For the first eight years of this decade, the American media seemed remarkably and aggressively secular. The press reviled George W. Bush, a Methodist president with a gift for evangelical acoustics, for his invocations of the Almighty. Based on the outcry when the 43rd president referenced a divine hand in human affairs, you would’ve thought Bush was calling for a dozen virgins to be sacrificed to the nearest volcano. But it turns out the media hang-up wasn’t with the fact that Bush was religious, per se. They simply thought he was praying to the wrong guy.

Enter Barack Obama, a man who – by the standards of the modern media – has his theological priorities in order. Obama, you see, worships at the altar of self. Lest you think this is harsh caricature, remember that this is a man who has publicly joked about being born in a manger and resting after his acts of creation — ala God on the seventh day. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called Obama “a gift from the world to us.” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas – apparently being the first person in recorded history to find Matthews excessively subtle – opined “he’s sort of God.” And on and on it goes.

While the references to Obama as divine are probably the product of media overcaffeination, the spiritual impulse that underlies them is unquestionable. Read through candidate Obama’s 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” and you’ll find the President-in-waiting relentlessly framing himself as a sort of Gnostic priest – a man with a knowledge of the true and the sublime pitifully out of reach for conventional politicians and the polarized public that elects them. He was to be a national healer, a man who by dint of his transcendence could manufacture consensus.

Except he isn’t. And in his weaker moments, Obama himself is capable of recognizing this. Only ten pages into the politics as self-help bible that is “The Audacity of Hope,” he tellingly concedes “I am a Democrat, after all; my views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the New York Times than the Wall Street Journal.” If only he had brought such clarity to the Oval Office.

Instead, Obama is back to his old tricks. Every hard choice is a false choice. There is no obstacle we can’t overcome with equal doses of patience and sweet reason. Hope and unity are universal salves.

This view of the world is not original to Obama. In many ways, it’s a direct descendant of the progressive movement that swept American politics in the late 19th and early 20th century. The grand conceit of the progressives was that if only we could find leaders of adequate learning, vision and expertise, we could make the world anew. Ideology was to be swept away by scientific pragmatism, as if all of governance was an attempt to divine the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Of course, given its vintage, we can now judge progressivism by its fruits. Its vision of perfecting man through science gave birth to the eugenics movement, and ultimately the horrors of Nazi experimentation. Its insistence on machine-like technocrats usurping the role of Congress spawned a huge federal bureaucracy that is as unresponsive as it is incompetent. And even though its crowning vision for world peace, the League of Nations, floundered, the United Nations eventually gave the lie to its premise that international organizations could adequately ensure global security.

Obama, despite being a self-proclaimed “student of history,” has learned nothing from the progressive experience. Instead, he has called upon its grand but disproven ambitions to create an agenda that resembles Samuel Johnson’s definition of a second marriage: “The triumph of hope over experience.”

If Obama were truly a student of history, he would understand that free-market capitalism is the only system capable of sustaining long-term economic growth and prosperity.

Up until the 19th century, no society in the world experienced sustained growth in per capita income. Yet as capitalism took root around the western world, growth began to become common. Today, those of us in the West consider it something just short of a birthright (which is to be expected when world production increases by an average of four percent per year, as it has since 1960). Yet Obama ironically lives out the prediction of the man whose ideas are the basis for many of his spending-intensive economic policies – John Maynard Keynes – who once said, “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”

That’s how we got the stimulus package, the child of a fanciful notion that the road to prosperity is to take $ 800,000,000,000, throw it in the air, and let the people who catch it feel rich. That’s how we get the notion that health care can be made more affordable by paying doctors less money to treat more patients. And that’s how we get the sagacious insight that the solution to America’s energy woes is to tax affordable, reliable sources of energy until the public is forced into using expensive, unreliable sources.

If Obama were truly a student of history, he would also understand former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s admonition that “weakness is provocative.” Adolf Hitler swallowed most of Europe because of an insidious (and accurate) calculation that democracies still reeling from the traumas of World War I wouldn’t have the stomach for a fight. Saddam Hussein seized the oil fields of Kuwait after an American diplomat telegraphed that the United States would play no part in an economic war in the Middle East. And Osama Bin Laden authorized a suicide mission that took 3,000 American lives after a decade in which terrorist attacks on American interests were met with retaliatory pinpricks.

Yet Obama’s foreign policy operates under the assumption that America’s enemies are aggrieved simply because they have been insufficiently included in our international sewing circle. Like Jimmy Carter before him, he seems incapable of grasping that American’s enemies may nurture grievances and hatreds that can’t be enervated by a transnational group hug. And thus do his initiatives repeatedly fail.

Obama winked at the possibility of direct talks with North Korea if the recalcitrant regime would only return to the table for the six-party talks. Instead, he got an endless series of missile launches and nuclear tests. He has offered to meet without preconditions with members of the Holocaust-denying Iranian government. In return, he got an unrepentant continuation of the country’s nuclear program and a reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has pressured Israel to make concessions for peace in the Middle East and commiserated with benighted Arabs. In response, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak – whose country was the venue for Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world – has replied that Arab nations will never respect Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

The old saw has it that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Perhaps. But repeating the behavior you’ve already seen bring ruin to others? That’s just incompetence.