When Obama came of age politically, a vibrant American left still existed. Arriving in the United States in 1973, my father found himself surrounded by people like my mother: students, white and nonwhite, radicalized by growing economic uncertainty, the failures of civil rights liberalism to transform the everyday experience of poor minorities, and the ongoing abuses of the national-security state, which spied on citizens, infiltrated and violently suppressed social movements, and prosecuted illegal wars abroad. Despite the factionalism on the left, virtually every constituency my father interacted with — from Panther offshoots to antiwar activists to more traditional democratic socialists — shared a basic critique of American capitalism and global power.

This critique identified capitalism, white supremacy, and the national-security state as the three pillars that sustained economic and racial hierarchy in the United States. At home, it required imagining the black freedom struggle as a poor people’s campaign for all who were excluded: African Americans, immigrants, indigenous peoples, and the white working class. The goal was to replace capitalism with a more equitable economic order, one in which wealth would be redistributed to abolish poverty and increase the actual social power of ordinary individuals. The overarching demand from the left was for self-determination.

As for foreign affairs, the problem was not simply the Vietnam War — which anyway had formally come to an end in 1973 — but the cold-war mentality and national-security infrastructure that enabled continuous intervention abroad and the sabotage of dissidents at home. Left activists called for a new internationalism built on the self-determination of communities in the Global South. With these twin demands — self-determination at home and abroad — activists rejected the liberal assumption that had come to define cold-war politics: that an easy transition to racial and class harmony in the US was possible, and could be accomplished alongside the establishment of a global Pax Americana.