Jonathan Last:
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the creation of Trumpism. The p.c. insanity on college campuses. Globalization and the hollowing out of the working class. ISIS in Paris and San Bernardino. The broadcast media that donated $1.898 billion in free media to the cause. Let’s stipulate all of that and much else besides.
But for a moment, consider the contributions of Barack Obama. Because as divisive as Donald Trump is, all he has done is raise the bar set by the most divisive president since Reconstruction.
As an empirical matter, it’s maybe more precise to say that Obama is the most divisive president since Eisenhower, because that’s when Gallup began measuring such things: By the pollster’s reckoning, the partisan gap in Obama’s 2012 approval rating is a yawning, historic 76 points. Remember how divisive the Bush years were? The Obama years have been worse. And it’s not just a partisan divide. In 2014, aWashington Post/ABC News poll asked respondents if they viewed Obama as more of a divider or uniter. It wasn’t even close among independ-ents, 59 percent of whom said he’s been a divider.
Where would people get such an idea? Possibly from how Obama treated his opposition. A few days after taking office in 2009, Obama invited a bipartisan group from Congress to the White House to discuss his stimulus proposal. Senator Jon Kyl — not exactly a firebrand — prodded Obama to consider a different mix of spending and tax cuts. Obama’s two-word response: “I won.” In August of that year at a presidential speech, Obama told a room of adoring supporters, “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to just get out of the way.” In February 2010, Obama convened a bipartisan summit on his health care reform package. At one point, Republicans requested that Obama do a little less filibustering and be a little more respectful of their equal time. His response: “I’m the president.”
Obama’s dismissiveness wasn’t just in public, either. In June 2010, Sen. Kyl recounted a one-on-one meeting where the president flatly told him that he would not secure America’s southern border — that is, enforce the law — unless Congress passed his preferred immigration amnesty plan.
In fairness to Obama, he was — is— the president. The executive and legislative branches are supposed to have an adversarial relationship more often than not. And politics is political, after all. But Obama has also gone out of his way to criticize the judicial branch. In January 2010 he used his State of the Union address to harangue the Supreme Court, while the justices were seated a few feet away.
Still, words are nothing compared with Obama’s actions: He rammed Obamacare through without a single Republican vote. And when he couldn’t find even a bare majority of votes for his immigration reform or gun control bills, he simply proceeded via executive decree.
When no one on the left was asking for it, Obama pursued the narrowest-possible reading of religious liberty, resulting in Supreme Court showdowns with a Lutheran school, which wanted to be free to hire its own ministers without government interference, and with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who didn’t want to be forced to pay for abortifacients. There was no reason for Obama to pursue these policies except as an exercise in premeditated divisiveness. On the question of religious liberty, Obama has sought to undo a national consensus and foment conflict. In doing so, he set in motion a slow-rolling constitutional and cultural collision that is likely to end badly. The only reason this chaos isn’t apparent to the general public is because Lutherans and nuns don’t riot.
Then there’s race relations. Obama was elected in large part because of his promise to heal racial wounds. It hasn’t worked out that way. In 2001, Gallup found that 70 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites thought race relations in America were somewhat or very good. By the time Obama was inaugurated those numbers had flipped, with 61 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites (having just absolved themselves by voting for Obama, one suspects) rating race relations as good. During Obama’s tenure, both numbers have been in freefall. Today, only 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites think relations between the races are good.
What happened? First came Obama’s decision not to prosecute two members of the New Black Panthers who had been charged with voter intimidation for their actions outside a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day in 2008. (In case you think the New Black Panthers are just a bunch of scamps, in 2014 two other members of the group were arrested for plotting to kill the chief of police in Ferguson, Mo.)
