What, then, is the Obama legacy? An insidious politicization of almost everything. Obamism has become a holistic concept of “fundamentally transforming America” that, like all ideologies, cannot be assessed solely by concrete laws and policies, but rather through a change in the mentality and spirit of Americans and those who govern them. Obama early on emphasized in messianic fashion that his hope-and-change agenda was not to be adjudicated by traditional metrics, but involved a cosmic transformation of hearts and minds: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
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What energizes this effort at holistic transformation is real anger at the perceived unfairness of the current democratic capitalist state—what Michelle Obama once referred to when she characterized America as “just downright mean.” Most of us unfortunately are unaware of these tensions in our otherwise “uninvolved, uninformed” lives. Indeed, in the words of former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, we are mere adolescents “just like your teenage kids” who “aren’t acting in a way that they should act.” The government defines “should”; the people do not.
The antidote has been for Obama administration technocrats to reexamine the way Americans go to the doctor, borrow money, pay their taxes, secure their borders, protect their country, explore space, and contemplate the weather. In each case, it turns out that someone wealthier and more privileged than the majority has done something wrong. The remedy is to provide more power and money to an all-knowing government elite who alone has the wisdom and morality to make things fairer by making them more equal.
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