"America's most irresponsible, incompetent and ideologically obsessed presidency not only left most of these political and economic crises on its successor's plate, it often masked significant problems that received virtually no attention, so prominent were the crises it caused....
"The result of this malign neglect is that post-Bush America is one disaster waiting to happen after another, all of which—when they do—are laid at the feet of the current president, regardless of whether addressing them is consistent with his policy agenda. For if he does not find a way to do so, they will likely overwhelm it....
"Faced with countless challenges merely to restore some sensible equilibrium to US policy regarding say, long-term deficits or financial regulation, Obama faces the conundrum of a system that, as currently constructed, gives the minority party no strategic stake in sensible governance. [...]
"We grew up with a set of assumptions. If you were born in the United States between, say, 1945 and 1965, you were raised in a basically liberal political culture when liberalism was the default position....
"When Reagan came, you thought: aberration....
"Thirty years later–actually, about 27 years later, or three or so years ago – I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations?...
"Think of this: We’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one. [...]
I think 'right-wing populist' is a cruel oxymoron. Get the loonies all stirred up by promising you'll give the fucking morons what they want and hope they are loud enough to suck in enough people to get you elected and then back to business as usual and try to get all the money for your real bosses. Fuck 'em and forget 'em.
"I say that a perhaps paradoxical comfort can be taken in these facts. If we insist on thinking of Obama–and in our personality-driven political culture, it’s so hard not to do this–as liberalism’s redeemer, he will always disappoint, as redeemers usually do. But if we think of him as one piece on a vexing historical chess board in a match that will take years to play out, we can exhale, and see the true shape of the tasks ahead of us."
Shorter: There was so much damage caused to this country in the Reagan-Bush years that we're screwed for the foreseeable future.
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