How Obama's Election Created the Modern Democrat Party and Transformed America
... Quite simply, it was the election and presidency of Barack Obama that is the genesis for all of the culture wars raging today...
As the first black nominee for president, Obama’s candidacy offered something powerful to Americans: the exorcism of America’s original sin of slavery...
His was a platform of warmed-over 1930s New Deal and 1960s Great Society statism, expanding existing social programs and continuing the march toward government-controlled health care. It was garden-variety liberalism...
The election of Barack Obama instead infused progressives and Democrats with an extraordinary degree of self-righteousness...
Those who opposed Obama were racists, troglodytes holding onto a white supremacist past...
Indeed, cynical Democrats recognized the political power of soaking everything in race and turning every public policy debate into a morality play...
If progressives were bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice, their opponents must be the agents of injustice, firmly planted on the wrong side of history. Having defined themselves as the arbiters of moral progress, progressives could now justify all manner of political attacks against their opposition...
Rather than demonstrating that America had moved beyond race with Obama’s election, America instead lurched wildly in the other direction, thoroughly saturating our politics in race. This was no accident. The cynical calculation of Democrats and progressives – that, given the presence of a black president, they could achieve their policy goals and neuter their opposition by branding Republicans racists no matter how mundane the policy argument – made race the central feature of American politics and turned American politics into an unending morality play. And it positioned one set of Americans, progressive Democrats in politics and the media, as moral judges and arbiters...
Power lay in accusing the political opposition of being racist and bigoted.
And so progressives identified and elevated every marginalized group...
Like a cancer, progressives’ obsession and weaponization of race is consuming America...