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Posted on 08/09/2025 6:25:05 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Barack Obama’s presidency didn’t just strain America—it shattered its social fabric, fueling the political divide that made today’s bitter polarization inevitable.
Someday, when today’s young Americans look back in anger at what their country has become—and believe me, they will be angry—they will have their pick of culprits to blame for the sad state of affairs. If there is any justice in the universe, however, they will focus their resentment and frustration on one man: Barack Obama. Although the United States (and the West more generally) had been drifting toward collapse for decades, Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the nation were, in retrospect, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Now, to be clear, I’m not referring here to something as small and meaningless as policy, foreign or domestic. As Presidents Trump and Biden amply demonstrated, policy can be changed and then changed back again, over and over and over. To be sure, the effects of these changes may be deleterious, and they may create substantively different outcomes than would have occurred otherwise. For the most part, however, the effects of policy changes are limited and, if corrected, temporary. Obama, for example, may have thrown the entire Middle East into flux and threatened the very future of the planet with his policy of appeasing the Mullahs of Iran, but Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, between them, undid most of that damage and returned the region to its pre-Obama status quo.
And nor am I referring to Obama’s inarguable and inarguably troubling role in the scheme to undermine Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (and, eventually, his presidency) by painting him as an agent of Russian influence. Russia-gate is ugly and treacherous, and a significant number of players—perhaps including Obama—should be held to account for what they did and how they manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus to serve partisan political ends. Some of them—perhaps including Obama—deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. This “scandal” is far more serious and far more perfidious than any other in American history—save, perhaps, the scandal of saddling the American people with an incoherent and incompetent president for a full four years, while others, still to be named, ran the country surreptitiously.
Nevertheless, Obama’s true offense is even more damning still.
As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so. A handful of lesser players may pay some minimal price for their involvement, but none of the big players, who made the big decisions and committed serious crimes, will ever do so. The nation today is simply too divided, too thoroughly bifurcated along partisan and ideological lines for serious punishment, much less widespread acknowledgement of guilt, ever to be a realistic outcome. Regardless of what documents, investigations, or testimony may conclusively demonstrate, roughly half of the country will refuse to believe it, including many elected representatives. Even if their guilt could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama nor anyone else of significance, will ever pay a significant price for their actions. Today, everything is political, and political lines cannot be crossed, no matter how vital to the country’s future crossing those lines might be.
And in a very real sense, Barack Obama is responsible for this.
The evolution of the Total State—the state that no longer acknowledges anything as nonpolitical—by and large dates from the Enlightenment and its fostering of “liberalism.” From that point on, matters that had once been handled by families and communities slowly but surely became the purview of governments and, eventually, centralized states.
The inimitable Russell Kirk famously noted that “All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss.” Much of that “ruin” can be attributed to the concentration of power in the hands of the centralized state and the expansion of that state’s jurisdiction to every aspect of people’s lives. There is no standard definition for the onset of “modern history,” although the Enlightenment serves as a reasonable approximate start date, given its ideas, ideologies, and revolutionary moral schemes. Those ideas, ideologies, and schemes radically accelerated the destruction of community and made the rise of the Total State virtually inevitable.
In Europe, the Total State grew steadily throughout the 19th century, in coordination with the nation-state and as an outgrowth of the consolidation of leftist ideologies. World War I, however, marked the line that separated the old from the new and signaled the inescapability of the Total States (and the slaughter that would accompany the descent from sovereign democracy to sovereign dictatorship).
In the United States, by contrast, the slide into the Total State largely happened in stages—four of them. The first of these was the advent of the Progressive Era. The Progressive movement was, more or less, the politicization of Protestant pietism. The Progressives—especially their intellectual godfathers, Richard Ely and his protégé Woodrow Wilson—were advocates of what is known as the Social Gospel, a religious movement spawned by the Second Great Awakening, which posited that the state can and should be harnessed to fix the problems of society and to make man’s existence more “Christlike.” Progressivism built on this foundation and largely succeeded in making the American state more religion-like, while also making American Protestantism more state-like. The damage done to the constitutional republic during the Progressive Era is both incalculable and still felt today.
The second stage in the growth of the American Total State was the New Deal. Hoover and then FDR expanded the size and the scope of the state dramatically, giving it almost unlimited power to impact the everyday lives of its citizens-turned-subjects. Those aspects of pre-modern American communities that weren’t destroyed by the Progressive reforms were finally done in by the New Deal. By the time World War II ended, the centralized American state stood supreme, both at home and abroad, and little could challenge its power.
The third stage of the American Total State began with the consolidation of power by the cultural Left during the 1960s. The New Democrats and their anti-war, anti-establishment agendas took what remained of the cultural remnants and pulverized them, making everything in man’s life subject to politics. “The personal is political,” the cultural Left insisted, and then, it did its damnedest to ensure that was the case.
Finally, in 2008, with the advent of the “Hope and Change” era, Americans were given implicit permission to hate one another for their differing “values” and to see one another exclusively as friends or enemies in accordance with those values. Rather than approach his election as the enormous racial accomplishment it was, the essential redemption of the nation’s long and sordid racial history, Obama chose to scold those unlike him and to turn them into the sociological “other.” He told his supporters to “fight” their political opponents, to “go low” when they “go high,” and to “punch back twice as hard” when confronted by opponents who resisted their proclamations of moral superiority. He and his administration demanded that supporters turn family gatherings into policy debates/arguments. He mocked his adversaries mercilessly and encouraged his “team” to laugh at them and see them as “lesser than.” In short, Obama took the political and cultural degeneration of the previous two centuries and made the acknowledgement and application of that “ruin” socially acceptable, if not socially mandatory.
As I said above, Obama arrived in the Oval Office and purposefully added as many straws to the already overburdened camel’s back as it took to break it.
Many political observers today think that Donald Trump is the most aggressive and uncompromising politicizer of American life who has ever existed. Whatever else he is, though, Trump is, first and foremost, the reaction to Obama’s action. Trump the politician did not spring, fully formed like Athena, from his father’s forehead. He was created over time, just like the rest of the American Total State.
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“Manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus” is quite the statement. If two men in suites with FBI - DOJ - CIA badges knocked on your door, would you feel comfortable opening the door? Randi Weaver says not a good move.
Barry always was, always will be a fraud.
bump
It was the instant that the words “fundamentally transform” came from Obama’s mouth that I became a prepper.
Brooklyn Saint Mickell explains how how this can be so in a YouTube video series.
The problem with declaring a “worst president EVER” is that rats consider it a challenge to worsen the previous record holder’s record.
O’Bama is an empty suit who considers himself to be the smartest person in the room. Hot air, a nothing burger, a wish sandwich. I’m sure there any number of substantial people able to effectivly run the country, but the DNC can’t seem to step past the corrupted gaggle.
“It was the instant that the words “fundamentally transform” came from Obama’s mouth that I became a prepper.”
For me it was George H.W. Bush’s NWO speech... it was all downhill after that. Trump has helped restore some, but it has been an uphill battle with the Marxist spawn.
My only hope now is Trump has planted some seeds that will bear fruit down the road, long after he’s out of the picture.
“Barack Obama’s presidency didn’t just strain America—it shattered its social fabric, fueling the political divide that made today’s bitter polarization inevitable.”
When he said “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” during his campaign the crowd cheered but no one asked “What do you mean by that?” That didn’t work out too good for us or the US.
“...none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so...”
They attempted to assassinate Trump twice, now it’s Trump’s turn. I predict you won’t be seeing those evil filthy scumbag democrats in public for long.
p
Good article. Obama was indeed was an apotheosis of the “total state” phenomenon. Having lived in communist countries and studied them, to me his actions were textbook marxist political agitation and social engineering, with a post-modern, 21st century hipster face.
The entire “BLM” and “Defund the Police” movement was a classic example. It started at the top, with Obama’s DOJ, because such movements must first of all have protection and support at the top. BLM founders visited the White House over 50 times. These were clearly planning sessions. These were Obama’s street muscle - his brownshirts or his red guards.
It encompassed both specific constitutional / governance aims, such as getting 3000+ independent police forces under the control of his DOJ, as well as general political aims - ratcheting-up racial tension and creating fear and overwhelming political correctness.
The purposeful opening of borders, and using the globalist networks of NGOs to organize the mass illegal migrant invasion of the USA under Biden was a final act after having created those levers of power over the previous 8-12 years.
Lenin, Hitler, Mao Tse Dong were voracious students of history and philosophy. They lived and breathed politics and history their entire lives.
this was NOT Obama. The choom-gang, lazy, homosexual Obama himself was NOT smart enough to do these things. He was clearly imposed on America.
The question I am still asking - exactly WHO and WHAT controlled him?
The fits that that thing threw after meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu were epic.
A complete moron realizing that it couldn’t pull the wool over a freaking GENIUS.
Hahaaaa…
Supposition posing as knowledge.
Just is acomin.
“Obama” has a fake name, fake parentage, fake life history, and fake US citizenship. It will be fun-fun when the truth is exposed and he gets arrested for his crimes.
An important info point. During Obama’s presidency the Democratic Party shifted from being by European terms a centrist party to a left wing party.
I predict you won’t be seeing those evil filthy scumbag democrats in public for long.
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I think you’re right. It’s going to be way past due.
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