It was a short break, not a rebuilding.
Hence, what's happening today is not going to be a one time event. It's been escalating since 2001, and at best, stagnating under Obama.
The root cause, or primary driver of the situation today is the exit of the Republican Party and the conservative media/political sphere from bipartisan politics and facts.
These two forces are the ones which rotate the flywheel that powers everything else.
Act in a bipartisan manner? Vote against the party lines ? - get primaried.
Cover something that doesn’t match the prevailing narrative ? Is not of utility to the party ? Be ignored.
Have a narrative that sells and can be used, but is absolutely bonkers or inaccurate? Doesnt matter, it’s going to be used.
This force constantly drove the base further and further right, removed any links to facts or reason at scale.
This in turn supports partisanship at all cost politics, and support for policies that have little to do with complex reality but everything to do with preferred narratives.
Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst republicans from a recent Fox Poll.
I agree it was long term project, it took decades of propaganda and hard work on conservative side. But like, Obama was not part of conservative project nor step toward Project 2025.
Instead of trying to evaluate the argument on its merits:
- There is a long-term systemic problem, POTUS is a symptom.
- Democracy has been at risk for 20 years in the US, starting with the destruction of Habeas Corpus after 9/11, under thunderous applause.
- The opposition has been weak at best, and didn't show its value by attempting to reverse the worse of the trends when they had the chance. So nobody trusted them anymore. They didn't represent something to rally for, only the opposite of what you didn't want.
You attempt to put me in a tribe and judge me on that.
Except... I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes, I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events. It's not an unexpected surprise.
Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
That is irrelevant. Regardless of where you live, your argument amounted to working really hard here to blame republican policies, radicalization and behavior on Obama. You tied together things that were in fact not alike at all.
>I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events
And insisting that Obama is in any way relevant to that long chain is either bad faith or just disinterest in what happened.
> Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.
But it is you who want to make it into that, except that "bad guys" are any random American politician you can think of. It does actually matter who did what.
Not only I don't conflate the two, but you make the whole Obama note the center of this discussion, while it was there for the purpose of illustration.
This is how tribe politics work and how the US fell to the best populists instead of trying to tackle society's problems.
I have no interest in discussing with you anymore, since you don't seem interested in talking about ideas, only find an enemy to your tribes.
Could he have done more? Sure. But he spent a lot of political capital getting the ACA done. Then he followed traditional political decorum when the GOP pushed him around that in hindsight was a mistake. If all the rules both written and unwritten are going to be thrown out, the obviously it's best for the person who throws them out.
This. There’s a deep vacuum of leadership in the Democratic Party. Obama is a widely trusted figure on the progressive side and has nothing to lose by saying plainly what everyone can see. Only Gavin Newsom has demonstrated a willingness to do this. At the Federal level, though, the leadership is MIA. I mean Obama owes no one anything now; but I do wish he would just say what needs to be said.