little more than inconveniences – something that generations of American liberals used to be well aware of.

With Democrats suddenly embracing these agencies’ delusions of grandeur, they began to perceive the refusal of Donald Trump and his supporters within the Republican party to do the same as a threat to themselves. Identifying themselves with the national interest, it was a short step to categorize support for Donald Trump as a threat to the nation.

The result was increasingly blatant interventions into domestic politics, matched with an internal homogenization that pushed out dissenters. If Donald Trump represented a threat to the FBI and CIA, then it followed that Donald Trump supporters within the FBI and CIA could not be loyal to those institutions. Even apolitical types who did not “recognize” the “threat” were less reliable than partisans.

As a result, Republicans hoping to gain entry to these institutions were forced to hide their politics. The spread of DEI throughout the Pentagon and intelligence agencies has been a more complicated process than a mere mandate from the Biden or Obama administrations, as it accelerated while Donald Trump was president as well. It was an organic response to the Democrats making loyalty to the bureaucracy a core ideological principle, which is why the far-left takeover of institutions cannot be ended merely with an executive order from a newly inaugurated President Donald Trump.

Ultimately, the left’s attempt to politicize everything from the FBI to corporate board rooms had the precise opposite impact as the stated goals of DEI or diversity. Rather than bringing institutions closer to the American people, it turned a gap into a chasm, with the added effect of dragging not just institutions, but the Democratic Party into open opposition with the American people. The consequences were on full display in November, when every demographic group except for white women with college degrees swung toward Donald Trump.

Most importantly, the defeat seems to have left the Democratic institutional alliance with no pathway forward. Following the 2016 election, both sides consoled themselves with the belief that their combined forces could have reversed the outcome. Through the 2022 midterms, they could convince themselves that they had done so.

The 2024 results, however, have revealed the truth. The Democratic Party, even with the support of the FBI, CIA, higher education, and much of corporate America, cannot win elections, and therefore cannot deliver the political protection those institutions need.

In turn, the support of those institutions is clearly not enough to allow Democrats to win elections, which is causing many on the left to question just what they have gained by sacrificing their principles on the altar of rehabilitation for the Liz Cheneys of the world, or treating Anthony Fauci as the Oracle of Delphi.

Make no mistake: this breakup is not coming because the institutions and Democratic Party have realized their alliance has been bad for America. It is coming because they realize that it is bad for them.

Nonetheless, its end will be good for America because it has the potential to restore a balance to both the American government and society. America needs political parties based around different ideas, not a political party based around having no ideas other than blind deference to authority. It needs institutions that see themselves as servants of the will of the American people as expressed through elections, not ones who see one of those parties as the instrument of their will.

Increasingly, that looks like what Donald Trump’s second term will deliver as its legacy.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.