American Politics Before September 11, 2001

• George H. W. Bush’s election signaled Americans’ continued embrace of Reagan’s conservative program and further evidenced the utter disarray of the Democratic Party

  • American liberalism, which was triumphant in the 1960s, was now in full retreat

• The Soviet Union also collapsed during Bush’s tenure, due to a stagnant economy and numerous international and domestic issues

  • The USSR officially disbanded on December 25th, 1991

  • The dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the world’s only remaining superpower, ending the Cold War

    • However, new markets began to rise

• The post-Cold War world was not without international conflicts

  • When Iraq invaded the small but oil-rich nation of Kuwait in 1990, Congress granted President Bush approval to intervene, laying the groundwork for intervention (Operation Desert Shield) in August and commenced combat operations (Operation Desert Storm) in January 1991

    • With the memories of Vietnam still fresh, many Americans were hesitant to support military action that could expand into a war, but the Gulf War was a swift victory for the US

• President Bush’s popularity seemed to suggest an easy reelection in 1992, but Bush had still not won over the New Right, the aggressively conservative wing of the Republican Party

  • After Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, a new form of liberalism emerged

    • They were conservative Democrats, so-called New Democrats

    • In his first term, Clinton set out an ambitious agenda that included an economic stimulus package, universal health insurance, a continuation of the Middle East peace talks, welfare reform, and a completion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to abolish trade barriers between the United States, Mexico, and Canada

      • Clinton’s presidency was a controversial one that ended with his impeachment

September 11 and the War on Terror

September 11th, 2001

• On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen operatives of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization hijacked four passenger planes on the East Coast

  • Two of the planes were flown into the twin tours, one flew into the Pentagon, and one was brought down by passengers to a field in Pennsylvania

  • In less than two hours, nearly 3000 Americans had been killed, stunning the country

• American intelligence agencies quickly identified the radical Islamic militant group al-Qaeda, led by the wealthy Saudi Osama bin Laden, as the perpetrators of the attack

  • Sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the country’s Islamic government, al-Qaeda was responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and a string of attacks at U.S. embassies and military bases across the world

War on Terror

• Bush advanced what was sometimes called the Bush Doctrine, a policy in which the United States would have the right to unilaterally and preemptively make war on any regime or terrorist organization that posed a threat to the United States or to U.S. citizens

  • This led the US into conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq

• Osama bin Laden relocated al-Qaeda to Afghanistan after the country fell to the Taliban in 1996

  • After September 11, with a broad authorization of military force, Bush administration officials made plans for military action against al-Qaeda and the Taliban

• What would become the longest war in American history began with the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001

• The capital, Kabul, fell on November 13th after numerous air strikes

• As American troops struggled to contain the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq

  • After the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991, American officials established economic sanctions, weapons inspections, and no-fly zones

  • In 1998, a standoff between Hussein and the United Nations over weapons inspections led President Bill Clinton to launch punitive strikes aimed at debilitating what was thought to be a developed chemical weapons program

  • The United States and Iraq remained at odds throughout the 1990s and early 2000a, when Bush administration officials began championing “regime change”

    • The administration publicly denounced Saddam Hussein’s regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction

    • Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, giving Bush the power to make war in Iraq

The End of the Bush Years

• The War on Terror was a centerpiece in the race for the White House in 2004

  • Bush was attacked for the ongoing inability to contain the Iraqi insurgency or to find weapons of mass destruction, revelations of abuse by American soldiers, and the inability to find Osama bin Laden

  • Moreover, many enemy combatants who had been captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were “detained” indefinitely at a military prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba

    • “Gitmo” became infamous for its harsh treatment, indefinite detentions, and torture of prisoners

    • Bush defended the War on Terror, and his allies attacked critics for failing to “support the troops”

• The second Bush term saw the continued deterioration of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Bush’s presidency would take a bigger hit from his perceived failure to respond to the domestic tragedy that followed Hurricane Katrina’s devastating hit on the Gulf Coast

  • Katrina became a symbol of a broken administrative system, a devastated coastline, and irreparable social structures that allowed escape and recovery for some and not for others

• Immigration, meanwhile, had become an increasingly potent political issue

  • Illegal immigration continued, often at a great human cost, but nevertheless fanned widespread anti-immigration sentiment among many American conservatives

  • Moderate conservatives feared upsetting business interests’ demand for cheap, exploitable labor and alienating large voting blocs by stifling immigration, and moderate liberals feared upsetting anti-immigrant groups by pushing too hard for the liberalization of immigration laws

The Great Recession

• The Great Recession began, as most American economic catastrophes began, with the bursting of a speculative bubble

  • Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, home prices continued to climb, and financial services firms looked to cash in on what seemed to be a safe but lucrative investment

  • Decades of financial deregulation had rolled back Depression-era restraints and again allowed risky business practices to dominate the world of American finance

• Mortgages had been so heavily leveraged that when American homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole system collapsed

  • In order to prevent the crisis from spreading, President Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the federal government immediately began pouring billions of dollars into the industry, propping up hobbled banks

• Massive giveaways to bankers created shock waves of resentment throughout the rest of the country, contributing to Obama’s 2008 election

• The Great Recession only magnified already rising income and wealth inequalities

  • A generation of workers coming of age within the crisis, moreover, had been savaged by the economic collapse

The Obama Years

• By the 2008 election, with Iraq still in chaos, Democrats were ready to embrace the antiwar position and sought a candidate that shared similar views: Barack Obama

  • During the election, Obama won the support of an increasingly antiwar electorate

  • When an already fragile economy finally collapsed in 2007 and 2008, Bush’s policies were widely blamed, and Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was tied to those policies

  • Obama won a convincing victory in the fall and became the nation’s first African American president

• President Obama’s first term was marked by domestic affairs, especially his efforts to combat the Great Recession and pass a national healthcare law

• Despite Obama’s dominant electoral victory, national politics fractured, and a conservative Republican firewall quickly arose against the Obama administration

  • The Tea Party became a catch-all term for a diffused movement of fiercely conservative and politically frustrated American voters

• Obama’s most substantive legislative achievement proved to be a national healthcare law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

  • Obama’s plan forsook liberal models of a national healthcare system and instead adopted a heretofore conservative model of subsidized private care

• Meanwhile, in 2009, President Barack Obama deployed seventeen thousand additional troops to Afghanistan as part of a counterinsurgency campaign that aimed to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda and the Taliban

  • In May 2011, U.S. Navy Sea, Air, and Land Forces (SEALs) conducted a raid deep into Pakistan that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden

  • The United States and NATO began a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011, with an aim of removing all combat troops by 2014

Stagnation

• In 2012, Barack Obama won a second term by defeating Republican Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts

  • However, Obama’s inability to control Congress and the ascendancy of Tea Party Republicans stunted the passage of meaningful legislation

    • Politics, economics, and race relations had grown stagnant

• The economy continued its halfhearted recovery from the Great Recession

  • The Obama administration campaigned on little to specifically address the crisis and, faced with congressional intransigence, accomplished even less

  • While corporate profits climbed and stock markets soared, wages stagnated and employment sagged for years after the Great Recession

• But if money no longer flowed to American workers, it saturated American politics

  • The influence of money in politics only heightened partisan gridlock, further blocking bipartisan progress on particular political issues

• Climate change became a permanent and major topic of public discussion and policy in the twenty-first century

  • The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in 1995 that there was a “discernible human influence on global climate”

  • American public opinion and political action still lagged far behind the scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming

    • Much of the resistance to addressing climate change is economic

American Carnage

The 2016 Presidential Election and Aftermath

• In the 2016 presidential race, Republicans spurned their political establishment and nominated a real estate developer and celebrity billionaire, Donald Trump, who:

  • Decried the tyranny of political correctness and promised to Make America Great Again

  • Swore to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants and bar Muslim immigrants

• The Democrats, meanwhile, flirted with the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, before ultimately nominating Hillary Clinton, who, after eight years as the first lady in the 1990s, had served eight years in the Senate and four more as secretary of state

• Trump and Clinton were the most unpopular nominees in modern American history, with most Americans viewing each candidate unfavorably

• With incomes frozen, politics gridlocked, race relations tense, and headlines full of violence, such frustrations only channeled a larger sense of stagnation, which upset traditional political allegiances

• In the end, despite winning nearly three million more votes nationwide, Clinton failed to carry key Midwestern states where frustrated white, working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party and swung their support to the Republicans → Donald Trump won the presidency

• Political divisions only deepened after the election as a nation already deeply split by income, culture, race, geography, and ideology continued to come apart

  • New policies, meanwhile, enflamed widening cultural divisions

    • Trump pushed for a massive wall along the border to supplement the fence built under the Bush administration

    • He began ordering the deportation of so-called Dreamers (students who were born elsewhere but grew up in the United States) and immigration officials separated refugee-status-seeking parents and children at the border

  • Under Trump’s presidency, the nation only spiraled deeper into cultural and racial divisions, domestic unrest, and growing anxiety about the nation’s future

    • Refusing to settle for a careful statement or defer to bureaucrats, Trump smashed many of the norms of the presidency and raged on his personal Twitter account

      • He also lied constantly, which led directly to January 6, 2021

January 6th, 2021

• In November 2020, Joseph R. Biden, a longtime senator from Delaware and former Vice President under Barack Obama, running alongside Kamala Harris, a California senator who would become the nation’s first female vice president, convincingly defeated Donald Trump at the polls

  • Trump refused to concede the election

    • He said that the election had been “stolen”, votes had been manufactured, and the whole system was rigged

    • So when, on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, the president again articulated a litany of lies about the election and told the crowd of angry conspiracy-minded protestors to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” they did

• Thousands of Trump’s followers converged on the Capitol

  • Roughly one in seven of the more than 500 rioters later arrested were affiliated with extremist groups organized around conspiracy theories, white supremacy, and the right-wing militia movement

  • The rioters held the Capitol for several hours before the National Guard cleared it that evening