RYAN ZICKGRAF: A tombstone for Obamaism.

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.

Obama was always about little more than Obama. The Obamausoleum is just the unmissable eyesore expression of that.