It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear. Brexit was a stunner. Compared to Donald Trump, it was a popgun. It’s become overwhelmingly clear that the real cost of the Great Recession was not the cost of fighting our way through it but rather the staggering resentment against global capitalism/neoliberalism that it has generated, and I speak as a convinced neoliberal if not capitalist.1
I have no particular resentment against Hillary Clinton but considerable disappointment with the party that found it had no choice but to nominate her—no choice because it had no one of national prominence under sixty except the president himself. It would be nice, after all, to have a candidate who doesn’t remember the Beatles, not to mention the Shangri-Las. And Obama, I must say, did much to plow under the new crop.
It’s possible that the steps needed, and the steps taken, to prevent global collapse were so toxic to the aggrieved middle class that, in effect, “nothing could be done” to diminish the political backlash to manageable proportions.2 Yet it’s also possible that, had Obama refrained launching the Affordable Care Act, we might have been able to weather the storm. The congressional elections in 2010 and 2014 would still have been painful, but surely not as brutal, and some new faces might have survived.
But it was not to be. I have frequently moaned about liberals’ fatal conviction that “the people” ought to want universal health care, when it was obvious that the American people (a good majority of them, anyway) do not want universal health care. They want what they had: subsidized health care available through their employers or through Medicare. Taxing or reducing their benefits to benefit someone else was not what they called “reform”. But Obama plowed ahead nevertheless, sure that he was “bringing us together” when in fact he was driving “us” apart.
ObamaCare was a political disaster for the Democrats in both 2010 (passage of the Act) and 2014 (the shamefully bungled roll-out), but it was the rise of ISIS, and the subsequent acts of terrorism in the U.S. and Europe performed in its name, that, I think, completely shattered the neoliberal brand. In both Europe and the U.S. there was an intensification of tribal thinking, though very largely directed at entirely guiltless minorities (Hispanics in the U.S. and Poles in the U.K.), a measure of the irrationality of the times.
Obama was, of course, not responsible for the rise of ISIS, but the Clinton/Obama foreign policy record is painful to behold. The administration bet heavily, and failed disastrously, on its ability to manage the “Arab Spring,” which, fifty years down the road, may have proved to be a good thing. But today not so much. If we hadn’t invaded Libya, a profoundly self-indulgent act, Hillary Clinton might be president-elect. If President Obama hadn’t nattered about red lines in Syria, and Hillary Clinton hadn’t been so “passionate” about reaching out to imaginary moderates, we wouldn’t be nearly so engaged there as well, with no purpose and continuing embarrassment and risk.
Whether Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine can be seen in any measure as the administration’s “fault” is another matter. An announced policy of realpolitik, informing Ukraine that it was in Russia’s sphere of influence, almost surely would have worked, but of course such thinking was entirely off the table in Washington in 2014.
In the 2016 primaries, all of the energy was on behalf of the most irresponsible candidates, a shape-shifting caudillo and a 73-year-old sophomore. The Beltway was, and is, in desperate need of new blood. But the price we have paid for that blood may be too terribly high. And that’s putting it mildly.
Afterwords
I have, more than once in the past decade, thought of changing the title of this blog to “A Journal of the Plague Years”. I’ll continue to resist, and continue to write. I think writing is a good habit, and the nice thing about habits is that good ones are as hard to break as bad ones. Simply performing the act is its own reward. I think even typing itself becomes relaxing, and good for the digestion. So I’ll continue, often pretending that nothing bad has happened, for fear of growing peevish and out of sorts.
