RICHARD FERNANDEZ: For the Left, Morality Needs Muscle Behind It.

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

The only possibility of error was timing. With respect to the overall arc of history, how could that be wrong? With Brexit an accomplished fact, globalism under threat from a looming pandemic, and his own party in disarray, it might occur to Obama that his ideology was not 20 years too early so much as a hundred years too old. But it probably won’t. There is no refutation of  “this is a moral issue, my friends.”

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