Posted: 09 Nov 2016 12:56 AM PST
Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His
victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an
inevitable arc that bent their way.
The
tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any
progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America.
We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim
women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New
York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national
future.
The past was gone. We were falling into the gorgeous wonderful future of dot
com instant deliveries and outsourced everything. We would become more
tolerant and guilty. The future was Amazon and Disney. It was hot and cold
running social justice. The Bill of Rights was done. Ending the First and
Second Amendments was just a clever campaign away. Narratives on news sites
drove everything.
Presidents were elected by Saturday Night Live skits. John Oliver, John
Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee were our journalists. Safe spaces
were everywhere and you better watch your microaggressions, buddy. No more
coal would be mined. No more anything would be made. The end of men was here.
The end of the dead white men of the literary canon. The end of white people.
The end of binary gender and marriage. The end of reason. The end of art. The
end of 2 + 2 equaling 4. This was Common Core time. It was time to pardon an
endless line of drug dealers. To kill cops and praise criminals. To be forced
to buy worthless health insurance for wealth redistribution to those who
voted their way to wealth.
This was Obama's America. And there was no going back. We were rushing
through endless goal posts of social transformation. The military fell. Then
the police. Now it looks as quaint as anything from the 50s, the 70s or the
80s. A brief moment of foolishness that already appears odd and awkward. And
then one day nostalgic. It wasn't the future. It's already the past. It's
history.
Scalia died. Hillary Clinton was bound to win. And she would define the
Supreme Court. Downticket races would give her a friendly Senate. And then
perhaps the House.
But there is no right side of history. There is only the side we choose.
The Obama era was permanent. It was history. Now it is history.
Its shocking ascendancy has been paired with an equally shocking descent. The
Obama era is done. It's gone. It's over. It was wiped from the pages of
history in one night that left Congress and the White House in Republican
hands.
It would have been bad enough if Jeb Bush had succeeded Obama. That would
have been inconvenient, but not a repudiation. Instead Obama's legacy was
dashed to pieces. His frantic efforts to campaign for Hillary did no good.
The public did not vocally reject him. What they did was in its own way even
worse. They brushed past him. They sidelined him. They gave him passable
approval ratings while dismissing his biggest accomplishments. They forgot
him. They made it clear that he did not matter.
And that is in its own way far more brutal and wounding. They didn't just
destroy the Obama era. Instead they dismissed it as if it never existed.
Obama didn't make history after all. He wasn't a teleprompter demi-god
standing athwart of history. He was Carter and Ford. He was there to be
forgotten. He didn't change the world. He wasn't the messiah. He was merely
mortal. Just another politician who will sag and age. Who will, in the end,
be photographed like Bill Clinton, lonely and lost in a world that has passed
him by.
The Obama era ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a national
consensus that maybe he didn't really matter so much after all. And those to
whom he mattered the most were his enemies determined to undo everything he
did.
Obama once thought that he belonged to the ages. Now he belongs in the
rubbish bin.
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