America's Been a Dumpster Fire for 30 Years—We Just Keep Changing the Lighter

Many Americans claim that when they see Barack Obama, they remember "a time in America where there was unity." That's adorable. It's also complete bullshit.

Is Obama cute? Sure. Charming? Always. Articulate and smart? Funny and witty? You get the point. Obama is everything, but the portrait of unity he is not. The president dubbed the Deporter-in-Chief might as well be called the Divider-in-Chief too.

The last time America had anything resembling presidential unity, George H.W. Bush was in office and most millennials were still in diapers. That was 1993. Nobody reading this remembers it. Nobody claiming Obama represented unity lived through actual unity. They're just making things up because nostalgia sells better than admitting we've been a dumpster fire for three decades straight.

Here's what actual unity looked like: Dwight Eisenhower governed with a 39-point partisan approval gap. Republicans loved him at 88 percent, Democrats approved at 49 percent. That gap represented genuine cross-party support. JFK managed 35 points. LBJ hit 30 points. These numbers came from an era when both parties contained actual ideological diversity instead of performing synchronized tribal warfare.

Then Ronald Reagan torched that entire framework. He broke the 50-point barrier and never looked back. Every president since has matched or exceeded his polarization levels like they're competing for worst marks in a class nobody wants to attend.

Bill Clinton logged a 56-point gap. George W. Bush reached 61 points despite that brief post-9/11 moment when the country remembered it hated terrorists more than each other. Barack Obama obliterated records at 70 points. Donald Trump hit 81 points because of course he did. Joe Biden sits at 76 points, proving that "unity" was always campaign rhetoric disconnected from mathematical reality.

This pattern screams one truth louder than any political speech: we've spent 30 years perfecting the art of hating each other, and we're getting better at it with each administration.

Obama's crime wasn't divisiveness. His crime was existing during peak polarization while people projected their fantasies about bipartisanship onto him like he was some kind of political Rorschach test. He tried incorporating Republican ideas into his agenda. Republicans voted against him anyway. He courted senators for months on healthcare. They rejected him unanimously. He spoke beautifully about transcending divisions. Mitch McConnell announced his primary goal was making Obama fail.

But sure, Obama was the problem.

The delusion runs deeper than just Obama nostalgia. People genuinely believe recent presidents could have unified the country if they'd just tried harder, been nicer, compromised more. This ignores that opposition party approval ratings have been in free fall since the 1990s. Eisenhower got 49 percent Democratic approval. Obama got 13 percent Republican approval. Trump got 7 percent Democratic approval. Those aren't rounding errors. They're a structural collapse.

Presidential approval ratings stopped measuring performance decades ago. Now they measure whether you're wearing the right team jersey. Republicans approve of Republican presidents at 90 percent while Democrats register single digits. Democrats do the exact same thing in reverse. The president could cure cancer or burn down the White House and the partisan gaps would barely move.

Trump averaged 88 percent Republican approval throughout his presidency despite everything. Obama averaged 83 percent Democratic approval while facing relentless obstruction. Biden maintains Democratic support in the low 80s while Republicans refuse to acknowledge anything positive. The pattern holds regardless of policy, scandal, or achievement because approval became identity instead of evaluation.

Cable news tribalism, social media echo chambers, geographic sorting, and the death of shared reality all accelerated this collapse. Americans increasingly consume different information, live in separate universes, and view the opposing party as existential threats rather than political opponents. Pew Research documented that partisan antipathy roughly doubled between 2002 and 2022. We didn't stumble into this dysfunction. We sprinted toward it.

George W. Bush's 90 percent approval rating after 9/11 lasted about as long as national solidarity after a terrorist attack. Months later, we were back to fighting about Iraq, surveillance, and whether torture counted as torture. That spike represented crisis response, not reconciliation. The moment the immediate threat faded, Americans returned to their regularly scheduled partisan warfare.

Biden campaigned explicitly on healing divisions and restoring normalcy. His approval ratings followed the exact trajectory as everyone who came before him: high same-party support, negligible opposition approval, massive partisan gap. Turns out you can't speech your way out of structural polarization that predates your candidacy by multiple decades.

The honest assessment requires ditching the fantasy that unity existed recently enough for anyone under 40 to remember. Eisenhower governed when parties contained ideological diversity, when Southern Democrats and Northeastern Republicans could collaborate, when geographic identity trumped partisan purity. That political landscape died before the internet existed.

Blaming individual presidents for polarization they inherited misses the point entirely. The trend line moves in one direction regardless of who occupies the White House. Approval gaps widen. Congressional dysfunction deepens. Americans sort themselves into incompatible tribes. Every metric screams the same message: worse.

Obama didn't create this environment any more than Trump or Biden did. They all governed within a system already broken, achieving what they could while presiding over approval numbers that reflected American political dysfunction rather than their personal successes or failures.

The romanticization of Obama as uniquely unifying ignores data. The demonization of him as uniquely divisive does the same. He was a president attempting to govern during unprecedented polarization while people on both sides projected their preferred narratives onto his administration.

Nobody has been a unifying president in 30 years. Not Obama. Not Bush. Not Clinton. Not anyone. The last president who governed with genuine bipartisan approval left office when grunge was still mainstream and the internet ran on dial-up. Everything since represents variations on partisan division, with each administration setting new records for how thoroughly Americans can hate each other along party lines.

Stop pretending Obama represented unity. Stop pretending anyone did. The country has been increasingly polarized since before most voters could legally drink. Acknowledging that reality beats cycling through another round of selective amnesia where we pretend the other side ruined everything while our team tried really hard to bring people together.

The system broke decades ago.

Trump has nothing to do with how divided this country is. He contributes to it, on a daily basis and has normalized cruelty but he didn't revolutionize divisiveness. That's U.S.A. made.

Is Trump cruel? Sure. Is he a racist? Always. Deceiving and vengeful? Brash and impulsive? You get the point. Trump is everything Republicans claim Obama was, except they're actually right about him. And his 81-point partisan gap proves Americans finally found someone who makes Obama's polarization look quaint.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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