Liberalism in Ruins

Vicror Davis Hanson lays the smackdown and hard. 

Survey the wreckage. 

The hope-and change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from "leading from behind" to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of war against ISIS.

Wow. Excellent survey but a bit short. That is all international while Obama's focus is on domestic policies. His aim to fundamentally transform America. How has he done?

Hanson continues, there are two saving graces to his misadventures abroad. 1) Each ensuing disaster diverted attention from the prior calamity, also true of domestic scandals. 2) Unable to stop oil and gas energy exploration on private land as he has stopped it on public lands Obama can take unearned credit for gas and oil renaissance that turns out a boon for American global leverage despite his efforts to thwart it. If Obama is lucky he will be able to avoid minor confrontations while ensuring catastrophic confrontations for his successors.

Although immigration is praised by those who benefit from it directly. The vast majority of Americans know when federal law is ignored then chaos follows. The burden of granting federal exemption to millions of foreign nationals who never followed U.S. law for entry falls to the middle class taxpayer and entry level workers.

The planet did not heat up, the ice caps did not melt away, global warming morphed to climate change, this after insisting weather is not climate, so now that climate change caused everything, it caused nothing. So what was it? A late 20th century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who have done so well by it, a secular religion filling a deep psychological yearning for a secular religion held by western big shots with no effect on the lifestyles of its priests.

Ferguson is the result of identity politics, salad bowl instead of melting pot, trillions of dollars spent over last fifty years into Great Society dependencies. We are left with the movement's slogans, "Hands up, don't shoot" now added to "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," and "If I had a son, he'd look like Travon."  Ferguson shows the problems of present day liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that facts of the shooting do not matter, critical legal theory ignoring time-honored role of disinterested grand jury, tolerance of illegality as acceptable protest against a system, and media's hyping while understanding the violence is remote from their own neighborhoods, schools and businesses.

Hanson avers the truth is Obama has always trafficked in racial divisiveness. From his candid memoir admissions, dutiful discipleship of racist Reverand Wright, to "typical white person," the clingers speech, "punish your enemies, Skip Gates, Travon Martin, and Michael Brown cases. Hanson describes his contortions as brilliant, the current canard that losing 6% of the black vote is proof of diversity while wining 40% of the white vote is sign of new racism.

Obamacare was, in the end, little more than a clumsy effort to take over the health-care system by redistributing resources from the supposedly too-well-off to the more noble less-well-off, with billions of dollars siphoned off to expand government bureaucracies and enrich crony capitalists  

The point of the program was not to provide coverage to millions of uninsured Americans — that could have been done far more cheaply through existing programs — but to create a vast new federal bureaucracy to redistribute health-care resources. 

My own healthcare is socialized and I have benefitted from it tremendously. It saved my life repeatedly. I am not exaggerating. I still value it. But that is socialized at the district level, not the federal level. And it is not even all citizens within a district, rather, all people working for an organization within the district. Important because closer, it is far more responsive. Example: our prescription drug provider was sold to a new outfit. They treated us as if we all landed from Mars, and they were all just born yesterday. Cost savings by the new company reduced customer service dramatically. I called and I wrote our head office. My voice was added to other voices and within the next year the provider was changed. That will not be possible under a federal system.

Hansen believes most importantly Obama has failed to deliver on his most extravagant promises to end crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and corruption. Instead, Obama will be remembered as presiding over the most corrupt administration in the last half century.

How conservative.

Historians will aggregate the scandals of IRS, VA, GSA, Secret Service, erosion of constitutional fidelity, serial falsehoods about Benghazi, amnesty, and Obamacare, harassment of journalists, Wall Street shakedown in 2008 and 2012, flood of lobbyists in and out of Obama's administration. And then there is Eric Holder spouting inflammatory racist rhetoric, politicizing Justice Department, selectively enforcing the law and being held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents.

The damage, as summarized by military historian, classics professor, scholar of ancient warfare, Victor Davis Hanson, is that six years after the summer of hope and change nobody in the Democratic party is bragging about American foreign policy, nor pushing for cap-and-trade, nor praising Obamacare, nor the way amnesty is handled, nor pointing to a cleaner more transparent bureaucracy. What started out hopefully ends with a president who habitually misleads, leaves an array of scandals and a discredited media, and policies that do not work, and by all historic models never could have worked.

Proof: Observe Democrats regroup for 2016. They will ignore or deny most of what Obama has done.

This is summary. Victor Hanson says all this and more so much more eloquently on National Review Online.