My argument is that you could see the turning point in public opinion breaking a political arrangement that had looked untouchable (and downright tyrannical, with journalists being ostracized and people getting marginalized as "unpatriotic") just a few months earlier. Katrina is when even Republicans decided the regime they had supported since 2001 was not fit for purpose anymore.
> you overlook that after GWB, we doubled down on the “US consensus”
That's hindsight after a decade. Obama ran on a campaign of dramatic change; at the time he was seen as a massive disruption of the status-quo, way to the left of the Clintons - let alone of Cheney. Whether he then delivered on his original promises, and in which areas, is irrelevant to why he was voted in the first time.
Talk about revisionist history, my goodness.
The underlying issue is that Obama was beholden to the exact same corporate influences as Bush. You don't rise through Chicago politics that fast without some deals in place. This isn't a condemnation of Obama, by the way, but recognition of the system's vulnerability.
I grew up during the Clinton/Blair/Merkel era. I thought socialism was defeated in 1991. Everyone understood that markets and the private sector, with some levels of “nudges” as necessary, were the solution to everything. “Politics” was about how much you thought we should nudge in various directions, and whether you thought kids should learn about condoms or abstinence in school. So when Obama initially ran for office, I didn’t perceive Obama’s fundamentally neo-liberal capitalist world view as being a profound similarity between him and Bush. It wasn’t until people like Sanders and Corbyn started getting substantial traction that I realized we weren’t yet at the end of history and a commitment to the current economic world order was actually not universal.
The two had different rhetoric on guns, religion, and abortion, but very carefully preserved the detante on these social issues by not proposing any significant legislation affecting them. On energy policy, both supported fracking and coal. (Obama had some last minute 2015 environmental regulations, which were quickly rolled back by Trump, but they clearly aren’t a priority seeing as how he waited until the last year of his presidency to act.) On healthcare, both had significant measures to expand coverage. (Bush’s Medicare Part D was a $50 billion/year program, while ACA was estimated to be $95 billion/year.)
I grew up during the fall of the Iron Curtain in an Eastern European country, building Russian Spectrum (Z80) clones for the bloc, the USSR had positive and negative impacts in our lives. I still live in the apartment that I received during the communist era through my work.
However the intervention of the Americans through CIA operations, after the fall of the Iron Courtain, were mostly negative, and we're still suffering because of them.
Not everything is black or white in life and the story is much more complicated than the "Russia bad" the media portrays in America. But I guess each one of us is a victim of a propaganda machine.
Leaving aside the offensive comparison of the US to the USSR, you overlook that after GWB, we doubled down on the “US consensus” by electing Barack “drone strike” Obama. (I think Obama was a great President, but he was also very little different than George Bush except in his oration.)