I'm not sure Obama wasn't fully aware of the havoc the race to the bottom would unleash on the Democrat Party, but I think he thought the effects would be even more widespread.
Frankly, with the insanity we are seeing, with the Legacy ('big name') Media predominantly corrupted, socially and politically, but with a significant following who are teetering on the brink of violent insanity because they believe the hyperbole they get from that (and seem to be cultlike in their devotion to the notions found and pushed there), I think the damage is even greater than Obama himself could have predicted.
Considering the Mass Formation Psychosis of COVID and the anti-Trump (TDS) movements which surround both the pandemic and Trump's electoral victory, and the crumbling of the climate narrative and the erosion of other narratives with the advent of alternative media and a reduction in censorship which at least allows the truth to get out despite attempts to criminalize viewpoints other than the Left Narrative, the question is one of whether we are witnessing the Left's psychotic break.
Granted, a lot of the histrionics of the Left are bought and paid for street theater, carried even to the point of violence and larceny and destruction, but essentially compensated incitement, "community organizing", and the provision of millions of dollars worth of materials, from flyers to signs to pink vagina hats, or whatever.
A lot of money has been spent, not to mention the hours devoted to the 'cause'. People who have been persuaded to back the cause du jour through primarily emotional arguments (because rational arguments fail to back that cause) become seriously emotionally invested in their beliefs and in the narrative that fostered those beliefs. It is a slow process, molding such beliefs, and years have been involved/invested in shaping and molding that belief system.
Typically, when people find out all they have believed in, the cause they have devoted years to, that has molded their persona, is all built on a tenuous fabrication of lies, not only their belief system, but their world comes crashing down.
Violence, suicidal ideation, denial, paranoid delusions, all ensue an are reflected in their behaviour.
One at a time, isolated from each other, that's one thing.
En masse, networked, acting out in concert, it becomes another; a mob bent on the destruction of those who exposed the truth, not on those who sold them the false worldview nor the high priests of their false religion, but bent on killing the messenger(s) so they can crawl back into their comfortable and 'safe' delusions.
They were always there, but Obama spent a career networking and organizing them, and the delusions have become a creed, wrapped in the thin veneer of a political party. Even now the nutcases are poking out through that membrane, not just in the streets, not just on some university campus, but in the halls of Congress.
