Zohran and the Democratic Revolution

I. The Rise and Fall of Obama Liberalism

In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama emerged as the ‘Modern Prince’ of American liberalism—a figure who crystallized the collective will of a nation at a moment of crisis. His historic win breathed fresh life into neoliberalism, doing so by clothing it in a renewed sense of optimism, coupled with a cool-headed, technocratic personal affect. His coalition—youth, professionals, union households, communities of color, suburban moderates—was held together not just by policy promises, but by the belief that cool, rational competence, hope, and post-partisan reason could restore faith in American democracy after the chaos of Bush and the 2008 financial crisis. Obama was the embodiment of the "West Wing" ideal: a politics of polished management, eloquence, and sophisticated deliberation.

But Obama’s governance revealed deeper contradictions: despite promising “hope and change,” he was not a break from the neoliberal paradigm that triggered the economic crisis—but its most eloquent steward. The Reagan-Clinton-Bush consensus—deregulation, financialization, privatization, imperial militarism—remained intact. The financial crisis, which could have been the death knell of this order, became its resuscitation. Instead of disciplining Wall Street, Obama’s team—Geithner, Summers, Bernanke—technocrats of financial management, bailed out the banks without extracting structural concessions. No major executives were prosecuted. No Glass-Steagall-style firewall was restored. The financial oligarchy, rather than being disciplined, was further empowered. The preservation of the system was justified as the only competent choice—the fatal core of the technocratic commitment.  

The result was economic stagnation and mass disillusionment with the existing political  consensus. The world that made neoliberalism plausible—the illusion of endless growth, stable employment, rising homeownership—was already unraveling. Obama’s refusal to seize the crisis as an opportunity for democratic reconstruction left working people’s economic hardship following the crisis unresolved. The recovery flowed upward; wages stagnated; inequality deepened. With the unraveling of the previously held consensus, we entered what Gramsci refers to as the interregnum in 2016, with populist movements emerging from both the left and right to contest for hegemony.

From the disillusionment with Obama’s stewardship of the neoliberal order emerged a spectrum of left populism, varying in boldness but unified in its rejection of technocratic deference to capital. On one hand stood figures like Elizabeth Warren, whose “progressive” populism demanded stronger antitrust enforcement, consumer safeguards, and rhetorical attacks on “corporate greed” only slightly veering from the technocratic style of the Democratic Party. 

On the other hand stood Bernie Sanders, who, identifying openly as a democratic socialist, articulated a left populism defined by boldness in vision. Sanders called for universal public goods, wealth taxation, and the reassertion of people power. He reintroduced the language of class struggle into the mainstream after decades of neoliberal “post-politics.” Rather than a plea for better management, Sanders declared that the crisis was one of power, not competence. Where Obama had treated Wall Street as a partner to be stabilized, Sanders named it an oligarchic force to be confronted. This was the deeper rupture with Obama liberalism: not merely policy divergence, but a fundamental reorientation from technocratic liberalism toward democratic anti-oligarchic politics.

The 2016 Democratic primary exposed the fault line within Obama liberalism. Mainstream liberals (including the bulk of Warrenite progressives)—many sympathetic to Sanders’ spirit and even his policies—ultimately chose Hillary Clinton, fearing that populism was too “vulgar,” too confrontational, too disruptive to the fragile order. They believed in a well-functioning society, not a transformed one. The choice for Clinton was, in many ways, a vote to preserve the West Wing ideal: a politics of polish, measured process, and elite control. Sanders’ style—raw, confrontational, and demanding—threatened the comforting technocratic veneer of the Obama era.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shocked the liberal base, but the Democratic establishment quickly restructured its hegemony around the #Resistance: a moral-affective regime that treated Trump as an aberration, rather than a sign of America’s descent into barbarity. Rachel Maddow’s Russiagate obsession, “I’d be at brunch” protest signs, and the cult of institutional “normalcy” kept the coalition intact—not through a positive vision, but through a shared enduring of and opposition to Trump’s term in office.

This framework held long enough to defeat Sanders again in 2020. Joe Biden, positioning himself as Obama’s heir and promising a “return to normal” that liberals yearned for following 4 years of Trump, attempted a grand reconciliation: unite mainstream liberals and populists through industrial policy. The Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act included real concessions—climate investment, drug pricing reforms, etc.—but they were framed less as reorientation of the economy to aid working people, and more as to gear it towards Cold War competition with China. The underlying structure of American capitalism—its oligarchic core—remained untouched. At first, it seemed to work. But three forces shattered the illusion:

1. Inflation, which hit working households hardest. Rather than confront “sellers’ inflation”—corporate price gouging in concentrated markets, as economist Isabella Weber has shown—the administration deferred to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, effectively once again choosing the interests of the financial oligarchy over working families. The effects of inflation drowned whatever economic populist concessions that “Bidenomics” was able to deliver, as reflected in public polling on how well people felt the economy was doing.  I’ve written before on the failures of the Democrats to translate economic legislation into voter support.

2. Gaza, where Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s war made continued allegiance to the Democratic Party morally unconscionable for millions.

3. Biden’s visible decline—his halting speeches, vacant stares—became a metaphor and a public spectacle. His physical and cognitive exhaustion represented the discrediting of the technocratic affect itself. He personified the rotting core of technocratic neoliberalism: a system that staked its legitimacy on competence was now led by a figure who seemed well-intentioned, yet exhausted, out of touch, and fundamentally incapable of the sophisticated management it promised. The prince was replaced by a decrepit king.

When Biden finally stepped aside, there was a flicker of hope. Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz—a soft progressive, likable, willing to fight—suggested the coalition might be restored. But the DNC convention extinguished that hope. The refusal to shift on Gaza, the courting of neoconservatives in the Republican Party like Liz Cheney, the absence of any bold economic vision—it was clear: the old order had no answers.  It was unable to adjust to a new world that required a new articulation and a new, bolder vision of the world. Trump’s reelection sealed it: the Democratic base was now truly orphaned. Not just disillusioned, but dispossessed of leadership. Today, democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies hardly put up a superficial fight against Trump, as we saw with the #Resistance during the first Trump term, with the government shutdown being the first true instance of one.

It was into this vacuum that Zohran stepped—not as a technocrat promising restoration, but as a novel kind of Modern Prince: one who speaks for the people whose concerns had been treated as at best secondary for so long.  Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the three pitfalls of the Biden administration — the cost of living crisis, the genocide in Gaza, and Biden’s cognitive decline are all directly addressed and rebuked in Zohran’s campaign.  He has centered his campaign around affordability, has decisively broken with the liberal orthodoxy of being “progressive except Palestine,” and has run an extraordinary campaign that embodies a form of political vitality that Biden, in his geriatric frailty, could not summon. Where Biden struggled to complete sentences—let alone energize a demoralized base—Zohran has campaigned with relentless physical presence, walking the length of Manhattan in a single day, showing up in every borough, and speaking with a clarity and stamina that signals not just policy difference, but generational and affective rupture in the Democratic Party. These factors, and not just Zohran’s policy platform or weak primary opponents, are crucial to understanding his massive national appeal and the attention his campaign has won.