“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

So began Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago on 4 November 2008. Eight years later, as the world watches the debacle of Trump vs. Clinton, the two most unpopular candidates in US history, it is fair to say that doubts about the greatness of US democracy are more widespread than ever.

Obama was elected on a campaign of “change” and “hope” in the context of mass revulsion at the Bush years of war, economic crisis and growing inequality. But while the US has changed, it hasn’t been in the way people were hoping for.

Income and wealth inequality is higher than when Obama took office, worse now than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. More people live in poverty, while corporate profits have ballooned. The wealth and unemployment gap between Black and white has grown.

Obama has deported more people than any US president in history. War still rages in the Middle East, albeit more by proxy and drone strikes than US boots on the ground. Obama has prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers as all previous presidents combined. Guantánamo remains open.

From the earliest days of Obama’s ascendency, the warning signs were there for those who cared to look. As Socialist Alternative magazine, a predecessor publication to Red Flag, noted immediately after Obama’s election:

“Obama’s win is bitter sweet. The hated Bush may be gone, but the reaction to Obama’s victory from those who drove Bush’s policies – the mass media, the military and political establishment, big business – should give those who want ‘change’ pause to think. Why? Because almost without exception the rich and powerful cheered Obama on.”

The reasons for this were twofold. First, in Obama they had a man they could trust, despite a bit of election rhetoric, to uphold their interests. He had never been a radical, and was an established Democrat who had voted the same way as Hillary Clinton 90 percent of the time. Despite running for the Democratic nomination against Clinton, he never got the treatment Bernie Sanders did. He was an insider who raised record amounts of campaign contributions from Wall Street.

Second, the Bush years were a disaster not just for millions of working class US citizens, Afghans and Iraqis – they were a disaster for the US establishment as well. The ruling class had enthusiastically backed Bush’s dream of a few quick wars to reshape the Middle East, install compliant regimes and secure another century of global dominance.

That dream became a nightmare as Iraqi resistance to US occupation grew. As the wars dragged on, failure became obvious and the costs were rising – trillions of dollars added to the US debt, more than 4,000 US soldiers killed, public opinion both around the world and at home becoming increasingly hostile and the whole empire bogged down and weakened.

They needed an exit strategy, both practically and ideologically. Bush began the former, which Obama continued, steadily pulling troops out of Iraq. But, crucially, Obama provided the latter as well. Bush’s policy failings were magnified by his bumbling, idiotic, cowboy-Republican, oil-tycoon persona. He was the Tony Abbott of US politics. Obama was the anti-Bush: Harvard educated, articulate, a Black president in a country built on slavery, and he made liberals swoon – all while continuing the bulk of Bush’s approach. Indeed, one of Obama’s first acts was to launch a troop surge of 30,000 into Afghanistan. It was a sign of things to come.

Obama had pledged that he would rein in the atrocities of the “war on terror” Bush had launched in 2001. He channelled the opposition not only to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to Guantánamo Bay and the mass torture program the Bush administration had unleashed around the world.

Instead, Obama has presided over a massive expansion of the shadowy national security state. Not a single purveyor of torture under the Bush regime was prosecuted. The practice of “rendition” continues, whereby torture is outsourced to US allies.

Sixty people remain prisoners at Guantánamo. Some have been there since it was first opened in 2002. Most have never faced any sort of trial, let alone a fair one. Others were officially approved for release several years ago but remain imprisoned. Thirty-one have officially been given the terrifying status of “a forever prisoner”. A huge expansion in surveillance has taken place, while whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have been mercilessly persecuted.

In a twisted way, these could be considered the lucky ones. Obama has exponentially expanded the policy of extrajudicial assassination via drone strikes. Under his watch there has been a 700 percent increase in drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as increased use in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The bulk of these strikes are now what are called “signature” strikes, whereby the CIA does not even know the identity of the target, but assumes, based on movements and associations, that they might be “terrorists” and therefore deserve to die.

At 14, Faheem Qureshi was a victim of Obama’s first drone strike, just three days after Obama became president. Two of Qureshi’s uncles and his cousin were killed in the blast, and he lost his left eye. Qureshi told the Guardian that all he knows about Obama “is what he has done to me and the people in Waziristan, and that is an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program”. Don’t expect these words to appear in the official histories.

Obama’s increased use of drone and other air strikes was part of his strategy to manage the US retreat from the Middle East. As troops were pulled out, bombs and an increased reliance on allies and proxy forces in the region became the dominant strategy to try to manage the mess the Bush years had created. Meanwhile, the Obama administration was trying to reorient US imperialism to deal with the bigger and longer term threat of the rise of China, with its “pivot to Asia”. These efforts were thrown into crisis again with the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011.

Caught off guard by an immense revolutionary wave of people demanding the fall of many of US imperialism’s favourite regimes, Obama paid lip-service to democracy while manoeuvring behind the scenes to aid the forces of counter-revolution, from Egypt to Syria to Bahrain and Yemen. He has increased weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, maintained $2 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military, and just approved the biggest ever gift of military aid to the apartheid state of Israel.

Meanwhile, in Central and South America, the Obama administration backed the violent military coup that overthrew Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, helped to destabilise left wing Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolas Maduro and most recently supported the parliamentary coup by corrupt right wing forces in Brazil.

On the domestic front, faced with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Obama repaid his Wall Street donors many times over. Even before his election, Obama interrupted his campaign in September 2008 to fly to Washington to cajole any reluctant Democrats to vote for Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout. The money kept on flowing, with total support to the banks running into many trillions of dollars.

Meanwhile, millions lost their jobs and their homes. There was no bailout for them. When Obama moved to rescue General Motors with billions more in bailouts, he made sure it was not just taxpayers, but also GM workers, who would pick up the tab. His restructure plan included 21,000 lay-offs – a third of the workforce – a 50 percent pay cut for any new hires and cuts to pensions.

As the misery of the economic crisis grew, alongside increasing inequality, disappointment in Obama began to set in. Tens of thousands of young people who had voted and campaigned for “change we can believe in” were losing patience. In this context, inspired by the Arab Spring and mass movements in Spain and Greece, the Occupy Wall Street movement was born.

Declaring, “We are the 99 percent”, they occupied parks and squares in hundreds of US cities. The high point was a demonstration of 100,000 in New York City. Under Obama’s watch, the peaceful encampments were dealt with by a violent FBI-coordinated police crackdown that resulted in thousands being arrested, tear-gassed and beaten. He was with the 1 percent.

His most high profile achievement, the “Obamacare” health reform, has proven to be another neoliberal fraud. A publicly funded universal health care system would cost far less than the trillions spent on war and bailouts, but it was never even on the cards. Instead, Obamacare forces people to buy private health insurance. Unsurprisingly, coverage has increased, along with skyrocketing premiums, in a country where most workers’ real wages remain lower than they were in 1970.

One area in which people most hoped Obama could make a real difference was racism. And yet under the first Black US president, hundreds of thousands have had to mobilise under the banner of Black Lives Matter against an unending tide of racist police shootings. Obama has offered only the most token recognition for the protest movement’s concerns.

Many have made excuses for the appalling record of the Obama administration. As it draws to a close, the sycophantic praise for the Obama power couple will begin in earnest. The Guardian gave us a taste with a fawning review of one of Michelle Obama’s recent speeches:

“With the touch of a poet, her speech last night shamed the tat and the tawdry of populism and held out the possibility of something better … She can find words that make pictures. She brings passion and intellectual clarity. She has an actor’s sense of timing. This morning she seems the world’s most complete leader.”

Who needs Brangelina?

Barack Obama has maintained an uncanny ability to avoid being blamed for the situation the US finds itself in. Partly this is due to the superficial approach of small-l liberals, for whom an eloquent speech and a crocodile tear are enough to forgive any number of crimes. Partly it is the persistence of lesser-evilism. Obama benefited greatly from not being Bush. Then he was attacked throughout his presidency by a range of racist Republican nutters who simultaneously denounced him as a communist and a new Hitler. Now he benefits from the inevitable comparison with Trump and Clinton.

This serves only to highlight the bankruptcy of lesser-evilism. Obama’s likely successor will be Hillary Clinton, a candidate so unpopular it took the miracle of Donald Trump for her to be electable. It’s hard to see how she will be as successful a salesperson for poverty and war as Obama has been.

Obama leaves behind a United States even more plagued by poverty and inequality. He leaves an empire soaked in the blood of yet more victims. But he also leaves behind a population more disgruntled with US capitalism and more sympathetic to the idea of socialism than in decades. It is in their struggles, against every aspect of this unjust system, that genuine hope lies.