A tombstone for Obamaism

The early reviews of the Barack Obama Presidential Center are in, and they’re deservedly brutal. The ex-president’s monument, opening on Chicago’s Southside this Juneteenth, has been compared to the Death Star, a Klingon prison, a self-cleaning cat litter box, or, as implied by President Trump in a Truth Social post , a giant garbage can.

Yet, what it resembles most, I’d argue, is a mausoleum, the Obamausoleum, if you will. The tower is clad in New Hampshire granite, rises in a faceted, asymmetrical mass with almost no windows, and looms over a grassy public park. It even has words carved near the top, giving the whole thing the unmistakable air of the world’s largest headstone. But what it marks — unintentionally — is the final resting place of Obamaism: a politics after politics, a monument to the fantasy that if enough institutions speak pleasant bromides in a reassuring voice, if politicians act like noble characters from The West Wing , some ineffable thing called “the arc of the moral universe” will bend and everyone wins. Who needs culture war when you can have culture peace ?

That’s not what was originally sold to voters. When Obama was elected in 2008 — almost 20 years ago — he promised a sharp political pivot from the neoliberal consensus of both the Bushes and the Clintons — “change you can believe in.” But then he spent much of his presidency convincing everyone that massive structural change was impossible in the face of Republican opposition. What he offered instead was the thin gruel of himself: Obama as symbol, Obama as cultural ascendance, Obama as proof that America had already become better simply by recognizing him. Now the Obama Center represents a near-billion-dollar effort to convince visitors that the symbolism of the first Black president was not a consolation prize but the victory all along.

The contrast with Trump’s proposed library is instructive, if only because Trump’s version appears more honest. The renderings depict an American palace, essentially: a 50-story glass tower in Miami, with a recreated Oval Office in its current gilded decor, a golden escalator nodding to his 2015 announcement, and a gold statue of Trump himself, fist raised in the Butler, Pennsylvania pose, visible from the ocean. Trump — in other words — wants power to look like power in the classical and profane sense: a golden statue, a skyscraper, a plane in the lobby, a throne room with paid parking.

The Obama Center performs the more sophisticated trick of making his power look like its own critique: socially conscious, locally engaged, and solemnly democratic. It is power laundered through the institutions Democrats still control: museums, foundations, public art, nonprofits, celebrity culture, while offering vague nods to activism. It conceals itself in the soft narcotic of inclusive language, forever speaking in the first-person plural, which you can’t miss in the center’s 88-foot-tall “Power of Words” installation.

To be fair, the center itself isn’t a total travesty. Many of the individual pieces of the 19.3-acre site sound perfectly pleasant (on paper, at least, as the Obama Foundation denied my media credentials for the opening three times). It is populated with 30 site-specific art commissions from artists such as Maya Lin, Nick Cave, and Julie Mehretu. There is also a working branch of the Chicago Public Library; a basketball facility called Home Court whose NBA-caliber court is stenciled with Obama slogans; and a garden pavilion that, in a move seemingly designed to give conservatives a conniption, is named after Nancy Pelosi. The outdoor spaces, particularly, hint at one of liberalism’s more defensible instincts: build something useful, make it pretty enough, and hope people will come. What you will not find on the campus is the presidential archive itself, making this the first “presidential library” since FDR’s that isn’t one — his records live either in a federal warehouse in the suburbs or online somewhere, managed by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit accountable primarily to itself.

Instead, the center is self-consciously billed as a new kind of presidential library: it’s a campus, a civic resource, a home for hope and change. There are classes planned, programs galore — gatherings, forums, activation, oh my! The Obama Foundation would desperately like you to stop trusting your lying eyes and stop thinking of the whole thing as merely a monument to one man. They say it’s about you, dear American. They say the tower somehow represents four hands coming together as a sign of unity, and point to the building’s stony crown, which contains a self-effacing line cast in five-foot-high concrete letters: “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word we .”

Yet it is hard to imagine the 225-foot windowless tower rising over Chicago’s Jackson Park as anything but a cold and misshapen monument to Obama’s ego. Consider the fact that architect Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’…