"as progressives and progressive institutions have gained clout in American life, I’ve grown disillusioned with the quality of the work they’re doing" The one thing progressives don't have is instinct for American politics. If you don't have the instinct, you can't do the job. It just doesn't work. I know, it's mystical. But political instinct is what Trump has. I raised money for Hillary and when she lost, I was surprised, like most Democrats, but being as I'm a Midwesterner, I knew that the centrist Dems (me) were done. When Hillary lost, we lost. Something huge had happened in the electorate. I didn't know what it was.
Is Crisis in Progressive Epistemology kind of a steelman version of Woke Mind Virus?
Purportedly serious people on the Right who talk about this seem to immediately descend into bad faith. Is there a TNR or Washington Monthly style voice of normie liberalism, or is it just dudes on Substack?
As Churchill once said, "If you are not a lefty when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a squishy center left technocratic neoliberal shill when you are middle aged, you have no brain."
I feel more moderate simply because so much of politics seems driven by extremes. Trump is the prime example, but the counter weight to him on the left seems very flawed. Apologies to yeats, but when things fall apart, maybe the center can hold.
The headline could have been "Maybe Chris Arnade was right."
"And I would like to see smart, ambitious progressive politicians run for office in blue states on (moderate) platforms that emphasize housing reform and improving the quality of local public services."
I think the “left” in the U.S. has become a reactionary movement. It’s not focused on solving problems— it’s focused on finding villains to be holier than. On housing policy, for instance, it’s not about identifying a problem and figuring out what research has to say about solving it— it’s about making sure that the right people are punished, regardless of whether that solves the issue.
So housing policy isn’t about building more housing supply to meet demand— that would be terrible because some developer might accidentally get rich along the way— it’s about punishing landlords until they give up their secret housing stash for free to the pure masses. And if that doesn’t work, the landlords go to the gallows.
Foreign policy is qualitatively the same— you can understand the world and everything about it through the prism of “America and Israel bad.” Part of that is Noah Smith’s observation that antisemitism is the ambit of foolish leftists, but part is just the same villain grasping. So you end up with bizarro self-proclaimed progressives declaring that Hamas are righteous freedom fighters and that Joe Biden is trying to do a genocide and take over Gaza by… building a pier to deliver aid. All of which makes foreign policy really hard to do when lots of us are both genuinely repulsed by Netanyahu’s coalition and their callous disregard for civilian lives, but also won’t be caught dead making common cause with those out there declaring that the problem with innocent dead Gazans isn’t the “innocent” part, but that it’s Gazans and not Israelis who are dying.
It seems like all these epistemic issues were also present at the DLC! They had different crazy ideas like the Iraq War, privatizing Medicare, and slashing social security benefits while creating mandatory savings accounts.
One issue that Matt usually stays away from but one that has damaged the left's standing among independents and moderate liberals, is the sheer number of dumb ideas related to the trans issue.
If you take a poll, it's very likely that moderates will agree more with Republicans than Democrats on most trans issues - allowing men in spaces reserved for women, sports, being forced to use pronouns, science denialism, etc.
I hope this isn’t already covered in another comment, but I think a big reason for the (often exaggerated) lack of scrutiny left-progressives give to their (our) proposals is that the non-progressive proposals often seem to give up on the possibility of big societal improvements before even trying.
To challenge myself, I’ll make the case with “defund the police”. This policy demand is often undercooked, might even be a bad idea, which I’m sure almost everyone here thinks. But let’s remember that lots of people who think “defund the police” can’t work are pretty clear-eyed about problems with policing. Yet their proposals for reform aren’t nearly at the scale of the problem. So, it’s not crazy to say “let’s try defunding the police” when every other proposed option accepts the inevitability of most problems with policing as is. It’s reasonable to gravitate to a proposal that in the right universe might actually solve the problem that started the conversation. Of course, I agree we should think through our ideas in a rigorous way.
But a policy being risky doesn’t make it a bad idea to start from, or maybe to implement. Lots of more rigorous people wanted to focus on banning slavery in the territories, but the abolitionists were right. (Sorry, teaching middle school US history right now. It’s a topic that really supports the idea that the most radical critics of the status quo often end up being proven right. Other historical periods not always so much.)
I think the trouble with this way of thinking is that it doesn't recognize tradeoffs. The characteristic feature of a tradeoff is that a solution at the scale that solves "the problem" makes some other problem worse. The problem with defund is that its appreciation of the severe problems with policing wasn't matched by an appreciation of the social utility of policing. And that's a pervasive issue on the left: the moralizing focus on some evil that must be eliminated encourages people to ignore tradeoffs. A certain degree of this can be salutary (you don't want to be a quietist who thinks nothing can be done about any bad thing, you don't want to be an apologist for genuine social injustice, of which there remains plenty) but taken too far it gets people into trouble.
I both (a) think this is true and (b) think that more defund people were/are thinking about tradeoffs seriously than a lot of center-left folks might think.
At the same time, often left folks reaction to tradeoffs is to propose an additional huge transformation to deal with the cost of their policy, e.g. “the social utility of police goes way down if we also massively redistribute income!”
Here in Austin rent is going down. We know what to do. Why aren't national politicians doing more than just rhetoric? (Gianforte in Montana is walking the walk) This seems high priority and broadly popular nationally even if locally no one wants development.
Perhaps start a single-issue third party just to prod the mainstream ones?
"Why aren't national politicians doing more than just rhetoric?"
Because zoning, land use, etc. is overwhelmingly a local decision? The federal government obviously has tools that it can use to influence that, but the biggest tool would be something involving use of offering federal funding tied to zoning reform, but there's no chance in Hell that Congress approves a major new spending program for the foreseeable future.
I agree with essentially everything here but particularly the desire to see the use of broad based taxes to fund a generous child benefit because I think that policy change would have tremendous in many other domains and improve the quality of life for many and I don’t think it’s centrist to argue that the party that wants to accomplish the goal of a better safety net should do everything it can to elect people who share this goal. I definitely think that the GOP tries to stimulate racial resentment and competition to get votes and I cannot understand why so many people who oppose GOP policies are nonetheless willing to assist them in this enterprise by also magnifying the salience of racial resentment and competition. That’s just terrible political strategy and the people who will pay the biggest price if Trump and the GOP take back power are the people with less wealth and they are, as we hear every day on NPR, disproportionately Black and Brown.
At the risk of getting into the deep end of the intellectual pool where I don't belong, I found a lot of common ground with Matthew. First, I also think the Left has forgotten about that movie "A Bridge Too Far". Politics is evolutionary, not revolutionary. A good example is that I don't think the nation is ready for a Nordic welfare state, nor ready for the tax burden it would take to implement one.
I'd like to see some sort of consumption tax on items not deemed essential. That would raise funds and also attack the climate problem which in a real sense, is a consumption problem. The U.S. has a large per capita carbon footprint. What happens if we charge ourselves, rather than China, for the carbon it takes to produce and ship all the stuff we are constantly buying and shipping halfway around the world? And those coal fired plants in China? Are they contributing to our excessive consumption?
As far as public safety, I'd like to see more efforts aimed at rescuing young people before they fall into violent criminal behavior. People with a bit of education and good jobs might not see the need to prove themselves on the street, or engage in reckless behavior. That's hard, but we are always talking about treating the symptoms (jail, gun control, drugs) rather than the disease.
With both parties increasingly engaged in partisan warfare rather than governance, I am not optimistic about the future. Again, related to public safety, the "Ban Assault Rifles" tweets I get six to ten times a day. That is not happening. At one time, I think Joe Biden suggested a half a loaf solution: amending the National Firearms Act to create a third class of firearms in between heavily restricted full auto weapons and what would remain loosely restricted low capacity guns. But that seems to be a casualty of the political culture war. It is easy to ask for the whole loaf and rally the base than to do the hard work of compromise in the public interest. The same polarization exists in energy production. Like Matthew, I see a future for low-carbon fossil fuels like natural gas, and non-carbon emitting small modular reactors. We can't shut down the economy.
I think it is time to move a lot of these discussions back towards the center.
I largely agree with your insights, hence the "Like", which was intended and well-deserved. I take exception with this one, though: "With both parties increasingly engaged in partisan warfare rather than governance ...". Sorry, but that's just incorrect.
I'm no Democrat: I've been an Independent for years, but before that I was a registered Republican, and there are still a number of Democratic Party beliefs and A LOT of Democratic Party policies that leave me uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I would contend that, since Newt Gingrich took control of the House Republicans, the Democrats have been the ONLY party doing governance. Not always well, and not always consistently, but the only ones. For all their faults, they're the ones who have kept us going so far, so props to them. If they fail this November, I don't think it's hyperbole to fear that that will be the end of the Republic.
"There is a rising premium of coalitional solidarity and avoiding infighting among Democratic Party elites that leads to all kinds of ideas just being under-scrutinized" I think this is basically correct and goes a long way to explain why so many smart people jumped on the "defund the police" bandwagon, they wanted to be Good Allies at what seems like a moment of crisis and so went along and didn't ask any questions.
FWIW This is basically what happened in Minneapolis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html some very vocal activists started yelling at elected officials and so they were like "Very well. If that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow" Mayor Quimby style and went along without thinking about how any of it would work or be sold to normie voters.
I've pretty much met you in the middle, Matt, coming from the opposite direction.
My trajectory represented the one described in the aphorism usually (incorrectly) attributed to Churchill, "If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain." But I've boomeranged back somewhat, mostly through a combination of Catholic social teaching, thinking, and listening to people like you.
I think that it's impossible to be serious about Christian values, or even plain humanistic ones, and accept either the notion that the poverty of some is the acceptable price for the wealth of others, or the notion that an equality of coerced poverty for everyone is any better. The only sensible and humane solution is to keep growing the pie WHILE we make sure that everybody has enough, and that individual liberty continues to prosper. "Degrowth" is a recipe for mutually shared misery, and I'm suspicious of the motives of any intelligent person who espouses it.
I agree with you that most of us are undertaxed, and that has to change. In the United States we've effectively replaced taxation with debt as the way to finance public services, which both distorts our understanding today of what they cost and short-circuits any chance of a rational discussion of priorities, as well as dooming our children and grandchildren to picking up the bill tomorrow. If I had my way, we'd go back to the tax rates that were in effect during the Eisenhower Administration for starters, adjusted for inflation, and make course corrections from there.
I'm with you too on housing policy, and don't think that it's a peripheral subject just for cranks. It's taking more and more effort to close our eyes to what bad housing policy is doing to more and more Americans, to say nothing of how deeply current housing practices (they hardly even merit the name "policies") embody systemic racism, often running on autopilot. Housing is a first order problem that consistently gets fourth and fifth order attention. Let's keep pushing it.
I also share you frustration with the read that many on the Left put on the Obama Presidency. How can people just memory-hole all the opposition he received from Congressional Democrats? Doesn't anybody else remember the miracle that he and Nancy Pelosi pulled off to get the ACA through when Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by a Republican? Any President could have handled legislative relations better, but by any objective measure, Obama was a success. The extent to which the racist Right has been permitted to distort his legacy is even more galling.
We'd probably disagree on a lot of details, particularly on which parts of the fixes should be at the state and which at the federal level, which should be voluntary and which should be compulsory; that's the difference between "Center-Left" and "Center-Right". But you're not alone, even when you think you're being a crank, so keep writing.
How did a President who delivered the biggest expansion of health insurance in fifty years, the biggest expansion of regulating Wall Street in eighty years, and the (at the time) biggest expansion of renewable energy ever--never mind beginning his watch in the depths of the worst economic crisis since the Depression and ending it with the economy steadily growing and unemployment steadily dropping--manage to leave so many people *who agreed with those goals* feeling like he was accommodating nothing? The future of Obama-type liberalism might depend on how accurately we can answer that question.
Matt is right that way too many of the people who should be defending Obama and his record were too willing to let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good then, and still are, so they can't be bothered. What most of us didn't anticipate, but should have, was the consistent, race-tinged tsunami of attacks that he and his record have endured from the Trumpist Republicans ever since he left office. The history of the Obama years is being rewritten while we watch the way that the history of Reconstruction was rewritten by the Dunning School, and if the lies aren't resisted a lot more forcefully, the new ones will stick the way that the old ones did.
"as progressives and progressive institutions have gained clout in American life, I’ve grown disillusioned with the quality of the work they’re doing" The one thing progressives don't have is instinct for American politics. If you don't have the instinct, you can't do the job. It just doesn't work. I know, it's mystical. But political instinct is what Trump has. I raised money for Hillary and when she lost, I was surprised, like most Democrats, but being as I'm a Midwesterner, I knew that the centrist Dems (me) were done. When Hillary lost, we lost. Something huge had happened in the electorate. I didn't know what it was.
Is Crisis in Progressive Epistemology kind of a steelman version of Woke Mind Virus?
Purportedly serious people on the Right who talk about this seem to immediately descend into bad faith. Is there a TNR or Washington Monthly style voice of normie liberalism, or is it just dudes on Substack?
As Churchill once said, "If you are not a lefty when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a squishy center left technocratic neoliberal shill when you are middle aged, you have no brain."
If Trump wins I could see progressives getting the WH in 2028 and having a good shot at a trifecta.
I feel more moderate simply because so much of politics seems driven by extremes. Trump is the prime example, but the counter weight to him on the left seems very flawed. Apologies to yeats, but when things fall apart, maybe the center can hold.
The headline could have been "Maybe Chris Arnade was right."
"And I would like to see smart, ambitious progressive politicians run for office in blue states on (moderate) platforms that emphasize housing reform and improving the quality of local public services."
I think the “left” in the U.S. has become a reactionary movement. It’s not focused on solving problems— it’s focused on finding villains to be holier than. On housing policy, for instance, it’s not about identifying a problem and figuring out what research has to say about solving it— it’s about making sure that the right people are punished, regardless of whether that solves the issue.
So housing policy isn’t about building more housing supply to meet demand— that would be terrible because some developer might accidentally get rich along the way— it’s about punishing landlords until they give up their secret housing stash for free to the pure masses. And if that doesn’t work, the landlords go to the gallows.
Foreign policy is qualitatively the same— you can understand the world and everything about it through the prism of “America and Israel bad.” Part of that is Noah Smith’s observation that antisemitism is the ambit of foolish leftists, but part is just the same villain grasping. So you end up with bizarro self-proclaimed progressives declaring that Hamas are righteous freedom fighters and that Joe Biden is trying to do a genocide and take over Gaza by… building a pier to deliver aid. All of which makes foreign policy really hard to do when lots of us are both genuinely repulsed by Netanyahu’s coalition and their callous disregard for civilian lives, but also won’t be caught dead making common cause with those out there declaring that the problem with innocent dead Gazans isn’t the “innocent” part, but that it’s Gazans and not Israelis who are dying.
It’s all deeply cynical and bad.
It seems like all these epistemic issues were also present at the DLC! They had different crazy ideas like the Iraq War, privatizing Medicare, and slashing social security benefits while creating mandatory savings accounts.
One issue that Matt usually stays away from but one that has damaged the left's standing among independents and moderate liberals, is the sheer number of dumb ideas related to the trans issue.
If you take a poll, it's very likely that moderates will agree more with Republicans than Democrats on most trans issues - allowing men in spaces reserved for women, sports, being forced to use pronouns, science denialism, etc.
I hope this isn’t already covered in another comment, but I think a big reason for the (often exaggerated) lack of scrutiny left-progressives give to their (our) proposals is that the non-progressive proposals often seem to give up on the possibility of big societal improvements before even trying.
To challenge myself, I’ll make the case with “defund the police”. This policy demand is often undercooked, might even be a bad idea, which I’m sure almost everyone here thinks. But let’s remember that lots of people who think “defund the police” can’t work are pretty clear-eyed about problems with policing. Yet their proposals for reform aren’t nearly at the scale of the problem. So, it’s not crazy to say “let’s try defunding the police” when every other proposed option accepts the inevitability of most problems with policing as is. It’s reasonable to gravitate to a proposal that in the right universe might actually solve the problem that started the conversation. Of course, I agree we should think through our ideas in a rigorous way.
But a policy being risky doesn’t make it a bad idea to start from, or maybe to implement. Lots of more rigorous people wanted to focus on banning slavery in the territories, but the abolitionists were right. (Sorry, teaching middle school US history right now. It’s a topic that really supports the idea that the most radical critics of the status quo often end up being proven right. Other historical periods not always so much.)
I think the trouble with this way of thinking is that it doesn't recognize tradeoffs. The characteristic feature of a tradeoff is that a solution at the scale that solves "the problem" makes some other problem worse. The problem with defund is that its appreciation of the severe problems with policing wasn't matched by an appreciation of the social utility of policing. And that's a pervasive issue on the left: the moralizing focus on some evil that must be eliminated encourages people to ignore tradeoffs. A certain degree of this can be salutary (you don't want to be a quietist who thinks nothing can be done about any bad thing, you don't want to be an apologist for genuine social injustice, of which there remains plenty) but taken too far it gets people into trouble.
I both (a) think this is true and (b) think that more defund people were/are thinking about tradeoffs seriously than a lot of center-left folks might think.
At the same time, often left folks reaction to tradeoffs is to propose an additional huge transformation to deal with the cost of their policy, e.g. “the social utility of police goes way down if we also massively redistribute income!”
Here in Austin rent is going down. We know what to do. Why aren't national politicians doing more than just rhetoric? (Gianforte in Montana is walking the walk) This seems high priority and broadly popular nationally even if locally no one wants development.
Perhaps start a single-issue third party just to prod the mainstream ones?
"Why aren't national politicians doing more than just rhetoric?"
Because zoning, land use, etc. is overwhelmingly a local decision? The federal government obviously has tools that it can use to influence that, but the biggest tool would be something involving use of offering federal funding tied to zoning reform, but there's no chance in Hell that Congress approves a major new spending program for the foreseeable future.
I agree with essentially everything here but particularly the desire to see the use of broad based taxes to fund a generous child benefit because I think that policy change would have tremendous in many other domains and improve the quality of life for many and I don’t think it’s centrist to argue that the party that wants to accomplish the goal of a better safety net should do everything it can to elect people who share this goal. I definitely think that the GOP tries to stimulate racial resentment and competition to get votes and I cannot understand why so many people who oppose GOP policies are nonetheless willing to assist them in this enterprise by also magnifying the salience of racial resentment and competition. That’s just terrible political strategy and the people who will pay the biggest price if Trump and the GOP take back power are the people with less wealth and they are, as we hear every day on NPR, disproportionately Black and Brown.
At the risk of getting into the deep end of the intellectual pool where I don't belong, I found a lot of common ground with Matthew. First, I also think the Left has forgotten about that movie "A Bridge Too Far". Politics is evolutionary, not revolutionary. A good example is that I don't think the nation is ready for a Nordic welfare state, nor ready for the tax burden it would take to implement one.
I'd like to see some sort of consumption tax on items not deemed essential. That would raise funds and also attack the climate problem which in a real sense, is a consumption problem. The U.S. has a large per capita carbon footprint. What happens if we charge ourselves, rather than China, for the carbon it takes to produce and ship all the stuff we are constantly buying and shipping halfway around the world? And those coal fired plants in China? Are they contributing to our excessive consumption?
As far as public safety, I'd like to see more efforts aimed at rescuing young people before they fall into violent criminal behavior. People with a bit of education and good jobs might not see the need to prove themselves on the street, or engage in reckless behavior. That's hard, but we are always talking about treating the symptoms (jail, gun control, drugs) rather than the disease.
With both parties increasingly engaged in partisan warfare rather than governance, I am not optimistic about the future. Again, related to public safety, the "Ban Assault Rifles" tweets I get six to ten times a day. That is not happening. At one time, I think Joe Biden suggested a half a loaf solution: amending the National Firearms Act to create a third class of firearms in between heavily restricted full auto weapons and what would remain loosely restricted low capacity guns. But that seems to be a casualty of the political culture war. It is easy to ask for the whole loaf and rally the base than to do the hard work of compromise in the public interest. The same polarization exists in energy production. Like Matthew, I see a future for low-carbon fossil fuels like natural gas, and non-carbon emitting small modular reactors. We can't shut down the economy.
I think it is time to move a lot of these discussions back towards the center.
I largely agree with your insights, hence the "Like", which was intended and well-deserved. I take exception with this one, though: "With both parties increasingly engaged in partisan warfare rather than governance ...". Sorry, but that's just incorrect.
I'm no Democrat: I've been an Independent for years, but before that I was a registered Republican, and there are still a number of Democratic Party beliefs and A LOT of Democratic Party policies that leave me uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I would contend that, since Newt Gingrich took control of the House Republicans, the Democrats have been the ONLY party doing governance. Not always well, and not always consistently, but the only ones. For all their faults, they're the ones who have kept us going so far, so props to them. If they fail this November, I don't think it's hyperbole to fear that that will be the end of the Republic.
"There is a rising premium of coalitional solidarity and avoiding infighting among Democratic Party elites that leads to all kinds of ideas just being under-scrutinized" I think this is basically correct and goes a long way to explain why so many smart people jumped on the "defund the police" bandwagon, they wanted to be Good Allies at what seems like a moment of crisis and so went along and didn't ask any questions.
FWIW This is basically what happened in Minneapolis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html some very vocal activists started yelling at elected officials and so they were like "Very well. If that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow" Mayor Quimby style and went along without thinking about how any of it would work or be sold to normie voters.
I'd also add in the Matt Bruening's idea of "Identarian Deference" which often pops up in progressive spaces and can really sabotage good faith debate and clear thinking as well: https://mattbruenig.medium.com/identitarian-deference-continues-to-roil-liberalism-6a1fc88e7f34
I've pretty much met you in the middle, Matt, coming from the opposite direction.
My trajectory represented the one described in the aphorism usually (incorrectly) attributed to Churchill, "If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain." But I've boomeranged back somewhat, mostly through a combination of Catholic social teaching, thinking, and listening to people like you.
I think that it's impossible to be serious about Christian values, or even plain humanistic ones, and accept either the notion that the poverty of some is the acceptable price for the wealth of others, or the notion that an equality of coerced poverty for everyone is any better. The only sensible and humane solution is to keep growing the pie WHILE we make sure that everybody has enough, and that individual liberty continues to prosper. "Degrowth" is a recipe for mutually shared misery, and I'm suspicious of the motives of any intelligent person who espouses it.
I agree with you that most of us are undertaxed, and that has to change. In the United States we've effectively replaced taxation with debt as the way to finance public services, which both distorts our understanding today of what they cost and short-circuits any chance of a rational discussion of priorities, as well as dooming our children and grandchildren to picking up the bill tomorrow. If I had my way, we'd go back to the tax rates that were in effect during the Eisenhower Administration for starters, adjusted for inflation, and make course corrections from there.
I'm with you too on housing policy, and don't think that it's a peripheral subject just for cranks. It's taking more and more effort to close our eyes to what bad housing policy is doing to more and more Americans, to say nothing of how deeply current housing practices (they hardly even merit the name "policies") embody systemic racism, often running on autopilot. Housing is a first order problem that consistently gets fourth and fifth order attention. Let's keep pushing it.
I also share you frustration with the read that many on the Left put on the Obama Presidency. How can people just memory-hole all the opposition he received from Congressional Democrats? Doesn't anybody else remember the miracle that he and Nancy Pelosi pulled off to get the ACA through when Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by a Republican? Any President could have handled legislative relations better, but by any objective measure, Obama was a success. The extent to which the racist Right has been permitted to distort his legacy is even more galling.
We'd probably disagree on a lot of details, particularly on which parts of the fixes should be at the state and which at the federal level, which should be voluntary and which should be compulsory; that's the difference between "Center-Left" and "Center-Right". But you're not alone, even when you think you're being a crank, so keep writing.
How did a President who delivered the biggest expansion of health insurance in fifty years, the biggest expansion of regulating Wall Street in eighty years, and the (at the time) biggest expansion of renewable energy ever--never mind beginning his watch in the depths of the worst economic crisis since the Depression and ending it with the economy steadily growing and unemployment steadily dropping--manage to leave so many people *who agreed with those goals* feeling like he was accommodating nothing? The future of Obama-type liberalism might depend on how accurately we can answer that question.
Matt is right that way too many of the people who should be defending Obama and his record were too willing to let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good then, and still are, so they can't be bothered. What most of us didn't anticipate, but should have, was the consistent, race-tinged tsunami of attacks that he and his record have endured from the Trumpist Republicans ever since he left office. The history of the Obama years is being rewritten while we watch the way that the history of Reconstruction was rewritten by the Dunning School, and if the lies aren't resisted a lot more forcefully, the new ones will stick the way that the old ones did.