It works for him — his approval rating rises as the nation seeks an anchor point.
Barack Obama pledged to be a transformative president.
In that, he’s succeeded.
Obama has been the most divisive president in modern history. But he’s done more than that: He’s destroyed all the institutions we hold in common, hoping that, by doing so, we will grant him more power.
America relies on our social capital: the notion that we can trust each other because we share things in common. Tocqueville wrote of America’s stunning reservoirs of social capital: “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations,” he wrote. Those associations are “not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types — religious, moral, serious, futile, very general, very limited, immensely large, and very minute.”
Forming such associations requires us to share values, generally. If you wish to destroy social capital, however, you begin by destroying the credibility of institutions and associations. That is precisely what Obama has done.
In June 2009, 48 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in organized religion. Today, that number is 41 percent. Trust in the military has dropped from 82 percent to 73 percent; trust in Congress has dipped from 17 to 9 percent; under Obama, trust in the police dropped to its lowest point since 1993 before rebounding slightly in June 2016; trust in the criminal-justice system collapsed from 28 to 23 percent.
Even trust in the presidency has dropped, from 51 to 36 percent.
Yet Obama personally floats blithely along in the polls — even though 68 percent of Americans say we’re on the “wrong track.” According to Gallup, Obama’s back up to a 51 percent approval rating; according to ABC News, he’s at 56 percent.
Why?
Because Obama has steadily eroded trust in American institutions. He has undermined churches by labeling biblical churches nasty and political for mirroring biblical views of marriage, and by attempting to use the federal government to impose leftist social policies from abortion to same-sex marriage to transgenderism. He has undermined the military by slashing it consistently, demeaning it on issues ranging from Guantanamo Bay to sexual assault, ignoring the advice of top military brass, and utilizing the armed forces for social experimentation. He has destroyed faith in Congress as a body, claiming that its intransigence gives him the ability to act alone. For years he has castigated the police as systemically racist, beginning with saying that the police department of Cambridge, Mass., acted “stupidly” against Henry Louis Gates and continuing on to his daily diatribes against “bias” in national policing today. He repeats the mantra that the criminal-justice system is responsible for “mass incarceration” of black youths.
As our institutions lose our trust, we look for something to unify us. That’s where Obama comes in.
That is what Obama seeks: an atomic blast against established associations and institutions and then replacement of those associations and institutions by a New Great Lawgiver.
Take, for example, his activity regarding policing in the last two weeks. Two weeks ago, he acknowledged that he knew virtually nothing about the shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota — but then he went on to suggest that they were not “isolated incidents” but rather symptoms of a broader policing ill. When, hours later, an anti-white, anti-cop racist black man shot to death five officers in Dallas, he took advantage of their funeral memorial to slander cops across the country. The following week, he met with race-riot fan Deray McKesson at the White House and asked the Louisiana police to treat him more gently; after the meeting, he stated, “I think it is fair to say we will see more tension between police and communities this month, next month, next year, for quite some time.”
All of this drives unease with police officers. It is clearly designed to do so — it’s a political virtue-signaling exercise that places Obama on the side of the angels and the police who actually protect young black people on the side of Satan.
So it’s only natural that trust in the police declines — but that Obama comes out smelling like a rose.
Why does Obama engage in the destruction of trust in fundamental American institutions? Part of it surely is ego; Obama sees himself as a healer, wandering the earth, gathering together the broken shards of human conflict and remolding them into something better. But there’s something else, too: If you believe that American institutions reflect American racism and exploitation, those institutions must be razed. If they are not razed, then human beings remain what they are: greedy, insecure, tied together by God and guns and xenophobia. But if institutions — which, after all, reflect the systems that built them — are torn asunder, then we can build new institutions, institutions that will change the hearts of men.
That is what Obama seeks: an atomic blast against established associations and institutions and then replacement of those associations and institutions by a New Great Lawgiver.
And Obama has someone in mind.
It’s not mere coincidence that Obama invoked himself at the Dallas police memorial some 45 times. He believes that he can, as his wife once put it, “fix our souls.” It’s worth recalling the context of that much-derided 2008 statement from Michelle Obama:
We are still a nation that is too divided. . . . We are still a nation that is still too cynical. . . . We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.
If you believe, as the Obamas clearly do, that our souls are broken, then the soul-makers — the institutions that help define us — must be destroyed so that we can be remade. And so it is for Obama, who hopes to strip away the ties that bind us, and replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh in the process.
All he asks is your love.
Too many Americans stand willing to love an abusive president: a man who has parlayed his power into destruction, all the while standing and grinning as Americans, seeking an anchor point, gather around him like sand accreting around the nearest stone. On the stone of himself, he seeks to build a new America — one that looks nothing like the old America. One that is transformed, healed, made different. And if it takes a little misery and suffering to make that happen . . . well, that is the stuff of which sacrifices are made.