Contemplating President Obama's once-heralded transformation of our nation, Victor Davis Hanson observes that "most of us are still not quite aware of how vastly different the world of 2013 is from even 2008."

Hanson notes that just as we were scarcely aware of the replacement of books and conversation with IPhones and texting, larger revolutions are flowing by our slumbering selves.

A few passages from this brilliant piece of writing illustrate the profound changes that we have barely noticed:

Discussing the Federal Reserve's money-printing and the consequent negligible savings interest rate, Hanson says

think of the billions of dollars in cash that are silently transferred from those who have saved to those who have no cash. The former receive little or no interest from the banks. The latter take out mortgages or car loans at historically low interest rates.

Did the president ever mention this revolution, among his boilerplate of "millionaires and billionaires," "pay your fair share," and "fat cats"?

Or what of the "good rich" and the "bad rich":

There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the "good rich" (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the "bad rich" (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people...

...We shrug at all this. A president who thunders to the nation that we must be on guard against the "well-off and well-connected" heads south to Palm Beach to meet his $1,000-an-hour golf pro...

Hanson next asks "when did the idea of citizenship largely disappear?" Given that it no longer seems to matter whether laws are enforced or what path to citizenship is taken or not, Hanson posits there is "now just a sort of nothingness," and that most have "napped through" the "revolutionary fact" that the entire immigration debate has become irrelevant, or in Hanson's word "superfluous."

And Mr. Hanson rhetorically asks "When did 7.8% unemployment become the new normal?" and "Are we always to borrow $1 trillion a year?"

The Hanson column saves its most scathing for last:

About four years ago the media just dissipated. Gone, buried...

...The media is a Ministry of Truth where spokespeople vie for superlatives -- a living "god,"  a man who creates tingles in our legs and is pictured as a "messiah" on our magazines. Each sermon is a new "Gettysburg Address"...

...Those noisy free-for-all press conferences are now like Xerxes's court at Persepolis, where toadies compete with kowtows...

Mr. Hanson concludes that

The world we knew is not the one we wake up to after a short nap. January 2009 now seems like a far-off dream, in a way that 2016 may be a nightmare.

On the current trajectory we are headed for a spending blowout on a crippled and crippling government-run health system, more new taxes in the name of everything from fairness to climate, a mortally wounded Second Amendment, a perilously weakened military, state-approved secular atheism, and a one-party redistributive capitalism a la the China so admired by Thomas Friedman and Barack Obama. 

And more revolutions that we may miss, even now swirling around the mind of the President. 

Read the Hanson column for his singular view on our changing nation.