I think something that we will be reckoning with more, both in the coming months and however many years in the future it takes to start getting better perspective on our present moment, is the role of President Obama's presidency in establishing the groundwork for making Donald Trump's election possible. I'm not talking about blaming Obama for what's happened; but I keep coming back to the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis, and to the Great Recession and its aftermath. The administration acted to keep the crisis from spiraling into another Great Depression; but time and again, the overall effort was intended to restore us to the status quo that existed before the meltdown. Banks are too still to big to fail; some are even bigger than ever. But beyond this, the Obama administration declined to take the side of citizens over corporate interests. The housing and default crisis was fed by banking and mortgage lender corruption at a nearly-incomprehensible, pinch-me-to-make-sure-I-didn't-just-dream-this scale; yet the government never decisively threw its support behind the millions of people who lost their homes to foreclosures driven by illegal and immoral banking practices. Banks were bailed out at taxpayer expense. And just as ordinary citizens did not find that the government had their backs, the Obama administration declined to pursue criminal charges, or at least a broad public airing, of who the true malefactors in the whole mess were. We needed a socio-economic sea change in our societal attitude to an immoral greed that nearly took down the world economy; instead, we got a general message that a lot of homeowners were just moochers and slackers, and ultimately deserved to lose their houses, as if a home were like any other good and not the bedrock of middle class existence for millions of people.
I am thinking about the links between Obama's shortcomings and the rise of Trump in particular because of the nomination of Steven Mnuchin as Donald Trump's Secretary of the Treasury. This is a man without any experience in government, and who's a former employee of Goldman Sachs, a company near the center of the financial crisis and which journalist Matt Taibbi memorably and amusingly described as "a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." Mnuchin, it also happens, also bought a distressed mortgage company during the financial crisis. This is a company that was subsequently accused of foreclosing too quickly on homeowners. Now, I don't know whether Mnuchin's mortgage company did nor did not actually foreclose on homeowners without proper procedures. I do know, though, that the fact that a person so closely associated with this toxic fraudulent business has been nominated as Treasury Secretary, and this nomination was not immediately and roundly laughed to oblivion less than a decade after the financial crisis, is a sign that the Obama and the Democrats did not begin to do an acceptable job of re-orienting the public discourse to a pro-consumer, anti-Wall Street direction. Political writer Thomas Frank has noted how the Democrats failed to hang the burden of the financial crisis around the necks of George Bush and the Republican party, so that they would be discredited for a generation like the Republicans were by the Great Depression. What we are seeing with the Mnuchin nomination is a perfect sign of the failure Frank describes. We needed a sea change in our socio-economic direction after the Great Recession; Mnuchin's nomination shows that we are dangerously close to a full return to more of the shitty same.
Beyond this specific nomination, you can see this election not just as a semi-rejection of Hillary Clinton, but of President Obama's guidance of the economy in the wake of the Great Recession. The continued erosion of our industrial base was not treated as a crisis immiserating tens of thousands and requiring a decisive response; instead, the Obama administration viewed it as just the way things are, an inevitable part of globalization. The wealth gap between the upper percentiles and everyone else has continued to widen; and yet the Obama administration has not treated this with nearly enough urgency. Obama, and, yes, the Democrats more generally, have adopted a "good-enough" attitude, when in fact the groundwork was being laid for the catastrophic rise of Donald Trump, as too many Americans continued to feel the ground give way beneath their feet. Trump has exploited the all-too-obvious gap between mainstream rhetoric and the real, lived economic existences of millions of citizens; he has at least acted as if the enduring crisis is a crisis, even if he's potentially the least qualified person on the political stage to actually solve it.