Perhaps one should blame Barack Obama for this. Ahmed’s political worldview seems to be part Obama, part Warren Buffett: vacuous civil rights rhetoric plus vacuous “progressive” corporate rhetoric. Obama was the one who finally sapped the last substantive content from the words “hope” and “change,” and who used racial inclusion as a way of justifying the status quo. Obama was politics as image and iconography rather than power and policy, precisely the sensibility that Ahmed has inherited. Obama’s realization was the same one that corporate America had about the counterculture: if you incorporated the images of radical politics, without any actual threat to the existing power structure, you could produce a version of progressive politics that Wall Street would love. You could feel like a good person and get rich at the same time.