How Barack Obama wrecked the Democratic Party

The story of 2016 is, in part, the missing white vote that got Donald Trump elected. Where is that white vote? A considerable part of it is in areas of the country where the Obama administration literally targeted heavy industries both venerable and brand-new—coal and fracking. Obama has spent his presidency favoring the environmentalist cause, which is popular with what the pollster Stanley Greenberg and the consultant James Carville called “the new progressive common ground,” over the continuing employment of the white working class in good-paying jobs. Obama and Clinton—who told an audience earlier this year with some pride that “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—were choosing not to expand the Democratic electoral coalition by bringing people with different interests together but to contract it ideologically. He and Clinton could do this, they believed, because a new and massive electoral coalition was taking the place of the old—one made up, in Greenberg’s words, of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”

This is an example of the way in which Barack Obama sought to provide the left with a sense of cultural and moral superiority. He and they were working to be saviors of the planet, just as they were working to push America forward into a new ethical framework in which traditional morality was an evil to be overcome and new modes of being were not only to be embraced but to be forced upon resistant small-town birthday-cake bakers. Those who bought into it achieved a kind of blind triumphalism. They pooh-poohed any warning signs that the transition to Obama’s brave new world was creating new social fissures. Their unending political dominance was now a matter of demographic inevitability, as celestially mechanical as the monthly lunar cycle. Nothing could shake this conviction, even as they suffered through Stage One and were rocked by Stage Two. That “progressive common ground” just wasn’t common enough, it turns out. Its numbers weren’t quite large enough yet.

And even more important, it just wasn’t as motivated by a commitment to the progressive agenda as Obama and Clinton thought. The new “coalition of the ascendant” Obama assembled in 2008 didn’t really care all that much about electing the first woman president. It didn’t care much about preserving Obama-era reforms, like his signature health-care act. It didn’t care much about standing athwart what the left insisted was a drumbeat of bigotry disseminated by Donald Trump. Its members did not swamp the polls to ensure that a global-warming skeptic was denied the presidency. The terrible truth is that the Obama 2008 electorate turned out to be relatively indifferent to progressive issues when push came to shove.