Welcome to Barack Obama’s America
In the wake of an Oval Office speech which went over so terribly that it has Politico openly wondering whether the entire form of presidential address is dead, yesterday’s announcement from Donald Trump that he believes the U.S. must block all Muslims from entering the country, “until our countries’ representatives can figure out what’s going on”, finally resolves the question about President Obama’s greatest political legacy.
It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump. It is an America that is more tribalist, where people feel more racially and religiously divided; more politically correct, where people feel less free to speak their minds; and it is an America where trust in the nation’s elites, whose skills are credentialed but unproven, are at historic lows.
These are the wages of progressivism at the end of the day. Big government inevitably leads to government incompetence. That incompetence leads to growing and now dominant distrust – both in government’s basic competence, and in the values of the people who still insist upon it. Our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics. And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides, offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites.
Consider the news that 965,000 migrants have sought asylum in Germany over the past year. Are jihadists using these refugee flows? Walter Russell Mead:
“Today’s Western elites, in the U.S. as much as in Europe, have never been so self-confident. Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post historical groupthink. And while the meritocratic priesthood isn’t wrong about everything—and the knuckle-draggers aren’t right about everything—there are a few big issues on which the priests are dead wrong and the knuckle-draggers know it.”
(Read more from “Welcome to Barack Obama’s America” HERE)
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