Further Reflections on the Obama Coalition In Light of the Executive Orders

For years, these policies were on a steady march through the institutions and society. With one small push, the whole thing wisped away into vapor.

"Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can influence it.”

Steve Jobs

With the snap of a finger, it feels like the people most committed to the old agenda switched sides.

As soon as he returned to office, Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. They dived into contentious issues, far beyond anything anyone would have believed possible a year ago. He commanded that DEI initiatives be abolished in the federal government. He declared birthright citizenship no longer applicable for certain immigrants. He will end diversity and inclusion in federal contracting, reverse recent immigration policy, and readjust the foreign policy status quo. He even ordered declassification for the JFK, RFK, and MLK files.

With a wave of the presidential pen, he’s unwinding every major Democratic priority of the last ten years. One would expect outrage and anguished cries from Democratic allies and supporters—corporate leaders, the media, and major national figures. After all, they claimed for years these priorities were so critical we needed speech codes, training programs, new departments, and even the firings of dissenters. Except for a bit of expected despair on Bluesky and similar quarters, the national mood has mostly been acceptance.

Actually, it’s more like an embrace.

One after another major corporation issued announcements about how they’re eager to implement this new direction. Mark Zuckerberg, whose company served as an engine of many of these policies, not only abolished them internally. He said on Joe Rogan his company needed to adopt a more masculine energy. Jeff Bezos of all people was parading around the inauguration. Davos was reportedly a ghost town this year, with few of usual titans who attend even bothering to show up.

What in the world is going on? These policies were on the march through the institutions for years, implemented by a unified leadership class. They felt undefeatable, if not inevitable. With one small push, the whole thing just wisped away into vapor and the people behind it now seem to be switching teams.

I think it has to do with my recent thoughts about the errors of the Obama Coalition.

WHY COUNTING ON PROFESSIONALS IS A PROBLEM

Counting on elite professions as the backbone of a coalition was terrible politics for another reason I didn’t mention in last week’s discussion—they’re ladder climbers. Ladder climbers can’t have firm beliefs if they want to succeed climbing ladders.

Ascending into America’s meritocratic class is a harrowing gauntlet. It starts from your earliest years, navigating tests and academic projects and clubs to get into a handful of elite universities. Then you need to pass more tests, build a network, and find a mentor. There are internships, perhaps graduate school, and the bottom rungs of elite jobs where you’re expected to toil 80-hour weeks for years while ingratiating yourself with bosses. Finally, if you manage to accomplish all that, the real race begins—climbing the ladder to the top of your profession to the glittering jackpot. At every stage you must be driven, ambitious, and prepared to sacrifice everything to pass the necessary tests to reach to the next level, while many others fail and drop out of the race.

This isn’t what politics is about. Politics is about challenging systems and creating new ones. Rising through professional institutions is about accepting systems that exist, sizing them up, learning the hidden rules, and gaming them until you get ahead. Political belief doesn’t accept systems, but challenges them for seemingly fruitless decades, grinding away while it all seems futile, until you slowly begin to pick up traction, and then maybe someday win. Most times, even when you’re right, you still lose, but do it anyway because you believe in it. The ambition of elite professionals is to accept the game, learn it, and then work like hell to beat it. The ambition of politics is to alter the game, knocking old systems down to create new ones.

Gandhi began life as an lawyer in British India. He could have dedicated his life to climbing that system to a nice and prosperous life. Instead he spent many difficult and futile years as a political entrepreneur looking to change the system instead of climbing it. Alexei Navalny similarly began life as a government lawyer who could have climbed the ladder of Putin’s Russia. His journey challenging the system ended less triumphantly, in a cold Siberian prison.

You can be on either side of this psychological divide in various arenas. Steve Jobs could have climbed the corporate ladder at Atari, but sought instead to change an industry during a time in which entrepreneurship was neither supported by an elite system nor high status. There also are many political operators dedicated to climbing the greasy pole of offices, constantly reshaping their image and opinions like Lindsay Graham into whatever is currently the best path to pleasing the machine.

Democrats sought to rebuild their party around pleasing the views of a demographic group that by nature shapes its views to whatever is most advantageous. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have been able to climb to their positions in the first place. People who stick to positions against the grain of their institutions don’t rise within them. I don’t mean professionals don’t believe things—I find most people genuinely believe whatever it is that they currently believe. I mean whatever they believe is never as deeply held as they think it is, and always changeable. If it wasn’t, they would never have been able to climb the bureaucratic machine.

This also, I suspect, is how Democrats went so off course. After building the party around professionals, the only people remaining in the party with strong idealistic beliefs were the identity groups and new academic left. That left them with the means to control its gates with rewards and punishments, and professionals eagerly complied to travel the easiest path ahead. For the same reason, now that those ideas are risky, the same people are finding reasons to recalibrate. In result, the entire thing is starting to come down.

This is what we expect elite professionals to do

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR POLITICAL REFORMERS

There’s a lesson here for would-be political reformers.

There’s a scene in Game of Thrones in which Varys poses a riddle. A sellsword is trapped with three men—a king, a priest, and a wealthy merchant. Each bids the mercenary to kill the other two. What does the sellsword do? Each has a claim to authority. Who has the power to command him? Is it the king with political power, the priest with the favor of the gods, or the one with money to buy his dreams? Or is it the hard man with the sword himself? The answer is the mercenary will do whatever he believes he’s supposed to do because all power is an illusion. It resides wherever people believes it resides. This is why Steve Jobs recognized society is more changeable than you think. Many things appear impossible so long as reinforcing status ladders are in place encouraging people to comply. Pop that bubble, and the ladder disappears into mist. Impossible things suddenly become inevitable.

I shouldn’t have been so shocked at the speed at which the people behind Democratic policies seem to have utterly changed course, betraying previously sincere beliefs. Not so long ago, I similarly was shocked when people changed their entire personas to conform to the new vibe in the Republican Party. I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” When Arendt studied the Germans who implemented the Nazi ideology, she found a lot of ordinary people who in any other context would have been perfectly nice, good neighbors, and decent citizens. Placed inside the Nazi machine, however, these boring people happily became the machinery of evil. As ambitious rule-followers, they simply wanted to conform and increase their status. If the way to do that had been defending democracy, they would have defended democracy. If it was to organize train schedules to the camps, they would do that too, without ever questioning the morality.

This is why it’s important to build coalitions around ideas instead of factions or demographics or power.

Theodore Roosevelt had an successful but unextraordinary early political career. Then he suffered great personal tragedy, causing him to recalibrate his life around doing as much good as he could. He took a job everyone thought was vastly beneath him, New York’s police commissioner, because he thought he could achieve something there. He achieved so many meaningful things so fast he quickly rose from that humble job to the presidency. Too many political consultants and political scientists treat politics like a big spreadsheet or a puzzle, stitching together parties and policies based on demographics and polls. They look at professionals as the ultimate siren’s lure—a powerful, educated, and well-placed constituency made up of their own associates and friends. They believe these people know things and are effective, so their ideas for governance must be good. All this is backwards to how things actually work.

You build parties around big ideas in which people can believe. Your leaders should be people who care more about changing the world than beating it. Your factions shouldn’t be people hoping to get something from you, but people who believe in you. Build around ideas, and then invite the professionals and ladder climbers to help administer what you’ve built. If your ideas are sound and people sincerely believe in them, they will come to build your party.

You really do have power to change the world into anything you like. Build a movement around the people who also believe that, and avoid those who see it as a static mountain for them to climb because it isn’t. The world is something we construct with every choice we make, and it can be anything that we decide for it to be.

What do you think about the new direction of America’s professional elites? Join the conversation in the comments.