I still remember election night in 2008 like it was yesterday. I was then a first-year university student who, like virtually everyone else I knew, had spent the past year swept up in Barack Obama–mania. Even from outside the United States (I was studying at the University of Toronto), the events of that evening felt like they carried an epochal weight. The moment CNN projected an Obama victory, it was as if some invisible barrier separating the present from a future of unlimited progress had been shattered. Suddenly, after eight years of George W. Bush and decades of political retrenchment, everything was possible again.

In feeling this way, of course, I wasn’t alone. And while it’s certainly embarrassing to revisit the naive earnestness of November 2008 more than ten years on, it’s also worth remembering the extent to which Obama and his campaign quite deliberately stoked expectations and communicated their mission in transcendent terms. In retrospect, some of us probably should have known better. But the conservative course charted by the president and his administration from the very outset genuinely did come as a surprise. While Democrats throughout my lifetime had rhetorically aligned themselves with progress, no figure in the mold of a John Kerry or a Bill Clinton had ever spoken quite like this:

The journey will be difficult. . . .  [But] if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment, this was the time when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.