The president meant exactly what he said when he promised to 'fundamentally [transform] the United States of America.'

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When I penned my first column for the Center for Individual Freedom early in 2009, we didn’t yet have the full measure of Barack Obama.

For those with eyes to see, it was clear that the new president was coming to office with a more explicit and comprehensive progressive agenda than any president since Woodrow Wilson. But we didn’t yet know how it would all play out.

Now, as I pen my final column* six-and-a-half years later, the mystery is gone. The president meant exactly what he said when he promised to “fundamentally [transform] the United States of America.”

There’s bad news and good news there. The bad news is that the president has been largely successful.

The nation’s health care system, broken before Obama’s tenure, is now essentially operated as a government utility. It’s become such a complex web of laws, regulations and subsidies that even the most determined reformer is going to have a hard time putting it on something like free-market footing.

America’s status as the indispensable guarantor of global order and peace has been abandoned. Everyday Americans may squirm when presented with the query, “Are you better off now than you were before Obama took office?” but it’s a much easier question to answer in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and the parts of Syria and Iraq that now belong to ISIS.

Even if the next president’s national security policy represents a wholesale refutation of Obama’s approach, it will take years to undo the damage that’s been done to our international alliances and our military capabilities. 

Respect for the rule of law has been shattered. Whether it’s the White House’s authorization of a de facto amnesty, the endless (and lawless) changes to ObamaCare or the failure to submit the nuclear deal with Iran to Congress as a treaty, Obama has made past practitioners of the “imperial presidency” look like pikers. The separation of powers may never quite recover.

There is, however, good news. The wave of conservative victories in 2010 and 2014 applied the brakes to the President’s most expansive ambitions. We were never subjected to cap and trade. Federal spending never went as high as it otherwise would have. Card check for labor unions was stillborn.

Now, to be sure, President Obama has done his best to get around the limits on his power. Indeed, most of his executive overreach has come since Republican control of Congress thwarted his efforts to work through the conventional legislative process. The silver lining for conservatives, however, is that everything Obama has done through executive action can be dismantled through precisely the same means if a Republican wins the White House in 2016. We can withdraw from the Iran deal. We can go back to enforcing existing immigration law. We can rein in the excesses of a predatory EPA.

Undoing the damage is only the beginning, however. If conservatives want to bring America back into communion with its heritage, they’ll have to be willing to cede power. That means weakening the federal leviathan and devolving more responsibilities to state and local governments.

It means appointing judges who are unwilling to let presidents color outside the lines. It means weakening the powers of unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state rather than pressing them into the service of “big government conservatism.”

While America’s physical existence may not be at stake in 2016, its spiritual essence will be. Unless we are willing to return to our first principles — limited government, fealty to the Constitution, free markets and a robust national defense — we will not be worthy of our forefathers. 
 
The damage from the Obama years has been done. Our responsibility going forward is to build a future in which this era will come to be regarded as a historical parenthesis — a period in which we temporarily deviated from our better instincts rather than one in which we saw the nation’s trajectory unalterably changed. 

We were unable to prevent Barack Obama from wreaking havoc. To atone, we must now begin the work of making his legacy irrelevant. That is the only way that we can restore the America we once knew.

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*EDITOR'S NOTE:  Troy Senik is becoming Vice President of Policy and Programs at the Manhattan Institute. We, along with his many devoted readers, will miss him, but wish him the best in his new position.