Excerpted from the prologue of Kenneth Mondschein's America: The First Quarter Millennium, copyright 2026. Some rights reserved.
There is a reason why we historians organize our classes on the history of the United States from the colonial era to the Civil War, and then from the Civil War to the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. Almost two decades after the fact, the 2008 election remains a watershed in American history.
Countless writers more eloquent than I have described how American society, up to that point, had been divided. My students find this hard to believe, raised as they were in a world where skin color is just another accidental, like the length of one's hair or one's sexual orientation. But in 2008 Obama represented the quintessential Other. While generations of immigrants — whose native tongue was Gaelic, or Italian, or Yiddish, or Spanish — had managed to transform themselves into Americans, the descendents of enslaved Africans had never realized this promise. In the year of Obama's birth, Freedom Riders were beaten, shot at and burned. In his childhood, fire hoses and police dogs were turned on the children and grandchildren of slaves.
Almost two decades after the fact, the 2008 election remains a watershed in American history.
But even more than the color of his skin, Obama's name was thought to be an insurmountable barrier. Remember that seven years before his election, extremists adhering to a victimized, perverted form of Islam had transformed passenger aircraft into improvised missiles, thus also transforming Islam itself into America's quintessential boogeyman. And yet, Obama was elected as its forty-fourth president.
Why did this happen? To give the simplest explanation, in the late twentieth century, American nativist sentiment, originally expressed in Know-Nothingism, xenophobia and closed borders, coalesced into a thousand subtle and overt gestures meant to widen the gap between Us and Them. Firearm ownership, opposition to immigration, opposition to sexual freedom and access to reproductive medicine — all of these were totems of a tribe that, pressured by external economic factors, feared change and sought to defend itself from an imagined enemy. Playing on these fears, the memetic engineers of the New Right sold a plan of government deregulation that, in turn, increased the economic pressure in a vicious closed cycle. Obama's good fortune was to be up for election at the very moment when this cycle could no longer sustain itself.
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