The Revolution of 2000-and-Late

The zeitgeist of this passing era was the fruit of the genius of three individuals above all: Barack and Michelle Obama, and Valerie Jarrett. They have been a team of unparalleled talent within the ecology of the global stage, all the while dominating internal American politics via their strength in pop culture and the media (and on the Internet).

Obama is an amazing man. In eight years he deeply restructured American culture through his rhetoric even as the Democratic Party itself was swept out of national politics on an unprecedented scale. It is an open question if the Democratic Party will actually survive. Yet none of that mattered during this era because Obama was so incredibly good at connecting to his base. Every Democrat was uniform in support for him, and loathe to countenance the slightest criticism of him in social media or in conversation. His legislative accomplishments were actually small, and he all but botched and abandoned his signature piece of federal law---Obamacare. But he was not about that kind of old school gears and levers of goernment. He was about changing American culture on a broad scale, about moving America far down the Road of Progress into the vision of the Good America that liberals imagined the country could become. Everybody knew this about him when we elected him.

He was the real-life version of the political reality show that liberals had been yearning for, a spin-off of that drama on NBC., where the Union, and the world, was made "more perfect" by well-intentioned Progressive political action promoting the general Welfare.