By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, December 01, 2016
The mix of politics and culture is far too complex to be
predictable. Even the best-laid political plans can lead to unintended
consequences, both good and bad — what we sometimes call irony, nemesis, or
karma.
Take the election of 2008, which ushered Barack Obama and
the Democrats into absolute control of the presidency, House, and Senate, also
generating popular goodwill over Obama’s landmark candidacy.
Instead of ensuring a heralded generation of Democratic
rule, Obama alienated both friends and foes almost immediately. He rammed
through the unworkable Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. He
prevaricated about Obamacare’s costs and savings. Huge budget deficits
followed. Racial polarization ensued. Apologies abroad on behalf of America
proved a national turnoff.
By the final pushback of 2016, the Obama administration
had proven to be a rare gift to the Republican party. The GOP now controls the
presidency, Congress, governorships, and state legislatures to a degree not
seen since the 1920s. “Hope and change” ebullition in 2008 brought the
Republicans salvation — and the Democrats countless disasters.
The Republican establishment hated Donald Trump. So did
the conservative media. His unorthodox positions on trade, immigration, and
entitlements alienated many. His vulgarity turned off even more. Pundits warned
that he had brought civil war and ruin to the Republican party.
But instead of ruin, Trump delivered to the Republicans
their most astounding political edge in nearly a century. The candidate who was
most despised by the party unified it in a way no other nominee could have.
Obama proved Israel’s best friend — even though that was
never his intention. By simultaneously alienating Israel and the Sunni
moderates in Jordan and Egypt, and by warming up to the Muslim Brotherhood,
appeasing Iran, and issuing empty red lines to the Assad regime in Syria, Obama
infuriated but also united the entire so-called moderate Middle East.
The result was that Arab nations suddenly no longer saw
Israel as an existential threat. Instead, it was seen as similarly shunned by
the U.S. — and as the only military power capable of standing up to the
soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy in Iran that hates Sunni Arabs and Israelis alike.
Today, Israel is in the historic position of being courted
by its former enemies, as foreign fuel importers line up to buy its huge, newly
discovered deposits of natural gas. As the Arab Spring and the Islamic State
destroyed neighboring nations, Israel’s democracy and free market appeared as
an even stronger beacon in the storm.
Almost every major initiative that Obama pushed has
largely failed. Obamacare is a mess. He nearly doubled the national debt in
eight years. Economic growth is at its slowest in decades. The reset with
Russia, the Asian pivot, abruptly leaving Iraq, discounting the Islamic State,
red lines in Syria, the Iran deal — all proved foreign-policy disasters.
Yet Obama has been quiet about one of the greatest
economic revolutions in American history, one that has kept the U.S. economy
afloat: a radical transformation from crippling energy dependency to veritable
fossil-fuel independence. The United States has become the world’s greatest
combined producer of coal, natural gas, and oil. It is poised to be an energy
exporter to much of the world.
The revolution in fracking and horizontal drilling has
brought in much-needed federal revenue, increased jobs, weakened Russia and our
OPEC rivals, and given trillions of dollars in fuel savings to American
consumers.
Yet Obama opposed the energy revolution at every step. He
radically curtailed the leasing of federal lands for new drilling, stopped the
Keystone XL pipeline, and subsidized inefficient and often crony-capitalist
wind and solar projects. Nonetheless, Obama’s eventual failure to stop new drilling
ended up his one success.
Hillary Clinton, in her presidential bid, did everything
by the playbook — and therefore her campaign went catastrophically wrong. Her
campaign raised more than $1 billion. She ran far more ads than did Trump. She
won over the sycophantic press. She got all the celebrity endorsements. She
united the Democratic party.
Logically, Clinton should have won. The media worked hand
in glove with her campaign. Her ground game and voter registration drives made
Trump’s look pathetic.
Yet all that money, press, and orthodoxy only confirmed
suspicions that Clinton was a slick but wooden candidate. She became so
scripted that even her Twitter feed was composed by a committee.
The more she followed her boring narrative, the more she
made the amateur Trump seem authentic and energized in comparison. Doing
everything right ended up for Hillary as doing everything wrong — and ensured
the greatest upset in American political history.
The ancient Greeks taught us that arrogance brings
payback, that nothing is sure in a fickle universe, that none of us can be
judged successful and happy until we die, and that moderation and humility
alone protect us from own darker sides.
In 2016, what could never have happened usually did.
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