A LEGACY OF CLASS WARFARE. LIBIN,

President Barack Obama’s farewell speech this week was billed by political observers as one last shot for the outgoing POTUS to nail down a presidential legacy for the ages. After 4,000 words, he had thrown a lot at the wall — legalized gay marriage, Obamacare, renewable energy programs, the quasi-rapprochement with Cuba, even the killing of Osama bin Laden. But what really stuck in defining the theme of the Obama presidency were his passionate demands for greater bigotry, discord and intolerance.

Not racial intolerance, of course. Obama’s farewell address was probably the most persuasive case he’d made yet during his presidency for racial harmony, not just calling for whites to recognize systemic discrimination, but for blacks and minorities to tie their own “very real struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face” including “the middle-aged white guy who… may seem like he’s got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change.” That’s a fair portrait of a huge number of voters who ended up backing Donald Trump for president — folks frustrated after spending the last eight years feeling like the Obama administration looked down on them as bitter rednecks clinging to guns and religion, languishing at the bottom of Washington’s policy priority list.

The president instead returned to his favourite battleground for social division: pitting the masses against the one per cent. There is “stark inequality” afoot in the nation, he reminded the audience. “While the top one per cent has amassed a bigger share of wealth and income,” it has been at the “expense of a growing middle class.” And “too many families, in inner cities and in rural counties, have been left behind.” There were the laid- off factory workers and hardworking waitresses — folks “just barely getting by and struggling to pay the bills.”

The progressive fight against wealth and income inequality actually lost ground under Obama; one wonders whom he blames for that. But while he didn’t identify the culprit, he did nevertheless passionately recommend a solution: Bigger, more expensive welfare statism, naturally. As economic dislocations made “a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete,” he said, America must forge “a new social compact to guarantee all our kids the education they need; to give workers the power to unionize for better wages; to update the social safety net … and make more reforms to the tax code so corporations and individuals who reap the most from this new economy don’t avoid their obligations to the country that’s made their very success possible.”

In Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago, where Democratic partisanship is as deeply ingrained in city culture as corruption and gang warfare, that line garnered big applause. It would have gotten a lot less just a few hours drive across state lines in any direction, be it to Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, or even Wisconsin, all home to factory workers and waitresses who have seen good middle-class jobs become obsolete. And who all voted in large numbers for the one-per-center candidate, Donald Trump, and against higher taxes, more regulations, bigger government and scapegoating of wealth and success.

As it is, the top one per cent of Americans hardly “avoid their obligations,” since they earn 15 per cent of national personal incomes while paying 25 per cent of total federal taxes. ( Of the five income quintiles in America, only the highestearning one pays substantially more in taxes than it receives from the government in transfers — about US$46,000 more — while the bottom three quintiles, most of the country, get more in benefits than their taxes cover.) But throughout his eight-year presidency, Obama never allowed that to stand in the way of his ongoing slander of the wealthy as greedy tax dodgers, of an unencumbered free market as “a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can,” and of business owners as eager to exploit and defraud workers and the public. He might not have known in 2008 that such tireless class-warmongering would someday nurture an environment where Americans would line up behind the reactionary politics of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, driving the Clinton- Obama machine from office and Democrats from Washington’s power corridors. But you’d think he’d at least realize now the wisdom in finally giving it a rest.

Obama gave himself credit in his speech for his ability to “reverse a great recession” and “unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history.” But that stretch was so bloody long because the recovery was so agonizingly slow. With the U. S. labour participation rate falling from 66 per cent in 2008 to under 63 per cent — as more and more Americans simply gave up on finding work — the average rate of job growth during the last 81 months amounted to a feeble one per cent, one of the worst presidential job- growth records since the Second World War.

But it speaks to Obama’s dedication to class warfare that, even after his presidency left the Democrats creamed, Americans sharply divided, and his country more wary of government than anytime in living memory, he continues to stoke hostilities. He called Tuesday for “workers of all shades” to join together, in class struggle, or they would be “left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.” That’s an awfully cynical thing to think of your countrymen — that, left to their own devices, Americans would devolve into dystopian Hunger Games. How odd that, as he was finishing the last of his presidential speeches, Obama chose to quote George Washington’s farewell address, one that warned Americans to reject “every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.”

OBAMA SEEMS TO THINK AMERICANS ARE ONE STEP AWAY FROM THE HUNGER GAMES.