Victor Davis Hanson captures important aspects of the latter days of the Obama administration in his PJ Media column “Sleeping dogs are waking.” Here he identifies a few signs of the racial mania that Obama has aggravated if not inspired:

[T]he Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

Professor Hanson addresses another aspect of the mental rot:

No military can remain a military if hostile powers routinely launch missiles at its $7 billion aircraft carriers, ship-jack its vessels and humiliate the crew, or buzz destroyers to interrupt naval exercises. Yet this is now the new normal of the U.S. military and Navy in particular. These provocations at sea and in the air will increase, as Iran, Russia, and perhaps soon China grasp that there are no consequences to symbolically humiliating the U.S, but some utility thereby in limiting its range and outreach to allies. Perhaps to avoid the harassment, we can rename destroyers “outreach vessels,” carriers can become “safe spaces,” and jet-fighters can be “contingency operators.”

The whole thing has a certain quality of decline and fall to it.