After President Barack Obama took office eight years ago, conservatives were reminded that, to quote Adam Smith, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

The right-wing depiction of Obama’s America was fantastically apocalyptic, but often drew upon truths. When Paul Ryan warned that Obama would plunge the country into a Greece-like debt crisis, he was completely wrong, and honest experts across the ideological spectrum said as much, but the claim resonated with Obama’s political foes because budget deficits in the aftermath of the Great Recession were very high.

When Republican members of Congress and others warned that Obama was going to inflict socialized medicine on the nation, just like the health systems in sluggish, left-wing European countries, they were being both dishonest and confused. But Obama and many Democrats really do think the United States should have a more comprehensive welfare state than we do, and would happily draw upon lessons from Europe to get us there.

The idea that this amounted to ruin in a nation has always struck liberals as ridiculous, but true to the original meaning of the expression, the ruin persisted throughout the Obama years, and America survived.



The Trump presidency has been a source of wider-spread and more well-founded alarm than the idea of the Obama presidency. The mixture of incompetence, extremism, and erraticism Trump brings to the White House elevates the risk of genuine national destruction to an uncomfortable level.