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The Post-American President Returns to Center Stage

Netflix last week announced plans for former President Barack Obama to produce a series where the Progressive movement’s biggest stars come together to promote their pet causes; in other words, a show that will be like every other television roundtable, with the exception of a few on Fox. I expect the program to be a love letter to Leftism and, more specifically, to be a vehicle for Barack Obama’s tedious and continuing defense of his vanishing presidential legacy.

Remember 2008, when Obama appeared to so many to be the agent of change, bringing hope to the ailing middle-class of America? Remember how he promised to make America a more equitable place; how we wouldn’t engage in any more “wars of choice,” or continue to be run down by an inattentive political class? Do you remember the implicit promise of his historic campaign in 2008—how his policies would revitalize the economy? Virtually every single one of Barack Obama’s campaign promises went unfulfilled or, when implemented, made the situation worse.

The most striking thing about Barack Obama’s political career was his obsession with constantly knocking the United States and the American people (specifically, the working-class) down to size. Barack Obama was America’s first “post-American president.”

Writing in 2015 about the idiocy of the Obama Administration’s executive agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, Esther Goldberg argued there were two Americas: one big, one small. Big America was “the place that made it safe for countries the world over to refrain from engaging in a dangerous nuclear arms race. The America that understood that ‘it had a vital interest in taking care of business in the Persian Gulf’ so that the flow of oil that helped build and maintain the Big America that stabilized the world order for over 60 years was not disrupted.”

According to Goldberg, however, former President Obama loved “Small America.” This was

the America that opens its doors to the Third World’s poor, offering them free health care, food stamps, welfare, housing, education, Obamaphones, all without asking that they accept American values and culture in return. And to achieve his ends, Obama [proposed] to hand the Middle East over to the tender mercies of . . . the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood. In Obama’s twisted reasoning, these forces of evil are just the thing to keep that turbulent region in line while he builds Small America.

Keep in mind that, Barack Obama believed that the United States was not “exceptional.” He also frowned upon those Americans who favored traditional marriage being the union of one man and one woman (as 61 percent of Americans still believe) or any other kind of traditional ideas about culture. Obama and his fellow Davoise mocked the majority of Americans (89 percent) who believed in God and believed that their faith held them accountable to certain dictates of behavior. The former president also loathed the 52 percent of Americans who wanted to protect the Second Amendment. Obama then raised healthcare costs for most Americans; fecklessly engaged in destabilizing and perpetuating foreign policy misadventures; and did everything in his power to deny Americans economic opportunity.

If Obama were a private-sector CEO with a record like this, he’d be in hiding, not issuing apologetics from Netflix. But, if Hillary Clinton’s inability to lose with grace is any indication, the American Left’s greatest stars are not about to apologize for their failures. In fact, they don’t recognize their failures at all. To the Left, their failed policies are actually successes, it’s just that Americans don’t recognize their success because Americans are too dumb to understand.

For its part, Netflix is making a strategic calculation. Like most international corporations today (and like former President Obama) Netflix is post-American. Netflix is concerned about maintaining high subscription levels from foreign audiences. Keep in mind that former President Obama’s approval with foreign audiences is—and always has been —higher than it is with American ones (77 percent of people polled in 10 European countries expressed having “confidence” in Barack Obama in 2016 compared to only 9 percent for then-candidate Donald Trump). Outside of the United States, Netflix’s audience has grown substantially larger than it is in the United States, meaning that its decision to give Obama a platform to issue his apologetics makes perfect business sense.

After decades of exhibiting greatness at every level around the world, the United States of the last 30 years began to falter. Part of that is because America’s leadership stopped believing in “Big America.” But Obama, in particular, viewed the idea of “Big America” as offensive. Most foreigners agreed with Obama’s plan to promote a Small America, which is why Obama is so beloved by foreigners (particularly in Europe).

In 2016, a plurality of American voters were tired of being told that hope was just a four-lettered word and they needed to abandon their greatness while accepting the breadcrumbs offered to them by an effete, cosmopolitan elite that was more interested in pandering to the proclivities of Brussels rather than in satisfying the demands of Bismarck, North Dakota. Finally, the United States has a pro-American president who isn’t particularly interested in what the world thinks or wants. He just wants us to be given the respect we deserve.

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Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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About Brandon J. Weichert

A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.href="https://twitter.com/WeTheBrandon">@WeTheBrandon.