They are keening in the Bay Area. “Oh, America, what have we done?” wrote a San Bruno reader to the San Francisco Chronicle the week after November’s election. “Many of us feel for President Obama, especially as we watch him gracefully support Donald Trump’s transition, knowing Trump’s priorities include destroying Obama’s legacy.”
About half the country did not wish to see Donald Trump elected president. To judge from the papers, though, their chief regret is not that Barack Obama governed in such a way as to help deliver the White House to Trump. No! What eats at them is that Americans voted in such a way as to unsettle President Obama’s peace of mind, or his self-esteem, or whatever it is we mean when we talk, as we increasingly do, of the president’s “legacy.”
That is how President Obama sees it, too. “If you want to give Michelle and me a good send-off, . . . if you care about our legacy, realize that everything we stand for is at stake,” he told the guests at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner in mid-September. “I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard.” Journalists have picked up this way of thinking. The week before Christmas, Coral Davenport of the New York Times wrote:
In the United States at least, this is a new way of looking at politics. Do Americans need to be told it is a dangerous one? Policy outcomes in a democratic republic are not supposed to be things you can “nail down” so firmly that democracy cannot dislodge them.
According to Google’s Ngram database, which tallies word appearances in books, the word “legacy” appeared until recently to be dying. It comes, through medieval Latin, from a word describing territory left in the hands of a Roman legatus (an imperial representative). A near-synonym for bequest, it has historically been attributed to the inheritor as much as to the bequeather. (In this sense, Obamacare and the “Iran deal” on nuclear weapons are, for better or for worse, our legacies, not Obama’s.)
To talk of “legacies” smacks of royalism and hierarchy. By the end of 1945, the word had hit rock-bottom, appearing in print only about half as frequently as it had in the 19th century. But since the war, it has had an extraordinary resurgence. Its usage has quadrupled. The word is more common than it has ever been. It might seem paradoxical that it should be the baby boom generation that presided over its revival. A generation that, starting in the 1960s, refused categorically to be bound by the political habits and customs of its ancestors now finds it natural to demand that the political arrangements it leaves its descendants be set in stone. Double standards are baked into the word itself. While the noun “legacy” has been used to place a halo of inviolability around what used to be ephemeral policy choices, the adjective “legacy” has come to signal “institutions you don’t have to respect because they were invented before the Internet.” When we talk about “legacy media,” we mean newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like this one.
The vogue for legacies is part of a larger philosophical shift. Politicians have acquired “legacies” at the same pace that personalities and events have stopped being “famous” and started being “iconic”—an adjective used 20 times as frequently today as it was at the end of World War II. We have moved from engaged admiration to passive adoration. It’s lucky we are close to the “end of history” and that the world of the future is, if not knowable, then at least modelable. Recently, Tom Farley, president of the New York Stock Exchange, unironically praised Goldman Sachs’s new chief financial officer for “his ability to take decisive action based on what the world will look like in 5 to 10 years.”
This kind of prediction looks like hubris. It is perhaps less so in the case of President Obama and his “legacy.” Part of his historical significance is easily predictable. He is America’s first black president. This means more than the answer to a 22nd-century trivia question. In the minds of many Americans, he has been given the role of redeeming black suffering and absolving white guilt. We do not know whether this mission is compatible with America as it has been understood historically, constitutionally, and emotionally, or whether a black presidency can become a normal thing, and a lot rides on the answer to whether it can. For those who wish President Obama well there is a sacramental dimension to everything he does. They talk about being “on the side of history,” which is something no human being can know.
Opinion leaders tend to treat all questions about Obama as having been answered—in the affirmative—before they are even asked. The campaign slogan “Yes we can!” played to this tendency. The decision of the Nobel committee to confer its peace prize on Obama just eight months into his presidency took it to preposterous lengths. But Obama’s role placed him in a hall of mirrors, and all Americans were confused about him inside their own heads. Americans desperately wanted to approve of Obama, and thus desperately wanted to interpret his behavior as meriting their approval. In 2014, Obama appeared on the Internet comedy show Between Two Ferns, where the schlub-humorist Zach Galifianakis asked him: “What is it like to be the last black president?” That question opened up an abyss. It was a terrifying moment. Seldom has it been mentioned since. It may have been inevitable that Obama’s presidency would turn into an era of taboo.
And this was a problem, because Obama is, in important respects that have nothing directly to do with race, an outlier to the American political tradition—the sort of leader that democratic constitutions are designed to thwart. He is less punctilious about constitutional forms than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. This was not so evident a failing in the early days of his presidency. Then he was carrying out his electoral mandate to unravel George W. Bush’s wars (for which his commander-in-chief authority largely sufficed) and acting to defuse the finance crisis (for which FDR provided, if you will, a precedent of doing the unprecedented). Later, in more normal times, his style would come to appear to a lot of Americans as autocratic and arbitrary.
His chief legislative achievements—his stimulus package and his health care reform—date from the early months of his administration. There was a malevolent kind of genius in the way the Affordable Care Act (Obama-care) used regulation to gut the employer-based model that provided the world’s best health care to 85 percent of the population in order to help about a quarter of those who had been uninsured. The most closely studied legislation of this generation, Obamacare was already unpopular when it passed, and its unpopularity has only increased with its implementation.
Obama’s antidemocratic instincts came out in many ways. He ruled by executive order, and even sought to regularize the status of millions of illegal immigrants using his “prosecutorial discretion,” a move for which his supporters claimed the Emancipation Proclamation as a precedent. He was the first president to understand the Supreme Court as a means by which the democratic parts of the constitution could be actively bypassed. No one would say that Brown v. Board of Education was one of the great achievements of the Eisenhower administration or that Roe v. Wade was a blot on Richard Nixon’s otherwise skillful handling of domestic policy. The gay marriage cases under Obama (Hollingsworth, Windsor, and Obergefell) were different. He was not merely a witness but a field marshal of the litigative strategy that culminated in the Supreme Court’s removal of America’s marriage laws from democratic scrutiny. As he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner the day after November’s elections, he had been plotting this strategy even as he campaigned as a champion of traditional marriage:
Obama’s discomfort with democracy was not limited to preferring courts and bureaucracies to votes. It was a kind of disposition. His defenders would say it blossomed under Republican intransigence, but there is no doubting the disposition. He declined to submit to the Senate for ratification the treaty (which he called a “deal”) allowing Iran a path to nuclear weapons. Or the Paris climate-change agreement made with China.
He managed, with the help of some ingenious bureaucrats and lawyers, partially to liberate the presidency from Congress’s control of the budget. His government collected tens of billions of dollars in fines (“settlements”), mostly from investment banks, redeployable by the administration—and nothing in this whole vast rap sheet of alleged white-collar crime produced a single allegation for which a major banker was sent to jail. He founded a financial watchdog agency that would be funded by the Federal Reserve, not Congress. He turned corporations subject to Justice Department antitrust scrutiny—Walmart being the glaring example—into the enforcers of administration preferences in state government. By 2015, Walmart was intimidating state lawmakers in Indiana, North Carolina, and Arkansas. There was always a lot of invisible power being wielded in the Obama administration, and the more invisible, the better: After Democrats were routed in the 2014 election, Obama claimed to have “heard” the voices of the two-thirds of people who didn’t vote.
Obama believed in elections, but in a strange way—as winner-take-all affairs. Once the victor in a presidential election was declared, there was no need to sound the people (or their representatives) until the next time round. This was a matter of principle for him: He treated the result of 2008 as if it gave him carte blanche, and there has been nothing inconsistent about his reaction to Donald Trump’s victory after November. “The people have spoken,” he told a press conference in mid-November. “Donald Trump will be the next president, the 45th president of the United States. . . . Those who didn’t vote for him have to recognize that that’s how democracy works, that’s how this system operates.”
Obama’s antidemocratic instincts in power had an extraordinary effect on the conservative part of the electorate. He turned conservatism into a democracy movement. That is why resistance to Obama, when it came—and it came early—took the form not of a Reaganite small-government uprising but of a pro-Constitution movement, the Tea Party, that in fact had strong anti-Reaganite tendencies. The whole of the Democratic party, unsurprisingly, blocked their ears to what the Tea Party was saying, but so did half the Republican party. They were thus flabbergasted when Donald Trump won the presidency at the head of the American equivalent of what, in the old days of democracy promotion, used to be called a “color revolution.”
Obama’s legacy is Trump—who ran to save the country from what Obama represented. Trump’s election means those policies that rested only on Obama’s say-so will likely die with the outgoing administration. Nor is it certain that Obamacare will be as hard to dismantle as Washington opinion would have us believe. True, federal programs—especially benefits programs—develop constituencies that fight for them. But from a Machiavellian perspective, this way of viewing things may be anachronistic and wrong. In the current polarized, one could almost say tribalized, state of our party system, gutting such programs might help a party by showing the other party’s voters that their leaders cannot defend them.
In the long term, Obama’s presidency may be seen as more a symptom of something than a cause of anything. He prospered in an age of debt and “off-balance-sheet liabilities,” and his presidency will be understood in this larger context. The habit of mind that leads us to talk about “legacy” is the same one that has caused us to accept the loading of debt on our children and grandchildren. Since 1980 we have assumed that it is possible—even ethical—to bind future generations to carry out our generation’s budgeting priorities, much as the proclaimers of “legacies” believe it is possible to bind future generations to our generation’s faddish ways of looking at history and society.
Thomas Jefferson saw it differently. In a letter to James Madison in 1789 he wrote:
Is that what is meant by “legacies”? If so, they are a component of the servile alternative to self-rule the country has lately been offered. They will merit attention in any intellectual housecleaning to come.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
