Houellebecq’s longstanding sexual concerns: in a memorable passage from The Elementary Particles, Bruno wonders, while watching attractive female students flirt with their less-intellectual classmates, what the future of the life of the mind would be if women no longer prized learnedness in sexual partners. The Muslim Brotherhood of Submission, by consciously building a society in which intellectuals have good sexual outcomes, works to address these concerns, even as they leave some measure of sexual inequality in place.

Though others have noted Houellebecq’s favorable portrayal of Islamic France, this reading of Submission may still be somewhat shocking; the novel, seen in this way, is likely much more transgressive than it would be if Houellebecq had just written the Islamophobic screed that his critics reflexively assumed he had written. But Ihas been the norm in America since 1968. Whether to blame it on the Republicans or the Democrats is beside the point, since it takes two to deadlock. What is interesting is how and why Obama managed to break through it for two years.

Obama set out to transform American politics, and he half-succeeded. First, he had to persuade liberals to believe in liberalism again—to believe in the possibility of broad, deep, and rapid political change, engineered by an activist federal government, led by a visionary prophet-president. No more Clintonian small ball. That was the “hope” part. Second came the “change”: He had to prove he could pull it off, could turn the renewed dreams into reality. In the first half of his first term, he broke through the