And
so, we are at the end of a year that has brought a presidential
impeachment trial, a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 338,000
of us, a huge social movement for racial justice, a presidential
election, and a president who has refused to accept the results of that
election and is now trying to split his own political party.
It’s been quite a year.
But
I had a chance to talk with history podcaster Bob Crawford of the Avett
Brothers yesterday, and he asked a more interesting question. He
pointed out that we are now twenty years into this century, and asked
what I thought were the key changes of those twenty years. I chewed on
this question for awhile and also asked readers what they thought.
Pulling everything together, here is where I’ve come out.
In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980.
In
that era, political leaders on the right turned against the principles
that had guided the country since the 1930s, when Democratic President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided the nation out of the Great Depression
by using the government to stabilize the economy. During the Depression
and World War Two, Americans of all parties had come to believe the
government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a
basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure.
But
reactionary businessmen hated regulations and the taxes that leveled
the playing field between employers and workers. They called for a
return to the pro-business government of the 1920s, but got no traction
until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the Supreme
Court, under the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren,
unanimously declared racial segregation unconstitutional. That decision,
and others that promoted civil rights, enabled opponents of the New
Deal government to attract supporters by insisting that the country’s
postwar government was simply redistributing tax dollars from
hardworking white men to people of color.
That
argument echoed the political language of the Reconstruction years,
when white southerners insisted that federal efforts to enable formerly
enslaved men to participate in the economy on terms equal to white men
were simply a redistribution of wealth, because the agents and policies
required to achieve equality would cost tax dollars and, after the Civil
War, most people with property were white. This, they insisted, was
“socialism.”
To
oppose the socialism they insisted was taking over the East, opponents
of black rights looked to the American West. They called themselves
Movement Conservatives, and they celebrated the cowboy who, in their
inaccurate vision, was a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the
government but to be left alone to work out his own future. In this
myth, the cowboys lived in a male-dominated world, where women were
either wives and mothers or sexual playthings, and people of color were
savage or subordinate.
With
his cowboy hat and western ranch, Reagan deliberately tapped into this
mythology, as well as the racism and sexism in it, when he promised to
slash taxes and regulations to free individuals from a grasping
government. He promised that cutting taxes and regulations would expand
the economy. As wealthy people—the “supply side” of the economy--
regained control of their capital, they would invest in their businesses
and provide more jobs. Everyone would make more money.
From
the start, though, his economic system didn’t work. Money moved upward,
dramatically, and voters began to think the cutting was going too far.
To keep control of the government, Movement Conservatives at the end of
the twentieth century ramped up their celebration of the individualist
white American man, insisting that America was sliding into socialism
even as they cut more and more domestic programs, insisting that the
people of color and women who wanted the government to address
inequities in the country simply wanted “free stuff.” They courted
social conservatives and evangelicals, promising to stop the
“secularization” they saw as a partner to communism.
After
the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, talk radio spread the message
that Black and Brown Americans and “feminazis” were trying to usher in
socialism. In 1996, that narrative got a television channel that
personified the idea of the strong man with subordinate women. The Fox
News Channel told a story that reinforced the Movement Conservative
narrative daily until it took over the Republican Party entirely.
The
idea that people of color and women were trying to undermine society
was enough of a rationale to justify keeping them from the vote,
especially after Democrats passed the Motor Voter law in 1993, making it
easier for poor people to register to vote. In 1997, Florida began the
process of purging voter rolls of Black voters.
And so, 2000 came.
In
that year, the presidential election came down to the electoral votes
in Florida. Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more
than 540,000 votes over Republican candidate George W. Bush, but Florida
would decide the election. During the required recount, Republican
political operatives led by Roger Stone descended on the election
canvassers in Miami-Dade County to stop the process. It worked, and the
Supreme Court upheld the end of the recount. Bush won Florida by 537
votes and, thanks to its electoral votes, became president. Voter
suppression was a success, and Republicans would use it, and after 2010,
gerrymandering, to keep control of the government even as they lost
popular support.
Bush
had promised to unite the country, but his installation in the White
House gave new power to the ideology of the Movement Conservative
leaders of the Reagan Revolution. He inherited a budget surplus from his
predecessor Democrat Bill Clinton, but immediately set out to get rid
of it by cutting taxes. A balanced budget meant money for regulation and
social programs, so it had to go. From his term onward, Republicans
would continue to cut taxes even as budgets operated in the red, the
debt climbed, and money moved upward.
The
themes of Republican dominance and tax cuts were the backdrop of the
terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. That attack gave the country’s
leaders a sense of mission after the end of the Cold War and, after
launching a war in Afghanistan to stop al-Qaeda, they set out to export
democracy to Iraq. This had been a goal for Republican leaders since the
Clinton administration, in the belief that the United States needed to
spread capitalism and democracy in its role as a world leader. The wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq strengthened the president and the federal
government, creating the powerful Department of Homeland Security, for
example, and leading Bush to assert the power of the presidency to
interpret laws through signing statements.
The
association of the Republican Party with patriotism enabled Republicans
in this era to call for increased spending for the military and
continued tax cuts, while attacking Democratic calls for domestic
programs as wasteful. Increasingly, Republican media personalities
derided those who called for such programs as dangerous, or
anti-American.
But
while Republicans increasingly looked inward to their party as the only
real Americans and asserted power internationally, changes in
technology were making the world larger. The Internet put the world at
our fingertips and enabled researchers to decode the human genome,
revolutionizing medical science. Smartphones both made communication
easy. Online gaming created communities and empathy. And as many
Americans were increasingly embracing rap music and tattoos and LGBTQ
rights, as well as recognizing increasing inequality, books were
pointing to the dangers of the power concentrating at the top of
societies. In 1997, J.K. Rowling began her exploration of the rise of
authoritarianism in her wildly popular Harry Potter books, but her
series was only the most famous of a number of books in which young
people conquered a dystopia created by adults.
In
Bush’s second term, his ideology created a perfect storm. His
administration's disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed
more than 1,800 people and caused $125 billion in damage in and around
New Orleans in 2005, revealed how badly the new economy had treated
Black and Brown people, and how badly the destruction of domestic
programs had affected our ability to respond to disasters. Computers
permitted the overuse of credit default swaps that precipitated the 2008
crash, which then precipitated the housing crisis, as people who had
bet on the individualist American dream lost their homes. Meanwhile, the
ongoing wars, plagued with financial and moral scandals, made it clear
that the Republicans optimistic vision of spreading democracy through
military conflict was unrealistic.
In
2008, voters put Black American Barack Obama, a Democrat, into the
White House. To Republicans, primed by now to believe that Democrats and
Black people were socialists, this was an undermining of the nation
itself, and they set out to hamper him. While many Americans saw Obama
as the symbol of a new, fairer government with America embracing a
multilateral world, reactionaries built a backlash based in racism and
sexism. They vocally opposed a federal government they insisted was
pushing socialism on hardworking white men, and insisted that America
must show its strength by exerting its power unilaterally in the world.
Increasingly, the Internet and cell phones enabled people to have their
news cater to their worldview, moving Republicans into a world
characterized by what a Republican spokesperson would later call
"alternative facts."
And
so, in 2016, we faced a clash between a relentlessly changing nation
and the individualist ideology of the Movement Conservatives who had
taken over the Republican Party. By then, that ideology had become
openly radical extremism in the hands of Donald Trump, who referred to
immigrants as criminals, boasted of sexually assaulting women, and
promised to destroy the New Deal government once and for all.
In
the 2016 election, the themes of the past 36 years came together.
Embracing Movement Conservative individualist ideology taken to an
extreme, Trump was eager enough to make sure a Democrat didn't win that,
according to American intelligence services, he was willing to accept
the help of Russian operatives. They, in turn, influenced the election
through the manipulation of new social media, amplified by what had
become by then a Republican echo chamber in which Democrats were
dangerous socialists and the Democratic candidate, former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, was a criminal. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s
Citizens United decision which permitted corporate money to flow into
election campaigns, Trump also had the help of a wave of money from big
business; financial institutions spent $2 billion to influence the
election. He also had the support of evangelicals, who believed he would
finally give them the anti-abortion laws they wanted.
Trump
lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes but, as George W. Bush
before him, won in the Electoral College. Once in office, this president
set out to destroy the New Deal state, as Movement Conservatives had
called for, returning the country to the control of a small group of
elite businessmen who, theoretically, would know how to move the country
forward best by leveraging private sector networks and innovation. He
also set out to put minorities and women back into subordinate
positions, recreating a leadership structure that was almost entirely
white and male.
As
Trump tried to destroy an activist government once and for all,
Americans woke up to how close we have come to turning our democracy
over to a small group of oligarchs.
In
the past four years, the Women’s March on Washington and the MeToo
Movement has enabled women to articulate their demand for equality. The
travel ban, child separation policy for Latin American refugees, and
Trump’s attacks on Muslims, Latin American immigrants, and Chinese
immigrants, has sparked a defense of America’s history of immigration.
The Black Lives Matter Movement, begun in July 2013 after George
Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering teenager Trayvon Martin, has gained
power as Black Americans have been murdered at the hands of law
enforcement officers and white vigilantes, and as Black Americans have
borne witness to those murders with cellphone videos.
The
increasing voice of democracy clashed most dramatically with Trump’s
ideology in summer 2020 when, with the support of his Attorney General
William Barr, Trump used the law enforcement officers of the Executive
Branch to attack peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C. and in
Portland, Oregon. In June, on the heels of the assault on the protesters
at Lafayette Square, military officers from all branches made it clear
that they would not support any effort to use them against civilians.
They reiterated that they would support the Constitution. The refusal of
the military to support a further extension of Trump's power was no
small thing.
And
now, here we are. Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden by
more than 7 million votes and by an Electoral College split of 306 to
232. Although the result was not close, Trump refuses to acknowledge the
loss and is doing all he can to hamper Biden’s assumption of office.
Many members of the Republican Party are joining him in his attempt to
overturn the election, taking the final, logical step of Movement
Conservatism: denying the legitimacy of anyone who does not share their
ideology. This is unprecedented. It is a profound attack on our
democracy. But it will not succeed.
And
in this moment, we have, disastrously, discovered the final answer to
whether or not it is a good idea to destroy the activist government that
has protected us since 1933. In their zeal for reducing government, the
Trump team undercut our ability to respond to a pandemic, and tried to
deal with the deadly coronavirus through private enterprise or by
ignoring it and calling for people to go back to work in service to the
economy, willing to accept huge numbers of dead. They have carried
individualism to an extreme, insisting that simple public health
measures designed to save lives infringe on their liberty.
The
result has been what is on track to be the greatest catastrophe in
American history, with more than 338,000 of us dead and the disease
continuing to spread like wildfire. It is for this that the Trump
administration will be remembered, but it is more than that. It is a
fitting end to the attempt to destroy our government of the people, by
the people, and for the people.
