It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.

Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.

When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.

But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.

Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.

Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.

While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.

Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.