How does Obama get away with it?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at PJ Media,

...The ideological success of Obama-ism, to the degree that it exists, rests largely in using sympathetic media, universities, foundations, the entertainment industry, and billionaire progressive activists — in the other words, the small but highly wealthy, influential and powerful coastal populations — to convince Americans that it is hip and cool to support agendas that they otherwise suspect, and to scare them that the alternative is a racist, sexist, homophobic America run by wealthy, cruel white male Christians.

The goal of mass migration, open borders, and an expansion of the welfare state was to create new voters, who would be both dependent on those who administered and promised greater government largess and yet enraged at those privileged enough to pay for it. The message was embedded within the non-ending administration disparagement ("spread the wealth," "you didn’t build that," "no time to profit," "punish our enemies," "nation of cowards," "my people") and presidential incitement in the Ferguson and Travyon Martin cases.

Otherwise, there is no Democratic agenda per se that is workable. Progressivism has become as nihilistic as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the cry-bully movement on campuses — all liberal children that devoured their parents while winning zero support among the populace.

...Obama-ism accepts that intrusive government, fueled by equality-of-result ideology and pop multiculturalism, has few answers to today’s existential crises. Will we really stop terrorism by banning semi-automatic weapons (as well as box cutters, pipe bombs, and remote-driven toys?), on the theory that taking away guns from those who follow existing gun laws will make us safer from thugs and terrorists who don’t?

Since the government could do nothing about enforcing the ban on the transference (illegal without re-registration) from friend to friend of weapons used by terrorists, or the illegal modification of weapons, in the San Bernardino shootings, can it at least achieve psychological penance by outlawing some other models used by law-abiding citizens who might comply?

Perhaps the liberal solution to ending the threat of jihadism is to further expand government indoctrination about the dangers of Islamophobia?

Or let in more refugees from the war-torn Middle East to expose them to the benefits of pluralistic democracy and multicultural tolerance and thus to mitigate radical Islam by hearts-and-minds outreach?

Or eliminate coal burning to stop global-warming-induced Middle East terrorism?

Or do we need still more presidential speeches damning the Crusades and high-horse Christianity, while apologizing for slavery, racism, genocide, climate change, and inequality — to convince radical Islam that their furor has a “rationale” and “legitimate” basis and thus we understand why we are their enemy?

Or change more vocabulary to mask reality, to build upon terrorism as workplace violence, jihad as a personal odyssey and the Muslim Brotherhood as largely secular? On the theory that gravity did not exist until the post-Newtonian world found a name for it, so too Islamic terrorism will perish if we banish its nomenclature. Is that why President Obama called the San Bernardino violence the result of generic “extremist ideologies"?

At last Obama has no more elections to worry about and can begin “to fundamentally transform” America in a way his electoral worries restrained him on four prior occasions. His dilemma is that he has lost all legislative and popular support for his agenda, and now relies either on executive orders or public petulance to demonize, slander, or otherwise reduce his critics and opponents to caricature. The president gets away with it due to the media stereotype that a) Obama was a constitutional law “professor” (once upon a time part-time lecturers claiming that they were full professors was a pedantic campus sin) who would correct past Bush legal overreach, and b) Obama was once a healer and so would never do what he now precisely does.

So we are left with liberal nihilism for the next 13 months. A self-described constitutional law professor will seek to unravel the Constitution in ever more ingenious ways, and as a "hope and change" healer he will tear the country apart through as many fault lines that he can leverage as possible.

What is the alternative to such nihilism? A new liberal agenda that will win over the American people, jumpstart the economy, pay down the debt and restore solvency, keep us secure here and abroad, and unite the people?

It does not exist, because it could not exist.

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