Excerpts from a good comparison of what Obama left us, and the Trump challenge…
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455051/trump-obama-compare-results
From January 2009 to January 2016 …
Barack Obama implemented the most progressive agenda since Franklin Roosevelt, …. Obama was … determined to move his party with him and “fundamentally transform” the country. His own skepticism about America’s past, its current values, and its future trajectories resonated on the world stage. …
The Democratic party was reborn in Obama’s leftist image. ….Among
Obama’s signature foreign policies were “lead from behind” in Libya; quietude during the Iranian anti-theocratic protests; strategic patience with North Korea; the multifaceted and often clandestine efforts to swing the Iran deal; the Russian “reset”; realignment away from Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies; and rapprochement with Cuba, Venezuela, and the South American Communist and socialist states. ..All reflected his own larger visions of
European Union and American progressivism as models for transnational world governance. A global council of Davos-like elites would best adjudicate climate-change crises, the excesses of capitalism, dangerous nationalism, the parochial and outdated restrictions on migration and immigration, and the lingering but still pernicious legacies of Western imperialism and colonialism.
“Crises” such as the spreading
ISIS caliphate, a nuclear North Korea with intercontinental missiles, an expanding Iranian-Shite-Hezbollah–Middle East crescent, a new greater East Asia prosperity sphere led by China that builds bases in the Spratly Islands, and a failed reset with Russia would more or less work themselves out on their own, given that all these dangers ultimately had their geneses in Western pathologies.
Be better Western leaders, Obama intoned, and the Other would react accordingly and thus positively.
Politicization-
Identity politics, progressive policing of ideas on campus, an end to campus free expression that only empowered hate speech, the politicization and expansion of the deep state, along with open borders and new laxities governing citizenship and voting would usher in new, kinder and gentler race, ethnicity, and gender agendas. A single EPA director, one high IRS commissioner, or a federal-appeals-court justice would now exercise far more political power than any congressional committee. The “law” — in the sense of customary non-surveillance of American citizens, disinterested attorneys general, or a nonpartisan bureaucracy — was redefined as whatever would best serve social justice and equality.
On the economic side, more regulations, larger government, more entitlements, higher taxes, zero interest rates, and doubling the national debt were designed
to redistribute income and “spread the wealth.” …. (engender) a robust, globalized high-tech and coastal informational economy, shepherded by a new breed of progressive activist zillionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Mark Zuckerberg. These new fortunes were cleaner, bigger, and put to better use than those of the old oil, rail, steel, mining, manufacturing, real-estate, farming, gaming, hotel, and construction wealth of the past. Big green and liberal money was now a good progressive thing.
Sermons such as “you didn’t build that,” “now is not the time [for companies] to profit,” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money”….
…By January 2017, American culture and the economy at home and foreign policy abroad reflected Obama’s values:
pathways to abortion on demand, radical gun control, tribalism, and democratic socialism. …Then came the unforeseen nomination, election, and governance of Donald J. Trump. …Trump was determined to ram through a conservative agenda not seen since the Reagan revolution of 1981–89 — and to govern as conservatively as Obama had progressively. …(in) his first eleven months (tax reform and reduction, conservative judges and cabinet heads, stepped-up energy production, deregulation, a new realist and deterrent foreign policy, immigration recalibration) will either grow the economy in ways that the prior administration could not, make American stronger and the world safer in a way the prior administration could not, and redirect American culture and values back in a more traditional direction — or it will not. ….Antidote One, of unapologetic progressivism under Obama
, did not lead to an economically robust and growing America, one safer abroad in a more secure world, and more cohesive, united, and stable at home …, America as just another nation among many, and a cultural revolution aimed at accentuating rather than assimilating race, class, and gender identities. We shall see if the subsequent Antidote Two, of unregretful conservatism under Trump, will provide what conservatism has always promised: greater prosperity, security, and unity.
