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A post whose time has come (was RE: Racism and the Republican party)
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Jonathan Sadow Offline
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A post whose time has come (was RE: Racism and the Republican party)
Back in this thread, I wrote

(11-04-2008 03:19 AM)Jonathan Sadow Wrote:  
Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:What I think is happening is that there's such a huge reservoir of hatred against W that people are falling for anything that looks different, and the more different the better. All I can think of to say is be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

At some point I'll probably put up a post going into more detail about this, but basically you're correct. Even if McCain wins this election, it's going to be driven by essentially non-rational factors, and that's not a good thing. I'll also speculate as to why this couldn't have happened 30 or perhaps even 20 years ago but could today.

Well, we're at that point now. We found out what H. L. Mencken meant when he wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard" - and did we ever get it....

Looking back at the Obama administration, it's tough to find much good, and most of it has to be considered in terms of things not getting even worse than they were. The economy sort of recovered, but it was the weakest recovery since World War II (and it couldn't gotten much worse), with consequent drops in employment participation rate and median income. Obama campaigned on the unconscionable size of the national debt, then doubled it during his presidency, meaning he piled as much debt onto the nation as did his 43 predecessors. Overall, the historical evidence suggests that Obama's actions most likely retarded the secular recovery the economy was experiencing during his administration and has laid the groundwork for something worse in the future.

It's the nature of foreign policy that its ramifications tend not to be experienced for some years, so the Obama legacy is not yet complete. The early returns, however, are not promising. Obama had the ability to get on the wrong side of just about every situation. His idea of negotiating with foreign powers seemed to be that a bad deal is better than no deal at all, such as the nuclear deal with Iran that conceded to virtually every Iranian demand. He changed the long-standing policy of paying ransom for American prisoners by releasing a billion dollars to Iran in exchange for five captives. The U.S. failed to support a popular rebellion in Iran that could have toppled the mullahs but did support a takeover of Egypt by Islamic fundamentalists who later were overthrown by the military to prevent the country from becoming a theocracy. Obama was feckless with allies, pulling defense systems from eastern Europe and letting Russia swipe Crimea from Ukraine. Obama drew a "red line" in Syria over the use of chemical weapons against civilians and did nothing when it was crossed. The Peoples' Republic of China started constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea and basing various territorial claims on that; the U.S. did nothing in response. The worst may have been the Iraq debacle; Obama declared victory precipitously and withdrew American troops, leading to a power vacuum filled by the Islamic State. Now, blood and treasure is being expended to win back the territory that had previously been won. About the only country Obama ever showed opposition to was longtime American ally Israel. Overall, it's difficult to argue that America's standing in the world hasn't declined over the Obama presidency, and it's going to take years to get out of this mess.

Domestic policy suffered as well. The Obamacare debacle is perhaps the best-known, in which supposed healthcare reform instead turned into essentially a giant expansion of Medicaid and wrecked the private insurance market. Obama was supposed to be the first "post-racial" president, but his administration proceeded to inject race into almost everything. From defaulting on a civil-rights case the Justice Department had already won against a black-supremacist organization engaged in voter intimidation to taking the side of blacks supposedly subjected to police brutality despite the lack of evidence, the Obama administration seemed to take the side of minorities in disputes whether the facts warranted it or not. Perhaps the most worrisome development was in the domestic war on terror. After September 11, 2001, no one in the U.S. died from terrorist activities throughout the rest of the Bush administration. During the Obama administration, 93 people were killed in the U.S. in domestic terrorist incidents (or, as the administration called them, "man-caused disasters" and "workplace violence"). That wasn't the only instance of policy coming before people; veterans died at the nation's Veterans Affairs hospitals due to games being played with waiting lists, and his lax policy toward illegal immigrants allowed legal aliens and citizens to suffer the depredations of criminal activity. To Obama, it seemed that ideology was more important than the well-being of Americans, and he appeared to be more interested in what was good for the Democratic Party than for the American people.

What's the lesson that can be drawn from this behavior? As I noted in my original post, non-rational factors led to the election (and re-election) of Obama. Simply put, Obama's policies were similar to those enacted in the 1960s and 1970s which turned out to be failures. Not surprisingly, the policies that failed in the '60s and '70s also failed in the 2000s and 2010s, yet too few people seem to have learned the lessons of history, and voting for someone advocating policies proven to have failed is not a rational act. As to why this happened, I think the reasons are complex, but perhaps the biggest contributor was the steady leftward march of the Democratic Party during the past 30 years or so. The Democratic Party is the de facto liberal party in the United States and so captures the trends of American liberalism. As liberal political thought has become more extreme in the past few decades, it's taken the party with it, and as liberalism has become less evidence-based and more emotion-based over the years, the party has become that as well. In a sense, it now provides a "safe space" for those who prefer to vent rather than think about issues and has thus aided the infantilization of our politics. A candidate like Obama, who validates these feelings, is thus very appealing to the burgeoning population to whom demagoguery is more persuasive than discourse. As I wrote, the issue is complex, and this explanation is incomplete, but the pity is that we failed to learn the lessons of history and were thus forced to repeat it. Let's hope we don't have to do this again (although personally I'm afraid that hope is in vain).

There was one aspect of the Obama presidency that differed from the '60s and '70s, and it's the most worrisome aspect: the disdain for the rule of law when convenient. It can be summed up by noting that the Obama administration lost about half of the court challenges opposing its actions, the highest failure rate since the Franklin Roosevelt administration (historically, administrations have won about two-thirds of the court challenges to their actions). Among those challenges the administration lost were recess appointments made in spite of the Senate still being in session and the attempted de facto legalization of underage illegal immigrants despite Obama himself stating two dozen times publicly that he didn't have the authority to do that. The Bill of Rights suffered its share of body blows; Obama attempted to have the Fox News Channel thrown out of the White House press pool, and its White House correspondent had his phone bugged by the Justice Department for no substantive reason. The Associated Press said that the Obama administration was the most unresponsive one to its Freedom of Information Act requests in history. The administration tried to force religious organizations to violate their beliefs in carrying our provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Second Amendment wasn't spared from attacks; the administration repeatedly proposed gun control measures that were clearly unconstitutional, especially after mass shootings (and often the proposed measures would have done nothing to prevent the shooting in question). The casual attitude toward the rule of law was reflected in the consequent politicization of the federal government. The Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups specifically because of their political beliefs by holding up their applications for extraordinary lengths of time. The Department of Homeland Security produced a report stating that the greatest threat to domestic security was not the radical Islamic terrorists that were actively killing people but rather tiny rightwing organizations that hardly anyone had ever heard of. As previously noted, the Justice Department had no qualms about inserting itself into local issues regarding supposed police misconduct and making prejudicial statements about the guilt of the officers involved, most of whom were subsequently exonerated. While politicization of the rule of law is of course corrosive to society, what's really problematic is that Obama's use of this tactic has in a sense legitimized its use. It wouldn't be surprising if in the future when Democrats are in charge they continue to treat the Constitution less as the basis for the rule of American society and more as an obstacle to their ideas of an American utopia that needs to be evaded. That, I'm afraid, will be Obama's legacy in the long run.
02-05-2017 01:25 AM
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