The Free Press
On January 20, 2009, a few journalists crowded into my apartment in New York, and we had brunch and cocktails, and two or three people smoked cigarettes, and we watched Barack Obama become the 44th president.
It felt like a moment of great possibility. There was the obvious historical significance—Obama being sworn in in the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and on the same Bible Lincoln had been sworn in on, in 1861. The end of an odyssey. The overcoming of our original sin.
But it was also—and it’s embarrassing to concede as much now—a moment of unbelievable cool, which was what Barack Obama was, at least in early 2009. He was from a big city, and he smoked, and he’d done cocaine, and he was black, and his whole demeanor was chill. He was no-drama Obama.
The journalists, who spoke two or three languages and had reported from three or four continents, who had had relationships with unsavory foreigners in places like Moscow and London and Hong Kong, loved him.
It was, in retrospect, the apotheosis of our neoliberal experiment. At the time, we didn’t really know what we meant by neoliberal—that would become clear after the political opponents of neoliberalism started running against it, during Obama’s second term. The German sociologist Alexander Rüstow coined the term in 1938, and it meant free-market economics and free trade and globalization and a radical borderlessness that was enticing to the under-50s because it seemed like something that older people, those who had been adults during the Cold War, could not grasp. (I recall telling my mother, in the spring of 1993, that I’d “hopped a train” from Paris to Krakow, and my mother saying, “Are you okay?” as if going to a formerly communist country might not be safe.) It was a differentiating principle. It was cool.
We had started electing cool presidents after the Cold War ended, when it suddenly felt as if the stakes of the American presidency were much less consequential—less nuclear. Recall Bill Clinton in his sunglasses playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, as wince-inducing a moment of political theater as there has ever been. A reminder that cool never ages well.
Today, Donald J. Trump was sworn in for a second term, meaning we’re done with all that now. The unbearable lightness of the whole post–Cold War chapter, which we should consider redubbing The Age of Adolescence, or the age of living off the achievements of previous generations. Instead of building on our legacy, we shrugged, or even smirked, at the success of our fathers—our cultural inheritance, our democratic institutions.
That’s what Trump was saying (or trying to say) in his inauguration speech: We had squandered everything that had once made us great.
Which is a decidedly uncool thing to say.
It’s not just that Trump is unfashionable, that he refuses to believe the things we’re all supposed to believe, that he’s unapologetically outer-borough.
It’s that his election—first in 2016, but really, in 2024—signals an end to this most unserious moment in American history.
The insufferable people—the so-called progressive elites, the Never Trumpers, those offended not as much by Trump’s agenda as his style, those who tsk-tsk him for delivering unorthodox inaugural speeches—are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness.
They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see—not simply its emptiness but its rot.
In 2016, he was surrounded by gatekeepers—vestigial organs of the old GOP. These were the people who were supposed to protect America—and Trump—from Trump. But Americans wanted Trump. His election was not a blip, the conclusion of some foreign machination. But it was hard to see: Almost everyone I knew, colleagues, friends, friends of friends, were apoplectic.
And yet, it was the start of a sea change. We could no longer afford to play it cool, to fret about using the right words or whether we were on “the right side of history” (which was deep for whatever was trending).
In 2025, the new administration is wholly MAGA. Steeped in it, starting with the new vice president. Most of the people in Trump’s inner circle this time came of age in an age of forever wars and opiates and housing and financial crises and a creeping, techno-progressive illiberalism that has turned America’s institutions against America, and they are hellbent on undoing that.
Many (but not all) of those in this new administration do not imagine themselves citizens of the world, but citizens of the United States. Unlike the journalists, the anywheres—those who wear their Americanness like a kind of garb that is sometimes but usually not in vogue—the somewheres, those who deeply feel their connection to this place, have nowhere else to go. They want to repair America, because, as J.D. Vance noted in his convention speech, this place is their home. When they say, “America first,” what they mean is “Home first.”
For a long time, the people in charge could issue executive orders, wage wars, spend trillions of dollars, overturn precedents with a triteness, a silliness, that in earlier times would have been unimaginable. That was when we wanted young, hip, likable, agreeable, fun.
We don’t care about those things anymore. We care about repairing the great American experiment. Building, innovating, imagining, transcending ourselves, as we have done over and over for hundreds of years.
Cool is dead, and the people who used to obsess over it—the journalists, the NGO people, the people who are part of the globalist miasma—are mute or hurt or wondering what just happened. Or vaguely interested, and unsure of what that says about them.
My answer: We live in serious times, and we have two paths, and we can and should argue about the particulars, the policies, the legislation, who is best fit to lead, but we should be crystal clear about the stakes. Either we succumb to our proliferating woes, or we revitalize our institutions, right the ship, become the country that will enable future human beings to colonize the solar system, achieve ourselves, reclaim what for so long has felt God-given.
Sometimes the news moves so fast, you have to look closely to recognize if you’ve seen it before. Check out Eli Lake’s new podcast, “Breaking History,” where he breaks down the news by breaking down history. Premiering January 22 on all podcasting platforms.