Note to reader: This piece talks about a speech given by President Obama in Kansas on the economy at the height of his presidency. I first encountered it not through the White House archives but through the work of Thomas Frank, who speaks about it brilliantly here. Frank has long understood what many liberals don’t: that the speech revealed not a break from the neoliberal consensus, but a deep faith in it. What follows is an attempt to carry that insight a step further—to show how this speech, delivered in the shadow of the financial crisis, crystallized a worldview that still defines the Democratic establishment today: a moral belief in meritocracy, even as the system it defends continues to unravel.

In December 2011, President Obama delivered what was widely hailed as one of the most important speeches of his presidency. Speaking from Osawatomie, Kansas—where Theodore Roosevelt had once warned of corporate monopolies and runaway inequality—Obama cast himself as a defender of the middle class and framed inequality as “the defining issue of our time.”

At the height of post-recession disillusionment, the moment felt like a moral pivot. Occupy Wall Street had captured the country’s attention just weeks earlier. The language of “the 99%” had entered mainstream discourse. And here was Obama, invoking the progressive legacy and declaring: “This kind of inequality—a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression—hurts us all.”

For a moment, it felt like a reckoning might be possible. Obama spoke of an economy that isn't working for everybody anymore, of a country where a few do better than ever. He denounced trickle-down economics, praised unions, and warned of a system tilted in favor of those at the top. It was, in tone and outline, a rebuke of the very forces that had defined the post-Reagan political consensus.

But the speech is more revealing in hindsight than it was at the time. Because for all its rhetorical power, it never truly breaks with the ideological assumptions that helped produce the crisis in the first place. Obama diagnosed the wreckage of the American Dream—but insisted the dream itself was still intact. The problem wasn’t the system. It was that people weren’t trying hard enough to win at it. In one of the more disturbing parts of the speech, Obama explains that having to take your kid to a food bank in America is “heartbreaking.” But what’s worse, he implied, “that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable.”

After laying out the facts of inequality—flat wages, skyrocketing tuition, declining mobility—Obama, speaking to the “solution,” pivots to the familiar liberal prescription: individual responsibility, specifically go to college, pull yourself out of poverty.

“It will require parents to get more involved in their children’s education. It will require students to study harder. It will require some workers to start studying all over again. It will require greater responsibility from homeowners not to take out mortgages they can’t afford. They need to remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Here the mask slips. The systemic critique gives way to a sermon. The bailout wasn’t just economic—it was moral, and it flowed in the wrong direction. The banks were rescued. The people were told to do better next time.

In Obama’s framing, the crisis wasn’t proof that the game was rigged—it was proof that too many Americans hadn’t studied hard enough to win. This is the logic of meritocracy at its most seductive: a system of rewards that paints itself as fairness. A crisis of power reframed as a crisis of discipline.

Meritocracy is more than an economic theory—it’s a moral promise. The idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll rise. In American liberalism, especially post–Cold War liberalism, this ideal became not just a story we told ourselves, but the organizing logic of policy, politics, and identity.

From Clinton’s (and Harris’) “opportunity agenda” to Obama’s obsession with STEM education and grit, Democrats embraced meritocracy as both ethical and efficient: a way to reward effort, manage inequality, and prove capitalism could still deliver fairness without redistribution. Rather than challenge the market’s outcomes, they sought to equip more people to win within it.

This shift was intellectual, cultural, and strategic. It tried to invoke the moral ideas of thinkers like John Rawls, who imagined a just society as one where talent was rewarded fairly. But in practice, it was closer to those like Charles Murray and the early neoliberals, who believed the cognitive elite should rise and rule. By the 1990s, it had become the bipartisan consensus: the best way to help the working class was to make sure their children went to college and joined the professional class themselves.

In this worldview, success is proof of virtue. Failure is unfortunate, but explainable. The system doesn’t need to be questioned, but calibrated. Technocrats would engineer “ladders of opportunity,” and the deserving would climb.

But what happens when the ladder breaks?

By the time Obama gave his speech in Osawatomie, the cracks were visible everywhere. Millennials were graduating into debt, precarity, and delayed adulthood. The housing market had imploded. The “knowledge economy” had consolidated in a handful of cities. And yet, the Democratic message barely shifted: just retrain and relocate. Sure it will be hard, but this country is build on “innovation.” The ladder is still there—you just have to climb faster.

This disconnect didn’t go unnoticed. It bred resentment not just among those left behind, but among those who were told they could win—if only they tried hard enough. It hollowed out the idea of solidarity and replaced it with a subtle moral hierarchy. The elites had earned their place. The rest had only themselves to blame.

Into that breach stepped Donald Trump. A man who, for all his grotesque wealth and Ivy League connections, spoke as if the game was rigged. Not because he opposed hierarchy, but because he knew how many people felt humiliated by it. He didn’t promise a better ladder. He promised revenge.

Trump didn’t emerge from nowhere. He emerged from the wreckage of a political system that congratulated itself for offering opportunity while ignoring how little it delivered. He emerged from a culture that mistook credentialism for justice, and mobility for meaning.

The enduring danger of meritocracy isn’t just that it fails—it’s that it convinces those in power of their place as the “winners.” In doing so, it paints a convenient story that absolves them of any greater moral obligation to the “losers” of this system.

Meritocracy transforms inequality into legitimacy. It turns every elite into a moral figure, every dropout into a case study in personal failure. And it tells the winners they have nothing to answer for, because the system worked for them.

This is what made Obama’s Osawatomie speech so revealing. He acknowledged the failures of the economy, but could not imagine a future beyond self-help and discipline. He understood that something was broken, but could only summon more aspiration, more homework, more bootstraps. The bailout, it turned out, wasn’t just financial—it was ideological. The system was preserved, and so was the story.

That’s the great lie that liberals tell themselves about meritocracy, and it’s in full force still today. The idea that society will always have winners and losers. That government’s purpose should just be making it a bit easier for the losers to become winners.

But the story is breaking. The ladder is broken. And the people know it.

What comes next will depend on whether we can name what was lost—and what must be rebuilt. A politics rooted not in merit or performance, but in responsibility. A renewed social contract—not between individuals and the market, but between a state and its people.

That would mean asking more of those who have power. It would mean seeing the system for the trap that it is. It would mean ending the era of earned survival—and beginning the work of building something we all deserve.

Closing note and update from me:

I wanted to share a quick update about what to expect here going forward.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing two essays a week, plus starting a weekend reflection and reading recommendation post. It’s been energizing, and I’m incredibly grateful for how this community has grown. But I’ve also realized that pace isn’t sustainable—not just for me, but maybe not for you either. We’re all overwhelmed with content, and the last thing I want is to be another inbox obligation.

So I’m shifting to a slower, more intentional rhythm:
—One main essay a week (usually midweek)
—Weekend reflections and reading recs will continue for paid subscribers
—Occasionally, you might see a short dispatch or note if something timely calls for it

This is about making space—for sharper writing, deeper thinking, and a clearer sense of direction for this project and the larger body of work it’s building toward.

Thank you for being here. Truly.

Evelyn