It's Evening in America: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

Part 4 of 8

Can I tell you something more?

As Vietnam slowly seeped from our collective psyche, much of the 1970s felt like a caesura from calamity and return to relative calm. Except for that zany episode when a bunch of bungling burglars broke into the Watergate office building in Washington D.C. trying to steal documents from the Democratic National Committee, and then a U.S. President tried to cover up his own involvement in what we learned was a wide-ranging effort to subvert democracy and maintain political power at any cost. Which became yet another litmus test of loyalty and proof whether you loved America or should leave it. There was economic stagflation, a gas shortage, the shameful scourge of disco, and at the end of the decade a hostage crisis in Iran, but relative to Vietnam and Kent State and Selma that all seemed rather tame.

In 1980, after serving just one term, American voters threw Jimmy Carter out of the chilly, solar-powered White House and elected a Hollywood actor who’s list of B-movie credits included Cattle Queen of Montana, She’s Working Her Way Through College, and Bedtime for Bonzo. He was also a two-term governor of California but so what?

His campaign advertising intentionally evoked the spirit of Manifest Destiny, holding us up as the ‘shining city on the hill’ and cheerily declaring that it was ‘morning in America’. A big part of Reagan’s appeal was that he actually believed it, and in retrospect it was likely the first noticeable sign of his advancing Alzheimer’s.

Many Americans, especially Republicans, look back on the eight years Reagan occupied the Oval Office as a halcyon time when it was indeed a bright, sunny morning and things were looking up. And during his two terms in office there were tens of millions who were firmly convinced the American Empire was very much on the rise.

I begged to differ then and will again do so now, but before I move on it’s worth noting that in today’s GOP the Gipper would be vilified as a woke liberal RINO and targeted by the MAGA minions with online vitriol and death threats. Which I guess proves elephants don’t have such long memories after all.

During his first inaugural speech, Reagan addressed our lingering economic malaise and said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” but he likely wasn’t fingering the entire federal state as a political bugbear, meaning only that business was being overregulated and that more free-market competition was needed to get the U.S. economy back on track. And deregulate he did, ending federal restrictions on the transportation, telecommunications, and banking industries which had the effect of providing more options and lower prices for consumers. But it also helped fuel a deep recession and together with huge tax cuts for the rich set us on course for a new Gilded Age.

The insidious effect of Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric was that ordinary citizens began to distrust the hand that feeds them and started to bite it. Quickly it became the GOP’s mainstream message, accepted as gospel by roughly half the country, that our government was turning us into a ‘nanny state’ and we were losing our individual freedoms and national identity.

This has unquestionably been a winning message at the ballot box for Republicans over the last four decades – does anyone else think it’s odd that people running for a seat of power in government say we should get rid of it? – but a losing one for our future as a group of truly united states. A government can be effective only so long as people believe it is effective, and by the end of the 1980s a whole lot of Americans didn’t believe that anymore.

The sudden collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 was hugely consequential for two reasons. First, it was a 9.0 geopolitical earthquake. With the shattered Soviet Empire now consisting of a friendly Russia run by a cherubic swill belly and a bunch of republics with a dearth of vowels in their names, and China still grudgingly and grindingly transitioning from a cultural revolution to an economic one, the United States was left as the world’s sole superpower. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it virtually overnight disarmed the common enemy which for more than four decades had loosely bound our political and social tribes together and created a false sense of unity. Now, the enemy was us.

The bitter irony being that at the apparent apotheosis of our global power and influence, cracks in the foundation of our body politic threatened to undermine the stability of the empire and left unattended could eventually prove to be irreparable.

Still, when Slick Willy Clinton ousted Poppy Bush from the White House in 1992, it seemed as though a majority, albeit a slim one, still believed that our system of government was acting in our best interests. But when a bunch of voters changed their minds about that and the so-called Republican Revolution gave them firm control of Congress, and a creepy guy with the creepy name of Newt declared war on compromise and civility, our politics fractured, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to put it back together again. From that time forward, Republicans – faced with unfavorable demographic trends, the rapid secularization of society, and shifting cultural mores – freely and almost gleefully fought their political battles using scorched-earth tactics, including but not limited to fear mongering, race baiting, smearing their opponents, and bald-faced lying.

Those tactics, cleverly packaged as ‘compassionate conservatism’ and given halting voice by the useful idiot that was George W. Bush, won the White House back for Republicans in 2000, if only by a hanging chad or two and thanks to a sympathetic Supreme Court.

Not long after on September 11, 2001, when 19 sick fucks flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing almost 3,000 Americans and injuring thousands more, the whole country was suddenly united again, and moreover a golden opportunity to demonstrate leadership on the world stage presented itself.

A chance for the empire to arrest its fall and rise once more.

Instead, all the hawkish neocons in the administration led by Vice-President Dick Cheney – the man who effectively was president but unelectable as such because he looked and acted like an overweight Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show – along with Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it was instead a golden opportunity to reshape the map and politics of the Middle East. So we invaded Iraq.

Part of Bush’s proclaimed ‘Axis of Evil’, Iraq was ruled under the iron fist of Saddam Hussein, and when it was discovered that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, we were apparently obligated to eliminate him and neuter his military, and free the Iraqi people from despotism.

Good plan, except there were no weapons of mass destruction, just some cherry-picked and doctored intelligence suggesting there were, and, as it turned out, the Iraqi people weren’t interested in trading Saddam for American hegemony. Because Karl Rove, Bush’s Mephistophelian top political advisor, remorselessly used the war as a political wedge, America was once again divided even though the dust hadn’t fully settled from 9/11. And any sense of unity and common purpose had vaporized like a twin tower.

The remainder of the Bush Jr. Era was stained by revelations that the rationale for the Iraq War was not based on faulty intelligence but outright fabrication, the badly botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and his badly botched attempt to privatize Social Security. The Aughts ought to have been a time of compassion, cooperation, and compromise, but instead were one of near total political paralysis.

‘W’ was so deeply unpopular by the end of his eight-year run, and America so ready for hope and change, that we astonishingly elected the first-ever person of color to the highest office in the land – the unfortunately named Barack Hussein Obama.

Sadly, reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, Obama proved to have feet of clay as president, and his weak and bland performance in office was a far cry from the campaign persona and soaring rhetoric. Not overlooking his remarkable achievement of healthcare reform and the Affordable Care Act – aka Obamacare –there’s no question he could’ve and should’ve been a more aggressive and forceful advocate for the farsighted agenda he championed. But right-wing opposition to his presidency was by no means based solely on objections to progressive policies. Millions of Americans were horrified a black man was in the White House and the racist backlash to his election was swift and severe.

The Tea Party movement, a bastard child of distrust in government and racial prejudice, purported to be a grass roots effort fighting for our individual liberties and freedom, but was in reality the second coming of the Confederacy.

And when Republicans flipped 63 seats in the 2010 midterms and took control of the House with 84 new members identified as Tea-Partiers, it amounted to psychological secession. Political division and dysfunction in America were now baked into the cake. The GOP’s policy position on virtually any issue was not just conservative in the extreme but basically ‘no’. And their only goal, which was publicly stated by not just rank-and-file members but leadership as well, was to deny Obama any legislative achievement going forward and see to it that he was a one-term president.

One could, and I do, point to 2010 as the year the Republican Party lost any interest in governance unless they had absolute power. The message was loud and clear that half a loaf wasn’t good enough anymore. They didn’t want to compromise, they wanted to win, and would try to do so at any cost.

Political parties and splinter groups within the parties have tried that approach many times in our history but failed because they did not command broad public support. Up until 2010, as crazy as it sounds today, a majority of Americans both on the right and the left wanted their elected representatives giving voice to and fighting hard for their views, but to eventually work something out and get shit done.

When John Boehner, out of disgust with the Tea Party Caucus and their unprincipled intransigence, dropped the gavel and rage-quit the Speakership of the House in 2015, it seemed as if the movement had run its course. But Joe the Plumber and the booboisie didn’t agree. Supercharged by the new phenomenon of social media it was clear there were a ton of teabaggers, and they were hopping mad about not just a black president but a whole host of cultural issues which made them feel marginalized, and threatened their way of life. By the time Obama’s two terms came to an end it was apparent that the Tea Party had tapped into a very odious subterranean river of rancor and racism and brought it to the surface of American politics.

But that’s not all I wanted to tell you either.

To be continued next week…