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| Former president Obama at a recent appearance (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune via ChicagoTribune.com) |
Me. I can't say I've found myself feeling nostalgic for the Obama era much at all over the past couple years, and that's in spite of the fact that I had thoroughly expected to miss him. In February 2017, I wrote:
I've known for a while I would miss Obama, despite the many, many problems with his presidency. I knew it as soon as it was clear our candidates in 2016 were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton--on the one hand a spectacularly insincere party hack whose idea of a fun time was blowing other countries to smithereens, on the other some sort of roaring, incoherent fascist gorilla that only understood brute force and that "If it won't salute, stomp it" (to borrow Hunter S. Thompson's useful description of the Hammerhead Ethic that I discussed in my last post). Both were worse than Obama in the way they were likely to govern, and neither could quite manage to come off as a real human being, as he could. Whenever she tried, Clinton came off like the worst actor in some made-for-TV movie from twenty years ago, and Trump never pretended to be anything but a living bulldozer, bent only on destroying whatever was in his way, with no qualms about breaking bones or drawing blood. With the American Nightmare that is the Trump administration now going at full force, I can only imagine I'll find myself missing Obama more each day.So what happened? Did I change my mind about Donald Trump? No, I still basically agree with the description I gave in that excerpt. Did my opinion of Obama worsen? Not really—in the very blog post that paragraph comes from I was strongly critical of him, and those criticisms still stand, but I wouldn't say I've become more critical than I was at the time. What I failed to take into account was a sort of political phenomenon that, at the time, I'd become numb to, but whose absence is particularly striking now that said phenomenon has become impossible. Some might call it complacency, but I'm not sure even that quite covers it. In short it's that liberals, by and large, seemed completely uninterested in acknowledging the failures and outrages of the Obama administration as they happened in real time.
Let's start with immigration policy. There has been widespread, and righteous, outrage—particularly from liberals—about the sheer cruelty of Donald Trump's treatment of migrants at the border, and needless deportations of undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to those around them. But where was that outrage under Obama? There are differences between the immigration policies of the two administrations, certainly, but there was plenty to be angry about before Trump even declared his candidacy for president. In 2014, Obama introduced a policy called "felons, not families," that supposedly emphasized deporting the former group over the latter. But according to the Marshall Project, over 80% of those deported under this policy had no convictions for violent or potentially violent crimes—and over 40% had no criminal convictions at all. Many of the people deported had children with US citizenship.
Despite the attempts of Obama and his supporters to claim that his administration focused on deporting dangerous criminals, there's no shortage of tales of unjust deportation during the Obama years. Take, for instance, Carmen Ortega, a 62-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer's who was ordered deported for possession of a controlled substance. Ultimately, the Obama administration deported around three million people. Over the course of his first few years in office, Trump actually deported fewer people than Obama during the same period of his presidency; the difference remains even if we only consider non-criminal immigrants deported.
And inhumane treatment of detainees didn't start with Trump, either. Human Rights Watch condemned the "[i]ndefinite detention of asylum-seeking mothers and their children" under Obama, noting that it took a "severe psychological toll." To take just one example from its report:
After more than eight months in detention, Melida (her real name), who is afraid to go back to Guatemala after gang members murdered her sister-in-law, has been diagnosed in detention with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), adjustment disorder with anxiety, and a major depressive episode. Her 4-year-old daughter, Estrella, has spent nearly 20 percent of her life behind bars and during that time was hospitalized for acute bronchitis and also suffered from acute pharyngitis, ear aches, fevers, diarrhea, and vomiting.So where was the outrage from all the liberals who are now (again, rightfully) horrified at Trump's grotesque treatment of immigrants? Make whatever excuses for Obama himself you want, his administration's record was plainly atrocious in this respect—but I didn't hear many liberals raising their voices about it at the time.
Or how about how Trump's disgusting subservience to Saudi Arabia? That's drawn criticism from liberals, to be certain. But how much better was Obama on that front? Before Trump was there to enable the kingdom's merciless, murderous assault on Yemen, Obama was doing the same. By the final months of Obama's presidency, coalition airstrikes had killed thousands of Yemeni civilians, the Saudis stood accused of violating international law, and the Obama administration had approved over $100 billion in arm sales to Saudi Arabia as well as providing them with crucial military assistance. But I don't remember hearing too many liberals speaking out about it.
Liberals are right, too, to be disturbed by Trump's authoritarian tendencies—but what about Obama's? When it came to light that the dystopian NSA surveillance programs begun under George W. Bush had been not just preserved, but expanded under Obama, there was some outrage from progressives, to be sure. But many liberals seemed more inclined to defend Obama than to condemn him, despite the obvious threat to any notion of privacy or civil liberties the programs posed (and continue to pose under Trump). A 2013 Pew poll found that Democrats had completely reversed their opposition to NSA surveillance under George W. Bush and now supported it by a nearly two-to-one margin.
Trump's liberal critics take him to task for his contempt toward the idea of a free press, but where were they when Obama was busy launching his own assault on the first amendment? James Risen, then a reporter for the New York Times, called Obama "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation," and not without good reason. Risen himself was threatened with jail time because he refused to violate a basic tenet of journalism and reveal one of his sources to the government. The Obama administration prosecuted more leakers of classified information under the Espionage Act than every previous president combined. The Department of Justice under Eric Holder spied on Associated Press reporters, seizing phone records for their work and personal phone lines as well as the general phone lines for several AP bureaus in what the news agency termed a "serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news." It also named Fox News reporter James Rosen as "at the very least, either...an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" in an espionage case because he reported on a classified government report leaked to him by a State Department security adviser. The Obama administration had a clear agenda: to intimidate potential whistleblowers and other leakers out of revealing classified information, and in the process to go after the journalists who relied on and protected them. The administration faced sharp criticism from mainstream reporters and news agencies for this behavior, but it mattered little to Obama's liberal admirers.
Liberals are aghast at Trump's anti-Muslim travel ban and his Islamophobia, but here, too, they reveal their selective blindness. Obama radically escalated the use of drone strikes, using unmanned aerial vehicles to repeatedly drop bombs on the Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen—countries the US was not at war with—killing hundreds of civilians. His administration made extensive use of "signature strikes," drone strikes that targeted people who were guilty of engaging "suspicious" behavior—even when the government didn't know the identities of the people it was killing, or whether they posed a threat. In a 2012 article about Obama's "kill list," the New York Times highlighted the uncertainty involved in this strategy:
[S]ome State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist "signature" were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees "three guys doing jumping jacks," the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.To take just one example of the "collateral damage" of Obama's drone program: one strike was launched against a wedding procession in Yemen, killing up to 12 civilians according to Human Rights Watch. One year later, the US government had still given no public acknowledgment of the strike or its victims, but had quietly paid over $1 million in compensation. In the name of ostensibly keeping Americans safe from terrorism, the Obama administration showed that it did not believe that people from what his successor would deem "shithole countries" were entitled a presumption of innocence, a fair trial, or any sort of due process; to simply be suspected of one day intending to hurt Americans was sufficient for a summary execution. Where was the liberal outrage then?
In fact, sometimes the Obama administration believed even Americans weren't entitled to due process before they were executed. One of the people Obama placed on the "kill list" was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had never been charged with a terrorism-related crime. He was killed by a drone strike in September 2011 along with three other people, including Samir Khan, another American citizen. When al-Awlaki's 16-year-old American-born son was killed in a separate drone strike, Obama campaign senior advisor Robert Gibbs said simply that he "should have [had] a far more responsible father[.]"
I assume you've detected the pattern here. But I'll quickly hit on a couple last points for good measure. The same liberals infuriated by Trump's obscene tax giveaway to the wealthy were often less vocal about the generous bank bailouts Obama presided over, or his administration's almost complete failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for the financial crisis they helped create. Horrified by Trump's environmental policies? You should be, but you should have also been horrified when Obama was pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that would have let major corporations sue countries over labor and environmental regulations that "unfairly" interfered with their ability to make a profit; when a draft of the environmental chapter of the deal was leaked, after years of negotiations, the executive director of the Sierra Club said that "[i]f the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse than George W. Bush’s."
The point of all this isn't that Obama was a terrible president. Compared to his predecessors (and truly terrible successor), I would say he was pretty middling in most respects. The point isn't even that you should blame him for all of the bad things done under his administration—like I said, you can make whatever excuses for him you want, and I do think that there is a sort of bureaucratic "deep state" that resists democratic accountability and control under every president. But regardless of who you blame for all the things I've mentioned, they're still bad things that should have provoked massive outrage from liberal-minded people. However much (or little) you hold Obama personally responsible for it, people needlessly suffered because of the policies and actions of his administration, and that was something that deserved attention.
But instead of being outraged about the abuses I mentioned, many liberals were more interested in heaping gratuitous praise on Obama, who they continued to hold in very high esteem. In September 2016, towards the very end his presidency, Gallup measured Obama's approval rating among liberal Democrats at 93%. Media outlets like BuzzFeed doted over Obama as if he were a celebrity rather than a president who presided over millions of deportations and hundreds of drone strikes. In early 2016, a Rasmussen Reports poll (which, granted, should be taken with a grain of salt given Rasmussen's obvious bias) found that 60% of Democrats would have given Obama a third term if they could have. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that Obama enjoyed (and still enjoys) a sort of cult of personality among many liberals. If liberals could have adored Obama personally while still vocally protesting when his administration put immigrant children in cages, then all of this hero-worship wouldn't have been so bad; but that wasn't the case. While there were, of course, left-wing and liberal critics of Obama throughout his presidency, they were generally drowned out by the liberal adulation of him on the one hand and the absolutely unhinged right-wing critics (who were much greater in number and got far more attention than their left-wing counterparts) on the other.
That is why I have no nostalgia for the Obama years. While Donald Trump is decidedly worse than Obama in just about every way imaginable, at least people are angry about it. At least we're having a discussion about our cruel immigration system, and about climate change, and about economic inequality, in a way that we weren't under Obama. And at least we now have some kind of authentically left-wing movement that's visible on a national level, represented by newly elected Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as well as by Bernie Sanders now that he's achieved a newfound prominence. The years between Obama's reelection and the 2016 campaign were frankly the most depressing years, politically speaking, that I can remember. The years since have been at various points horrifying, infuriating, and utterly sickening, but they have always at least felt like some kind of a battle is going on, and that maybe the right side even has a shot at winning. That certainly isn't to say things are better under Trump, but it's hard to feel much nostalgia for a time before the only really encouraging political developments of recent years had even begun.
The purpose of this blog post is certainly not to shame anyone who's become an outspoken critic of Trump after being complacent under Obama. If you're speaking out (and ideally doing more) against the many, many inhumane and destructive acts of the Trump administration, that's great—but if you're prepared to return to complacency when immigrants are mistreated, the climate is endangered and the working class is shafted as long as a Democrat is back in the White House, then you're part of the problem. To return to something like the Obama years is not just inadequate; it's arguably the most tragic way the Trump era could end. It would mean that the one good thing that has come out of the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump—the complete disruption of a broken status quo, and the popular mobilization of liberals and leftists—would be totally squandered. Whether the next president is Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren or even Bernie Sanders, there will undoubtedly be failures, missteps, wrong and even immoral decisions made under their administration. Every critic of Donald Trump should be ready to subject his successor to the protest and criticism from the left that Obama saw so little of.
