What's your evidence for this statement? Can you think of a few things that he might have done well or accomplished?
That's the problem with politics in the US today. People increasingly fall into the trap of ideological differences that the politicians have set (bread and circuses), while pursuing their own agendas. Obama didn't/couldn't have done anything correctly or right, because he falls into a different bucket. Trump can't/won't do anything right because he falls into a different bucket.
This is the failure of the imagination; reducing others whose beliefs and motivations you don’t understand to a literally subhuman category. You can use other words: barbarian, bigot, racist, sexist, hater, etc. You 'other' people that don't agree with you in this fashion:
- I am a rational/good human being.
- Because I am a rational/good human being, I believe X.
- If you do not believe X, you are either ignorant, stupid, or evil.
- Because you are ignorant, stupid, or evil, it is useless to debate with you and pointless to listen to you.
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/It is written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist. Haidt is a self-described liberal, but his research focuses on morality – its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and development.
Haidt basically argues that conservatives and liberals disagree because they are being motivated by different moral matrixes. When they see each other as “evil”, it’s because they don’t understand the moral matrix the other is operating from (Haidt is not a moral relativist, and does believe in evil, he just doesn’t apply the word to most political or philosophical disagreements).
I don’t agree with everything that Haidt says, but I recommend this book to everybody. He develops and works with a few axioms, two of which are:
There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.Morality binds and blinds.The second axiom sounds purely negative, but it’s not; rather it’s the acknowledgement that while a strong moral code can be a powerful tool for personal happiness and social order, at the same time it blinds us to the validity of competing moral codes.
The entire book is an exercise in the scholarly and scientific application of imagination to the problem of moral social conflict, and especially to the necessity of understanding the other side.
And this is important. Understanding does not mean agreement, and without proselytizing conservatism to liberals or liberalism to conservatives, Haidt (I think successfully), communicates how the artificial sides fall into specific views, and, I think anyone who reads this book will come a long way toward understanding how people, in a general and specific manner (family, friends, people that should 'know better'), voted differently in this divisive election.