| WHEN AMERICA STOPPED BEING GREAT A History of the Present Nick Bryant London: Bloomsbury Continuum, March 2021 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4729-8548-4 | ||||
| ISBN 1-4729-8548-6 | 374pp. | HC | $30.00 | |
It is often true that outsiders to the United States more easily perceive the underpinnings of the various crises that arise within our borders. Britishers, joined with us by a mostly common language but raised in a different tradition, are especially well-placed to obtain such insights. One such is Edward Luce, Washington correspondent for the Financial Times and author of Time To Start Thinking. Another is this author, Nick Bryant, who is the BBC's New York correspondent. He begins by assessing what the scope of his inquiry should be.
For anyone trying to make sense of the present, the question is always how far to reach back. But to explain how Donald Trump made it to the White House in 2017, and came close to renewing his tenancy in the 2020 election, I am going to retrace my own steps. So I'll begin with my first trip to the United States, when the mood was more buoyant. It was the time of Ronald Reagan's 'It's morning in America,' a wholly different place from the dark dystopia of Donald Trump's 'American carnage' inaugural address, the mass mourning of Covid-19 and the storming of the US Capitol. – page 13 |
Nick Bryant's narrative covers a lot of ground: from the presidency of Richard Nixon through those of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. He interweaves it with some of his personal story. He first visited America, the land that fired his imagination, as a teenager. He stayed with a British emigré family living near Los Angeles. Arriving just in time to catch the opening of the 1984 Olympics, he found the country lived up to his expectations. His first chapter summarizes this progression of presidents, with emphasis on Reagan, whose contradictory record in the Oval Office set the tone for the country's slow political transition from collegial bipartisanship to our current extreme right-wing tribalism.
That tribalism fed on the distrust of government that sprang from Nixon's escapade in Watergate, from Reagan's mantra that government is the problem, from Bill Clinton's triangulating veer to the center, from George W. Bush's many mistakes, and from the Obama administration's failure to address the Great Recession's impact on Main Street as much as it did for Wall Street. But the public's disenchantment came not totally from a failure of leadership at the federal level; it flowed as well from structural changes in the economy due to automation, from jobs shipped overseas in search of higher corporate profits, from the gradual erosion of employee benefits, and from soaring income inequality.
In the 1994 congressional midterms, Republicans picked up 54 seats. They ended 40 years of Democratic domination of the House of Representatives, and also won the Senate. Even the liberal bastion of New York State fell to them as George Pataki defeated Mario Cuomo for governor. This generational shift in the framework of American politics was crowned by the ascendance of Georgia's Newt Gingrich to the Speakership of the House, and it marked the first time since Reconstruction that House Republicans from states of the Old Confederacy outnumbered Democrats from that area.
Gingrich labeled politics as "war without blood."1 He replaced Bob Michel, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and practiced a bipartisan form of leadership. Michel's top priority had been the defeat of Soviet communism; for Gingrich it was the defeat of American liberalism. He soon got his bandwagon rolling.2
President Bill Clinton struggled to remain relevant. But the massacre of 168 people, including 19 children, at Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building on 16 April 1995 restored him to prominence. The bombing allowed him to act as consoler-in-chief and appeal to the moderate middle — in sharp contrast to the metaphorical bomb-throwers like Gingrich and talk-radio elites like Rush Limbaugh. "There is nothing patriotic about hating your country," Clinton said in a speech, "or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government." (See pp. 112-113.)
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When Clinton spoke, as a candidate, of ending welfare as we know it, he was essentially endorsing Reagan's contention in 1988 that 'the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won'. Following the Republican Revolution led by the conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich in 1994, Clinton ended up almost ventriloquising Reagan. 'The era of big government is over', he declared in his 1995 State of the Union address, in what sounded more like a capitulation rather than accomodation. – Page 59 |
The revolution that Gingrich began in 1994 with his "Contract for America"3 presaged a Republican takeover of Congress in that year's midterm elections: they gained 54 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate, ending a period of Democratic dominance that had lasted since 1953. Over the next 25 years, the precepts of the Contract spread throughout the Republican Party. Seen in the rear-view mirror, it proved to be a signpost pointing to the GOP's transmogrification into a party focused exclusively on power and money. The result was Trump's trashing of the presidency. Today, out of office but not out of influence, he works with Gingrich on a new Contract with America. Again, Republicans are signing up.4
The late Phil Ochs had a song called "The Ringing of Revolution." He called it a cinematic song, as it depicts a corrupt federal government besieged and toppled by angry citizens. This resonates with me, for it is exactly what extreme right-wingers have been talking about since before Trump entered the Oval Office — and they are part of that government. The difference is, they don't really want to replace it with something that better serves the American people; they want to replace it with themselves as rulers accountable only to their wealthy patrons.
Whatever the year, whoever were the candidates, reporting on the US primary season always felt like entering the gates of a journalistic theme park and roaming its various sectors with a notebook in one hand and popcorn in the other. Caucus-land in Iowa, with its snow-covered plains and Midwestern manners; Live-Free-or-Die-land in New Hampshire, with its white-steepled churches and ever so cranky voters; and Confederacy-land in South Carolina, with its barbecue, black churches and Stars and Bars flags. To make sense of 2016, though, one had to visit the Old Industrial Heartland. Some Beltway commentators made do with reading the bestselling field guide, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance's memoir, with its first-hand account of white working-class despondency and self-pity. 'We talk about the value of hard work,' Vance wrote of his fellow Appalachians, 'but tell ourselves that the reason we are not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all of the jobs went to the Chinese.' To see the book come to life, all one had to do was fly to Pittsburgh and then drive out to the neighbouring valleys, with their onion-domed Russian orthodox churches, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls and windowless bars — the landscape of The Deer Hunter. The most relevant local landmarks were the skeletal remains of the old steelworks, with their carcass-like furnaces, and the empty shells of derelict factories that now served as echo chambers for the rallying cry 'Make America Great Again.' From 2001 to 2013, some 65,000 factories had closed across the country with the loss of five million manufacturing jobs. These post-industrial landscapes provided the seedbed of Trump-land. He was a beneficiary of a malfunctioning economy where all but 200,000 of the 11.6 million 'good' jobs created since the Great Recession had gone to those with a bachelor's degree or some college education. – page 238 |
Thus the American public had real reasons to complain. Yet, in the main, the antipathy between our two main political parties can be laid to Republican reliance on cultural "hot-button" issues — abortion, rising secularism, growing tolerance of same-sex marriage and related issues, the perceived "onslaught' of undocumented immigrants, and ever-simmering racism — to distract from their party's inability to come up with effective policy prescriptions.
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To fight their class and culture war, these hollowed-out communities co-opted a New York billionaire, a 'bridge and tunnel' guy from the outer boroughs who had always been mocked by Manhattan's elites. Trump intermixed the politics of grievance with the politics of vengeance, which is why the 'Lock Her Up' chant directed against Hillary Clinton became so popular. Trump wasn't so much aspirational as avenging: a vigilante candidate. He promised to settle a few scores with the political elites, China and immigrants. Tellingly, he had nothing to say about the real job-killer: automation. From 2006 to 2013, it was estimated that trade accounted for the extinction of 13 percent of manufacturing jobs. Robots and other factors at home killed off 88 percent of these jobs. It was easier to scapegoat NAFTA, China, and Mexican immigrants, and to stoke the nostalgic nationalism that was central to his appeal. Trump was the main beneficiary of a Rust Belt revolt against robots. – Pages 239-240 |
What this all boils down to is exactly what Nick Bryant promised us: a history of how America drifted to the brink of collapse.
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As any student of this country knows, the notion of American decline is as old as America itself. Paradoxically, this has been especially true of the post-war years, when the United States was truly in the ascendant. Sputnik, Vietnam, the domestic upheaval of the 1960s, the malaise of the 1970s, the rise of Japan in the '80s and early '90s, the rise of the rest. America has routinely been cast as a has-been nation, often at the very moment it was making a comeback. There is a vital difference, however, between then and now. The national turnarounds of the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s relied on a level of political collaboration in Washington largely absent today. Faced with the post-Sputnik panic in the 1950s, patriotic bipartisanship flourished. Faced with a black revolt in the '60s that threatened to tear the country apart, right-minded Democrats and Republicans came together to pass the landmark civil rights acts. Faced with a criminal presidency during Watergate, there was eventually a cross-party push to force Nixon from office. Alas, a solutions-based politics has given way to a conflict-based politics. Problem-solving has given way to partisan point-scoring. Just about the only thing politicians in Washington have in common is that they breathe the same toxic air. Now, even catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the coronavirus have become accelerants of polarisation. We are no longer talking about decline, a strain of thought I resisted until returning to live here in 2013, when the body of evidence became too overwhelming to ignore. This has become about disintegration, the breakdown of national cohesion. America now feels like a continent rather than a country a geographic expression rather than a properly functioning state. Shared land occupied by antagonistic tribes. The electoral map, with the west coast and northeast coloured blue and the states in the middle of the country shaded red, looks partitionist. The very term United States is oxymoronic. There are two Americas with very different realities. – Pages 340-341 |
Well researched, with good notes and index, When America Stopped Being Great is a valuable summary of American politics of the past sixty years. I give it top marks and rate it a must-read and a keeper.
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