Barack Obama's America - Created Trump

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Welcome To Barack Obama'sAmerica

Ben Domenech

Welcome To Barack Obama's America about:reader?url=http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/08/welcome-to-barack-obamas-america/

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By

December 8, 2015


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In the wake of an Oval Office speech which went over so terribly

that it has Politico openly wondering whether the entire form of

presidential address is dead, yesterday’s announcement from

Donald Trump that he believes the U.S. must block all Muslims

from entering the country, “until our countries’ representatives can

figure out what’s going on”, finally resolves the question about

President Obama’s greatest political legacy.

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to

Donald Trump. It is an America that is more tribalist, where people

feel more racially and religiously divided; more politically correct,

where people feel less free to speak their minds; and it is an America

where trust in the nation’s elites, whose skills are credentialed but

unproven, are at historic lows.

These are the wages of progressivism at the end of the day. Big

government inevitably leads to government incompetence. That

incompetence leads to growing and now dominant distrust – both in

government’s basic competence, and in the values of the people who

still insist upon it. Our modern elites respond to that rational

distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and

toxifies our politics. And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit


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these divides, offering the promise of an authoritarian who

represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented

the elites.

Consider the news that 965,000 migrants have sought asylum in

Germany over the past year. Are jihadists using these refugee flows?

Walter Russell Mead:

“Today’s Western elites, in the U.S. as much as in Europe, have

never been so self-confident. Products of meritocratic selection

who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant

custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY

Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies,

Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human

rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see

farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less

tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside

the magic circle of post historical groupthink. And while the

meritocratic priesthood isn’t wrong about everything—and the

knuckle-draggers aren’t right about everything—there are a few

big issues on which the priests are dead wrong and the knuckle-

draggers know it.”


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In the presidential context here in America, Bill Schneider frames

this as “the working class versus the educated elite.”

“Trump’s support for the Republican nomination is not defined by

ideology or age or gender. It’s defined by education. Among GOP

voters with a college degree in the latest CNN poll, Trump comes

in fourth with just 18 percent. But he has a huge lead among

non-college voters — 46 percent. No other candidate comes close.”

Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their

hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is

showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and

authority of the elites, and offering a vision of a presidency for a new

authoritarian era, where the Commander in Chief rules by Tweet.

This latest storm over his promise to block all Muslims will cast him

again as the man who calls the elites on their bull, who promises to

bomb America’s enemies or bend them to knee, to sweep away the

pretensions of the elites who say what you are not allowed to want

with a wave of his hand.

President Obama was supposed to be someone who unified us as a

nation; whose eloquence brought us together in harmony and


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dialogue; he was supposed to be not just smart, but wise and

capable. In all these aspects, the professor in chief has failed – and

as his failures have increased, so have his inclinations toward

anti-Constitutional authoritarianism. David Harsanyi:

“[I]t’s disturbing to witness so many people cheering and

defending the circumventing of due process. On the one hand,

some of this might be frustration liberals feel with the sluggish

state of American politics — and we see it often in Obama’s

contention that executive power (“doing something”) is necessary

because the democratic process is moving too slow for his liking. A

more concerning scenario, though, is that protecting progressive

notions of “tolerance” is beginning to supplant the idea of

protecting basic rights… When Donald Trump… advocated

banning all Muslim immigration yesterday, most of the

Republican Party rightly condemned the idea. There was no such

reaction to Obama’s no-fly list gun ban.”

Obama was also supposed to be a historic leader when it came to

reality-based foreign policy and the cause of peace. Instead, he has

proven to be a blinkered strategist undeterred by facts on the

ground.


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“Even as the president reassured Americans that he remains

committed to pursuing the strategy for the Middle East that he

outlined more than a year ago, White House officials are quietly

reexamining how to intensify the campaign against an elusive foe

that has inspired homegrown terrorism in the United States. But

the changes under consideration do not stray beyond a set of

limited options, with the president reiterating his opposition to a

large-scale ground force, which he said would only help the

Islamic State recruit new foot soldiers.”

Keep in mind, President Obama would not be the president were it

not for the fatigue of the American people for war in the Middle

East. It is his core bias toward avoiding sending any more American

soldiers to the region, at all costs. It is a testament to how much this

approach is now viewed as a failure that a majority of Americans

now say they favor sending ground troops to fight ISIS.

“For the first time in CNN/ORC polling, a majority of Americans

(53%) say the U.S. should send ground troops to Iraq or Syria to

fight ISIS. At the same time, 6-in-10 disapprove of the President’s

handling of terrorism and 68% say America’s military response to

the terrorist group thus far has not been aggressive enough.”


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There is a marked frustration in the president’s lectures of the

American people, an undercurrent that has only grown over the

course of his tenure. At first he was frustrated with politicians in

Washington not listening to him. Now he seems more frustrated

with the American people for not listening, either. But they have

taken a lesson from these lectures over the past seven years that is

now very clear, and that is fueling the Trump phenomenon – the

lesson that we were wrong about Obama, just as he is wrong about

us.


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Barack Obama's America - Created Trump