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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

“Michael Moore just had to wait for America’s anger to catch up with his,” Sean Penn wrote in a flattering Time mag essay about No. 45 on the magazine’s Top 100 of 2005.

The Hollywood actor claimed that the morbidly obese millionaire leftist provocateur “inspired his fellow Democrats with a workingman’s toughness” by going to the Republican convention and “replying to their ‘four more years’ chant with ‘two more months.'”

The “two more months” was an unintentional prophecy.

By 2005, Moore was breathing dust from his own movement. His agitprop documentaries fell away into irrelevance and a decade later, ‘Michael Moore in TrumpLand’ grossed $149,000 while ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ barely made back its budget.

Moore may have placed 2nd on Time’s list of important entertainers, but it was Jon Stewart, arriving in 9th place, who really mattered. Where Sean Penn’s puff piece hailed Moore as an aggressive provocateur, NBC newshead Tom Brokaw’s tongue bath hailed Jon Stewart as “our Athenian, a voice for democratic ideals and the noble place of citizenship.”

Stripped of the Brokawian Made for PBS balderdash language was this, while Moore pranced around in working man drag, Stewart wore suits and had the tone to take over the media.

And the side asset of the media that is popularly known as the Democratic Party.

Moore vs. Stewart was a bigger bellwether for the party which was in the process of jettisoning its working class gear for black framed hipster glasses. Moore boasted of growing up on a dirt road while Stewart grew up in a nice Jersey suburb. By the Obama era, everyone on MSNBC and all the prominent leftist cable influencers, like Stephen Colbert, looked like the population of a corporate vegan restaurant, earnestly ironic, suited up members of the hipster bourgeoisie.

The lesson that the Democrats took away from the 2004 election was that appealing to the white working class was a waste of time. The party’s future lay with upper class leftist college grads who hated Bush, not because of his politics, but because he was déclassé. So was Moore, shuffling around in a baseball cap and vest, trying to blend into Colorado, and John Kerry, a former Vietnam War bad boy trying to appeal to patriotic Middle America with his salutes.

Obama, who affected the detached attitude and the self-consciously unselfconscious manner of the new rising hipster bourgeoisie, was the future while Hillary Clinton, still trying to convince the moms of America that she was just like them, was just as part of the past as Moore and Kerry.

The hipster bourgeoisie was more fastidious about its style than its politics while appearing not to be. Their ideal was the organic, great effort put into what appeared effortless: a $40 plate of three brussel sprouts covered in an orange sauce, stripped kitchen cabinets and a carefully curated list of bands on a sloppily labeled mix CD. Obama and Stewart’s brand of politics was about appearing to be authentic by not trying too hard, while trying very hard indeed.

Michael Moore had spent his entire misbegotten life trying very hard to be noticed, but his working class costume was on the outs in a new progressive movement of shiny suits.

Coolness among elites is always a facade. HIBOs or the hipster bourgeoisie were the high-earning college graduates who loved their elite status and feared exposure. The early beginnings of the internet had groomed them to pursue social status through personas and the highest status in HIBO circles came from resolving paradoxes and combining the incompatible, Harvard Marxists working on Wall Street, enjoying the benefits of both realities.

The working class was on the way out. Incomes for the white working class were not keeping pace with the growth among college grads in Fortune 500 companies and startups. The future wasn’t listening to Moore telling Democrats how to win over the white working class, it was working at Apple or Facebook, overseeing a team of cheap Indian or Chinese visa workers, and then kicking back at night in a Bay Area one-room with Jon Stewart mocking Bush.

Forget Sister Souljah moments. Open borders, mass migration, pro-crime policymaking and a new civil rights movement was the future. And Obama showed all of it could be remade in the HIBO image. Third world immigrants, LGBTQ activists and upper middle class white brats, all wearing the same clothes, all listening to the same music and all sharing the same politics. It was like an Apple ad except the expensive shiny product was Obama and the Left 2.0.

Jon Stewart wasn’t the cause, he was a symptom. The Democrats became a party of radical college grads while Republicans reacted by aiming for the working class. The realignment was as much a matter of style as actual balance sheets. The classes were more cultural than real. Much like Elvis and the Beatles or PCs and Macs, a line was being drawn through the culture.

Wokeness was just a recognition that the line crossed everything because it was all political.

The HIBOs were leftists because they were college grads and they were both because they loved rules. Raised by dilettante parents, they came of age in the era of Zero Tolerance. By the time they got to college, they wanted everything regulated and spoon fed to them. Earlier generations had rebelled, but the HIBOs desperately wanted to conform and belong.

The more rules you gave them, the happier they were. Fair trade, recycling, LEED, BDS and boycotts of corporations and then entire states told them they were good people. Online they assembled lists of people who were behaving badly and tried to get them fired. It started small and then eventually the mobs grew big enough to congeal into the mass of cancel culture.

Did it have to happen this way? Maybe. Maybe not.

Had Obama gone down in 2008, the party might have tossed the HIBOs aside the way that it had the white working class who failed to come out for John Kerry. But I doubt it. The HIBOs were their own kind of cultural revolution and while they are culturally dead now, their legacy remains with us.

Styles come and go. The era of cool detachment made way for memes, fake authenticity for the authentic fakeness of social media influencers, and MSNBC no longer looks like it’s in the business of selling hipster frames, instead it’s now thronged with the multicultural career women who fill up all the slots at journalism school while painstakingly following celebrity fashions.

Obama is done because the whole cultural movement he was part of blew away. It’s as hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t part of it as goldfish swallowing, Woodstock or Seattle grunge. Within a decade we went from people fainting at Obama rallies to the country tuning him out. Like Michael Moore, Barack Obama doesn’t understand that he wouldn’t succeed today or that his entire manner is as passe as plaid. He ushered in the era we’re in, but doesn’t understand it.

The HIBOs are around, but they’re less mannered than they used to be. In the manner of all trends that peak, they no longer feel the need to declare themselves. They carefully jump from cause to cause, knowing that if they make a misstep, their careers will come apart. After Oct 7, they waited, put out their social media antenna and realized that they had to support Hamas.

And so it is with most things.

HIBOs like Obama or Stewart used to set the pace, but now they just trot after it. The new zeitgeist is more bluntly Marxist. Its irony is only used to sharpen its contempt and extremism. The HIBOs never had much of a sense of humor, but the woke bourgeois or WOBOs that succeeded them take nothing at face value and violently suspect anything humorous.

WOBOs see a neurotic subtext in everything. They scream on social media and occasionally in the streets. Unlike their HIBO forebears, they don’t bother hiding their pain and isolation in layers of detachment. Their hate, their extremism and their gleeful violence are out in the open.

The HIBOs pretended that they didn’t want to burn everything down. And they really didn’t. They liked their lives, their studio apartments, their trips to Iceland and their iPhones. The WOBOs are angry and getting angrier. Life they know will be worse for them and the gadgets offer only the thinnest escape. They will earn less than their parents, marry later, divorce earlier, love less and fail faster. The seas are rising and they no longer believe Obama or anyone will lower them.

David Brooks, who coined the term, BOHO, combining bourgeois and bohemian, famously marveled at the neatness of Obama’s pants. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

The HIBOs, the Obamas and Stewarts, with their perfectly creased pants and their perfectly rehearsed roles, had been embraced by the elites of another era like Brooks and Brokaw because they seemed so very professional and so certain of themselves. Now they recoil at the WOBOs who are still sure of themselves but, like AOC, don’t bother with the perfect creases.

Loudness is the new authenticity, but the white working class is still unwanted.

WOBOs pride themselves on their upper class multi cultural superiority. The more wealth and power they have, the more they are convinced that they are the oppressed. And that is what makes them so nakedly relentless and ruthless. The liberal weakness, one that HIBOs still suffered from, was that they knew they were not the victims and had to wield power in their name, the WOBOs however believe they are the victims and wield power in their own name.

That’s why the WOBOs don’t need to deflect, deploy irony or arch their brows. They can do what even Obama did not dare by waging war openly against America and its institutions.

Much as the HIBOs were a cultural movement bred by internet smugness, the WOBOs are a cultural movement incubated by social media narcissism. They have no filter, no conscience and nothing to them except a screaming selfishness diffused into pop culture rage. They don’t hope, they hate, and they are too busy deconstructing everything to create anything.

As the first and likely last HIBO president, Obama was bad enough, but waiting in the wings is the first WOBO president who will be even worse.