Taking hope and change and turning it into more of the same over 8 years significantly disillusioned millions of people, which explains both the 2016 election loss and Democrats during Obama’s tenure experiencing the largest loss of down-ballot power in modern history. Obama won in 2012 because the GOP nominated an avatar of Wall Street and Obama went populist — but the general trajectory of mass disillusionment continued amid the undeterred rise of oligarchy.

That liberals and country club Republicans like this are still logging onto the Internet in 2026 pretending that the wiping out of the working class while bailing out rich bankers has no political effects at the ballot box is proof of how much they are still determined to remain in a hermetically sealed bubble of self-soothing nonsense.

It also shows their elitist disdain for the working class by portraying them not as economic actors making political choices but instead as dumb rubes who respond only to celebrity.

Liberals then waiving it all off by citing that Obama was/is a popular celebrity is only more proof of the deep cynicism and nihilism of this subset of Americans — an increasingly tiny bloc of comfortable peanut gallery observers and lifestyle liberals who absolutely refuse to acknowledge systemic forces or believe that real-world conditions in the economy have any effect on politics.

This liberal/Never Trump Republican desire to deny the truth of what happened and revert back to some pre-crisis neoliberal “normal” — a normal that itself created the very crisis we’re now in! — threatens to sow the seeds of a repeat of the cycle that we experienced from 2008-2016.