From a classic Christopher Caldwell essay from September 7, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, "1968: A Revolting Generation Looks Back": How fitting that Obama's entire working experience was as a Community Organizer, which is, at its core, organizing "grievance" groups for political action.

"The victory of lifestyle politics over class politics had huge consequences. It broke the lower classes' monopoly on grievances against society; the well-off—or subgroups of them, presenting themselves s 'women,' or 'gays,' or 'students'—could suddenly be 'alienated,' too. And they pushed their claims of oppression under a wholly new type of political discourse. The Myth of Objective Consciousness could not—by definition—be dethroned through rational argument. As Herbert Marcuse said, 'A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization.' Because that civilization was so reasonable, so democratic, to argue on its rational terms was merely to make oneself a dupe of power. So sex and drugs and, most of all, 'feelings' became appropriate weapons in the political arena."