Over at Unherd there is a wonderful piece on “The Obama Carbuncle” — the hideous presidential library that has been constructed in Chicago to memorialize Obama’s presidential self-image. Theo Zenou remarks on its chosen location:

Much has been made about how Obama chose — scrap that, insisted on — the South Side, historically where Chicago’s working-class black communities have lived. It was there, too, that the former president spent his formative years as a community organizer. “The best education I ever had,” Obama later said. Placing his library on the South Side is a way to bring economic opportunity to the people who made him.

Or so the official narrative goes. But as David J. Garrow, author of the definitive Obama biography explains, the 44th president’s library is actually located at the top of the South Side, near Hyde Park, which “for decades has been this integrated, middle class, upper middle class island built around the University of Chicago and very separated” from the rest of the South Side. “Going further south,” Garrow says it’s important to realize, “there’s another 70-plus blocks.”

Like Obama’s actual presidency, the presidential center could have done more to benefit the black community but instead chooses to serve America’s upper-middle-class idiotariat.

Notably, despite being located near a university, this is the only presidential library without a physical archive where historians and biographers might dig and work. Instead, the president’s files are digitized on a website. Again, the library is like the presidency itself — filled with grand images and exhibits, but not offering a democratic people the substance they’ve come to expect.