By 2012, the culmination of this Progressive march saw the United States elect a president with little or no understanding of free market capitalism, no appreciation of private property rights, little demonstrable Christian religious influence (to the point that by 2012 polls showed that up to half of the American public thought he was a Muslim), and an apparent disdain for American exceptionalism. Barack Obama repeatedly apologized to foreign nations for past American “mistakes” or transgressions and denigrated (or greatly mischaracterized) American exceptionalism by insisting that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As the British magazine The Economist stated, Americans had put into power “a left-wing president who has regulated to death a private sector he neither likes nor understands. . . .”6 In 2008, in his famous “Joe the Plumber” comment, Obama stated that it was government’s duty to “spread the wealth around,” and in 2012, referring to private businesses that had become successful, he said, “You didn’t build that [business]. . . . Somebody else made that happen.” That “somebody else” was, of course, government—not the private sector. Comments such as those showed Obama had no concept of what made markets work. Likewise, in his bailout of General Motors, he demonstrated that he had no regard for private property—in that case, the property of the bondholders who were saddled with an enormous loss to protect union pensions.
