How Democrats Lost Obama’s Vision of American Identity

Ask people what single line they remember about Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and most will quote his words about unity, about there not being a black, white, Latino, or Asian America, but rather the United States of America.¹ But he also recognized the necessity of connecting the language of American unity to progressive policy goals. As Obama described his personal views:

[W]e are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother.

Barack Obama recognized that persuading people to back policies (or candidates like himself) that call for sharing resources with others first required convincing them to identify with those other people as members of the same community—namely the American people.

Obama’s soaring depiction of our country’s story, in which we’ve committed terrible wrongs in the past but also drawn upon our founding documents and values to make remarkable progress, resonated with enough Americans to elect and re-elect him to the presidency with commanding margins—a feat accomplished by none of the Democratic Party’s three subsequent presidential candidates.

It should be obvious that Donald Trump’s vision of America represents something like the antithesis of Obama’s. What’s less obvious but equally important is that Democratic politicians—influenced by far-left academics—have in important ways departed from how the 44th president talks about our history and our national identity in the years since he left office.

Obama’s approach centers on the need to actively inculcate a sense of peoplehood that unifies Americans of every kind, even as it makes space for identities based on race, culture, religion, and more. He understood that a healthy society requires a concept of America within which people of all backgrounds can find themselves. People need to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, something that connects them to a larger purpose. A concept of Americanness—a liberal patriotism—that can connect Americans to one another across boundaries is crucial to countering Trumpism broadly and racial/ethnic tribalism more specifically. Obama’s integrative vision of our national identity provides an ideological foundation for what political scientist Robert Putnam called “bridging social capital.”

Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, Obama, in his final State of the Union, called on Americans to reject “voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.” He called on us instead to be “inspired by those...voices that help us see ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white, or Asian or Latino, not as gay or straight, immigrant or native-born, not as Democrat or Republican, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed.”

Where the Academic Left’s Critique of Obama Misses the Mark

The academic left broke with Obama on three critical issues: how much commonality exists across racial lines, the trajectory of history, and whether to emphasize universal or race-specific programs. These ideas raise important questions that are vital to debate and discuss. However, they are often not only problematic on the merits but also profoundly harmful to the Democratic brand.

Embrace of Race Essentialism

First, there’s the question of whether to highlight commonality across lines of race versus stressing the differences, the latter sometimes to the point of race essentialism. Obama constantly emphasized the former in a balanced way, as he did in his “A More Perfect Union: Race, Politics, and Unifying Our Country” address in 2008: “Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Likewise, here’s the 44th president on December 6, 2024, at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum: “Pluralism does not require us to deny our unique identities or experiences, but it does require that we try to understand the identities and experiences of others and to look for common ground.”

Obama’s approach sharply contrasts with the race essentialist mindset that characterizes the views of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. In a statement that reflects her core beliefs, she urged white people to accept that “your race shaped every aspect of your life from the moment that you took your first breath.” Race is certainly an important influence on any American’s life, but DiAngelo’s statement flattens out the wide range of the lives white Americans live. Rhetoric and policy based on such ideas cannot help but fail to adequately address the real struggles of poor whites, who remain the majority of Americans living in poverty.

The Denial of Racial Progress

A second area of disagreement concerns the degree to which we have made progress reducing racism over the course of American history. In the “A More Perfect Union” speech, then-Senator Obama contrasted his view with that of his left-wing former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in terms that could also apply to the academic left in more recent years. The problem was not in calling out racism but instead in speaking,

as if no progress had been made; as if this country…is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In a sharp contrast, from its very first paragraph, The 1619 Project laid out its founding principle. It contends that the idea our country was born on July 4, 1776, “is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619”—when the first enslaved Africans arrived on our shores. At that point, “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.” Subsequently, The New York Times, which published this collection of essays, softened this claim as well as other similarly provocative language after receiving pushback from scholars and others. Nevertheless, the core of the argument remains that the enslavement of Africans in what would become the United States—a truly horrific, despicable practice that has no doubt cast a long shadow and still matters today—is the single most important event in our history, more important than the act of creating the nation itself.

Leaving aside the accuracy of this highly questionable assertion, a Democratic Party seen as believing it has no chance of being entrusted with governing our country. The Brahmin Left, however, ate it up, and The 1619 Project, about which historians have raised some serious questions, won the Pulitzer Prize. Similarly, Ta-Nehisi Coates, expressing sentiments that stand diametrically opposed to Obama’s, asserted about black Americans: “We were never meant to be part of the American story.” He says this without qualification. The statement is totalizing and eternal. Coates’s words carry real anguish, caused by racism, that all Democratic officials should understand, but this view fails to acknowledge progress, and its complete embrace would leave the Democratic Party with a politically unpopular worldview that makes it less able to enact positive change through policy.

The Support for Racial Preferences

A third area of at least partial disagreement centers on the question of whether to support universal programs—which disproportionately benefit Americans of color—versus those that explicitly target Americans by race. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy; it’s also good politics.” He also explained:

The only thing I cannot do is…pass laws that say I'm just helping black folks. I'm the president of the entire United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African American community.

Compare this to what Ibram X. Kendi wrote in the first edition of How to Be An Anti-Racist, perhaps the ur-text of the race essentialist academic left: “Racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” Kendi altered this section in a subsequent edition, after facing criticism. What he wrote provided the intellectual foundation for the push in policy for equity. It stands in direct opposition to what Obama expressed in the “A More Perfect Union” speech, when he called on Americans to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

Biden and Harris’s Move to the Left of Obama on Race

Academics and public intellectuals aiming to stir the conscience of their readers have goals and methods that must differ from those of politicians running for office, who seek the political power to make change. Such provocateurs can take positions to the left of mainstream politicians because, after all, they don’t need to win more votes than their opponent. But what’s especially notable here is that Democratic elected officials shifted to the left of Obama on race as well.

The Biden administration relied on several of the universal programs Obama championed, but Biden also adopted too much of the Brahmin Left’s positioning on race. His first executive order called for a government-wide focus on “equity” that, among other things, promoted DEI trainings in federal government agencies and offices. Biden’s Education Department, likewise, advanced similar thinking on race in its programming. In April 2021, the Biden White House promoted a program of grants for teaching civics and American history that both uncritically praised The 1619 Project and quoted directly from Kendi’s book.

Looking at funding, the American Rescue Plan included $4 billion of debt relief that would benefit indebted farmers of color—most of whom were African American—but excluded whites. White farmers sued on the basis of racial discrimination. This policy further entrenched the belief among some white Americans that a Democratic president and Congress—focused on equity of outcomes rather than equal rights—stood on the side of minorities and stood opposed to white interests. This was a far cry from Obama’s position that he would not pass laws that only helped black Americans. Struggling black farmers in Alabama are not better off because the government chose not to include struggling white farmers in Iowa. But the latter are definitely worse off for not getting that help, and the reason behind the policy might well lead those white farmers to resent both people of color and the Democratic officials who made that choice.

Furthermore, such choices weaken the multiracial coalition of the economically vulnerable that true progressive change requires, something Dr. King understood. In Why We Can’t Wait, he called for a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” that would include poor whites. Echoing Dr. King, Obama also tended to endorse universalist rather than race-specific policies.

Rhetorically, as well, neither Biden nor Harris decisively broke with the hard left, as Obama did when he forcefully distanced himself from Rev. Wright, or President Bill Clinton did when he distanced himself from Sister Souljah, a rapper who said after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”

Some might have expected that Biden and Harris’s more race-specific equity rhetoric would have resulted in increased support among voters of color. It did not. The reality is that the wealthy white liberals who proudly declare their devotion to the principles of DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist express positions on racial issues like policing or education that stand far to the left of most African Americans. The views of the Brahmin Left—which TLP’s Ruy Teixeira noted “have come to define the Democratic Party in the eyes of many working-class voters, despite the fact that many Democrats do not endorse them”—are alienating the very Americans most likely to face racial oppression. These groups also happen to include some of the fastest-growing segments of our voting population.

Democratic politicians must find ways to clearly distance themselves from the more extreme, unnuanced aspects of race essentialism, as Obama repeatedly has done. To be fair, President Biden and Vice President Harris on occasion employed language that echoed, at least in part, the Obama vision of America discussed here. Unfortunately, doing so does not have the same impact as putting it at the core of one’s worldview.

A Path Forward

Since Obama left office, Democrats have lost sight of the importance of his type of conception of America. He provided both an accurate picture of the country and showed an ability to win over sufficient numbers of working-class voters of every race—the overwhelming majority of whom are strongly patriotic. Democrats need to reembrace the Obama vision of America and avoid the more identity politics-based vision of the Brahmin Left if they wish to get a fair hearing from working-class Americans on policy prescriptions they propose.

Some intellectuals offer a path forward that differs from that proposed by Kendi, Coates, and The 1619 Project. Writer Heather McGhee has offered a compelling vision of how to talk about race along Obamaesque lines. She wrote:

The zero-sum story of racial hierarchy...is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division. It has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.

McGhee argues that Republicans pit racial and other groups against each other such that if one gains, the others must lose. That story is a false one. She notes that what she called the “race left” inadvertently contributes to this zero-sum vision by “focus[ing] on how white people benefited from systemic racism.” She argues that’s not an accurate story. Many whites suffered, rather than benefited, under the old laws of white supremacy, even as those laws harshly oppressed black Americans above all. For the most part, white people “lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.” Her key illustration is that when courts ordered desegregation of public swimming pools, some communities chose to fill in the pools rather than integrate them. Black people got hurt, but so did working-class whites. McGhee’s formulation is both accurate and politically persuasive to a broad audience.

Democrats need to move away from the language of equity, which implies that it would be acceptable to close the racial gaps in health or education by helping members of the disadvantaged racial groups improve while denying any help to lower-income whites. Obama understood this reality instinctively, as he made clear in his “A More Perfect Union” speech. He called on all Americans to “realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.” Like the 44th president did, today’s Democrats must talk along these lines regularly and weave these concepts into their communication about all kinds of issues, not just on special occasions.

To reorient themselves, Democrats must make some choices and offer newer, more inspiring alternatives than they have in recent years. Barack Obama brilliantly walked a middle path between extremes. He managed to acknowledge inequities and the need for more progress while also offering hope. Obama flatly rejected the faddish vision that, in the words of Teixeira, claims “America was born in slavery, marinated in racism, and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis.”

Perhaps nowhere did Obama strike the balance better than in his speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. Obama asked:

What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people—the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many—coming together to shape their country’s course? What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

To right the ship, tell a credible and also inspiring story, and win elections, a new generation of Democrats needs to recapture this same spirit.

Ian Reifowitz is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Empire State University.

1. This article draws upon a longer report published by the Progressive Policy Institute, as well as from my books, Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012) and Riling up the Base: Examining Trump’s Use of Stereotypes through an Interdisciplinary Lens (Boston: DeGruyter Brill, 2025, co-authored with Anastacia Kurylo), along with my article, “How Progressives Talk about July 4 and Our National History in the Post-Trump Presidency Era” (Daily Kos, 2024).