American Carnage, American Dream: The Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump Years

American Carnage, American Dream

• This lecture combines the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump years.

• The title reflects the contrast between Barack Obama's vision of the American dream and Donald Trump's portrayal of American carnage.

• Obama represented the American dream, citing his own rise from a fatherless, poor background to becoming the first African American president.

• Trump, in his 2017 inaugural address, depicted America as plagued by crime, illegal immigration, and disadvantageous foreign deals.

• This contrast captures the tension between hope and despair in the present moment.

The 9/11 Attacks

• On 09/11/2001, 19 Al-Qaeda members hijacked four planes.

• The terrorists received flight instruction in American aviation schools.

• At 08:46 AM, the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

• Seventeen minutes later, a second plane hit the South Tower.

• A third plane crashed into the Pentagon.

• Passengers on the fourth plane prevented it from reaching the Capitol, and it crashed in Pennsylvania.

• The World Trade Center towers collapsed, resulting in nearly 3,000 American deaths.

• The attacks reshaped the debate on America's global role and citizen protection.

• The attacks shattered the sense of American invincibility.

• An image called "The Falling Man" captures a man falling from the World Trade Center.

• The identity of the falling man remains unknown.

• The photo has become symbolic of the uncertainty and tragedy of that day.

Course Focus Questions

• How did nine eleven shape American society and foreign policy in the twenty first century?

• What values and ideas shaped key American foreign policy decisions?

• What new challenges and controversies did The United States face during the Bush, Obama, and Trump years?

• How did liberals and conservatives modify their long standing visions of the role that government should or could play?

George H.W. Bush Presidency

• George H.W. Bush, Reagan's vice president, became president at a time of promise with the fall of communism.

• By the late 1980s, the USSR was collapsing due to internal and external pressures.

• Independence movements arose in Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries.

• Hungary removed the barbed wire fence between it and Democratic Austria in May 1989.

• Solidarity won control of Poland's new parliament, forming the first democratic government in postwar Eastern Europe.

• The Soviet Union reacted with apathy, a reversal of past policies.

• Restrictions on speech, voting, and economic activity were lifted.

• The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and East Germans crossed into West Berlin.

• By the end of 1989, the Soviet Union no longer dominated Eastern Europe.

• In August 1990, the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved.

• The Soviet Union ceased to exist, and member states became independent nations.

• The US declared victory in the Cold War.

• George H.W. Bush championed American ideas such as democracy, free markets, civil liberties, and open elections.

• The fall of communism reinforced American faith in the superiority of capitalism.

• Some commentators urged introspection and reform of capitalism.

• A cartoon questioned whether the fall of communism would usher in a better world, depicting a homeless man left out in the cold, jobless and hungry.

• Even in moments of triumph, there were calls for introspection.

• Capitalism's triumph was questioned due to homelessness rates unseen since the Progressive Era.

• The US battle against communism was not over.

Tiananmen Square

• In April 1989, university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest the removal of a communist official.

• Chinese communist officials decided to end the demonstrations with violence.

• On June 4, tanks appeared in the square, and troops shot hundreds of protesters.

• A lone man stood in front of 17 tanks, in a solitary gesture of defiance.

• Americans hailed the unknown "tank man" for his defense of peace and human rights.

• The event is still largely unknown to many Chinese citizens today.

• China's suppression of democracy provoked different visions over how to proceed with economic relations.

• By 1990, American companies increasingly outsourced manufacturing jobs to China using cheap Chinese labor.

• Some argue that helping the Chinese government improve living standards inadvertently bolsters the autocratic regime.

• Others argued that exposing Chinese citizens to Western goods and values will someday sow the seeds for an eventual democratic and capitalist revolution.

• A prosperous and industrially strong China might replace The United States as the world's strongest military and economic power.

Bush's Domestic Record

• George H.W. Bush was the last old guard Republican president.

• He passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

• The ADA prohibited discrimination against disabled Americans in employment and public accommodations and in telecommunications.

• Bush courted the conservative wing of the Republican Party by promising to crack down on crime.

• In 1991, the Los Angeles riots broke out after white police officers were acquitted of brutally beating Rodney King.

• Americans differed on what the video of the beating revealed.

• Some saw a poorly trained and racist police force that harassed blacks while others saw overworked police officers protecting law and order.

• The not guilty verdict set off four days of rioting.

• The riots highlighted the rights of African Americans to interact with law enforcement without endangering their lives.

• Debates arose over aggressive police approaches to black motorists which sparked the question of whether or not it was rooted in centuries old practices where black bodies were seen as inherently criminal.

• Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American judge, to the Supreme Court.

• Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment.

• Thomas called the televised confirmation hearings a "high-tech lynching."

• The Senate confirmed Thomas by a narrow majority.

• Workplace sexual harassment became front page news, and an unprecedented number of women won congressional seats in the 1992 election.

Bush's Foreign Policy

• Bush had been a naval pilot in World War II and former director of the CIA.

• He addressed problems closer to America's borders, and his administration felt uneasy about returning the Panama Canal in 2000 to a Panamanian dictator.

• In December 1989, Bush launched Operation Just Cause to remove Manuel Noriega from power in Panama.

• It was a crisis in The Middle East that offered Bush the opportunity to propose a new focus for US foreign policy.

• In August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

• The Bush administration had a choice to militarily intervene in the oil rich Persian Gulf or not.

• The Bush administration decided to send American soldiers.

• In Operation Desert Shield, Bush assured the public that The United States was solely going to war to prevent Iraq from attacking peaceful neighbors.

• General Colin Powell, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, established the Powell doctrine.

• The Powell doctrine said that The United States should only go to war as a last resort when the president had full support from the nation and the international community if it could employ overwhelming military force to win without a serious loss of American life, and if it had a clear exit strategy.

• Victory in the Persian Gulf War led to a reevaluation of American foreign policy goals.

• After defeating Hussein, Bush announced that The United States would build a new world order, which he defined as playing an active global peacekeeping role dedicated to spreading democracy and prosperity.

• Victory on the Persian Gulf War catapulted George H.W. Bush to popularity, to approval, the approval ratings that he had not seen in his administration to that point.

• Conflicts existed within The United States during the lead up to the Persian Gulf War about whether the war was actually about spreading democracy or whether it was about maintaining US control over lucrative oil profits in The Middle East.

• Opponents of going to war urged George H.W. Bush to use sanctions, but Bush countered that Hussein's atrocities against his own people made him worse than Hitler.

• Critics said that was a dramatic hyperbole and Bush later claimed those comments.

The Clinton Years

• Reagan years redefined the American political landscape by shifting the political center away from New Deal.

• A new breed of democratic politician was needed, socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

• William Jefferson Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election and won reelection again in 1996.

• Clinton had chaired the Democratic Leadership Council and was committed to shifting the Democratic Party to the political center by accepting market based solutions to social problems and by balancing the budget and ending deficit spending.

• Clinton seemed to exude energy and possessed a vast knowledge of government which won him a dedicated following, and he seemed compassionate.

• Clinton's campaign mantra was "I feel your pain"

• The ninety two election also saw one of the most successful third party candidacies in US history via Ross Perot.

• His campaign focused almost exclusively on how the federal deficit had exploded under Reagan and Bush and end up winning 19% of the popular vote.

• President Clinton saw an integration of conservative fiscal ideas such as balancing the federal budget as well as conservative ideas about welfare reforms, and he also embraced a less a less protectionist economic policy with other countries by embracing free trade.

• Clinton broke with organized labor to back the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, which was a treaty that lifted trade barriers amongst The United States, Mexico, and Canada.

• Labor unions opposed NAFTA because they feared that it would encourage US factories to relocate to Mexico.

• American businesses liked NAFTA because it prohibited foreign companies based in Mexico from manufacturing knockoffs of American products, and it would help protect these businesses overseas in domestic markets by stopping the flow of counterfeit goods.

• Clinton also expanded the war on drugs.

• He will institute don't ask, don't tell within the military.

• The Republicans were successful in attacking the Clinton's comprehensive health care plan as socialized medicine.

• Clinton was impeached over an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky in 1998 as a result of an investigation into some of the things that he had been doing during his time as Arkansas's attorney general.

• He was not removed from office, and this showed how Americans viewed sexual harassment or sexual power dynamics between men and women in workplaces.

1994 Midterm Elections

• The midterm elections in 1994 saw the ascendance of a new kind of conservatism under Newt Gingrich.

• Gingrich promised that if elected in '94, Republicans would end what he called the corrupt liberal welfare state.

• The Gingrich's manifesto was called the contract with America which envisioned smaller government, less regulation, term limits for members of congress, welfare reform, and adding a balanced budget amendment to the constitution.

• Clinton stole Gingrich's thunder by undertaking his own program of social welfare reform, and Clinton would modify legislation passed during the New Deal and would reduce reduce the time that families with dependent children could receive financial institute financial assistance.

• Clinton repealed certain provisions of the Glass Steagall Act, which was passed during the Great Depression.

• Gingrich's contract with America would inform a whole new generation of conservative politicians, including George w Bush, the two thousand election.

The Computer Revolution

• At key moments in American history, transportation or communication breakthroughs transform our lives.

• Computers were first introduced in the nineteen eighties, and by the late nineteen nineties, millions of Americans spent hours a day at work or home typing on personal computers.

• The computer industry supplanted the car and steel industries as the engines that drove American prosperity.

• Microsoft and Apple became powerful corporations that employed highly educated workers and developed global markets for their products.

• By the end of the decade, more and more Americans relied on the Internet to deliver business and social correspondence electronically.

• The Internet evolved from a primitive computer system designed in the late nineteen sixties to facilitate the exchange of data amongst geographically distant military installations.

• Engineers in Switzerland developed the World Wide Web, which was a system for organizing electronic information, and it the internet use exploded.

• In 1994, '6 million Americans were connected to the Internet, and by 02/2001, the 130,000,000 Americans who surfed the web daily in offices, libraries, schools, or at home accounted for a quarter of all global Internet traffic.

• The Internet reshaped how Americans worked and played at the dawn of the twenty first century.

• Virtual business meetings could now take place amongst people who were dispersed all around the globe and office workers working in the same building could send a stream of emails to each other throughout the day rather than phoning each other or delivering a message in person.

• As with any new technology, humans had to grapple with the pros and cons that this technology introduced into their lives, whether that was sedentary lifestyles, desensitization to the media, and a whole bunch of other things.

• Schools brought the Internet into the classroom regardless of the concerns.

• The Internet facilitated the spread of information and spread of misinformation in unprecedented levels.
  / Anyone could create a website allowing virtual communities to form around almost any issue.

• So the Internet could be great for the medical community to research a medical condition, but it could also be used to help terrorists publicize their cause and their violence around the world.

The LGBTQ Community & Immigration

• A new front over civil rights has emerged in the last three decades, which is over the LGBTQ community.

• Fundamentalist churches opposed legislation granting LGBTQ folks legitimacy.

• Homosexual men were labeled pedophiles.

• In 1981, the mainstream press began printing stories of mysterious ailment sweeping through gay communities in New York and San Francisco know as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS, and that acquiring AIDS in the nineteen eighties was a death sentence.

• The raging political debate over the status of gay people in America colored the competing responses to AIDS.

• Religious conservatives viewed AIDS as god's retribution against what they called the morally degenerate, ignoring evidence that AIDS could also strike the heterosexual population.

• Having just repudiated the notion that gay people were mentally ill, Now gay folks confronted fears that they were all diseased.

• The community lobbied vigorously for increased federal funds to find a medical cure for the disease.

• Activists were leery about urging homosexual men to modify their sexual behaviors.

• Kramer popularized the safe sex message.

• One was humanizing AIDS victims and drawing attention to the mounting death toll while other groups adopted a less poignant and more militant tone.

• Radical activists embraced by the slogan silence equals death and demanding better medical treatment.

• In the mid nineteen nineties, controversies over LGBTQ rights overlapped in many ways with the growing economic power and social status of women.
  *More and more women entered the workforce in the eighties and nineties.

• Because of family structures changed.

• Gender roles within families also changed.

• Changing family structures prompted sometimes really venomous debates between the new right who wanted to reverse those trends and liberal democrats who championed the rights of nonmarried partners to live together and of single women to have children outside of wedlock.

• Many people who consider themselves liberal on other issues joined with conservatives in condemning same sex or gay marriage.

• In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman.

• Under this statute, states that banned same sex marriages did not have to accept legal marriages performed in other states if a gay couple married to if a gay couple moved to their jurisdiction.

• Only be with the passage of the overfell decision in 2015 that gay marriage would become a reality nationwide.

• The Human Rights Commission noted that 500 anti LGBTQ plus bills were introduced into state legislatures across the country this year, and nearly 150 of them directly targeted transgender people.

• One of the things that opponents and supporters of immigration disagree on is whether or not immigrants take away from our society rather than give back.

• Immigrants get benefits from coming to The United States that ultimately come at the expense of taxpayers.

• One of the questions in the debate is in many stances, critics of immigration say that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants.

• Conservative politicians are speaking to fears that immigration, especially from nonwhite, non English speaking nations, would fracture American culture.

American Foreign Policy

• After the Cold War, the nation faced new foreign policy dilemmas, whether or not the nation should intercede on humanitarian grounds to stop massacres in parts of the world that were not strategically important to The United States.

• In 1992, for example, images of a civil war induced famine in Somalia flooded American airwaves and newspapers.

• Bill Clinton responded to the public outcry over these images by sending US Troops to help restore order to provide aid.

• Public opinion shifted dramatically in 1993 when news cameras captured the image of cheering Somalis dragging the corpse corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu.

• This would lead to The United States withdrawing its troops from Somalia, and this would lead to Clinton removing very reluctantly when humanitarian crises sprouted up again.

• President Clinton also had to respond to the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, the intentional mass killing of one ethnic group by another in the Balkans.

• the United States would then participate in NATO airstrikes and helped broker a peace accord.

• When Kuwaiti and Iraqi born terrorists exploded a massive car bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.

• Al Qaeda was determined to launch what they called a jihad or holy war against western nonbelievers.

• Not all terrorist threats during this period originated overseas when Timothy McVeigh parked a rental truck filled with explosives in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounded over 800.

• McVay viewed the attack as a payback for the federal government's recent assaults against private paramilitary groups and their rural compounds.

• This bombing would remain the deadliest terrorist attack against American civilians until nine eleven a mere six years later.
  *
  The Bush administration made no distinction between terrorists and those who harbored them, and he issued an ultimatum to Afghanistan's Taliban Government to turn over Al Qaeda members or face invasion.

• Bush received overwhelming support from congress, the American people, and foreign nations when The United States unilaterally attacked Afghanistan US forces bombed Al Qaeda training camps and arms depots and then joined with Afghan rebel groups to drive the Taliban from power.

• Critics worried that Bush and his administration were condoning torture by allowing CI agents to use waterboarding and the decision to incarcerate captured prisoners indefinitely, deny them the right to a fair trial also aroused controversy.

• Responding to criticism that the nation's security agencies had failed to prevent nine eleven, the president also created the Department of Homeland Security and Also secured congressional approval for the Patriot Act, which expanded the government's investigative and police powers.

America's War on Iraq and Terrorism

• Containing Saddam Hussein's ambition to acquire weapons of mass destruction had been an ongoing goal since the end of the Persian Gulf War.

• Neoconservatives made removing Saddam Hussein a primary goal of American foreign policy.

• These advisers would urge a new doctrine called the Bush doctrine championing preemptive war.

• The United States had the right and the obligation to use force unilaterally to remove hostile regimes before they could pose a serious threat.

• Building his case for invading Iraq, President Bush repeatedly claimed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein had links to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, which had been responsible for nine eleven.

• President Bush misled the American people by making false claims about WMDs and about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda resulting making America less secure and diverted resources from the more justifiable war in Afghanistan, preemptive war set a dangerous precedent that lowered the threshold for going to war to simply feeling threatened by another nation.

• The war in Afghanistan, of course, does not end until 2021 when the Taliban quickly took over after US Soldiers after US Soldiers left.

• President Obama pulled the last American soldiers out of Iraq in 02/2011, but that power vacuum led to the rise of a more even more dangerous organization in ISIS, the ISIS caliphate that necessitated further American involvement from 2013 to 02/2017.
  *The government invaded the private lives of American to build a security fence using the planks from their home to maintain security while exposing their lives to public view.

Climate Change and the Obama Era

• The computer revolution, shifting demographics, the rise of global terrorism, ethnic cleansing, were not the only factors changing Americans' daily lives along with climate change that scientists increasingly worried about .

  • Americans were about 4.2% of the global population, but drive almost a quarter of the close to 700,000,000 cars.

• Average temperatures have risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last one hundred years, a phenomenon called global warming.

• 1. 8 degrees Fahrenheit number was from the nineteen eighties, Now scientists know that we the global temperature has actually increased to about 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels.

• Global warming was attributed to the widespread burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil that pumped C o two into the air, C o two or carbon dioxide was one of several greenhouse gases that trapped the sun's heat in the Earth's atmosphere and raises the moral and political obligation of The United States to invest these in developing nations that are to bear the brunt of climate change.

*Is The United States responsible, morally responsible, to developing nations in places like Africa, Southeast Asia, who are going to bear the brunt of climate change related disasters, migrations, droughts, flooding, even though these nations have emitted relatively little c o two, have contributed the least to this problem.
*Scientists also believe that climate change has affected rainfall patterns and storms that increase droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes, The Arctic ice cap is melting at an alarming rate as the Earth's ice caps lead to rising sea levels.

• In The United States, there is a concerted movement to deny that these things are happening.

• Climate change is denied by some because they question the scientific evidence that links climate change to human activity also, it has to do with Americans not wanting to disrupt the current lifestyles.

• George w Bush administration refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

• President Obama joined or pledged The United States to the Paris Climate Accords.
  *During the Trump administration, the United States pulled out of these accords in 2020, but but the Biden administration revoked or reversed that a year later, leading nations across the world to question whether United States can be a reliable partner in combating globe in combating global climate change.

• National security concerns motivated reexamining energy policies given America's reliance on foreign oil importations and presence in the Middle East spurring efforts into green technology.
  *Democrats championing bolstering oil production at home by lifting restrictions on things like drilling.
  Democrats and environmentalists worry that drilling could contaminate these pristine areas and we are losing valuable time in the battle against climate change by not ending our consumption of fossil fuels.
  *World has a decade to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels done by an international body of accredited climate climatologists, climate scientists, ecologists.

• George w Bush's administration was quite unpopular by 02/2007 and Obama was elected president and embraced transformative changes but his term occurred the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression due to the relaxed regulations of financial institutions, consumers taking advantage of risky but easily accessible mortgage policies.

• In the world, Obama emphasized a much more bilateral and cautious approach but continued US presence in Afghanistan, and in fact, he increased the number of soldiers there.
  Obama achieved a dramatic success when US special forces killed Osama bin Laden.
  The withdrawal of The United States from Iraq in 2011 lead to the rise of new militant organizations like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
  The president was criticized for a failure to be actively involved in various governments creating instability.

• Remote controlled armed drones were increasingly used creating both intended and unintended terrorism repercussions.

• Under the Patriot Act, the National Security Agency began collecting and storing phone records of US citizens, and Edward Snowden leaked the information to The Guardian newspaper before seeking refuge abroad.
  *In 02/2014 Obama establish diplomatic relationships with Cuba and he also tried to negotiate an agreement with Iran on restricting its nuclear program

Trump

• Obama had some mixed success approving of massive taxpayer funded bailouts as a way to reverse the great recession as well as passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and repealed president Clinton's don't ask, don't tell policy.

• Obama encountered vigorous political opposition.
  Group of Republican conservatives formed the Tea Party movement and attacked the president as a socialist.
  -It was a transformative election where many Americans are struggling with economic difficulties and the country is politically divided by issues of debt and the proper sizes of government.

• -One side of the aisle Obama was attacked by left wing organizations like Occupy Wall Street that believed that the president, congress was not doing enough to curb growing income inequality in the country and high unemployment.
  The economy did show improvement over Obama's term and unemployment dropped steadily throughout his presidency.
  Trump spoke to grievances and opposed free trade agreements.
  He embraced right wing nativist populism against Mexican and Muslim immigrants by mirroring racist groups.
  Throughout Western Europe, anti immigrant right wing nationalist parties gained ground such as Brexit and anti Muslim parties in France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia.
  Trump found governing harder than campaigning.
  He used his Twitter account to insult those who disagreed with him, and he claimed the mainstream media was the enemy of the American people, promoting fake news

*Trump, like Obama, continued to govern at a time where it was becoming clear that global terrorism was becoming more pervasive and not less and created new threats that would be at play for generations, and in this way a new form of warfare that had to be dealt with was economic cyber warfare
congress rejected Trump's campaign promise to repeal Obamacare, but president Trump was successful in winning appointments to the Supreme Court.
He gained the passage of a Republican tax cut law that disproportionately favored corporations and the wealthy.
He also revoked Obama's DACA program.
*Trump spent his first two years in office trying to erase the fact that Obama had been president at all by challenging his Citizenship.
In the twenty twenty elections, Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden by a sizable electoral margin of more than 7,000,000 votes so Trump and his campaign fueled rumors that the election was rigged and that voting irregularities had prevented Donald Trump from winning.
On January sixth of twenty twenty one, Donald Trump gave a speech to thousands of his supporters and he called for his supporters to fight like hell.
The supporters marched on The United States Capitol to to prevent the certification of the twenty twenty election and the first nonpeaceful transfer of power since the American Civil War.
Now there have been in American history challenges to election results in 1800 and in 02/2004 but what happened on January sixth of twenty twenty one was something differently entirely because it was not one singular event, but the culmination of a years long multipronged assault on democratic norms, institutions, and on the electoral processes of American democracy.
The issues confronting the Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies that continue to dominate public discourse included the failure of wage increases, the growth of income inequality, climate change, and social media.