George W. Bush was, in retrospect, very much a continuation of his father as President. Domestically, a continuation of an attempted Christian Democratic turn that harnessed religious enthusiasm to a pre-conservative tradition fundamentally okay with social spending.

Internationally, a continuation of post-Cold War cleanup. The lands of the Ottoman Empire fell largely under British and French influence after WWI and America succeeded as their patron after WWII, ending up supporting local autocrats as a guard against the Soviets. By the 2000s, a decade after the Cold War and two after a significant shift from pan-Arabism to political Islam, this system had outlived its purpose and was showing strain.

This played out as a conflict with local regimes as in Iraq, which had been one of the first to be reined in the “hyperpower”, "global cop" moment after the superpower conflict, but the overall story was an attempt to shift from American-backed autocracy to American-backed democracy. (Afghanistan was mostly one more installment of failed effort to integrate remote Afghanistan into any broad order of sovereignty)

This continued into the Obama era with Robert Gates and the “Arab Spring”, a major issue was that with ISIS and even more moderate jihadists, we grew more convinced that these autocrats really were far more compatible with US interests than any forces likely to hold power in their absence – the abandonment of regime change in Egypt and the inability to generate any enthusiasm for war with Russian proxy in Syria seems to have marked the end of this. The Arab world might require proper modern national institutions, but no one really wants to reenact the French Revolution and the 19th century to get there.

In domestic affairs, the “No Child Left Behind” national education framework was largely abandoned, and Medicare prescription drug coverage probably does something in the background to shore Republicans up with the elderly.

Barack Obama’s task was to take Bill Clinton’s relegitimating the Democrats as a governing party and do something with it. National health care had been a dream since the 50s at least, failed under Clinton, and with Obamacare it is an established thing now, as much as Social Security or Medicare of food stamps. DACA obviously failed to resolve illegal immigration as an issue, though it presumably benefited its beneficiaries a bit for a while.

The New Democratic relegitimation had largely been about gathering politicians, media, activists, and funding streams together and uniting them around fairly moderate messages. It was really organized for a cable TV media ecosystem. The late blog era could kinda work by analogy (the Nation and National Review had definitely been part of the 90s) but social media was another beast entirely.

Obama’s praised “cool” relationship with the media was largely oriented around impressing gatekeepers who then relayed his mythos. Though an impressive orator, the President making a speech about something no longer was necessarily the defining thing about it. In contrast, Trump’s McLuhanite “hotter” social media style, if you were aware of some national political issue, first off you were on Twitter, second off so was the President, he was aware of it, and you were aware that he was aware of it. He was in your head, more precisely he was in all your narratives.

By the end of Obama’s term, the Democratic Party was significantly delegitimized again. Tellingly, his largest accomplishment – being the fabled First Black President – was not one that particularly involved actively doing much of anything. I think it is still an open question whether we can consider his presidency or Bush’s as more successful.