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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Yeah, unless Cap has a friggin' Oracular Head or Crystal Ball telling them what the future holds...
edited 9th Feb '17 6:09:01 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised![]()
Even if healthcare doesn't get shredded, it takes an extraordinary amount of optimism not to expect the Trump era to obliterate a large chunk of Obama's positive legacy. We don't know what the future holds even if it is set in stone (and I tend to think it is because that's the worldview most compatible with our contemporary understanding of physics), but I find it extraordinarily unlikely that Trump will fail to dismantle Obama's positive legacy in its entirety; he's been vested with more power than pretty much any President in the past 50 years by virtue of his party's total control of government.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:13:19 PM by CaptainCapsase
My own reckoning is that it will take a miracle to salvage Obama at this point. Leftist intellectuals have been pointing to democracy being in decline for years, and now that Trump's been elected, their centrist and center-right counterparts have been looking back and realizing that the warning signs have been here for a long while, and are cursing themselves for failing to see what should have been obvious.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:16:55 PM by CaptainCapsase
I think there's a possibility that Obama will be remembered as Great in contrast to Trump- the standard narrative might end up being 'Obama set the country down the right path, but then Trump came along and ruined it, and that's why everything went to shit'.
Which would be oversimplified and in some ways misleading, but that's nothing new as far as standard historical narratives go.
That's assuming people don't come to the (correct in my opinion) conclusion that it should have been blatantly obvious to policymakers that liberal democracy was at the verge of a crisis well before Trump descended from the golden escalator, especially considering leftists (among them Bernie Sanders) were screaming bloody murder about an impending descent into oligarchy. But that's hubris for you.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:25:04 PM by CaptainCapsase
It's not just hindsight though; a lot of people (mostly those left of center left) were trying to warn policymakers about this before it was too late. Unfortunately, as was the case with Cassandra, nobody cared to take those warnings seriously until the crisis was in progress.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:28:04 PM by CaptainCapsase
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You say that, and yet large scale trends in history don't work like that. Trump isn't an isolated phenomena, he's part of something happening around the world, and it wouldn't have ended if Clinton had won. Perhaps she would've been able to defuse it, at least in the United States, but she'd face even more of an uphill battle than Obama in doing so, and that's assuming she actually genuinely recognized the threat rather than dismissing it.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:35:21 PM by CaptainCapsase
Twas probably too late by the time it got to President Obama.
President Obama got hit with the full force of generations worth of reactionary effort. There are none equal to that task. It takes many...
However, he held off well, now, and his time will have lasting effects. He certainly proved that a liberal platform could win—provided one gets people out to vote. Just by existing he proved the USA's majority opinion on matters of culture, at least by anecdotal evidence. The LGBT persons who saw such expansion of their rights aren't likely to go quietly back to the days when they had to meet secretly in night clubs in constant fear of police harassment and Aids was called GRID. An entire generation grew up with him as President, and the effects of that are unpredictable, but Gen Y hate Trump beyond all measure. (If only we voted more). His appointees to the federal judgeships will be there long after his departure.
He showed that Bush and Trump aren't the sole faces of the USA.
TL:DR—President Obama's policies. in terms of laws on books and attitudes on the federal level, might be gone, but he has viable legacies in terms of a culture, the change in the overton window, civil service, and simply being a civil and intelligent contrast to Trump. In that I mean, a change form President Bush to Trump might not have highlighted what we lost quite so severely...(The scientists lining up to run for office might instead be boarding planes to Germany).
edited 9th Feb '17 6:35:08 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives![]()
Yeah, I'm really not convinced by that. I'm not convinced said wave would've had the momentum to last another four years after a defeat on the largest stage in the world. And I'm super not convinced large scale trend work like how you're presenting them either- all the evidence said that Trump winning was the less likely outcome. Like, he had 1-in-4 odds of winning.
I'd say that Obama has the potential to be remembered as a great president, but it all depends on two things:
- How much of his legacy does Trump manage to erase.
- How much do future politicians use him as a reference point.
Also, for all the worries about oligarchy, remember the Republican base is dying out, the millenial generation is trending far to the left compared to older ones and the Trump administration might just be the wake up call for it to understand the importance of voting and that both sides are not the same. (A possible point in favor of that interpretation
).
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That's a rather fatalistic view of the world, I must say. So what you're saying is that we're living in the best of all timelines? I disagree with that notion. I don't even think it was too late to stop Trumpism in 2016, though that genuinely would have required a mass movement with the backing of the party.
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Trump winning was unlikely, but Trumpism was something that policymakers really should have seen coming.
If America doesn't become a illiberal democracy, that'll be more a testament to Trump's incompetence than anything else. There's no indication he respects democratic norms, and no indication the GOP is willing to defy him to any real extent. He's in a position of power that most Presidents could only dream of.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:44:22 PM by CaptainCapsase
Also, the negative fallout from Brexit and Trump might make other countries think twice about populism. Support for EU exit plummeted since Leave won in the UK, and the electoral situation in France and Germany is looking up. Even in Canada, the Conservative "primary" seems to favor relative moderates (both in format, they use rank ballots, and in the fact that the Trumpesque canditates have strong but limited support bases).
Maybe Trump was the shock the world needed?
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
France's election are the test of whether 2017 is remembered as the year the EU collapsed; there are many, many more Trump imitators out there. The EU isn't going to survive the decade, if you want my opinion; the only way it makes it is if the southern European countries are forced at gunpoint to remain in the EU by France and Germany, and that's not significantly better than the alternative, since that puts us right back into 19th century geopolitics.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:49:15 PM by CaptainCapsase

I'm not convinced that the second coming of Jesus Christ himself could have "defused" the brewing shitstorm of the time.