chapter 40 - copied from textbook

same thing as last time :) + attached flashcards

40.1 - bush begins

As the son of the forty-first president (“41”), George W. Bush (“43”) became the first presidential offspring since John Quincy Adams to reach the White House. Raised largely in Texas, the younger Bush publicly distanced himself from his family’s privileged New England heritage and affected the chummy manner of a self-made good ol’ boy—though he held degrees from Yale and Harvard. (His adversaries sniped that he had been born on third base and claimed to have hit a triple.) He promised to bring to Washington the conciliatory skills he had honed as the Republican governor of Texas, where he had worked well with the Democratic majority in the state’s legislature.

But as president, Bush soon proved to be more of a divider than a uniter, less a “compassionate conservative” than a crusading ideologue. Religious traditionalists cheered, but liberals jeered, when he withdrew American support from international health programs that sanctioned abortion, advocated federally financed faith-based social-welfare initiatives, and vetoed legislation providing for government-sponsored research on embryonic stem cells, which many scientists believed held the key to conquering diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Conflict over the harvesting of stem cells, a practice deemed by many religious groups to be the destruction of human life in embryonic form, was just one example of the ways that Americans struggled with the ethical implications of revolutionary advances in biological engineering. The Human Genome Project mapped the DNA sequencing of all twenty thousand human genes in 2001, pointing the way to radical new medical therapies, but also raising thorny questions about the legitimacy of technological tinkering with human life. These issues prompted President Bush to establish a Council on Bioethics in 2001, but it was soon ensnarled in bitter political as well as ethical wrangling, and was eventually superseded by President Obama’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which unfortunately proved no more effective than its predecessor.

On the environmental front, Bush pleased corporate chieftains but angered environmentalists through a slew of actions early in his tenure. He repudiated a major international effort to arrest the rate of global warming, the Kyoto Treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Criticism mounted when Bush allowed his hard-charging vice president, Dick Cheney, to hammer out his administration’s energy policy in behind-closed-doors meetings with representatives of several giant oil companies. Cheney, dismissing energy conservation as a mere “sign of personal virtue,” advocated aggressive expansion of domestic energy supplies, including new oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska’s ecologically fragile north coast.

The centerpiece of Bush’s fiscal policy was a pair of whopping tax cuts, passed by Congress in 2001 and 2003. Combined with a softening economy and the rising costs of military interventions overseas, these measures turned the federal budget surpluses of the late 1990s into yawning deficits, reaching more than $400 billion in 2004 and nearly $460 billion in 2008, when a galloping financial crisis deepened them even further (see Figure 40.1).

40.2 - terrorism comes to america

On September 11, 2001, the long era of America’s impregnable national security violently ended. On a balmy late-summer morning, suicidal terrorists slammed two hijacked airliners, loaded with passengers and jet fuel, into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. They flew a third plane into the military nerve center of the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C., killing 189 people. Heroic passengers forced a fourth hijacked aircraft to crash in rural Pennsylvania, killing all 44 aboard but depriving the terrorists of an additional weapon of mass destruction. As the two giant New York skyscrapers thunderously collapsed, some three thousand innocent victims perished, including people of many races and faiths from more than sixty countries, as well as more than four hundred of New York’s police and fire department rescue workers. A stunned nation blossomed with flags, as grieving and outraged Americans struggled to express their sorrow and solidarity in the face of the catastrophic terrorism of 9/11.

President Bush responded with a sober and stirring address to Congress nine days later. His solemn demeanor and the gravity of the situation helped to dissipate the cloud of illegitimacy that had shadowed his presidency since the disputed election of 2000. While emphasizing his respect for the Islamic religion and Muslim people, he identified the principal enemy as Osama bin Laden, head of the shadowy terrorist network Al Qaeda (see Section 39-8). Since 1998 bin Laden had taken refuge in landlocked Afghanistan, ruled by Islamic Fundamentalists called the Taliban. (Ironically, the United States had indirectly helped bring the Taliban to power by supporting religious rebels resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.) Bin Laden drew on popular Muslim opposition to Washington’s policies in the Middle East, including both the American military presence there and its unwavering support of Israel. He also benefited from broader, worldwide resentment of America’s enormous economic, military, and cultural power. Ironically, America’s most conspicuous strengths had made it a conspicuous target.

When the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, Bush ordered a massive military campaign against Afghanistan. Within three months American and Afghan rebel forces had overthrown the Taliban but failed to find bin Laden, and Americans continued to live in fear of future attacks. Confronted with this unconventional, diffuse menace, antiterrorism experts called for a new kind of “asymmetrical warfare,” employing not just traditional military muscle but also counterinsurgency tactics like innovative intelligence gathering, training of local police forces, economic reprisals, infiltration of suspected organizations, and even assassinations.

The terrorists’ blows struck fear deep and dark among a people accustomed to immunity from foreign attacks on their homeland. In this edgy atmosphere, Congress in October 2001 rammed through the USA Patriot Act. The act permitted extensive telephone and e-mail surveillance and authorized the detention and deportation of immigrants suspected of terrorism. Just over a year later, Congress created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to safeguard the nation’s borders and ferret out potential attackers. The Justice Department meanwhile rounded up hundreds of immigrants and held them without habeas corpus (formal charges in an open court). The Bush administration further called for trying suspected terrorists before military tribunals, where the usual rules of evidence and procedure did not apply. (The Supreme Court eventually denied the president that authority in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [2006].)

In the same anxious atmosphere in 2001, Congress also passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Originally aimed at the terrorist perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, the AUMF was subsequently used to justify military actions not only in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. Almost two decades later, amid continuing controversy, it remained in effect.

As hundreds of Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan languished in legal limbo and demoralizing isolation in the Guantánamo Detention Camp on the American military base at Guantánamo, Cuba, public-opinion polls showed Americans sharply divided on whether the terrorist threat fully warranted such drastic encroachments on America’s venerable tradition of protecting civil liberties.

Catastrophic terrorism posed an unprecedented challenge to the United States. The events of that murderous September morning reanimated American patriotism, but they also brought a long chapter in American history to a dramatic climax. All but unique among modern peoples, Americans for nearly two centuries had been spared from foreign attack on their homeland. That unusual degree of virtually cost-free national security had undergirded the values of openness and individual freedom that defined the distinctive character of American society. Now American security and American liberty alike were dangerously imperiled.

40.3 - bush takes offensive against iraq

On only its second day in office, the Bush administration had warned that it would not tolerate Iraq’s continued defiance of United Nations weapons inspections, mandated after Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, after playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors for years, expelled them from his country in 1998, inducing President Clinton, with congressional approval, to declare that Saddam’s removal (“regime change”) was an official goal of U.S. policy. But no sustained military action against Iraq had followed. Now, in the context of the new terrorist threat, the Bush administration focused on Iraq with a vengeance.

In January 2002, mere months after the September 11 attacks, Bush claimed that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, constituted an “axis of evil” that gravely menaced American security. Iran and North Korea were both known to be pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and Iran had long supported terrorist operations in the Middle East. But Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, defeated but not destroyed by Bush’s father in 1991, became the principal object of the new president’s wrath. The elder Bush had carefully assembled a broad international coalition to fight the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He had also spoken so often of “prudence” that late-night television comedians had mocked him for it. In contrast, his son was brashly determined to break with long-standing American traditions and wage a preemptive war against Iraq—and to go it alone if necessary. The younger Bush thus cast off his campaign-trail appeal for America to be a “humble nation” and stood revealed as a plunger, a daring risk-taker willing to embrace bold, dramatic policies, foreign as well as fiscal. In that spirit Bush began laying plans for a war against Iraq.

Itching for a fight, and egged on by hawkish Vice President Cheney and other “neoconservative” advisers, Bush accused the Iraqi regime of all manner of wrongdoing: oppressing its own people; frustrating the weapons inspectors; developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction; and supporting terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Perhaps most controversially, Bush also suggested that a liberated, democratized Iraq might provide a beacon of hope to the Islamic world and thereby rebalance the political equation in the volatile Middle East. To skeptical observers, including America’s usually reliable European allies, the very multiplicity of Bush’s reasons for war cast doubt on his case. In particular, his ambition to create a democracy in long-suffering Iraq, burdened with centuries of internecine conflict, seemed naively utopian. Secretary of State Colin Powell urged caution, warning of the long-term consequences for the United States of invading and occupying an unstable, religiously and culturally divided nation of 25 million people. “You break it, you own it,” he told the president.

Heavy majorities in both houses of Congress nevertheless passed a resolution in October 2002 authorizing the president to employ armed force to defend against Iraqi threats to America’s national security and to enforce United Nations resolutions regarding Iraq. A month later the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to give Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.” There followed a months-long cat-and-mouse game. U.N. weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Saddam once again harassed and blocked them. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The inspectors asked for more time. The United Nations declined to authorize the use of force to compel compliance.

In this tense and confusing atmosphere, Bush, with Britain his only major ally, launched the long-anticipated invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Saddam Hussein’s vaunted military machine collapsed almost immediately. In less than a month, Baghdad had fallen and Saddam had been driven from power and hounded into hiding. (He was found and arrested some nine months later and executed in 2006.) From the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier off the California coast, speaking beneath a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” Bush triumphantly announced on May 1, 2003, that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” (see Map 40.1).

40.4 - owning iraq

President Bush’s words soon came back to haunt him. Neoconservative pundits in Washington had predicted that American soldiers would be greeted as liberators and that Saddam’s ouster would lead to flowering democracy across the Middle East. In reality post-Saddam Iraq quickly devolved into a seething cauldron of violence.

The country’s two largest religious communities, minority Sunni and majority Shia Muslims, clashed violently, especially in the capital city of Baghdad. Both factions attacked American forces, especially after the U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army, which deprived Iraq of an effective indigenous police force. Hatred for Americans only worsened with revelations in April 2004 that Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison had been tortured and humiliated by their American captors. Amid this chaos, jihadist terrorists from around the region flooded into Iraq, often fueling the intra-Iraqi conflicts to further their own radical Islamist vision. Although Al Qaeda had had no link to Iraq under Saddam, as Bush had inaccurately alleged, the organization certainly moved in afterward. These three battles—Shia-Sunni ethnic violence, counteroccupation insurgency, and jihadist terrorism—fed a spiraling maelstrom of bloodshed. By the end of 2006, more Americans had died in Iraq than in the attacks of September 11 (see “Thinking Globally: America Through Foreign Eyes: Hyperpower or Hapless Power?” Section 40-7). Iraqi suffering was far greater. As of 2017, the American death toll in Iraq exceeded 4400, while more than 500,000 Iraqis had violently perished.

Almost from their arrival, American forces began preparing to withdraw. In the summer of 2004, the American military ceded political power and limited sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. A series of national elections followed in 2005, with millions of Iraqis voting for a national assembly to draft a constitution and, later, for parliamentary representatives and a president. But under the seeming stability of Iraq’s new democratic government lay deep, violent tensions. Sunni Muslims, the minority that had held power under Saddam Hussein, feared reprisals and repressions under a majority Shia government. Unsuccessful at the ballot box, many Sunnis turned to bombings and political assassinations.

40.5 - reelecting george bush

Americans had rarely been as divided as they were in the first years of the twenty-first century. Civil libertarians fretted that the government was trampling on personal freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Cultural tensions boiled up over the rights of gay and lesbian Americans when leaders in San Francisco and Massachusetts permitted same-sex couples to marry in 2004. Affirmative action continued to spark sharp debate, as a divided Supreme Court permitted some preferential treatment in admitting minority students to the University of Michigan in 2003.

Amid these divisions George W. Bush positioned himself to run for reelection. Targeting what he called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” he touted the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which mandated sanctions against schools that failed to meet federal performance standards. He played to cultural conservatives in opposing stem cell research (see Section 40-1) and called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But most of all, he promoted himself as a stalwart leader in wartime, warning the country not to “change horses midstream.”

Embattled Democrats chose lanky and long-jawed Massachusetts senator John Kerry to represent their ticket. Kerry pushed progressive visions of government and counted on his Vietnam War record to counter charges that he would be weak in the face of terrorism. Despite increased public misgivings about the war in Iraq, Bush nailed down a decisive victory in November 2004. He received the first popular vote majority by a presidential candidate in more than a decade—60,639,281 to 57,355,978—and bested Kerry in the Electoral College, 286 to 252. This time his victory was clear, constitutional, and uncontested.

40.6 - bush’s bruising second term

Reelection, George W. Bush announced, gave him “political capital,” which he intended to spend on an aggressive domestic agenda. The appointment of two new conservative Supreme Court justices (John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.) upon the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor seemed to bode well for his ambitions. But Bush soon overplayed his hand. Attacking the core of New Deal liberalism, he proposed a radical program to privatize much of Social Security. A massive outcry led by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and other liberal groups reminded Americans how much they loved Social Security, warts and all. Bush’s proposal faded away within six months of his reelection. The same fate befell a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

The president also took aim at the contentious issue of immigration reform. Anti-immigrant pundits and politicians—many in Bush’s party—leveled the old charges that illegal immigrants were welfare-spongers and job-stealers. Immigrant sympathizers countered that undocumented aliens had to be legalized so that they could receive the same protections as other workers. Bush worked hard on a proposed law to establish a guest-worker program for undocumented workers and to create a path to citizenship, albeit after paying a fine. Nativist forces condemned the plan as “amnesty.” Business interests protested that employers would be overburdened with verifying the right to work. And immigrant rights advocates charged that the program would create “second-class citizens.” In the end, the compromise bill pleased no one and died an ignominious political death, to Bush’s deep disappointment.

Bush soon suffered further embarrassment. Revelations exploded in 2005 that the government was conducting illegal wiretap surveillance on American citizens inside the United States, in violation of federal law. There followed yet another political misstep when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) botched its response to the deadly Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, flooding 80 percent of the historic city and causing over 1300 deaths and $150 billion in damages. A consensus began to build that Bush was a genial personality but an impetuous, unreflective, and frequently feckless leader, a president in over his head in a sea of complex problems that he seemed incapable of mastering.

As disaffection spread, Republicans fell victim in the midterm elections of 2006 to the same anti-incumbency sentiment they had ridden to power twelve years earlier. Democrats narrowly regained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since they had lost them to the Gingrich revolution of 1994 (see Section 39-3). California Democrat Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House.

The biggest factor in the Democratic sweep was the perceived mishandling of the war in Iraq. Prewar claims about WMD and Iraq’s connections to Al Qaeda and 9/11 had all proved false. By late 2005 polls revealed that most Americans considered the war a mistake. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned after the Republicans’ “thumping” in the 2006 midterm elections. But Iraq still knew no peace, and the death toll, Iraqi and American alike, continued to rise. The Bush administration sought to salvage its policy in early 2007 with a “surge” of twenty thousand additional troops. The surge brought a modest measure of stability to Iraq, but as the 2008 election cycle got under way, public opinion nevertheless solidified ever more strongly against the war.

40.7 - the presidential election of 2008

With neither the sitting president nor vice president running, the 2008 election was truly “open” for the first time in eighty years. The race for the Democratic nomination soon tightened into a fiercely fought contest between the forty-six-year-old, first-term Illinois senator Barack Obama and the pre-campaign favorite, former First Lady and sitting New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Obama narrowly prevailed. Son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama had a cosmopolitan background well suited to the age of globalization. He promised gridlock-weary voters a “postpartisan” politics that would end the divisive battles of the Bush years. To strengthen his national security credentials, he picked foreign-policy-savvy Delaware senator Joseph Biden as his running mate.

Republicans nominated long-time Arizona senator John McCain, aged seventy-two, a self-styled “maverick” and a Vietnam War hero who had endured years of torture as a prisoner of war. He had a record of supporting bipartisan legislation on such issues as normalizing relations with North Vietnam, campaign finance, and immigration reform. To the astonishment of even some of his closest aides, McCain picked first-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The telegenic Palin briefly galvanized the conservative Republican base. But when interview gaffes exposed her breathtakingly weak grasp of the issues, she became fodder for late-night television comedians and, polls showed, at least as much a liability as an asset to the Republican ticket.

Obama’s poise and gravitas in televised debates favorably impressed many voters, and his campaign slogan, “Yes we can,” inspired widespread hope and enthusiasm. Then, just six weeks before election day, a massive economic thunderclap gave his campaign a buoyant boost.

The American housing price bubble, fed by years of the Federal Reserve System’s easy-money policies and the private banking system’s lax lending practices, burst at last. By 2008 the collapse in real estate values was generating a tsunami of mortgage defaults, especially among “subprime” borrowers whose escalating housing payments stretched them to the breaking point. Lenders watched in horror as countless homeowners defaulted and the worth of mortgage-backed securities sank precipitously. Aggressive “deleveraging” set in worldwide, as financial institutions from Tokyo to New York to London scrambled to reduce their debt loads by selling assets (at ever-declining prices). But some debts could not be unloaded at any price, and credit markets soon froze everywhere. Following the collapse of the venerable Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, stocks sank into a deep swoon. The gravest financial hurricane since the Great Depression of the 1930s was gathering ever-increasing force (see Figure 40.3).

In contrast to the infamous 1929 stock-market crash that heralded the onset of the Great Depression, it took days, not years, for a terrified Bush administration to intervene on a gigantic scale. The federal government nationalized the country’s two biggest mortgage companies, the Federal National Mortgage Association (“Fannie Mae”) and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”), and effectively took over the world’s biggest insurance company, the American International Group (AIG). Treasury secretary Henry Paulson next persuaded Congress to create the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), authorizing a whopping $700 billion to buy “toxic” assets and inject cash directly into the nation’s biggest banks and corporations. (Despite public outrage over TARP’s original cost, when the program ended in 2014, the Treasury reported a net profit of $15 billion.)

Unsettled by the galloping economic calamity, and seizing an opportunity to atone for the nation’s troubled racial history, voters delivered a historic victory to Barack Obama. He garnered 53 percent of the popular vote and won the Electoral College 365 to 173 (see Map 40.2). Democrats also enlarged their majorities in the House and the Senate.

Obama’s election gave promise of opening a new chapter in the long-vexed history of American race relations. It also confronted the nation’s first African American president with the daunting challenge of governing a country embroiled in two wars even as it sank into the deepest economic abyss since the 1930s. “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” jibed the satirical magazine, The Onion.

40.8 - obama in the white house

Inspired by Barack Obama’s vision of hope, a vast and exuberant crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his inauguration. Youthful energy was in the air, though in his inaugural address Obama struck a sober note by calling on Americans to “put away childish things” and embrace “a new era of responsibility.”

Obama’s solemn tone was fitting. Even as he spoke, home construction was grinding to a halt, mortgage foreclosures were soaring, and countless businesses were shutting their doors. Most alarmingly, the economy was shedding a sickening 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate climbed above 10 percent—the highest level since the early 1980s and perhaps heralding a return to the catastrophic joblessness of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Obama strongly counterpunched against the deepening crisis in his first hundred days, including a huge “stimulus” bill—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—that contained nearly a trillion dollars of tax cuts, as well as new spending for jobs, infrastructure projects, and relief to state and local governments. Despite bitter criticism, the government also helped to arrest the economy’s freefall by shoring up bankrupt automakers General Motors and Chrysler, saving up to 3 million jobs. The eventual cost to the government was some $10 billion—arguably a bargain price to pay for rescuing a major American industry and staving off a repeat of the Great Depression.

By the summer of 2009, the worst of the panic was over, and the economy began to expand once more, though painfully slowly. Economists tempered their comparisons with the Great Depression and gave the less frightening label “Great Recession” to the turmoil. But the economy had been badly wounded and continued to suffer, as the first steps toward growth were feeble and faltering. The unemployment rate stayed stuck above 9 percent. As millions of Americans lost jobs and homes, and many permanently abandoned their search for employment, the confidence-crushing and security-sapping legacies of the Great Recession wormed their way deeply into the American psyche and would not be quickly dislodged.

Even while pursuing economic recovery, President Obama also sought to achieve the long-sought liberal goal of health-care reform. When attempts to enlist Republican support bogged down in congressional haggling, he relied on Democrats alone to pass a landmark health bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (customarily shortened to Affordable Care Act, or ACA) in March 2010. The new health-care law (popularly known as “Obamacare”) mandated all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, required states to establish “exchanges” whereby individuals and small businesses could purchase health-care insurance at competitive rates, prohibited insurers from denying coverage to anyone with a preexisting medical condition, and allowed children up to the age of twenty-six to remain covered by their parents’ health plans. Obamacare also provided subsidies to those below certain income thresholds to help pay for private insurance while funding a major expansion of public Medicaid insurance for poorer Americans. The price of the bill was estimated at $940 billion over ten years, but experts also predicted that the bill’s cost-cutting measures would reduce the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion over twenty years.

Scarcely pausing, Obama soon followed his health-care success with the 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (commonly known by the names of its principal congressional sponsors, Dodd-Frank), which pointed the way to a major overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system. The act aimed to curb the risky, high-flying practices that had contributed to the debacle of 2008 with new controls on banks, investment houses, and stock markets, and with new truth-in-lending rules to protect consumers.

40.9 - back to backlash

Yet, in a polarized political era, Obama had unusual difficulty reaping the political rewards of these legislative achievements. He seemed caught between an anvil and a boulder. Because his measures only halted but did not fully reverse the economy’s decline, critics on the left condemned him as too timid. Because federal budget deficits ballooned dramatically on his watch, critics on the right excoriated him as a big-government spendthrift.

The conjunction of expanding federal programs and mounting deficits tapped into a deep vein of American wariness of “big government.” Starting with vehement attacks on the health-care bill in the summer of 2009, angry protesters accused Obama of promoting “socialism” and “unconstitutional” controls over individual lives. Calling themselves the “Tea Party” after the American Revolutionary Patriots, these aggrieved citizens combined a knack for street-theater demonstrations with nonstop Internet and media fulminations against the president and his policies. Bankrolled by billionaire donors and corporate-backed political action committees (PACs), the Tea Party movement galvanized a hyperconservative grassroots constituency that pushed the Republican party even more sharply to the right, eventually spawning a small but potent and tight-right “Freedom Caucus” within the Republican House membership.

Heartened by the Tea Party’s mobilization, Republicans determined to fight the administration tooth and nail, steadfastly repudiating Obama’s promise of a postpartisan politics. The president did succeed in appointing two new Supreme Court Justices, Sonia Sotomayor (the Court’s first Hispanic) in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010, bringing the number of female justices to three. But other efforts, like a “cap-and-trade” bill to curb greenhouse gases and reduce global warming, fell victim to the fervent minority’s opposition, as gridlock continued to jam the gears of government.

As the Great Recession continued to weigh heavily upon the land, Obama’s approval ratings steadily slipped, and his party slid downhill with him. In the midterm elections of 2010, Republicans gained six seats in the Senate and a whopping sixty-three seats in the House, enough to give them majority control of the lower chamber when the new Congress convened in 2011.

Heartened by their triumph, Republicans looked to the upcoming 2012 presidential election with increasing hope for victory—though the spectacle of protracted bickering and partisan intransigence while the health of the nation’s economy hung in the balance deeply disillusioned many Americans of both parties.

40.10 - new directions in foreign policy

Along with economic problems, Obama also inherited America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to chart a more tempered and pragmatic course after the neoconservative ventures of the Bush years, Obama assembled a foreign-policy team that included former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Obama sought to utilize his own global popularity in efforts to repair frayed alliances, forge new arms-control agreements, and engage the citizenry of regional hotbeds of anti-Americanism like the Middle East. His personal and symbolic appeal to many foreign observers was vividly conveyed in 2009 when—to the surprise of many including himself—he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The president sought to wind down the Iraq War while leaving behind a reasonably stable country. Shortly after taking office, Obama announced that American combat operations in Iraq would end in summer 2010 and that all American combat troops would be withdrawn by 2011. Despite continuing violence and the agonizingly slow birth of a viable Iraqi government, the deadline for ending American-led operations was met. The last U.S. combat forces departed from Iraq in December 2011.

Afghanistan was a pricklier nettle to grasp. Obama had declared that the Afghan war was necessary to defeat Al Qaeda and prevent future terrorism. But Afghan jihadi (militant Islamic) fighters grew stronger against an Afghan government plagued by incompetence and corruption. More ominously, the Taliban and Al Qaeda found refuge across the border in unstable but nuclear-armed Pakistan, posing the danger of an expanded conflict there as well.

Pressed by some to seek a way out of the increasingly costly conflict, and by others to deepen the American commitment, Obama chose to do both. In December 2009 he declared that American troops would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan by 2011—but that to achieve that goal he was temporarily deploying an additional thirty thousand U.S. soldiers to combat the insurgency. Despite this commitment and a new counterinsurgency strategy, little political progress ensued. Meanwhile, American forces managed to achieve a dramatic success in neighboring Pakistan in May 2011 when they concluded a ten-year manhunt by killing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Though falling short of his goals in Afghanistan, Obama made good on his pledge to begin withdrawing troops in 2011. By the end of his presidency in 2016, only 9800 American service members remained in the country.

In what proved to be one of Obama’s most controversial policies, he stepped up the use of aerial attacks from unmanned remotely piloted aircraft, popularly called “drones.” The increasing intensity of U.S. drone attacks sparked both domestic and international outcries about this revolutionary new kind of warfare, though the administration maintained that drones permitted surgically precise strikes that spared innocent civilians. Particularly troubling were attacks on U.S. citizens in places like Yemen. Even if they were known terrorists, critics charged, their constitutionally guaranteed right to trial by jury protected them from summary execution.

Obama also strived to honor his promise to roll back Bush-era antiterrorism policies. He issued executive orders banning water-boarding and other practices that were widely considered to constitute torture. The president also tried to shut down the controversial military detention center in Guantánamo Bay. But Congress blocked his efforts, and as late as 2017, forty-one of the nearly eight hundred prisoners captured in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks continued to languish in Guantánamo with little prospect of release. Nine had died in captivity, seven of them apparent suicides.

40.11 - the politics of inequality

Chronically high unemployment and stubbornly anemic economic growth after the 2008 financial meltdown helped sharpen a national debate over class, inequality, and the role of government in the economy. The financial sector provided a particularly rich target for many Americans’ ire. Financiers’ soaring incomes helped to drive the surge in the richest Americans’ income share. Even with new rules in place, regulators seemed mismatched against Wall Street’s outsized political clout.

The fall of 2011 saw the emergence of an eclectic protest movement that colorfully highlighted the issue of rising inequality. “Occupy Wall Street” began as a small demonstration by youthful radicals who pitched their tents in New York’s financial district. Similar encampments soon sprang up in several other cities and popularized the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent”—a reference to the concentration of wealth and income among the highest earning 1 percent of Americans. Though the protesters gradually decamped, President Obama eventually acknowledged their cause, declaring in his January 2012 state of the union message that he refused to “settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.” He called the challenge to restore broadly shared prosperity “the defining issue of our time.”

Growing inequality had deep roots and grew to dramatic proportions as the new century unfolded. In an unsettling reversal of post–WWII trends in American society, during the last two decades of the twentieth century the rich had grown fabulously richer, middle-class incomes had stagnated, and the poor were left to make do with an ever-shrinking share of the economic pie. Between 1968 and 2016, the share of the nation’s income that flowed to the top 20 percent of its households swelled from 40 percent to 51 percent (see Figure 40.4). Even more striking was the remarkable increase in inequality among those high earners. The top 5 percent of income recipients saw their share of the national income grow from about 15 percent in 1968 to 22.6 percent in 2016. And as for the top 1 percent so frequently targeted in the Occupy movement’s rhetoric, their share of national income rose from 8.4 percent in 1968 to a whopping 20.2 percent in 2016. The gap in wealth—what people own, as distinct from what they earn—was even more dramatic: in 2016 just 20 percent of Americans owned nearly 90 percent of the nation’s assets.

Widening inequality could be measured in other ways as well. In 1965, chief executives typically earned 20 times as much as the average worker in their corporations; in 2016, they earned 271 times as much. Some 41 million people remained mired in poverty in 2016, or nearly 13 percent of all Americans—up from 11.3 percent in 1973 (approximately 9 percent of non-Latino whites, 22 percent of African Americans, 19 percent of Latinos, and 9 percent of Asians).

These figures offered a depressing indictment of the inequities afflicting an affluent and allegedly egalitarian republic. A similar trend toward inequality was evident in many industrial societies, but it was most pronounced in the United States. In the new century, Americans on average were no longer the world’s wealthiest people, as they had been in the quarter-century after World War II. Citizens of several other countries enjoyed higher average per capita incomes, and many nations boasted more equitable distributions of wealth and well-being (see Figure 40.6).

What caused the widening income and wealth gaps? Some critics pointed to the tax and fiscal policies of the Reagan and both Bush (father and son) as well as Trump presidencies, which favored the wealthy (see Table 40.2). But deeper running historical currents probably played a more powerful role, as suggested by the similar trend lines in other industrialized societies. Among the most conspicuous causes were intensifying global economic competition; the displacement by robots of high-paying manufacturing jobs for semiskilled and unskilled workers; the greater economic rewards commanded by educated workers in high-tech industries (see Figure 40.5), the rise of the financial sector as a percentage of national GDP; the shrinkage of unions; the growth of part-time and temporary work; the rising tide of relatively low-skill immigrants; and the increasing tendency of educated men and women to marry one another and both work, creating households with very high incomes. Educational disparities also contributed to economic inequality, starting with the underfunding of many schools in poor urban areas and the soaring cost of higher education. A 2017 study revealed that at the eighty most selective colleges, more students came from families with incomes in the top 1 percent than from all the families combined in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution.

The very nature of the contemporary economy seemed to pose daunting obstacles to creating more equitably shared prosperity. When the twentieth century opened, United States Steel Corporation was the flagship business of America’s booming industrial revolution. A generation later, General Motors, annually producing millions of automobiles, became the characteristic American corporation, signaling the historic shift to a mass consumer economy. Following World War II, the rise of International Business Machines (IBM) and, later, Microsoft, as well as Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google (the “FANGs”), symbolized yet another momentous transformation, to the fast-paced “information age.” But, in a sobering illustration of the dynamics of the new economy, that most iconic modern American company—Apple—only employed 80,000 Americans in 2016. When General Motors had boasted a similar status in the American economy a half century earlier, it employed over 600,000 Americans.

40.12 - battling for the white house in 2012

To a striking degree, inequality—both economic and political—remained a central theme of the heated 2012 presidential race. Barack Obama sought reelection on the basis of his stewardship of the economy in crisis times, his signature health-care law (narrowly upheld in a Supreme Court decision that summer), and his winding down of two unpopular wars.

The Republican party nominated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as their presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Romney, the first Mormon presidential candidate of a major party in American history, had made his career in management consulting and private equity investing before entering politics. His record as governor of liberal Massachusetts was decidedly moderate, but he secured the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2012 by hewing to a much more conservative line, promising to repeal both the Affordable Care Act and the Wall Street Reform Act, cut domestic spending, and slash taxes. Citing Obama’s concerns about inequality, Republicans attacked him as fomenting “class warfare.”

The role of money in politics became a divisive issue in the race, thanks to a highly controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a five-to-four ruling, the Court held that the First Amendment prohibited limits on political expenditures made by corporations, unions, and advocacy groups. The decision helped to spur the proliferation of so-called super-PACS, which, by avoiding any direct contributions to candidates and parties, could pour unlimited sums into the political arena. It also enabled nonprofit advocacy groups to spend money on elections without disclosing the source of their funds (“dark money”). With the floodgates of political spending thrown open, the presidential race of 2012 proved to be the most expensive in American history to date, with both campaigns and their allies spending a combined total of over $2 billion.

On election day, Obama won a decisive victory, with 65,915,796 popular and 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 60,933,500 and 206 votes. Democrats managed to retain control of the Senate, but the House remained in GOP hands.

Powerful demographic trends helped account for Obama’s victory (see Map 40.4). While just 39 percent of white voters supported him in 2012 compared to 43 percent in 2008, whites’ overall share of the electorate was declining, while the multiracial Obama coalition comprised several groups—conspicuously including Latinos—that were growing in electoral importance. But as events would prove just four years later, the Obama coalition was not as robust a harbinger of the future as many had predicted.

40.13 - second term stalemate

Obama had expressed hope that a victory over Mitt Romney might “break the fever” of intractable opposition afflicting congressional Republicans. But with the partisan balance of power essentially unchanged by the election and deep-seated ideological disagreements still defining the political divide, such a hope proved wishful thinking.

Driven largely by the outsized influence of the Freedom Caucus, congressional Republicans grew ever more intransigent. Their unrelenting opposition to the Affordable Care Act forced a sixteen-day government closure in October 2013. Republicans also grew ever more fractious within their own ranks. In 2015 rebellious House Republicans unseated their leader, Speaker John Boehner, and after rancorous debate settled on Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan as his replacement.

The spectacle of eternally feckless wrangling in Washington fed mounting disgust with all branches of government. Polls showed President Obama’s approval rating drooping as low as 40 percent, while more than 80 percent of citizens disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job. Even the historically hallowed Supreme Court fell short of majority approval.

Faced with apparently implacable congressional obstruction, Obama resorted ever more frequently to executive actions to achieve his objectives. After repeated congressional failures to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), which would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented youths who either graduated from college or served in the U.S. armed forces, Obama in 2012 announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. It provided renewable two-year periods of exemption from deportation and eligibility for work permits for people who had arrived in the United States as minors, but without proper documentation (usually as the children of undocumented immigrants). Of the nearly 2 million eligible people, some 800,000 had enrolled as of 2017, when the newly installed Trump administration rescinded the policy, while asking Congress to consider putting the program on a statutory basis.

Obama also relied on executive orders in the environmental field, including action to strengthen protection of Alaska’s enormous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to create or expand national monuments in several western states, and to address the challenges of climate change by lessening dependence on fossil fuels. Lacking statutory authority, all such actions were vulnerable to reversal by Obama’s presidential successors.

40.14 - the immigration impasse

Few issues remained as intractable as the vexed matter of immigration, as foreign-born persons in the United States surged to more than 13 percent of the population in 2018, a level not seen since the 1920s. Numbering 58 million in 2017, Latinos were the country’s largest minority group (see “Makers of America: The Latinos,” Section 39-3), but other immigrant-derived communities were also growing rapidly—notably Asians, who numbered more than 20 million by 2017. Both groups were especially well represented in California.

As in the past, high levels of immigration aroused deep anxieties among many Americans resentful about millions of newcomers who supposedly stifled economic growth, unfairly competed for jobs, depressed wages, and freeloaded on public services. The truth was, according to a careful 2016 study by the National Academy of Sciences, immigrants positively contributed to the nation’s overall economic output and had “very small” effects on employment and wages. They were net contributors to federal revenues, though net beneficiaries at the state level where services like education and hospital care were principally funded. Studies also revealed that since 2009, more people were migrating from the U.S. into Mexico than from Mexico, a trend that was likely to continue as Mexican fertility rates sharply declined and the Mexican economy steadily improved. Thus the proposal to build an anti-immigrant wall along the nation’s southern border, soon to surface in the 2016 presidential campaign, looked like a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse had escaped.

40.15 - civil rights and civil liberties

The Supreme Court in 2013 waded into politically troubled waters in Shelby County v. Holder, as a narrow conservative majority declared unconstitutional Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which had required states with a history of racial discrimination to seek federal clearance for any changes to their voting laws. The decision opened the door for some states to restrict ballot access by passing strict voter identification requirements and limiting registration periods, practices that critics charged unfairly penalized minority, poor, and young voters. When minority turnout declined in some swing states in the 2016 presidential election, civil liberties advocates pointed to Shelby as the culprit.

Two years later, in Obergefell v. Hodges, a narrow liberal majority on the Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses conferred on gay people a constitutional right to marry. Following on the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the decision capped a momentous period of legal advancement for gay and lesbian Americans amidst a broader cultural acceptance of homosexuality.

Explosive revelations about government spying operations erupted in 2013, when Edward Joseph Snowden, a coltish computer-whiz, carried out a daring digital heist. A former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Snowden clandestinely copied 1.5 million classified documents and arranged for their release to the public. The files exposed the NSA’s sweeping capture from Internet companies of U.S. citizens’ digital communications (“PRISM”); the construction of a giant data storehouse in Bluffdale, Utah, that could store up to twelve exabytes of information; the systematic monitoring of overseas web traffic of non-U.S. citizens; and even the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone communications. Congress attempted to rein in the NSA’s most aggressive practices in the USA Freedom Act of 2015, but much of the NSA’s surveillance powers remained intact.

To avoid criminal prosecution, Snowden eventually sought sanctuary in Russia, where he has remained since. Cursed as a traitor or hailed as a patriot, Snowden sparked impassioned debates over the tradeoff between security and civil liberties. His revelations also served to remind Americans of the pervasive impact of the Internet on their daily lives—and of the potential threats to privacy that the Internet enabled.

Created by the federal government in the 1960s for Cold War–era collaboration among American computer scientists, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the Internet was exploding into homes, businesses, schools, and offices. The number of households with Internet access skyrocketed from 18 percent in 1997 to more than 80 percent just two decades later. Americans now depended on the Internet to communicate, shop, work, pay bills, and electronically bond with family, friends, and lovers. Its earliest boosters touted the Internet as a democratizing technology that would upending the hierarchical worlds of traditional media, business, and politics, and spread information and power more equally among the masses. But as events would soon show, not all the Internet’s effects were benign.

40.16 - a age of distrust

A president’s party usually suffers setbacks in midterm elections, and 2014 proved no exception. Republicans expanded their majority in the House and gained control of the Senate for the first time in eight years. Many observers attributed those results not to blossoming affection for Republicans, but to deep disillusionment with the political status quo. Wall Street had roared back from the Great Recession, as had sectors like energy and high technology. But tens of millions of ordinary Americans remained stuck in the financial sink-hole created by the foreclosures and job losses of 2008. The seemingly endless wars in the Middle East also ground on, sending America’s over-stretched all-volunteer military on deployment after deployment. A resurgent populism flared up on both left and right, fueled by the Internet’s new mass-communication technologies.

The electronic media, already carved up by cable television and sliced ever more thinly by the Internet, shattered into thousands of highly personalized pieces with the spread of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. Computer algorithms now precisely selected and cunningly targeted the news that Americans consumed. The torrent of data amounted to a digital-age update to the venomously partisan world of pamphlets and broadsides in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Social media did open opportunities for political activism, notably in the Arab Spring (2011), Occupy (2011), and the Black Lives Matter (2015) movements, but they also worked to reinforce what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” the natural human tendency to give more credence to those ideas that agree with one’s own pre-existing opinions and thereby shut individuals off from alternative points of view.

Contrary to earlier predictions that the proliferation of mass media would nurture a “global village,” in fact the multiplicity of media divided Americans into ever more isolated tribal units and resurrected primal habits of trusting no one outside the tightly drawn circles of the familiar. Distrusting government was an old American habit, but modern Americans were also coming to distrust a broad array of other institutions as well (see Figure 36.2)—and they increasingly distrusted one another. Alarmingly, young people were the least likely to place trust in others (see Figure 40.8). Amid information overload and online shouting matches, the political and cultural gap between red and blue America widened still further.

40.17 - obama’s troubled last years

Stymied by a Republican Congress and confronting an increasingly disenchanted public, President Obama struggled to govern effectively during his last years in office. He could take credit for his first-term passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank reforms in the financial sector, and for arresting the economy’s free-fall during the Great Recession. Yet both those legislative achievements continued to excite raucous conservative criticism, and the economy’s recovery from the crisis of 2008–2009 remained painfully feeble.

Racial issues also erupted during Obama’s second term, deflating the hope that the election of the first African-American president had heralded the birth of a post-racial era. When an armed resident of a Florida gated community fatally shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, Obama declared that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Worse was to come in the years that followed, as African-Americans met violent deaths at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; New York City; Cleveland; San Francisco; and elsewhere. A self-declared white supremacist, declaring that he wanted to ignite a race war, opened fire on black church-goers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, killing nine worshippers.

These incidents spawned a vigorous protest movement, Black Lives Matter, which prompted counter-cries of “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” (defending law enforcement officers)—exposing anew the racial fault lines that continued to seam American society. Protesters also publicized America’s dubious status as the nation with the highest incarceration rates in the world. In the wake of hardline sentencing laws enacted in the 1990s, the nation’s prison population soared—and was so disproportionately made up of minority inmates that one commentator dubbed the system “the new Jim Crow.” By 2016 American prisons held some 1.5 million inmates, most of them men, nearly half of them black men, who were jailed at six time the rate of whites. Many observers blamed those wildly disparate numbers on the inequitable consequences of the decades-old “war on drugs,” with its inflexible mandatory sentences.

Violence blighted many communities in modern America. An unhinged gunman killed 20 six- and seven-year-old children, as well as six teachers and staff, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, in 2012. Other mass murderers slaughtered 12 people in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012; 9 in Roseburg, Oregon, and 14 in San Bernardino, California, in 2015; 49 in Orlando, Florida, in 2016; 58 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and 25, as well as an unborn child, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017; and 17 in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Despite the heartrending carnage, efforts to tighten gun-control laws continued to go nowhere. A despondent President Obama lamented that “Somehow this has become routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. We’ve become numb to this.”

Developments abroad gave the beleaguered president no respite. A U.S.-led military effort unseated Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, but in what Obama later called the worst mistake of his presidency, no preparations were made for the aftermath of Qaddafi’s fall. Amidst the ensuing chaos, the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, touching off years of political recriminations back home against then Secretary of State and later presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Civil war in neighboring Syria broke out in 2011 and soon descended into a diabolically complicated battle between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government and a bewildering array of rebel factions, including, eventually, a fanatically militant group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). President Obama brought down upon himself no end of denunciation when he warned in 2012 that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that would compel an American response—and then failed to act when evidence mounted that Assad had resorted to chemical warfare. Nor did the Obama administration come up with effective counter-measures when a newly assertive Russia, led by ambitious autocrat Vladimir Putin, annexed the territory of Crimea in 2014 and intervened militarily in neighboring Ukraine.

The Middle Eastern cauldron boiled ever more dangerously in 2014 when ISIS seized vast tracts of real estate in Iraq and Syria, proclaimed those lands the center of a new global caliphate, and began fiendishly flouting established standards of international law and even basic human decency. ISIS fighters beheaded civilians, enslaved young women, and genocidally extinguished minority communities that fell within their grasp. Along with affiliates like Boko Haram in northern Africa, ISIS seemed poised to write an exceptionally barbaric new chapter in the long and sorry annals of human cruelty. That threat prompted President Obama, in violation of all his earlier instincts and promises, to reintroduce American troops into the Middle East. By early 2018 Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian forces, with help from both the United States and Russia, had pushed ISIS back to just a few last-ditch strongholds. Nearly half a million Syrians and Iraqis lay dead, while some 5 million desperate Syrian refugees had fled their blasted homeland.

The outgoing president could claim one last foreign policy victory in 2015 when an American-led coalition persuaded Iran to curtail its nuclear weapons program in return for the lifting of economic sanctions that had throttled the Iranian economy since the revolutionary take-over in 1979. But even as the champions of the Iran nuclear deal breathed a sigh of relief at this important gain for nuclear non-proliferation, American hawks prepared to attack the agreement in the upcoming 2016 election campaign.

40.18 - the astonishing election of 2016

The presidential election campaign of 2016 dramatically exposed the depths of the raw divisions that plagued the republic. The race for the Democratic nomination pitted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, a curmudgeonly septuagenarian Vermont senator and self-declared democratic socialist who excoriated wealthy “one-percenters” and advocated government-financed universal health care. Millions of fired-up and left-leaning young people who “felt the Bern” gave Sanders several primary victories, but his candidacy finally yielded to the more centrist, deep-pocketed, and well-oiled Clinton electoral machine. Yet even as Democrats became the first major American party to nominate a woman for president, Sanders’ impressive popularity testified to the on-going struggle to define the party’s agenda.

Meanwhile, New York City real estate mogul and reality-television personality Donald J. Trump bullied, belittled, and bamboozled sixteen rivals to snag—some said hi-jack—the Republican nomination. His legions of critics, including many Republican grandees, considered the brash billionaire a swaggering colossus of ignorance, vanity, and vulgarity. Candidate Trump trashed the Affordable Care Act, threatened China with tough trade sanctions, promised massive spending on infrastructure, lambasted immigrants as the principal source of the nation’s woes, and pledged to build a “beautiful” wall along the Mexican border—and compel the Mexicans to pay for it. With often cavalier disregard for the facts, Trump, prince of plutocrats, campaigned as a populist who would “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C., and “make America great again.”

The campaign maelstrom intensified when WikiLeaks, an international organization dedicated to disclosing confidential documents, released thousands of e-mails illegally filched from inside the Clinton campaign. American intelligence services concluded that Russian hackers were the source of WikiLeaks’ information trove, and that Russia had interfered in the election in myriad other ways as well, generating thousands of false social media accounts whose combative posts fueled already raging partisan fires. Russia had cleverly manipulated the cacophonous social media environment to exploit and amplify political divisions in order to disrupt the American electoral process. The principal beneficiary of the chaos was Donald J. Trump, which ultimately prompted several investigations into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

On election day a majority of nearly three million voters preferred Clinton, but Trump’s narrow victories in just three traditionally Democratic states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—tipped the Electoral College count in his favor. To the utter astonishment of almost all pundits and prognosticators, the thrice-married former Democrat, a sexual predator caught on tape boasting about groping women, became the oldest and richest person ever elected to the presidency, the first president without any prior military or political experience, the fifth to assume office while losing the popular vote, and, said some, the most unprepared and least qualified person elevated to the presidency in the history of the republic.

How to account for Trump’s stunning political upset? Some commentators pointed to the failures of Clinton’s campaign, which targeted several discrete constituencies but never succeeded in defining a unifying vision for the nation. Worse, Clinton committed major political malpractice when she publicly lumped “half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it.” Pro-Trump citizens responded by sporting tee-shirts declaring “I’m an adorable deplorable.” A journalist challenged Clinton to explain “how can you unite a country if you’ve written off tens of millions of Americans?”

Then in the waning days of the campaign, FBI Director James Comey informed members of Congress that he was considering re-opening a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. Members immediately leaked the information, casting a dark cloud over the Clinton candidacy. Just two days before election day, Comey announced that there was no basis to re-open the investigation. But the damage was done.

Yet in addition to Clinton’s liabilities, Trump’s astounding victory also stemmed from his uncanny ability to mobilize deep grievances long festering in the body politic. Clinton carried some 490 of the nation’s more than 3100 counties, heavily concentrated in big coastal metropolitan areas, where two-thirds of America’s GDP originated. In the nation’s rural, interior, and poorer counties, Trump handily prevailed, especially among white voters distressed by job insecurity and wage stagnation, discomforted by immigration and accelerating cultural change, and disgusted by down-their-noses condescension from self-anointed elites (see Map 40.5). In short, prosperous, cosmopolitan “blue state” citizens, including minorities, tended to vote Democratic, while their less-favored countrymen dwelled in economically challenged, socially conservative, and more racially and ethnically homogenous deep-red Republican territory. America had become two nations.

40.19 - trump in power

Following an inaugural address that pugnaciously asserted his nationalist, protectionist, and nativist agenda, Trump’s first months in office were chaotic. The new president at first seemed more determined to take a wrecking ball to the despised Washington “establishment” than to honor his campaign promises or organize an orderly government. Though his party controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the White House, Republicans proved unable in early 2017 to accomplish their most cherished objective, the repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “It’s an unbelievably complex subject,” said an apparently dumfounded Trump. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” No sanctions against China were forthcoming. Infrastructure spending went unmentioned. The promised wall along the Mexican border remained unbuilt. Trump’s approval ratings drooped to the lowest levels ever recorded in a president’s first year in office.

The incoming administration seemed perplexedly unready to assume power, as high-level officials came and went with baffling speed and hundreds of appointments went unfilled throughout the executive branch. Trump’s first White House chief of staff lasted just six months. His press secretary, six successive communications directors, and chief political strategist soon followed him out the door, as did his original Secretary of State, who lasted just over a year. Amid charges that he had misrepresented to Vice President Michael Pence the nature of his communications with Russian officials, Trump’s first national security adviser resigned after less than a month in office and later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to the FBI. Demoralized Foreign Service officers departed the State Department in droves, as key offices stood empty in Washington as well as in American embassies and consulates around the world.

Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, in May 2017, allegedly for mishandling the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe, but later admitting that his real motive was to deflect Comey’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which some observers thought might ultimately expose connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians. In the wake of Comey’s dismissal, the Justice Department appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to continue the Russian investigation, which continued to cast a lingering shadow over the new administration’s legitimacy.

The very heavens seemed to mirror the nation’s tumult in 2017, as epic hurricanes blasted Puerto Rico, Florida, and the Gulf Coast, and monster wildfires blazed across the West, consuming thousands of homes and dozens of lives. Though climate change and the warming of the world’s oceans surely played a role in those disasters, the Trump administration gave a welcoming embrace to climate skeptics, including, ironically, at the Environmental Protection Agency, where hundreds of dedicated climate scientists began heading for the exits in despair.

Amidst all these developments the impulsive president tweet-blasted a nonstop avalanche of sometimes crass and often confounding comments. Trump inveighed against the media (“fake news”) and slimed his fellow Republicans (“Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “little Marco Rubio”) and even foreign officials (“Rocket Man”—North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un). These tweet tantrums were red meat for the media. No prior president had so effectively dominated the news cycle, even as pundits worried that he seemed incapable of keeping a lid on his id.

Trump swiftly reversed several of Obama’s executive orders safeguarding the environment, promoting clean energy, and protecting immigrants brought to the United States as young children by undocumented parents (see Section 40-13). His attempt to ban immigration from several Muslim-majority countries met with massive protests and repeated judicial blockage until provisionally approved by the Supreme Court in late 2017.

Women, many of whom were fuming at the defeat of the first major-party female presidential candidate by a former beauty-pageant owner, took the lead in protesting against Trump’s policies and persona. Their activism fed an avalanche of accusations of sexual misconduct, facilitated by countless posts on social media declaring that sexual harassment had happened to “#Me Too.” The outpouring brought down several high-profile gropers in the entertainment industry, the media, and the U.S. Congress.

Gradually a semblance of order emerged in Trump’s White House, as the several seasoned military officers (“my generals”) that Trump had appointed to key positions prevailed upon him to temper his shambolic leadership style. (In a notable constitutional inversion, the country now looked to military officers to restrain the mercurial commander-in-chief, turning topsy-turvy the traditional logic of civilian control over the military.) The Republican Senate expeditiously approved Trump’s nomination of a brainy and conservative Coloradan, Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court, and proceeded to fill many other federal judgeships whose Obama-era nominees it had deliberately ignored.

Republicans who had warily hitched their political fortunes to Trump’s unbridled ego, and long suffered his verbal slings and arrows, finally reaped their reward. The new administration began aggressively repealing countless federal regulations, to the delight of business owners and the dismay of labor unions and environmentalists. At the end of 2017, congressional Republicans triumphantly submitted for the president’s signature a sweeping Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the most significant overhaul to the U.S. tax code since the days of Ronald Reagan. The hastily drafted new law achieved several long-standing and high-priority Republican objectives. It sought to boost economic growth by permanently and substantially cutting the corporate tax rate while temporarily and modestly lowering the tax burden on most individuals and families. It also facilitated the repatriation to the United States of corporate profits held overseas. It made home ownership more expensive by capping the long-standing mortgage interest deduction and severely reduced the deductibility of state and local taxes—apparently punitive political retribution against high-tax “blue states” that invested heavily in social services. Its architects also cleverly stitched into the bill clauses that struck directly at some keystones of Obama’s legacy, allowing oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and eliminating the “individual mandate” that helped finance the Affordable Care Act. The bill threatened to add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the ensuing decade as traditional Republican debt-hawks tossed their hallowed fiscal principles to the wind. Its champions hailed the new law as a Christmas gift for individual Americans and a potent stimulus for the economy. Opponents condemned it as an economically delusional piece of vengeful political trickery that would shower most of its benefits on the wealthiest Americans—including the billionaire president.

Notably the tax reform bill passed without a single Democratic vote in either congressional chamber, just as Obama’s Affordable Care Act had passed without a single Republican vote seven years earlier. What were arguably the two most consequential pieces of legislation of the early twenty-first century thus became law as purely partisan measures, another stark illustration of political polarization (see Figure 40.9).

40.20 - the world warily watches washington

Trump’s election rattled the world, allies and adversaries alike, as much as it did many Americans. His “America First” slogan, perhaps unwittingly echoing an isolationist watchword of the hyper-isolationist 1930s, signaled a repudiation of many of the principles that had guided U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century.

American global leadership in the decades after World War II had helped to shape a remarkable passage in the world’s history. It was not a utopian age, to be sure, but the post-war era saw no great war among the major powers, and witnessed an international economic expansion of unprecedented scale and reach (“globalization”), as well as the worldwide conquest of diseases like polio and smallpox, the decolonization of Africa and Asia, the eventual fall of the Soviet empire, the modernization of China, and the spread of democracy to countries that had not known it for generations, if ever.

It was a remarkable record, and it owed in no small measure to America’s active international engagement. But globalization was spawning its own discontents as the twenty-first century advanced. Across the rich, developed world, citizens chafed at competitive pressure from rising powers, bemoaned increasingly large inflows of immigrants and refugees who sought lives in politically stable and economically prosperous societies, and bewailed the erosion of their distinctive cultural heritages. British voters gave dramatic punctuation to such sentiments when they chose to leave the European Union in 2016 (“Brexit”), while elsewhere in Europe, populist movements threatened to reject the unifying work of generations and revert to ancient nationalist ways.

America had long played a steadying and integrating international role, building multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Its security guarantees to its NATO partners had helped to underwrite the evolution of the European Union. Similar guarantees in Asia contributed mightily to the prosperity of allies like Japan and South Korea, while its liberal trade policies had facilitated the phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy, lifting millions from poverty into the middle classes. It may have been an overstatement to call the United States the “indispensable nation,” but there can be no doubt that its power and presence were substantial in the post–WWII global arena.

President Trump’s “America First” agenda, while perhaps an understandable response to the stresses of globalization, threatened to dismantle that international economic and security architecture and put at risk the peace and prosperity of the entire planet, including the United States. Repudiating international trade agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, threatening nuclear-armed North Korea with “fire and fury,” defying the United Nations by moving America’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, ratcheting up tensions with China and Iran—all seemed destined to isolate the United States, shrink its global influence, and amplify its vulnerability in a time whose many challenges—economic, environmental, medical, and military—called for more international collaboration, not less.

40.21 - the american prospect

Well beyond its two-hundredth birthday as the twenty-first century unspooled, the United States was both an old and a new nation. It boasted one of the longest uninterrupted traditions of democratic government of any country on earth. Indeed, it had pioneered the techniques of mass democracy and was, in that sense, the oldest modern polity. As one of the earliest countries to industrialize, America had also dwelt in the modern economic era longer than most nations. But the Republic was in many ways still youthful as well. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking—all characteristics of youth—were honored national values. The most transformative forces in the early twenty-first century world were American-born technology companies. Consumers from Berlin to Beijing seemed to worship the icons of American culture—downing soft drinks and donning blue jeans, watching Hollywood films and television series, listening to rock or country music, even adopting indigenous American sports like baseball and basketball. In the realm of consumerism, American products appeared to have Coca-Colonized the globe.

America’s twenty-first century had begun much like the twentieth, as society continued to be rejuvenated by fresh waves of immigrants, full of energy and ambition. New civil rights achievements, notably the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling declaring same-sex marriage constitutional, energized gay and transgender Americans. Yet victories for inclusion and tolerance, along with the galloping pace of technological innovation and the stresses of globalization, left many citizens feeling adrift, insecure, and sometimes deeply resentful.

Much history remained to be made as the country entered its third century of nationhood. The political upheavals of the era served as a reminder that the great social experiment of American democracy was far from completed as the United States faced its future. Astonishing breakthroughs in science and technology, especially in genetics, bioengineering, data processing, and communications, presented Americans with stunning opportunities as well as cultural and political challenges and sometimes wrenching ethical choices. Global climate change made the responsible stewardship of a fragile planet more urgent than ever. The persistence of inequality and prejudice continued to summon Americans to close the gap between their most hallowed values and the stark realities of society in the twenty-first-century United States. The “forever wars” that unfurled in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nurtured fear and anxiety, as well as a toxic surge in anti-Muslim sentiment, in the body politic. And the severe economic crisis that convulsed the nation and the world in 2008 demonstrated that free-market capitalism could still produce abundant misery as well as material abundance.

Men and women make history only within the framework bequeathed to them by earlier generations. For better or worse, they march forward along time’s path bearing the burdens of the past. Knowing when they have come to a truly new turn in the road, when they can lay part of their burden down and when they cannot, or should not—all this constitutes the sort of wisdom that only historical understanding can engender. As Americans confront the unending challenges of the twenty-first-century world, they would do well to remember Woodrow Wilson’s admonition: “Democratic Institutions are never done; they are like living tissue, always a-making. It is a strenuous thing, this of living the life of a free people.”