I was struggling to remember what Barack Obama had done since he left the White House. To challenge myself, I decided not to look anything up and truly disgorge whatever images and ideas had been lodged in my memory. There was the jetting around with Richard Branson. There was a podcast of some sort, a Netflix documentary (or documentaries), a chat with Bruce Springsteen. There’s the summer reading list. His wife published a book that outsold even his own. He campaigned, of course, for other Democrats, whether it was candidates in the midterms or Joe Biden, his successor. This year, he and Michelle delivered speeches at the Democratic National Convention that were extraordinarily well-received. I was there, and I was impressed. I did think, and still do, that if either had run in this race against Donald Trump, they could have won.

None of that matters because the Constitution bars Barack from serving again and Michelle has no interest. They both stumped for Kamala Harris and had nothing to show for it. As Black men bled out of the Democratic coalition, Obama hectored them on the campaign trail for making “excuses” about not wanting a female president. It was professorial Obama at his finest; no hope, no change, merely condemnation for not doing what better-educated elders expected of you. Not surprisingly, few listened to him, and Trump proceeded to annihilate the multiracial Democratic coalition that Obama had assembled in two stunningly successful presidential runs. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was able to cling on to bits of what Obama had left behind—she was still running up the score in Miami-Dade County and dominating along the Rio Grande—and Biden grasped at less of it, benefiting more from an anti-Trump turnout boom that sent him to the White House. Politically and culturally, the Obamas found themselves in a transformed nation, the zeitgeist hurrying past them. The youngest generations, veering rightward, have little regard for them, and aging Democrats are beginning to think of Obama, as the writer Ethan Strauss pointed out, as a Michael Jordan-like presence: the greatest there ever was, but mostly disconnected to the present day. Barack Obama is a symbol, a monument. Like all ex-presidents, this is his fate, and when he’s trundling about doing his surrogate work in 2028, it will be as a specter of what was, and will probably not be again. There will be other Democratic presidents, but there won’t be another Obama.

The dismantling of the Obama coalition—the great surge of new, nonwhite voters into the Republican Party—doesn’t have to be permanent. Trump’s victory resembles George W. Bush’s in 2004, when he also won the popular vote and was supported by more than 40 percent of Latinos. Two years later, a backlash midterm made Nancy Pelosi speaker, and two years after that, America elected its first Black president. American politics is fickle and fluid; coalitions are made to be broken, and loyalty to party is barely skin-deep. What has grown apparent is that, with this Trump restoration, there will be no second Resistance. The social justice left, the so-called woke, is mostly somnolent. The marches are spare. The talk of anti-fascist uprisings is muted. There is no screaming in the streets, no days of mourning, no promises to decolonize any bookshelves. The women’s march may or may not be on, Black Lives Matter is nowhere to be found, and ICE is not getting abolished. The liberal media has not minted any new star journalists, pundits, or talking heads. Few are railing against Jill Stein or the Russians. The CIA and FBI are not getting sanctified. The untethering of culture and politics, indeed, has begun.