Ok if you don't want to acknowledge OPs comment is indicative of divisive obnoxiousness, fine.
"The tea party or true conservatism rarely rose to the level of Obama's campaign rhetoric?"
What? What are you talking about?
For one, Fox News pushed the validity of the tea party movement even though it was a small minority. "True conservatism" I don't know what you're referring to. If Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah plain are hallmarks of the tea party as they are portrayed (by Fox News, which maybe you are condemning), they are also guilty of the same divisiveness of mainstream republicanism if you look at their stance on immigration, military intervention, and race, guess what it's the same mainstream repubs but just more hawkish fiscally. For sure "true conservatism" (whatever you're defining that as) is not found in Trump and the alt-right. If you're referring to libertarianism, yea I agree, Ron Paul and libertarians share no blame in the divisiveness that 90s conservative media and mainstream republicanism has wrought from decades of dog whistle social politics that fired up their base over racism, terrorism, xenophobia, and identity politic, while pulling the rug out economically for them.
Second, if you don't know the If you don't know the history of the southern realignment in the 60s, please do some reading on it. Read "politics and rage" about george Wallace and the party realignment in the 60s and the 70s. In sum, Republicanism turned to identity "values" politics to court the southern white vote and form the modern Republican Party by playing off of racism, xenophobia, Cold War fearmongering, terrorism fearmongering, and "rule of law" pandering, while simultaneously dismantling the middle class and fueling massive debt increases (Reagan tripled the debt without actually going to war.
If you don't know the history of the erosion of the fairness doctrine and equal air time regulation by republicans and the subsequent rise of conservative talk radio and Fox, go read about it. Fox created the entertainment partisan conflict driven mainstream media as we know it. If you hate the way CNN and MSNBC report the news, blame roger ailes and Fox. But by the time Obama got in office the decades of terrorism fear mongering, racism dog whistling, xenophobia, and divisive right wing media gave us the most absurd congressional obstructionism by a party to date in American politics. Yes, the tea party arose from pushback on Bush repub fiscal irresponsibility, but much of it was fueled by seething Fox Newsish hatred for Obama's progressivish policies, which, If you look at the numbers, he held the debt more steady than bush or Reagan, also a large share of his debt load came from Bush 2 bailout. I don't even consider the tea party to be true libertarians, their only policies were just people being pissed off about taxes and debt spending. Ron Paul and that movement was legit and didn't engage in republican divisiveness over social issues because they were actually social libertarians.
Obama's rhetoric can hardly be called divisive. He highlighted problematic social issues in the most delicate goddamn way. If you really think that republicans (decades of dog whistle racial identity politics and outright homophobia and xenophobia), Trump, and the alt right shouldn't take a lion share of the blame for the current absurdity you must only watch Fox News, read Drudge Report, and watch infowars all day.
Talk about incoberent policies haha, massive tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves? Gtfo. Look at historical rates of debt in this country and historical rates of wage growth across income distributions under dem leadership and repub leadership. Read political history books, research policies and their historical effectiveness, read books on economics, just please do more to find things out about policy. I used to be a libertarian (still hold some of those principles in some ways) and majored in Econ with heavy study in Austrian economics. I used to dislike Obama until I started realizing that the right was out of their minds ridiculous in the way they treated Obama and their default hatred for everything and anything he said or did. I found myself saying "jeez he's not that bad". If you don't think Trump's stupid purposeful trolling since he opened his mouth on birtherism in 2010 (playing on decades of Repub identity politics dog whistling, what a surprise it worked) isn't one of the primary catalysts for the shitty state we are in then you need to start doing some reading to catch up with reality. If you want to talk dem faults for going the way of repubs and chasing corporate money, reverting to identity politics primarily for their base appea (at least they've been on the right goddamn side of history for the most part since the realignment), I can do that. I don't agree with radical stupidity of calling everyone racist and sexist, but there's a reason that overreaction occurred, doesn't justify it, just saying there's a reason it began to occur in recent years.