This is a picture of a magnet that was being sold at Strand's Book Store in New York City a few years ago. No, I did not buy it, but I liked it and took a picture, which I am sharing here now.
Perhaps it was my father where I got my inherent cynicism towards American politics and general political thinking. Or maybe it began with him, and grew with years of experience and observation as to the overall trends which we tended to gravitate towards as a country.
One way or another, my skepticism that anyone or anything will fix this mess has grown over time.
From a young age, my parents - and perhaps particularly my father - pointed out the serious flaws of the very popular, even idolized, President Reagan. At a time when Reagan was enjoying unbelievable popularity, winning 49 of the 50 states to gain another term in office, all we heard in our household was how so-called Reaganomics, which was really not much more than good old trickle-down economics, was making things worse by widening the economic gap in the country, busting and then demonizing the unions which, like it or not, are historically responsible for things like the 40-hour workweek, weekends off, paid vacation time, holiday pay, and other benefits. Corporate greed was at an all-time high, and government corruption was creeping up there. Pollution levels were off the chart, as was spending on the already bloated and out of control military industrial complex. And all of this was basically being applauded by a very supportive, and frankly, either naive or outrageously selfish and narrow-minded American public. Those trends continued for another four years when Vice-President George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan in the Oval Office.
Then came 1992. I turned 18 years old. And to my astonishment, the Democrats actually had a chance to win the White House. To be sure, Bill Clinton was not my first choice among the Democrats. Nor my second or even my third, for that matter. He instinctively kicked in my distrust as a slick politician, with every hair and every word perfectly in place at all times. Yet admittedly, once he became the nominee after giving the acceptance speech, I bought into Clinton. Suddenly, he felt like another JFK. And he was winning, beating Bush, who had looked simply unbeatable just months earlier. There was also a new trend in music and activism, and this enhanced that sense of a changing world, a new world being born. All of this seemed to good too be true.
It was. Clinton did win, but what happened over the course of the next eight years swore me off the Democrats, and I became an independent, despite a brief relapse into being a Clinton fan again after that second acceptance speech in 1996. I should have known by then that this guy can give a great speech, and make mountains out of mole hills. Almost everything about this guy was in his own presentation of himself, and lacked actual substance. He claimed to have paid off 60 percent of the national debt, but he did that with temporary loans. It's sort of like if you take out one loan to pay off another, and then claim to have paid off that debt. Technically true, but you still owe the exact same amount. Another example: his environmental record. I had thought that he would finally do something, affect meaningful change to help protect the environment. After all, Al Gore was his Vice-President, and he was the most famous environmental activist in the country. Indeed, Clinton could and did claim to have passed through strong and sweeping legislation to protect the environment. What he was not so quick to point out is that the bulk of this came in the last 72 hours, or three days, of his eight years in office, knowing full well that his successor would quickly sweep all of that away. It made Clinton and the Democrats looks like they took strong action, while making Bush and the Republicans appear like the villains. A clever political move. Some might suggest slick. But it certainly was not real change in any meaningful sense.
Also, Clinton was rather terrible in his own ways. For all of his talking points again trickle-down economics against the Republicans, he effectively not only kept it in place, but entrenched it in certain ways during his presidency. He repealed Glass-Steagall, and monopolies predictably resulted. He got rid of welfare as we knew it and was a strong advocate of NAFTA, which sent many American jobs overseas. In this video, in fact, Robert Reich himself admits that they simply had no plan whatsoever to deal with the lost jobs for many blue collar Americans.The overall trend of diminishing manufacturing jobs continued under Clinton's watch. He privatized the prison system, which helped to create the monstrous system which exists today, and which sometimes amounts to virtual, modern day slavery, or it's closest equivalent. And his policy of trying to add eastern European countries into NATO, when his predecessor had promised not to expand NATO, helped to create the tensions with Russia that exist today, and which were crucial in the present day war in Ukraine.
Very quickly after that brief flirting again with becoming a Clinton fan in 1996, I became disillusioned with all of this. Once again, he just seemed like a slick politician, but effectively touting hollow achievements. All of this was his "Bridge to the 21st Century?" It was wildly inadequate.
And yet, he began looking good again once George W. Bush took over. Under Bush, we saw the worst national security disaster in American history, saw numerous massive corporate scandals (Enron, Blackwater, Halliburton, and so on), and the economy lagged throughout most of his presidency. In fact, he almost ran the economy into the ground during his time in office, so ripe was the environment for corporate scandals. Wall Street began to look like a bloated and out of control monster to many, especially in it's role that led to the Great Recession. Then, of course, there was the whole fighting two very costly wars at once thing, and blatantly lying and misleading the American public about the justifications for invading Iraq, which turned out to be exactly the kind of quagmire that cynics had warned about. Yet there was Bush, standing in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner and proclaiming victory. Let's also not forget his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Still, despite all of this abundant evidence that his presidency was a disaster, just a couple of years after leaving office, people were apparently missing this pathetic excuse for a president.
Barrack Obama felt like too much hype. You judge presidents often by their weakest points, and Obama certainly had some, despite some people viewing him almost as a picture of perfection. He hardly changed Bush's policies at all for the first four years. So much was this the case, that some people cynically - yet accurately - began to describe his first term as Bush's third term. Then, there was the whole getting rid of habeas corpus thing, which is a right protected by the Constitution. And all of those illegal drone strikes, and surveillance even against out allies, particularly Germany.
Still, I understand how people came to miss him. When you are sandwiched between George W. Bush and Donald Trump, it is easy to look good. Indeed, it almost felt like Obama's presidency were the good old days, once Trump took over.
Trump was a disaster. This was a man who attacked freedom of speech right off the bat by banning not just discussion but even mention of climate change. He disgraced the country by pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord. Pollution began to run rampant as Trump loosened the regulations previously imposed on corporations. Corporate greed predictably grew out of control yet again. Americans never seem to learn. Unions were predictably attacked once again. Despite his claims that the world would look up to and respect the United States once he, a presumably strong and serious leader, was in charge, he was literally laughed at in front of the world when he mistook the United Nations for a Trump rally. Let's not forget that he dismantled the White House pandemic team just in time for an actual pandemic to hit. And he kept "joking" about becoming "president for life" like they have in China, and which he suggested was a good idea which the United States should look into. He also claimed that his supporters might demand a third term. Mind you, this was well before the 2020 election, when he would be seeking a second term.
And all of that was not even the most disgraceful part. After all, this was the same guy who mocked a disabled reporter, and who suggested that Mexicans in the United States were rapists and criminals. He had a difficult time condemning Nazis, dismissed dozens of countries in Latin America and Africa as "shithole nations" while holding up Norway as the ideal country from which to obtain immigrants. Trump briefly put up a short video of one of his supporters shouting "white power!" during the 2020 election. There was a visible spike in hate crimes and overall tensions as a result of Trump's political rise to power. Through it all, Trump displayed his typical classless behavior, and he never seemed capable of reigning in his authoritarian bent.
I had hoped that he would finally go away once he lost the 2020 election. But he didn't. A man with his kind of ego will not go away so easily. And he's back, and with a real shot at getting the presidency again. This, despite admitting that he wanted to assume dictatorial powers, and that he would focus on revenge during his second term. Those are his words, not mine.
This man claimed that once in the White House, the United States would just keep winning, winning, winning. So much would this be the case, in fact, that he said people would get tired of it, and ask him to stop winning, and he would say no. We should have known that he had simply misspelled whining. Because yeah, we got a lot of whining with him, and it's still going on. This supposedly strong leader is the first to whine about how unfairly he's been treated. Yeah, poor little Baby Trump, born with a gold-plated spoon in his mouth, having lived a life of privilege and excess from the beginning. Somehow, despite his quite advanced years, he had served as proof that wisdom and grace do not necessarily come with age.
And this country's seriously thinking about putting him back in the Oval Office?
Unbelievable.
Am I supposed to grow out of my cynicism towards American politics? In truth, this election is incredibly uninspiring. I mean, a rematch between Biden and Trump? These are the two best and most qualified candidate in a country of over 330 million? Really?
I wish things were different. And I sure wish that this country would finally move beyond Trump, and recognize just how awful he was for the country. But as Reich points out in the below video, Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of what ails us. And until we recognize that, we'll have yet more Trump, or some clone version of him somewhere in the future to deal with.
Why do so many Americans support a neofascist? | The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich
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