Barack Obama's Legacy Is More Secure Than You, or the GOP, Think

[babylonsister]

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Barack Obama’s Legacy Is More Secure Than You, or the GOP, Think
By Jonathan Chait

Barack Obama.Photo: Dan Winters


Barack Obama is one of a handful of presidents with transformative domestic legacies. Some of those presidents, like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, left their office to a chosen successor who carried forward their vision. Lyndon Johnson saw his popularity dissipate in response to a failed war. Abraham Lincoln was murdered, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was a pro-slavery southern Democrat who abhorred Lincoln’s vision. There is no precedent for a departing chief executive like Barack Obama. Having saved the economy from ruin, reshaped health care and environmental policy, and reformed the financial industry, he leaves office as the most popular politician in America, to be succeeded by a man who has mocked his work, not to mention the legitimacy of his citizenship, and has pledged to destroy it all.

After conservatives spent the Obama years terrified he’d sent their country spiraling into a socialist dystopia, and liberals spent it fretting he had done too little, they are mostly united in their belief that Donald Trump will erase the entire Obama project in the blink of an eye. On November 10, Charles Krauthammer gloated, “Obama’s legacy is toast; it’s gone.” Many liberals quickly arrived at the same conclusion. “What will outlast Trump?” asked John Judis in The New Republic. “We just threw everything out!” But this assumption is too shallow and too confident. It reflects, in part, the conservative fallacy that Obama mostly relied on easily reversible executive orders and the liberal fallacy that he mostly floundered in the face of Republican obstruction. The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a broad array of problems to which his opponents have no workable response. For all the horrors Trump may yet unleash, the specific changes Obama wrought may prove far more durable than either his gloating enemies or his despairing supporters believe.

Some of these changes are being overlooked or misunderstood today, just as they were when they first were enacted. The 2009 stimulus, for instance, included a tax credit for workers at the bottom of the income scale, the primary purpose of which was to get more cash into the hands of people who could spend it quickly. It succeeded at this task, but it also served a long-term social objective of making the tax code more progressive. In 2015, Obama struck a deal with the Republican Congress to make those tax cuts permanent in return for making permanent a series of supposedly temporary business tax cuts that had been routinely extended for years. Also, in 2013, the administration allowed expiring Bush-era tax cuts on incomes over $450,000 to lapse, which triggered the return of higher Clinton-era tax rates. The combined effect of lower taxes on the middle class and the poor, higher taxes on the wealthy, and Obamacare provisions reduced post-tax incomes for the highest-earning one percent by more than 5 percent and increased incomes for the lowest-earning tenth of households by an average of 27 percent. With vanishingly little attention, Obama had moved the needle against income inequality.

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Many other elements of Obama’s legacy will prove difficult or impossible to reverse permanently. The Trump administration will almost certainly refuse to enforce as intended the Dodd-Frank act, which dramatically curtailed risk in the financial system. But this is the standard approach by a Republican presidency toward regulations it dislikes but lacks the votes to overturn. Republican administrations inevitably refuse to enforce labor law, environmental regulations, workplace protections, and so on. Dodd-Frank will fall into the same category. And when a Democrat (or perhaps a moderate Republican in a chastened future party) returns to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the legacy of these reforms will be renewed without having to wait or hope for congressional approval. The actions Obama took to save the economy — fiscal stimulus, a bank restructuring, and an auto bailout — cannot be undone. And the almost completely unnoticed reforms to education unleashed by the “Race to the Top” grants tucked into the stimulus continue to drive innovation and better results in public schools.

Obama’s reactionary opponents wish to nullify his legacy not because it changed little but because it changed so much. Any large-scale reordering of power and resources in American life will inevitably face resistance, sometimes for decades. After Lincoln managed to ban slavery, southern states launched a violent terrorist counterattack, disenfranchising their African-American citizens, subjecting them to constant physical terror, and forcing them into exploitative labor arrangements almost tantamount to slavery. Conservatives never gave up their hatred for Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms, and the war against New Deal programs has never ended. (As recently as 2005, Republicans were trying to privatize Social Security.) Republicans continue to attack jewels of Lyndon Johnson’s legacy, like Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. Sweeping reforms create powerful enemies who do not disappear. As Obama warned in a 2014 speech at the LBJ Presidential Library, “History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.”

Trump may very well destroy the underpinnings of a system of government put in place more than two and a quarter centuries ago, and if he does, it will be not only Obama’s legacy that is repealed but the legacies of every president from Washington onward. But the future is not predetermined. It depends upon our actions and choices. Protecting, fulfilling, and, in some cases, restoring Obama’s legacy will require mustering the political will to rally around it. If Obama’s supporters defend the pillars of his legacy, rather than fatalistically accept their destruction, they stand a good chance of warding off the most frontal attacks. And where they fail, and Obama’s achievements are repealed, then they can set out to repeal the repeal when the opportunity presents itself.

And it will. Previous generations of Americans knew times when it seemed impossible to imagine slavery might be abolished, women given the right to vote, business subject to any government regulation. Progress tends to come in great dramatic bursts of action and then recede. Barack Obama’s presidency represented one of those great bursts. His was a vision and incarnation of an American future. His enemies long to restore a past of rigid social hierarchy, with a threadbare state that yields to the economically powerful. He, not they, represents the values of the youngest Americans and the world they will one day inhabit.

[Cha]

1. I'm so grateful for this.. Thank you, Jonathan Chait!

Barack Obama's Legacy Is More Secure Than You, or the GOP, Think

"If Obama’s supporters defend the pillars of his legacy, rather than fatalistically accept their destruction, they stand a good chance of warding off the most frontal attacks. And where they fail, and Obama’s achievements are repealed, then they can set out to repeal the repeal when the opportunity presents itself."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/obama-legacy-more-secure-than-you-think.html?mid=twitter-share-di

It's a goal! Mahalo, babylonsister~

[babylonsister]

2. I'm just sorry it's a goal we even have

to go after, again. But I'm sure they'll damage whatever Obama tried to accomplish.

[Cha]

3. I know.. it's all so surreal.. we're just muddling along

any best way we can.. any port in the storm and this one!