The time when America stopped being great
By Nick Bryant BBC News, New York
A year ago
Donald Trump produced the biggest political upset in modern-day America, but
were there historical clues that pointed to his unexpected victory?
Dominance
Shattered confidence
Flying into
Los Angeles, a descent that takes you from the desert, over the mountains, to
the outer suburbs dotted with swimming pools shaped like kidneys, always brings
on a near narcotic surge of nostalgia.
This was the
flight path I followed more than 30 years ago, as I fulfilled a boyhood dream
to make my first trip to the United States. America had always fired my
imagination, both as a place and as an idea. So as I entered the immigration
hall, under the winsome smile of America's movie star president, it was hardly
a case of love at first sight.
My
infatuation had started long before, with Westerns, cop shows, superhero comic
strips, and movies such as West Side Story and Grease. Gotham exerted more of a
pull than London. My 16-year-old self could quote more presidents than prime
ministers. Like so many new arrivals, like so many of my compatriots, I felt an
instant sense of belonging, a fealty borne of familiarity.
Eighties
America lived up to its billing, from the multi-lane freeways to the cavernous
fridges, from the drive-in movie theatres to the drive-through burger joints. I
loved the bigness, the boldness, the brashness. Coming from a country where too
many people were reconciled to their fate from too early an age, the animating
force of the American Dream was not just seductive but unshackling.
Upward
mobility was not a given amongst my schoolmates. The absence of resentment was
also striking: the belief success was something to emulate rather than envy.
The sight of a Cadillac induced different feelings than the sight of a Rolls
Royce.
It was 1984.
Los Angeles was hosting the Olympics. The Soviet boycott meant US athletes
dominated the medals table more so than usual. McDonald's had a scratch-card promotion,
planned presumably before Eastern bloc countries decided to keep their
distance, offering Big Macs, Cokes and fries if Americans won gold, silver or
bronze in selected events. So for weeks I feasted on free fast food, a
calorific accompaniment to chants of "USA! USA!"
This was the
summertime of American resurgence. After the long national nightmare of
Vietnam, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis, the country demonstrated its
capacity for renewal. 1984, far from being the dystopian hell presaged by
George Orwell, was a time of celebration and optimism. Uncle Sam - back then,
nobody gave much thought to the country being given a male personification -
seemed happy again in his own skin.
For
millions, it really was "Morning Again in America", the slogan of
Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign. In that year's presidential election, he
buried his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale in a landslide, winning 49 out of
50 states and 58.8% of the popular vote.
The United
States could hardly be described as politically harmonious. There was the usual
divided government. Republicans retained control of the Senate, but the
Democrats kept their stranglehold on the House of Representatives. Reagan's
sunniness was sullied by the launch of his 1980 campaign with a call for
"states' rights", which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial
of civil rights.
His chosen
venue was Philadelphia, but not the city of brotherly love, the cradle of the
Declaration of Independence, but rather Philadelphia, Mississippi, a rural
backwater close to where three civil rights workers had been murdered by white
supremacists in 1964. Reagan, like Nixon, pursued the southern strategy, which
exploited white fears about black advance.
Still, the
anthem of the hour was Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA and politics was not
nearly as polarised as it is today. Even though the Democratic House Speaker
Tip O'Neill reviled Reagan's trickle-down economics - he called him a
"cheerleader for selfishness" and "Herbert Hoover with a
smile" - these two Irish-Americans found common ground as they sought to
act in the national interest.
Both
understood the Founding Fathers had hard-wired compromise into the governmental
ystem, and that Washington, with its checks and balances, was unworkable
without give and take. They worked together on tax reform and safeguarding
Social Security.
The country
was in the ascendant. Not so paranoid as it was in the 1950s, not so restive as
it was in the 1960s, and nowhere near as demoralised as it had been in the
1970s.
History is
never neat or linear. Decades do not automatically have personalities, but it
is possible to divide the period since 1984 into two distinct phases. The final
16 years of the 20th Century was a time of American hegemony. The first 16
years of the 21st Century has proven to be a period of dysfunction, discontent,
disillusionment and decline. The America of today in many ways reflects the
dissonance between the two.
In those
twilight years of the last millennium, America enjoyed something akin to the
dominance achieved at the Los Angeles Olympics. Just two years after Reagan
demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, that concrete and
ideological barricade was gone. The United States won the Cold War. In the New
World Order that emerged afterwards, it became the sole superpower in a
unipolar world.
The speed at
which US-led forces won the first Gulf War in 1991 helped slay the ghosts of
Vietnam. With a reformist leader, Boris Yeltsin, installed in the Kremlin,
there was an expectation Russia would embrace democratic reform. Even after
Tiananmen Square, there was a hope that China might follow suit, as it moved
towards a more market-based economy.
This was the
thrust of Francis Fukuyama's thesis in his landmark 1989 essay, The End of
History, which spoke of "the universalisation of Western liberal democracy
as the final form of human government".
For all the
forecasts Japan would become the world's largest economy, America refused to
cede its financial and commercial dominance. Instead of Sony ruling the
corporate world, Silicon Valley became the new high-tech workshop of business.
Bill
Clinton's boast of building a bridge to the 21st Century rang true, although it
was emergent tech giants such as Microsoft, Apple and Google that were the true
architects and engineers. Thirty years after planting the Stars and Stripes on
the Sea of Tranquillity, America not only dominated outer space but cyberspace
too.
This phase
of US dominance could never be described as untroubled. The Los Angeles riots
in 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the police
officers charged with his assault, highlighted deep racial divisions. In
Washington, Bill Clinton's impeachment exhibited the hyper-partisanship that
was changing the tenor of Washington life. In the age of 24/7 cable news,
politics was starting to double as soap opera.
Yet as we
approached 31 December 1999, the assertion that the 20th Century had been The
American Century was an axiom. I was in the capital as Bill Clinton presided
over the midnight celebrations on the National Mall, and as the fireworks
skipped from the Lincoln Memorial down the Reflecting Pool to illuminate the
Washington monument, the mighty obelisk looked like a giant exclamation mark or
a massive number one.
Shattered confidence
The national
story changed dramatically and unexpectedly soon after. While doomsday
predictions of a Y2K bug failed to materialise, it nonetheless felt as if the
United States had been infected with a virus. 2000 saw the dot-com bubble
explode. In November, the disputed presidential election between George W Bush
and Al Gore badly damaged the reputation of US democracy.
Why, a
Zimbabwean diplomat even suggested Africa send international observers to
oversee the Florida recount. Beyond America's borders came harbingers of
trouble. In Russia, 31 December 1999, as those fireworks were being primed,
Vladimir Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin.
The year
2001 brought the horror of September 11th, an event more traumatic than Pearl
Harbor. Post-9/11 America became less welcoming and more suspicious. The Bush
administration's "war on terror" - open-ended conflicts in
Afghanistan and Iraq - drained the country of blood and treasure.
The collapse
of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, arguably had
a more lasting impact on the American psyche than the destruction of the Twin
Towers. Just as 9/11 had undermined confidence in the country's national
security, the financial collapse shattered confidence in its economic security.
With parents
no longer certain their children would come to enjoy more abundant lives than
they did, the American Dream felt like a chimera. The American compact, the
bargain that if you worked hard and played by the rules your family would
succeed, was no longer assumed. Between 2000 and 2011, the overall net wealth
of US households fell. By 2014, the richest 1% of Americans had accrued more
wealth than the bottom 90%.
To many in
the watching world, and most of the 69 million Americans who voted for him, the
election of the country's first black president again demonstrated America's
capacity for regeneration.
"Yes we can."
"Yes we can."
"The
audacity of hope".
Barack
Hussein Obama . . .
Read more at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41826022
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