Since his retirement from politics, Barack Obama has displayed an astonishing lack of regard for the public good. Instead of serving his fellow human beings, he has mainly devoted himself to a rigorous program of conspicuous self-celebration.

All summer, millions of Americans this year worried about being evicted from their homes, catching the Delta variant, persuading recalcitrant loved ones to get vaccinated, or whether a COVID resurgence might keep schools closed in the fall. Former president Barack Obama was apparently loftily unbothered by any of these plebeian concerns.

The distinguished memoirist was too busy planning a ginormous sixtieth birthday party for himself on his vast and vulgar Martha’s Vineyard estate, a sprawling 6,892-foot tumor on a beautifully spare coastal landscape, which the Obamas bought in 2019 for $11.75 million. The 475 guests were to include George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey. Even people close to him argued for weeks that as the White House was urging caution, given the recent COVID resurgence, the optics of this shindig were not good. Last week he appeared, for a moment, to be conceding to internal Democratic Party pressure by disinviting most of the guests, limiting the celebration to family and close friends. But that soon turned out to be some kind of head fake.

While Obama’s party might not have caused a deadly outbreak — it was outdoors and the Obamas were requiring guests to be vaccinated — the former president’s birthday bash showed, at a minimum, a cavalier insensitivity to the fears and needs of his neighbors, as well as a general indifference to the political fortunes of his fellow Democrats and the sufferings of Americans. But the kerfuffle shouldn’t surprise close observers of Obama’s ex-presidency, which has been strikingly bereft of public-spiritedness.

He’s distinguished himself as an enemy of labor and friend of racist cops. NBA players began to go on strike last August after Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by police seven times in front of his kids, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Amid a national uprising over the shooting and many other acts of racist police brutality, Obama called LeBron James and players’ union leader Chris Paul and urged them to get back on the court and finish the playoffs, which they did.

Obama was also instrumental in shutting down Bernie Sanders’s bid for the presidency, a huge setback to the movement for social democracy in the United States. When Sanders was leading in the primaries, Obama worked to organize the other rival candidates to drop out and back Biden, making it impossible for Sanders to win. He then persuaded the democratic socialist senator to drop out of the race.

And let’s not forget Obama’s awful museum in Chicago. The three-memoir author is erecting a garish monument to himself on Jackson Park, which community activists argue will wreak havoc on cherished green space and a fragile ecosystem, as well as upon the legal scaffolding for the very idea of the public interest (we wrote about this late last year).

In addition to his appalling Vineyard manse, Obama is also planning to live in an additional ecological monstrosity in Hawaii — owned by close crony Marty Nesbitt, chair of the Obama Foundation board — and developed for the Obamas. ProPublica reported last year that the Obama’s planned beach house has a controversial sea wall, which protects the estate in storms but is illegal because such structures disrupt the flow of the ocean and contribute to beach loss throughout the state.

It goes on here if you can stomach it