This excerpt is running in TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

The optimism and euphoria that was so widespread when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 has long ago soured. Both in international relations and in the virulent politics that has erupted since 2016 in almost all the older democracies and many of the newer ones as well, we find ourselves today in truly baleful circumstances. 

Tracing this history is the focus of my new book After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke our World. My central concern is on paths not taken, choices made or forgone by political leaders that closed off better options and made our current circumstance if not inevitable much more likely. It is not a twenty-twenty hindsight book. The decisions I examine were made in defiance of credible alternatives that were being pressed at the time by serious people inside and outside of government. “Barack Obama’s gift to Donald Trump” is significant not only for its account of U.S. political dynamics in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but also because Obama’s approach became the template for many other democratic governments, with similar results, that I discuss  elsewhere in the book.

Barack Obama’s gift to Donald Trump

Barack Obama took office amidst the worst financial crisis since the Depression, yet his response differed notably from FDR’s seven decades earlier. President-elect Roosevelt ignored lame duck President Hoover’s entreaties to embrace a bipartisan response, leaving him twisting in the wind for the then four-month interregnum. Obama did the opposite, lobbying Democrats to support President Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program that the Republican Congress refused to adopt. This lent color to the impression that the emergency had fallen out of the sky rather than resulting from reckless deregulation of mortgage and financial markets that had been pursued in response to relentless lobbying by the big banks – including Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson when he was head of Goldman Sachs – that were now desperately seeking bailouts. 

Roosevelt’s first term was marked by far-reaching banking and securities reform, establishing the main components of the New Deal – the Federal Housing Administration, the Public Works Administration, Social Security, robust protections for organized labor, farmers, homeowners, and consumers – and steeply progressive tax reforms. Obama bailed out the banks, paid bonuses to executives who had led their companies and the country to financial disaster, and curtailed regulatory reform to accommodate the bank lobby, while doing little for millions who were harmed during the crisis. FDR responded to attacks that he was a traitor to his class by declaring “I welcome their hatred” and winning........

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