Those who have jobs aren’t immune. Health-insurance costs have spiraled out of control since Obamacare’s inception, with forty-nine states seeing premium hikes in 2016. There are also at least a thousand ongoing investigations into potential ISIS members in the United States. And last but not least, the national debt rose from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office in January 2009 to more than $19 trillion as of February 2016.
It is expected to reach $20 trillion by the end of his presidency.
• Arguing several property rights cases rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court, under which Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency showed severe contempt for such rights through coercion—thwarting constitutionally protected private property rights.
The fact that these policies represent only a fraction of the progressive Obama priorities foisted on the public under the banner of “fairness, justice, and equality” indicates that the Obama administration has overloaded our system under one big Cloward-Piven crusade for privileges masquerading as “rights.”
In 2008, Obama made an astute observation: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”
It’s clear that Obama fancied himself as the Democratic Reagan, the man who would lead the nation to the promised land of postconstitutional progressivism. Eight years later, there is no argument. Obama has achieved this fundamental transformation. He has changed the trajectory of the country in the way he prophesied. From unconstitutional executive orders to the abrogation of private property rights and his neglect of constitutional checks and balances, Obama has made a mockery of America’s system in the service of his progressive agenda.
WILSON’S GHOST: FIGHTING GLOBAL SOCIAL INJUSTICE
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Describing visions of foreign policy is a difficult business. On the left in particular, there is a divergent array of views, from interventionist Wilsonian internationalists to isolationist Code Pink “antimilitarists.” The former believe that it is America’s duty to spread democracy worldwide, arguing that all people share universal liberal principles and should coexist under international coalitions and norms. The antimilitarists echo the views of those during the Vietnam era who saw America’s cause as a fundamentally negative one around the world and who wanted to end the “military-industrial complex” altogether.
During his first inaugural address, Obama unveiled an essential line with respect to how he would deal with America’s adversaries: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Only those on one side of that handshake wound up keeping their end of the bargain. America bent over backward repeatedly for its enemies. The Iran nuclear deal, for example, is the living embodiment of the core elements of progressive foreign policy, the culmination of Obama’s most ambitious (and dangerous) project. The result is America’s aiding, abetting, and enabling of Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. Under a deal purportedly crafted to partially destroy and halt Iran’s nuclear program (recall Obama’s desire for a nuclear-free world), Obama not only agreed to allow Iran to maintain key parts of its nuclear infrastructure and protect it against attack but also released upward of $100 billion certain to be used for the mullahs’ nefarious jihadist designs.
The Obama administration’s easing of sanctions also opened up commerce with a regime that had been on life support. In the aftermath of the deal, Iran continued launching ballistic missiles, almost certainly violating the deal’s terms. This sort of appeasement and, worse than appeasement, this active support of a terrorist regime is the kind of stance that could only make sense to a progressive who sees the world as he or she wishes it to be. Empowering your enemy does not make them a friend, it only makes them a stronger enemy. At the same time, caving to Iran only worked to undermine one of America’s staunchest traditional allies, Israel, which Iran has repeatedly vowed to destroy.
While Iran was the worst and most egregious exercise in progressive naivety and willful blindness, there were many other Obama administration disasters born of the same ideology.
Another crucial element of the Obama doctrine was the long-held progressive aim of self-determination for oppressed peoples. Ironically, like George W. Bush, Obama believed in spreading democracy to the Middle East. However, his belief in this was based not on an embrace of a pluralistic system grounded in individual liberty but rather on majoritarianism. And if the majority party was the Muslim Brotherhood, terrorists who formed the tip of the jihadist spear, so be it. Secular authoritarians would have to either embrace reforms or step aside.
As the so-called Arab Spring unfolded, Obama sought to get on the right side of history, over and above the advice of his national security team. He encouraged Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime U.S. partner and strategic ally of Israel, to implement reforms toward “fully representative democracy.” Left unsaid was the fact that the only organized political force beyond Mubarak’s military regime was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood.
As protests swelled in Tahrir Square and the situation grew dangerous, the White House changed its tune and asked Mubarak to step down. The Muslim Brotherhood filled the power vacuum, led by notorious Islamic supremacist Mohamed Morsi. The Obama administration supported Morsi’s radical regime by continuing to provide it with monetary aid and heavy weaponry.
And then there was Libya, whose failures became real to all Americans on the night of September 11, 2012, when U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and CIA operatives Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were murdered by jihadist terrorists. Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, like Mubarak, had repressed jihadist forces, jailing thousands of Islamist militants and largely disarming in response to America’s invasion of Iraq. He had, in effect, become an ally. But the Obama administration again sought the overthrow of an authoritarian leader in favor of “democracy.” U.S. and NATO air forces were responsible for aiding the “rebels” who overthrew the Qaddafi regime, but what the United States really helped accomplish was to turn Libya over to the worst of the jihadist forces. The United States, ousted from the country, was greeted in 2014 with images of jihadists diving into the swimming pool of its former embassy in Tripoli. There are now approximately sixty-five hundred ISIS fighters in the failed state.
Obama accomplished this feat while also subverting the Constitution. He never received congressional approval for military action, and then he violated the War Powers Resolution by claiming that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the law. After all, the law can mean different things at different times to progressives; it depends on what they need to use it for. Also worth remembering is that as the situation on the ground in Libya deteriorated, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, no doubt on behalf of the administration, held the line on keeping Ambassador Stevens in the country. The valuing of political correctness and progressive ideology even over life and limb proved to be fatal.
Volumes can and will be written on Obama’s hostility toward Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. While his policies have helped empower those enemies posing an existential threat to the Jewish homeland, he has spent much of his presidency espousing moral equivalence between the Arabs of Palestine and the Israelis, in hopes of a peace deal that cannot be achieved when one side seeks the other’s destruction.
Under Clinton’s leadership at the State Department, it was revealed that the Obama administration went so far as to seek to literally undermine Israel’s governmental position by strengthening the Palestinian Arabs. U.S. intelligence agencies spied on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to capture his communications. Following Clinton’s tenure, Secretary of State John Kerry went so far as to threaten Israel over the so-called boy
cott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, warning that Israel could be subject to a crippling broad-based boycott. In effect, he legitimized the actions of its enemies. The United States eventually backed away from language in anti-BDS legislation that it deemed too controversial for “blurring the lines between Israel and the West Bank.”
The Obama administration’s stance toward Israel has been reflective of broadly held progressive views on the Jewish nation akin to those held in Arab studies departments across the United States, including the department led by Obama’s friend Khalidi. Many progressives again believe that the “Zionist” entity is an illegitimate, repressive, apartheid state. It is treated as a colonialist Western occupier and oppressor. Obama’s policies, while not overtly reflecting this mind-set, represent the maximum level of hostility that a sitting U.S. president can apply toward Israel. As a result, Israel is now in a perilous position, with threats from Arabs of Palestine, Hezbollah, ISIS, and the Iranian regime itself growing daily.
In Russia, Obama’s “reset” and promises of “flexibility” have been met with the ascendancy of President Vladimir Putin as a world leader. What has been the effect of Obama’s open hand to Putin’s clenched fist? Russia walked into Ukraine and took it over. Obama, like so many other progressives who have underestimated dictators in the past, chose to ignore Putin’s belief that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Obama has invited a new one.
China’s saber-rattling in the South China Sea, including the continued expansion of man-made islands and its crippling and costly cyber-attacks on U.S. businesses, represents a further show of strength by America’s adversaries in the face of Obama’s “open hand” policy.
In Cuba, putting aside the fact that the Castros maintain a repressive Communist regime, Obama overturned decades of U.S. policy to open up diplomatic relations with the country, along with commercial ties that culminated in Obama and Raúl Castro sharing a hot dog at a Cuban baseball game. The end result will be a much-needed lifeline for Cuba in the form of foreign capital. This influx will not only sustain but also strengthen the Communist government, propping up an anti-American regime less than a hundred miles from our shores, a regime from which new threats can easily grow.
The sum of Obama’s foreign policy has been the empowering of America’s worst enemies, while its friends and America itself grow increasingly unsafe. Ideology has firmly trumped the national interest. Like those of progressives before him, Obama’s actions reflect a man who sees the world as the utopian version he wishes it to be rather than what it actually is.
Obama set out to “change” and “transform” America, and he has done exactly that. He has pushed the country as close as it could stomach to socialized medicine. He has made a mockery of the Constitution. He has engaged in unprecedented diplomatic dealings with all manner of enemies, foreign and domestic. He has doubled the national debt to $20 million while growing the size and scope of the state and reducing individual liberties.
Some on the left have expressed disappointment with Obama, saying that he was, for example, a “counterfeit” progressive. I don’t buy it. The nation looks radically different from how it looked at the start of his administration. And remember, waves all look different; some crash to the shore with ferocity, while others slowly roll in. But one wave always gives way to another. Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ—they all paved the way for Obama, each pushing as far as their times would allow.
I have no doubt that the seeds planted during the last eight years will bloom in the years ahead, no matter who takes over the Oval Office next.
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PROFILE IN FEAR:
FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS, OBAMA’S FATHER FIGURE
Frank Marshall Davis sat in the back of a patrol car and feared for his safety. Who knew what might happen to a young African-American in Kansas in the 1920s? The police car had pulled alongside him as he was walking down the street in his neighborhood, minding his own business.
“Git your black ass in the car with us,” the chief of police had instructed. He told Davis that a white woman on a nearby street had complained of a prowler.
Frank was frightened, but he complied. Such was the life of a black man in America, he believed. He flashed back to a time when he was five years old. Two other kids had placed a noose around his neck, choking him. Freed with the assistance of a passing stranger, Frank had made it home and told his family what had happened. They, in turn, had complained to his school, which, in turn, had completely ignored them.
Now the police chief pulled the car up in front of an unfamiliar house. A white woman, the one who’d registered the prowler complaint, was brought forward to identify Frank.
It wasn’t him, she told the policeman.
“You sure?” the police chief asked.
She said she was.
Frank was pretty sure the police chief was disappointed. It’s not every day they have a chance to whip a big black nigger, he thought.
“Where do you live?” the chief asked him. Then he turned to his buddies. “I didn’t know any damn niggers lived in this part of town, did you?”
“There’s a darky family livin’ down here someplace,” one of the others replied.
The conversation only fueled Frank’s fear and enmity—and anger. I’d give twenty years off my life to bind these three cops together, throw them motionless on the ground in front of me, and for a whole hour piss in their faces.
It was easy to understand why he was filled with all-consuming hate. For the cops. For America. For anyone or anything that represented power and inequality. And eventually for the free-enterprise system that allowed such people to exist.
Davis had spent much of his life fixated on identity and race. After growing up in racially hostile Kansas in the early 1900s, he had eventually departed for the more inviting pastures of the leftist intellectual bastion of Chicago.
Prolific and creative, he moved in progressive circles in the 1930s and ’40s, writing columns for various Communist-line publications and castigating America for its racism, colonialism, and imperialism. “The United States was the only slaveholding nation in the New World,” he wrote, “that completely dehumanized Africans by considering them as chattel, placing them in the same category of horses, cattle, and furniture.”
He mocked the notion of “the American way” as a slogan peddled by “flag-waving fascists and lukewarm liberals.” He was angry, bitter, and seeking to change the world.
In 1948, at the urging of Stalin sympathizer Paul Robeson, Davis left Chicago for Honolulu, seeking a more inviting home for his interracial marriage. The legal barriers against interracial marriage in most American states only furthered his lifelong view of the United States as irreparably racist.
A literal card-carrying member of the Community Party USA, Davis was deemed a big enough threat that the FBI created a file on him that ran to six hundred pages. His Communist agitation culminated with testimony in front of the U.S. Senate in 1956 in which he pled the Fifth. From that point on, however, he lived out his days largely undisturbed in Hawaii, writing poetry and taking provocative photographs of nude women. He also took pictures of Hawaii’s shorelines, which drew the interest of the FBI and others who suspected he was planning to send the photos to Soviet leaders should Hawaii ever need to be targeted.
Among his friends on the island was another Kansas transplant by the name of Stanley Dunham. The two friends would often play games like Scrabble and drink together. Mr. Dunham had a grandson who, as it happened, shared many things in common with Davis. His name was Barack Obama.
Young Obama also spent much of his adolescence in a profound identity crisis. The boy living in liberal Hawaii was suddenly conscious of the fact that he was at the intersection of very different worlds: black and white, African and American, foreign and near. His lack of identity, combined with the void created by the absence of his late father, accentuated the standard teenage ang
st of a sixteen-year-old.
Later in life, Obama described the context of his internal struggle during a library talk shortly after his book Dreams from My Father came out. “I end up coming into adolescence at a time when the tensions between the races even in a place like Hawaii are becoming more pronounced,” Obama told the audience, “and sort of the identity politics that is so pronounced today was already starting to come to the fore.” He went on:
I’m a very angry young man at the time . . . partly because my father is absent. Partly because I’m trying to struggle, “What does it mean exactly to be a black man in America?” Partly because I’m sufficiently isolated in Hawaii without a large African-American community, without father figures around that might guide me and steer my anger. What I end up relying upon are the images and stereotypes that are coming through the media. And I’m having to patch together and piece together exactly what it means for me to be both African and an American.
It was in this frame of mind that Obama absorbed the lessons of his grandfather’s drinking buddy, Frank Davis. After one instance in which Obama claims he felt particularly alienated about race, he sought out Davis for help and had “a discussion with him about the kind of frustrations I am having and he sort of schools me that I should get used to these frustrations.”
This was one of many conversations the two would have. It was Davis who helped Obama sort out his feelings about race and who gave heed to his fears, hopes, and ambitions. Davis later explained that “black people have a reason to hate.”
Davis remained a critical character at every turn of Obama’s life journey. According to Davis biographer Paul Kengor, Obama memorialized his legacy in his first book: