The return of Obama nationalism

The second Trump administration makes the American journalist Sohrab Ahmari yearn for competent technocracy. In a recent column, he gave voice to what many are perhaps thinking: ‘give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers – policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad’. Since the choice is presumably between a Red Caesar, and a hydra-headed unaccountable blob, he argues the latter is at least less volatile and mercurial, and therefore, preferable. Ahmari accepts that ‘Pre-Trump technocracy… contained in itself all the elements that made Trump’s rise inevitable.’ And yet, he seeks efficiency and stability. ‘But so long as Congress is more or less moribund, and American lawmakers see their jobs as auditioning for cable news, the country is fated to lurch between mad kings and imperious bureaucrats. Both are bad. Still, after what we lived through in 2025 and 2026, I say bring back the wonks.’

Ahmari is from my age cohort, the early millennials, and his political journey was similar to mine and many others of our age. Disillusioned by a crusade across the Middle East, an absurd combination of Gen-X coded New Atheism and Christian Zionism; angered by the attempted rejection of democracy that was embodied in the reaction against Brexit in the UK and the ‘Russiagate’ probes in the US following the 2016 election of Donald Trump; and then aggravated further by the late-Biden era surge of transgenderism, mass-migration and Covid lockdowns, Ahmari was one of the original signatories of the memo titled Against the Dead Consensus. It is important, therefore, to note that both him, and Oren Cass, as well as a host of right–wing podcasters, who propelled Trump to victory, have now publicly broken ranks with the Trump administration. Historians should be humble about the political prediction trade, but it is now conceivable to speculate that a fever is breaking and a certain style of populism will face its most serious challenge in the coming years.

Over the past three decades, American politics can be best understood as a form of simmering class-conflict between, on the one hand, relatively lower-income, and low-church evangelical and Christian Zionist constituencies, and, on the other, a coalition of cosmopolitan elites, including high church WASPs and secular, middle-class liberals. While the latter appeared to be in decline during the height of the populist ascendancy, the weakening of populism might once again make them the most viable and competent alternative. In this context, a reconstituted political coalition may emerge, drawing on the legacy of liberal and feel-good, soft-nationalism associated with the Obama era — fuelled by secular and middle-class millennials characterised by their anti-war and secular instincts.

The Barack Obama presidency was a repudiation of both the policies and the style of the George W. Bush administration, marked by the rise of millennial political consciousness alongside an intensely evangelical-coded culture and foreign policy, especially during the wider War on Terror. Andrew Bacevich once argued that this period blended moral and religious ideas with global political ambitions. Anyone reading the liberal Wonkette or conservative RedState between 2010 and 2012 will remember the blog wars and the conditions that generated a new political movement led by a different kind of elite consensus.

Obama’s approach, however, did not reject elites but rather reshaped their role and legitimacy. A distinct elite-led managerial liberalism adapted to a globalised and digitally connected world, standing against the Bush administration’s fusion of overt evangelical theology and neoconservative foreign policy. Educated millennials, tired by the Bush years’ emphasis on moral absolutism and providential wars abroad, prioritised multilateral restraint, secular cosmopolitanism and a technocratic elite ethos. At the same time, there was a hint of a subtle form of nationalism that can be described as ‘Obama nationalism’. ‘When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment’, Obama wrote in 2006, ‘when I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.’ But his overall vision of America was that of a chastised and secular superpower: a normal country without any crusading impulse or foreign-lobbied wars.

The millennial cultural shift also influenced businesses, media, academia and technology, from music to micro-breweries. Films and TV shows such as Modern Family, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and The Big Bang Theory reflected and reinforced these changes by promoting multiculturalism, overt-intellectualism and a more ironic, self-aware tone. These cultural artefacts normalised a high church, high-IQ cosmopolitanism, one that appealed to coastal professionals and suburban strivers alike. By 2015, millennials had become the largest group in the American workforce. Not only were they more educated than previous generations, with a significantly higher percentage holding college degrees, they were temperamentally cosmopolitan. The rise of major tech companies like Google and Facebook came off the back of millennial political power. Social media platforms helped spread and reinforce these ideas, creating what some observers call a ‘networked elite’ consensus.

This consensus partially depended on stable economic and political conditions that didn’t last for a variety of reasons. As these conditions weakened, the visibility of millennial elite culture also made it a target for disdain from the economic subalterns, helping to trigger a populist backlash that would later take political form. The Obama-era elite planted the seed of technocratic arrogance. Several major crises also contributed to the weakening of elite authority during this time. The long-term impact of wars in Libya and Syria reduced trust in foreign policy experts. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the limits of expert-led governance and the resultant ‘informational hegemony’, as inconsistent messaging and economic disruptions created doubt. Cultural debates over gender and trans-identity looked abusive to the middle classes. Populism provided the shield against those overreaches.

However, one can assume that technocratic, secular, cosmopolitan elitism is now poised for a comeback after almost ten years of populist interregnum. The possible return of elite influence is not just part of a political cycle, but is driven by deeper structural factors.

The first key factor is demographic change. Millennials are now the largest group of voters and are reaching their peak years of economic and political influence. By 2028, Americans under 45 will form the majority of voters, elder millennials among them in the prime of their career, businesses, political influence, school boards and public offices. Their political and financial leverage will endure for at least the next three decades. Demographically, millennials marry later and have children later than prior cohorts, concentrating on resources and delaying family formation in favour of credentials. Economically, they stand at the threshold of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, mostly from Baby-Boomers to millennials. Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion in assets will shift by 2048, with millennials inheriting roughly $46 trillion, more than any other generation. This unfathomable capital infusion, paired with millennial control of tech, higher-education, finance and media, will translate into unmatched political and aesthetic influence, favouring a return to a brand of secular, meritocratic and institutionally competent governance over populist disruption.

Second, evangelicalism and its foreign-policy corollary, Christian Zionism, are on the way to becoming a spent force in American politics, the ongoing Iran War representing a final, desperate supernova of that worldview. Its end will also have corollary effects on every other aspect of American foreign and domestic politics. The Pew Research’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study shows Christians at 62 per cent of American adults (down from 78 per cent in 2007), with evangelicals specifically at 23 per cent (down from 26 per cent).

NBC polling reveals only 13 per cent of 18-34-year-olds hold a favourable view of Israel, with 63 per cent negative; even among younger evangelicals, support tilts towards Palestinians. A fresh 2026 Pew poll shows that 60 per cent of American adults have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 per cent last year, with 59 per cent having little or no confidence in Benjamin Netanyahu. In both political parties, majorities of adults under the age of 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively. These are catastrophic trends. The Iran conflict is doing to the future generation what wars in Iraq and Libya did to the millennials: endless Middle Eastern commitments are now considered Boomer and Gen-X coded.

Finally, and most importantly, the inability of populist movements to establish a stable system of governance also creates opportunities for elites to return in a revised, and hopefully chastised, form. Consider the leading electoral question of our times. The rise of populism in the post-pandemic period cannot be understood solely through traditional partisan lenses, as it has drawn support from constituencies not typically associated with right-leaning or anti-establishment movements. Among these are segments of liberal and politically moderate women, particularly in urban and suburban areas, who grew increasingly disillusioned with the prolonged social and institutional disruptions caused by Covid-19 policies, such as school closures, inconsistent public health messaging, and the strain of balancing professional responsibilities with childcare during lockdowns. This shift was less ideological than experimental, rooted in frustration with governance failures rather than a wholesale rejection of liberal values.

Simultaneously, concerns over rising crime and visible disorder in major cities further accelerated this political realignment. In many metropolitan areas, increases in property crime, retail theft and public safety incidents contributed to a perception that authorities had lost control of basic civic order. The normalisation of disorder, whether in the form of encampments, shoplifting or reduced police presence, clashed with expectations of competent governance and urban liveability. A significant surge of populism in America was therefore arguably fuelled by suburban liberals disgusted by the excesses of Covid disruptions, school closures, transgender politics, mass-migration and crime. These are all policy questions, ready to be solved by better policy, rather than a wholesale repudiation of the character of the American republic, as espoused by a section of the populist right that rails against women’s workforce participation, or demands more religious observance.

Populism delivered disruption, but no competent governing cadre. As the failure of DOGE highlighted, populists also failed to create a class of experts and a durable counter-elite. Counter-elitism requires competence, institutional capture and a cosmopolitan veneer: qualities that are ideologically anathema to populism’s anti-expertise, anti-coastal ethos. As a result, populism acted more as a disruptive force than a lasting alternative, leaving behind a gap rather than a fully developed replacement.

History tells us, Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1896, that civilisations were never created by crowds:

Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture; all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising… in consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power, crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

In light of populism’s seeming inability to form a governing counter-elite, Le Bon’s words were prescient.

American politics is poised towards a renewed version of what might be cautiously defined as Obama nationalism. This emerging politics will pursue pragmatic realism abroad, meritocratic cosmopolitanism at home, and a rejection of both evangelical moralism and populist anti-intellectualism. It will be fuelled by middle-class professionals, and anti-war millennials, who both crave competent governance over spectacle. Millennial financial and political power is likely to ensure that this coalition will be structurally opposed to both Gen-X-coded interventionist forms of New-Atheism (think Senator John Fetterman, or Sam Harris) and Baby-Boomer foreign policy exceptionalism, and will preferably try and temper the Obama- and Biden-era overreaches especially on questions related to gender and crime.

Elitism’s return will not be a restoration of the pre-2015 status quo but its evolution: chastened by crisis, yet structurally inevitable, avoiding both the aggressive interventionism of earlier periods and the mindless, inward and anti-intellectual tendencies of populism. But the causes that led to the rise of populism have not disappeared, and should give technocratic elites no cause for complacency. In fact, they would be best advised to shed the more toxic, socially progressive and arrogant elements from their ranks.