By Aly Kamadia, Editor In Chief of iDose
The American era had been buried. Donald Trump’s presidency represented its eulogy. The questions that Americans faced were clear: what led to a premature death and could an American era be resurrected?
In answering these questions, looking back to September 11th, 2001 was both informative and timely.
9/11 & Bush Junior
On what would have otherwise been a regular Tuesday morning, terrorists highjacked three airplanes that were converted into missiles which flew into the US Pentagon and New York City’s Twin Towers. Scenes once restricted to the imagination of Hollywood thrillers became crimes against humanity inflicted upon innocent Americans.
George W. Bush’s administration reacted swiftly. Within a mere couple of months the Taliban – who were controlling most of Afghanistan and had provided shelter to Al-Qaeda – were overthrown. Osama Bin Laden had (temporarily) evaded capture. Though on December 5th (2001) at a conference in Bonn, Germany, major parties including the United Nations agreed to install Hamid Karzai as head of the interim government.
For neocon hawks, Afghanistan wasn’t enough. The 9/11 attacks were opportunistically seized as a pretense to initiate one of their wildest fantasies: regime change in Iraq (recall that invading Iran and Syria was also part of the plan).
Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Though inconvenient facts didn’t deter the Bush administration from unleashing a propaganda campaign that would pave the way for the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. They felt no shame in cherry picking intelligence to advertise the laughable narrative that Saddam had, or was on the verge of acquiring “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
But their delusions of building democracies in the Middle East at the barrel of a gun didn’t conform to reality.
As the years unfolded, the disasters of the Iraq War became increasingly transparent. Even if morality and ‘unintended consequences’ were swept aside (e.g. thousands of Americans returning in coffins, hundreds and thousands of dead Iraqis who despised Saddam, millions of refugees etc. etc.), Iraq was the largest strategic foreign policy blunder in contemporary American history.
Enter Obama & “Change you can believe in”
The American public was so frustrated that by 2007, an unknown man (at the time) whose name many Americans had to learn how to pronounce, ‘Barack’ Obama, genuinely felt he had a shot at becoming president. As an intellectual who wasn’t respected by many elders within both parties, while laughed at for daring to challenge the invisible ‘Clinton machine’ (i.e. in the Democratic primaries), Obama’s masterful oratory and intelligent campaign proved to be a deadly combination for the moment.
The single most decisive issue that Obama used in defeating Hillary Clinton was her vote to authorize the Iraq war. Obama had voted against it, and Hillary Clinton’s incompetent campaign judgement proved fatal. Refusing to apologize for giving Bush and company the green light for Iraq had led to her defeat. (To be fair, almost two decades after the ‘war on terror’ began, most members of the elite class hadn’t apologized for Iraq. As was too often the case, many of their careers had actually immensely benefited. An example was the Democratic primaries that would follow in 2016, which were in many ways a Clinton coronation ceremony.)
Obama would soon deploy this same criticism in the general election against (the late) John McCain. Though even if Iraq hadn’t happened, McCain didn’t have a shot at beating Obama. Because it was hardly only some influential American political elites that were guilty of harboring delusional fantasies. The ideological allegiance of various economic elites along with the greed and stupidity of too many business elites had ushered in a financial crisis (2008). The Great Recession’s chaos unfolded with an intensity that crowned the Great Depression (1930’s) as its most recent point of comparison.
The ‘free market’ ideology that had been ushered in since the Reagan years had been shattered. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (1986-2007), who had been a pivotal player (perhaps even the pivotal player) in instituting this economic way of life, gave testimony in 2008 that was carved into historical memory.
During an exchange at a Congressional hearing, Representative Henry Waxman asked Greenspan whether, “in other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right. It was not working.”
To which Greenspan responded, “…precisely. That’s precisely the reason I was shocked.” (Despite some remarkable talents, Greenspan’s understanding of ‘how the world worked’ was laughable to anyone who has digested real philosophy – unlike that of Ayn Rand’s. One wishes he had never attended her apartment meetings mentioned in his memoirs.)
Quite the statement. For it was the very weight of his particular world view that was pushing the American economy in freefall, ready to greet the first African American president.
During his eight years in office, Obama undoubtedly made some constructive moves (some of which would be later overturned by the next president). Though if graded on his ability to deliver even a notable fraction of the “change you can believe in” that he so eloquently campaigned on (recall that Obama ran as a populist president, whose rhetoric was so powerful that he had become a walking god), Obama’s presidency turned out to be an utter failure.
When Obama won the presidency, he delivered a solid and hopeful speech. Change had finally come, only to be greeted 8 years later by the change of Donald Trump
It was foolish for anyone to blame Obama for creating the conditions that allowed for Trump’s rise. Though undeniably obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that at least since Reagan, he followed in a list of presidents who were hardly visionaries. The strategically odd foreign policy of endless wars continued; the surveillance state intensified; recycled economic elites were given too much influence amidst the economic chaos. (To some of their credit, intellectuals like Ben Bernanke had long understood the importance of economic history.) And despite the supermajority that Obama enjoyed when entering office, during his entire presidency, the hardships of regular Americans continued uninterrupted by any ‘change they could believe in’.
Post Obama
So divorced from reality remained some of the American elite that they continued to hold the view of being the ‘leader of the free world’ – a sentiment along the lines of a sermon once delivered by a former secretary of state. Madeleine Albright had famously proclaimed, “…we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
But behind closed doors out in the open for everyone to see, even American allies knew there was no evidence to suppose that Americans were taller or could see ‘further’’. If they could, why was Donald Trump president of the most powerful nation on the planet?
While the US remained the uncontested military power (acutely aware of China’s continued rapid ascendance), the Iraq invasion and a foreign policy of endless war had paralyzed US credibility on international affairs. America remained the world’s most dynamic economy, though its brand of neoliberal capitalism was hardly something that elicited envy.
No doubt that citizens across the world admired the freedoms afforded to American citizens (as one example). But what good were certain individual liberties if one’s life was shackled by miserable economic conditions? What good, for example, was the constitutional right to peacefully assemble if in the real world, an individual’s jobs didn’t provide them the practical right to eat a full meal, or have restful sleep?
More broadly, given that the US was the richest nation in human history (measured in absolute terms), what might others not have been so jealous of?
Were they jealous of endless and strategically-allergic wars that came at a price tag of $ 6,000,000,000,000 (six TRILLION dollars) and excessive American blood? Jealous of the emergence of mass surveillance – on the level that Orwell hadn’t dreamt of for authoritarian states let alone free societies?
Were they jealous that four in ten Americans couldn’t afford a $400 emergency (while a small few made a millions dollars a day)? Jealous that nearly 15 million American children were living in poverty? Jealous that they saw “left” Democratic presidential candidates arguing against medicare for all American citizens (something every other advanced country in the world enjoyed)?
Whether maintaining global dominance or not, for a glorified American era to return, a necessary (though insufficient) condition was to have the White House occupied by an astute visionary. Trump not only flunked the test, but his face turned into an effective advertisement for dictators touting the dangers of democracy.
Too many Democratic presidential candidates responded with solutions that saw Trump as an aberration to be simply replaced, along with a side order of some incremental change. Neither their policies nor visions acknowledged that the premature death of the American era was a result of a bizarre foreign policy of endless war and a fanatical devotion to a particular brand of ‘free market’ capitalism. Thus it was easy to fall prey to cynicism.
But optimism’s eyes were wide open too, staring at us in ways that were too alluring to ignore. Though tiny, there were at least a handful of Democratic presidential prospects who understood that while Trump was a menace, it was well past time to wage a war not only on him (via election), but on the very conditions that paved the way for his rise. Success in that fight, while far from inevitable, would indeed place the United States as the true leader of the free world.
Aly Kamadia is Editor-In-Chief of iDose. To read more articles by Kamadia, click here. To read the Editor’s message, click here.
Note: The views expressed in this article are the author/s, and not the position of Intellectual Dose, or iDose (its online publication). iDose reserves all rights, unless stated otherwise.
