Obamaism Is Dead

 Barack Obama rose to prominence and the presidency on the back of a vision of a post-partisan, post-racial America with his 2004 Convention speech. That idea is dead, and I think he'd agree. Two things drove this home for me.

Christian Pulisic is probably the most talented soccer player this country has produced. The other night he had two goals before halftime and to celebrate one, he did the "Trump Dance" where it looks like Trump is jerking off two giraffes. When asked about it, he said, "I thought it was funny." The "Trump is funny" concept is simply a place I can't imagine arriving at, yet millions of Americans think he's a gas.

Secondly, it's pretty clear the psychological toll that Trump's Made For TV administration is going to take on people. The farrago of outrage is incessant and debilitating. As my wife noted, Trump has picked a series of sexual predators for his Cabinet, including Attorney General and Defense. 

This is not a partisan difference over even something as profound as the Iraq war. That was, in my opinion, both immoral and a catastrophic error, but it was policy. Trump represents a sort of post-policy, anti-politics of the aggrieved and the ill-informed. The populism of the moment is very likely to get a lot of people killed, because we have built a world on a foundation of expertise and he is working to dismantle that. 

This is a clash over values.

Yes, the "Faculty Lounge Politics" is bad. I'm soaking it and it's just annoying. But that's all it is is annoying. However, while many of the efforts to promote belonging and hearing more voices are poorly thought out and poorly executed, they represent a set of decent values. Trump stands for a rejection of all that. His America is going to be even crueler than the last time, and it will happen because millions of Americans rejected the basic premise that character is destiny. 

Hell, they rejected the idea of policy based voting. They aren't voting for his policies, they are voting because they just didn't like the cost of stuff. Nothing he is planning to do will help that, but if you reject the words of every single economist, that's an easy prejudice to indulge in.