“…Despite [Donald Trump’s] controversial campaign, he exceeded expectations [in the 2016 election]. What happens next, however, is unknown.”
- Molly Ball, writing for The Atlantic, 11 November 2016
It is now three days since the 2016 presidential election. The outcome was startling, to say the least! But not uncommonly, if such a peculiar element, with such peculiar agendas and notions, ascends to the presidency we’d call it a revolution. There was the recent “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s, for example.
It’s not the same this time.
The overriding desire of an administration to undo what is and improve everything with its own fingerprint is familiar. This sometimes produces revolution. Still, mainstream political punditry seems reluctant to call this a revolution, and this is because revolutions are about the political triumph of an idea, while 2016 saw the prevailing of emotional wants. Americans wanted to feel less vulnerable, less aggrieved, less taken advantage of, less taken for granted, less degraded; they wanted more; they wanted greatness. They wanted.
Let us go about three years back in time and look at how this limbic eagerness came to such a crescendo in late 2016.
In late 2013, the Middle East was still reeling from the political upheavals of what is now referred to as the Arab Spring. Each of several Islamic nations had its own reshuffling or revolution. The most difficult and scarring of these revolutions was in Syria, where the secular dictator there, Bashar al-Assad, had been born into a sort of hereditary monarchy. Assad believed that the authority to govern Syria was his birthright, and his actions were totally consistent with such an opinion: he immediately sought to crush the (pro-democracy) rebellion by military force.
The fighting in Syria became so intense and so internecine that a political void developed in eastern Syria and western Iraq, a place where there was so much authority-of-the-gun that there was virtually no law at all. And into this political void stepped a new and especially extremist Islamic creed, ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq).
The nightmarish and interminable fighting in Syria and Iraq against both the Iraqi government and the Syrian government yielded hundreds of thousands of refugees. Add these to hundreds of thousands of refugees from other politically devastated Islamic nations, and you have a humanitarian crisis beyond the capabilities of the United Nations.
Millions of Moslem refugees flowed into majority Christian countries in any way they could to flee the violence and political turmoil of their (erstwhile) homes.
But something else of extreme significance was happening. By early 2014, ISIS terrorism and atrocities grew in their scope and depravity. And they were discussed and shown on the Internet and on the TV news all around the world. Such awareness and fear is significant anywhere, but in the United States each image of an ISIS terrorist beheading his hapless victim took on deeper significance. People from around the world do not fully understand the American mind – how Americans look at something not only with dismay and disapproval, but with a puissance-awareness born determination to retaliate, to attack the loathsome barbarians. Americans knew very well that theirs was not a matter of building up their military capabilities to devastate ISIS, but bringing forth the political will to attack when the two misadventures that were Afghanistan and Iraq II were so very fresh in the memory, and which served to make President Obama somewhat dovish in his actions as Commander in Chief.
President Obama took office in 2009 with a repeatedly-stated intention to get United States military forces out of the Iraqi and Afghani theaters as soon as possible, and his stated priority was to scale down the American presence in Iraq. Obama’s want to retreat from Iraq first and foremost was like other presidents’ foreign policy decisions and was based not so much on evenhanded geo-strategic goal-setting as it was on a belief that the Iraq war was far the most costly and unjustified of the two. The “successful” executives will very often distinguish themselves or try to distinguish themselves from the presumed errors and shortcomings of their predecessors, and the goal of establishing difference superiority can often outweigh impartial, unbiased policymaking. This particular of Obama’s foreign policy agenda – getting the American military out of Iraq – was, make no mistake, a repudiation of George W. Bush. Indeed, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in an obvious Nobel Committee rebuke of President G.W. Bush’s foreign policy, and Obama stated that he intended to eventually warrant the Prize.
And in the succeeding paragraphs I will share how this desire to undo the agenda of one’s predecessor is so historically relevant to us now.
Each new president from a different political party – at least in recent history – arrives not only with an intention to push forward new policy objectives, but to specifically undo or undermine the policies of his ideologically oppositional predecessor.
In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected on a promise to make the tax system fairer to common working people… that is, to “make the rich pay their fair share.” And this usually meant a move to a more progressive tax policy. Clinton was able to get this new policy adopted. The Clinton presidency managed to bring about a remarkable balancing of the federal budget. And when he left office in early 2001, the federal government had actually managed a slight surplus. Remember that when we discuss these political matters regarding federal expenditures and debt, we are talking about two distinct but related things: the national debt and the yearly deficits. Clinton’s eight years in the White House reversed a worrisome financial trend. Budgets had expanded in the twelve years that Reagan and George H. W. Bush lived in that House, deficits rising into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, and adding about $2.5 trillion to the total debt, approximately doubling it.
Inheriting a worrisome debt of far over $5 trillion, Clinton did what any responsible and competent president would do: he repudiated the debt accruing policies of his Republican predecessors and worked to obtain a balanced federal budget. His first year in office was 1993. That was an especially propitious year for budget balancing. The U.S. economy was in good shape and the (capitalism and America-dominating) “new world order” globalization, combined with the collapse of Soviet communism, allowed for greater trade with the world and a reduced American military budget. This, combined with new tax policies enacted during the Clinton years, allowed for the balancing of the budget – to this day, a remarkable achievement, given how very unbalanced it was in early 1993.
Remember my previous remarks here – that the succeeding president from the opposing party will repudiate the agendas of his predecessor. George W. Bush ran for the presidency in 2000 on a promise to undo the Clinton tax structure that had increased taxes on the wealthy and balanced the budget. And G.W. Bush followed through on his promise. Many prominent economists argued in the press and TV media that this reversal of tax policy would ruin the balance of income and expenditures.
History tells that they were absolutely right: in George W. Bush’s eight years as president, the federal budget deficits went from… well, not deficits at all, but surplus (in Clinton’s departing fiscal year) to a yearly deficit of over one trillion dollars. And, since we are contrasting a deficit with a surplus, the percent difference is not mathematically calculable; it is far over one octillion percent – far, far over!
But George W. Bush did not only disdain his predecessor’s fiscal policy, he disdained Bill Clinton’s associates too, his coterie of advisors and liberal supporters. One of these was Richard A. Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism before and during the earthshaking events of 9-11. Clarke was extremely intelligent and capable, and he was one of very few top-level staff that remained through the transition from Clinton to Bush.
In the first few months of Bush’s administration, Clarke requested from the president’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, a “meeting of the principals” – a security meeting of the president’s cabinet members – to inform them so as to initiate a government-wide effort to coordinate security so as to enhance anti-terrorism efforts. But Rice too was dismissive of (Clinton era) Clarke, and he went without answer to his request for months. Clarke asked again and again, warning of the urgency of taking action. Rice finally arranged the meeting for early September, at it ultimately took place only one week before the terrorist attacks of 9-11.
When George W. Bush left office in early 2009, the United States economy was in crisis. The nation was headed into certain recession, and all were trying to avoid descent into outright economic depression. And the exigency of Obama’s dealings with the Great Recession in the first several months of his presidency historically obscure Obama’s disdain for all things Bush.
In America, we always claim – as if the claim and intention were enough to make something so – that we must not let the terrorists intimidate us, and we must go on with our lives as usual. But the terrorists have their effect! It is invisible, and it is cumulative, but over time we grow in ire and resentment and the determination to fight back, to act out on what has built up emotionally over months and years.
Alas, terrorists are such dastardly, elusive rascals, and the effect of their atrocities on minds in Western societies is insidious. We emotively believe that fighting is surely the way to deal with terroristic villains. But we’re in a trap. We also believed, due to our substantial and unarguable military superiority, that we would prevail in Vietnam in the 1960s. (By the way, the United States did not achieve its objectives in that “conflict”.) But ISIS radicals are indisputably terrorists, and we have an ongoing and cogently conceived policy of not ever negotiating with terrorists. Ergo, we must deal with them, but are prevented from dealing with them by using language constructively. Logic predicts then, military responses to ISIS.
In an effort to reduce “collateral” deaths and limit blowback, U.S. efforts against ISIS terrorists are going to take many more months to succeed. Importantly, these are months where the progress on the ground for the allied militaries is arduous and difficult and almost invisible, and the atrocities in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando Florida in the United States, as well as the attacks in France, are very visible on the TV and on the Internet. Oh-so-subtly feelings of being emasculated and humiliated grow in the emotive aspect of the American; anger and violent want develop.
Unemployment, job insecurity, the perception of Washington being controlled by detached, disaffected cliques and elites, corrupt practices, and kindly, attentive and compassionate treatment of undocumented families in the United States results in a further feeling of powerlessness and abandonment for ordinary Americans, especially white Americans, who sometimes view themselves as “the real Americans.” As terror is objectionable, it is “foreign”. Terrorists are conceived in the minds of the American people as foreigners, and the general thinking about foreigners infects American thinking about “immigrants”, and by extension the thinking about other ‘them’ (such as racial and ethnic minorities) becomes less generous.
Along comes a demagogue to assure the whites, the poor, the alienated, the uneducated and the vengeance-addled fearful that he is their voice, their champion. He will act where others are too timid to.
However, most Americans look at the demagogue with disgust. Polls show him with the highest unfavorable ratings of any major party candidate ever. He seems like he does not have any morals. He seems unintelligent. He seems alarmingly uninformed and incautious. He promises to torture terrorists, not because it is somehow useful or politically wise to do so, but because “they deserve it.” And many Americans, hearing this in their living rooms, silently nod. Here is someone who promises to behave in a manly way toward that which has made us feel so emasculated, so disgusted and degraded for so long. We felt slightly emasculated when we could not so much as keep millions of illegal aliens from crossing our southern border, but then the images of the terrorists (also aliens) cutting off Christians’ heads was received by Americans – and especially by white males whose privileged status took a serous blow with the 2008 election of Obama – felt their country had abandoned them, as a sundering of the organ-identity from the sovereign person, the vile and violent separation of imperative personhood from person, a fate more grievous than death itself.
The demagogue spoke directly to this fear of losing essential identity. And his claim to “make America great again,” surely took on the romantic luster of a promise to employ manly (assertive, violent) means to revive American greatness. And if the demagogue were to run in the election against a woman, this concern about unmanly unassertiveness would be still more acute.
American greatness and American assertiveness are not, in general, agendas most Americans oppose. These sound very good. But ironically, Americans have now got their delivery from humiliation at the cost of essential dignity and character in the person of the president himself, and that also indicates an ultimate humiliation. American voters’ efforts to rescue themselves from felt emasculation resulted in their voting for what amounted to the debasement of the nation.
And if it is true that America has lost the seminal character of dignity and self-respect in their leader, it is hard to see on the horizon anything other than a failed presidency– and that crucial 47 percent of a substantial nation, in the dubious context of proactively reclaiming its “identity”, unwilling to ever admit its error in placing the emotional want over the sane and civilized, tries to maintain that militancy and bluster are the hallmarks of greatness.
Americans badly wanted their nation to be esteemed, but their choice for president was based not on qualities that logically produce greatness, but something that is comfortable with reproach and invective, oppression and retribution.
In the twenty-first century, we will reach something futurists and technology experts have called the “technological singularity,” an historical development where computer and computational effectiveness surpasses that of humans, where the nonhuman machine is superior in ‘thinking’ to humans. From such an eventuality, experts contend that nothing can be predicted. The singularity would surely mark a revolution in technology, but it also marks a juncture with utter unpredictability.
We might predict failure in a presidency so ill-conceived and accursed and threatened by its own inured predilections. (The president “tweeted” just yesterday, after he’d been elected, about the demonstrations against him going on in various large cities across the country, and called the participants “professional protesters,” and wrote that they were “unfair”. Hence, his belligerence and confrontational style are sure to persist during his presidency, and his claims that we need to end the division in our country can claim no leader at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after 20 January 2017.)
The election of a private sector president in 2016 is not a triumph of ideas, and it does not mark a revolution; it accomplishes, at this point, a place in history of mere unpredictability – a singularity. This present outcome amounts to mischance, and nothing future of American political culture can be reliably guessed at. And therefore we can neither predict humankind’s demise nor its survival.