[r3trohack3r]

At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.

[thaumasiotes]

So... what part of the program stopped?

[r3trohack3r]

It’s in air quotes for a reason. Obama ran on promises to end it and protect whistleblowers like Snowden. Then he kept it alive under new branding and doubled down on vilifying whistleblowers like Snowden.

[throwing_away]

Well when you say it like that, it sounds like the government is an unstoppable bureaucracy that only cares about its own expansion.

[econ]

I'm no historian or otherwise an expert but someone told me that secret services exist almost independent from the government that spawned them and that some even continue to exist after the government is gone. (I forget the examples) The point being that it serves itself first and may act to benefit other parties. (The status quo) The government or the citizens may end up further down the list than imagined.

[eru]

> (I forget the examples)

Well, Russian / Soviet secret polices might be examples?

[throwaway48476]

They made a whole show about this called Yes Minister

[emptysongglass]

One of the worst presidents the US has had in at least the last 50 years and he was held up as a champion by the left. Expanded the black sites programs, supported some of the worst foreign conflicts the US has been involved in, somehow was elected twice.

[mapt]

> he was held up as a champion by the left.

I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.

A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.

But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.

A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.

People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.

[emptysongglass]

I would say you don't know what "the left" means either, insofar as I don't believe the common use of the word today or then to describe "progressives" was as a loanword for socialism. I don't even think most Americans know what socialism really is, given they're often spotted fawning over the Nordic Model as a proud example, Bernie included, which has nothing to do with socialism. We also have a party called "the Left" here in Denmark, which has nothing to do with the American left in common use today.

It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.

You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.

I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.

[mapt]

My point is that most American leftists don't think he was a great president either.

_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.

Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.

The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.

This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.

[lern_too_spel]

Pure revisionism. Obama did not run on that promise, but he shut down the email metadata collection program before it was even leaked and limited and then shut down the phone metadata program after it had leaked. Snowden leaked details of compromised computer systems to China. That's not whistleblowing.

[r3trohack3r]

I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.

He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.

His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.

Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.

These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken

https://www.whistleblowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/8....

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/obama-...

[lern_too_spel]

> I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.

That was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. I, along with many others, pointed it out at that time. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB

> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.

You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.

> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program

The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.