Obama’s symbolic presidency fostered liberal complacency that curdled into cynicism.
Evidence
Obama’s eight years in office are best understood as the further entrenchment of existing trends from the early aughts: most notably, the poptimist embrace of mass culture and the veneration of entrepreneurs. If anything, the powerful symbolism of Obama’s presidency fostered great complacency among liberals. Many believed that the election of a Black president had forever repudiated racism and that their charismatic hero would fix everything. But then, as Republican obstructionism stalled Obama’s agenda, hope curdled into cynicism. Both optimism and despair resulted in a similar disinterest in political intervention, in many ways mirroring the collective embrace of the culture industry’s most brazenly commercial output. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 208
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The optimism-then-cynicism arc mirrors the reader’s omnivore-monoculture thesis: both moods end in non-intervention and passive mass-culture consumption.
Related
- Obama-era liberal optimism and despair both yielded political disengagement (similarity 0.93)
- Obama’s presidency marked the last peak of collective liberal optimism. (similarity 0.81)
- Obama’s 2008 victory could not reverse already-established cultural trends (similarity 0.80)
- Obama’s election marked a new era but could not reverse cultural shifts (similarity 0.79)