by Conrad Black
The Clinton-Bush lack of rigor and discipline in the country’s international accounts and regulatory standards, lassitude in immigration, and encouragement of consumer and municipal and state debt accumulation rolled over the world like a tidal wave, and the whole financial structure of America and Europe was instantly revealed in its ghastly infirmity. Most of the American automobile industry, which had conceded $30,000 of union pension and health-plan benefits for every car manufactured while producing clunkers instead of cars worthy of great trademarks like Cadillac, Lincoln, and Chrysler that had been respected everywhere in the world, was living off continued tariff protection for trucks and now went into bankruptcy at the speed of the contestants in the Indianapolis 500. Arizona had sold the state Capitol on a lease-back; states were releasing prisoners (in itself a good thing in what had become a carceral nation, but not for the right reasons). Suddenly, America had its pockets turned inside out and everything was crumbling.
And there were unusually worrisome aspects to the crisis. No one—bankers of all kinds, from the Federal Reserve to the lending and merchant banks; industrialists and academic economists (with a couple of exceptions); financial journalists, politicians, and Treasury officials—had foreseen what was coming. Not only was the country bust, and its private sector largely bust, and much of the population personally very stretched, but the mystique of American capitalism had been vaporized. The whole architecture of the American economy—based on consumer appetites and an addiction to the service industries (over $1 trillion a year in legal billings), on essentially superfluous spending that was a partially self-imposed taxation on the whole private sector, and on the unsustainable snobbery of preferring to work in skyscraper offices rather than in light, much less heavy, industry—wobbled. And even in the extreme winter of the problem, during the election campaign of 2008, almost no one said anything sensible about the proportions, causes, and possible remedies.
It was in this fraught atmosphere that the second Bush era came to an end. The Democrats had a gripping campaign between Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (now of New York), wife of the former president, and Senator Barack Obama of Chicago, the first (half) African American (and son of one Muslim parent) to make a serious run for the presidency. The Clintons were presumed to own the Democratic Party, as the last unambiguously and durably successful leaders of it since Roosevelt (though the Kennedys might have got there if JFK and RFK had not been assassinated). Senator Clinton won more votes and states in the primaries, but Senator Obama seduced his party and then the nation with a subtle formula that was never explicit, but was clear to the electorate: The great, white, decent, centrist majority of America, conscientiously guilty over the treatment of the African Americans after what Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” followed by 100 years of segregation and a slow upward incline since, could be rid of its guilt and, as a bonus, never have to listen to the charlatan leaders of the African American political community who had unworthily succeeded Martin Luther King, if it only elevated Barack Obama to the headship of the nation.
The large number of ex-officio superdelegates to the Democratic convention in Denver were seduced by this tacit bargain, and Obama was the ideal candidate to offer it. Though his pigmentation was African, neither his physiognomy nor his inflection and cadences were ethnically distinct. He was eloquent and a fine, athletic-looking man. It was certainly long past time the United States ended any reticence about selecting a non-Caucasian as its leader. And many Democrats clearly resented the proprietary attitudes of the Clintons, and probably the indignities Bill Clinton had brought on the presidency with his indiscretions and his intimate flirtations with perjury, though it was, on its face, bizarre to punish his wife electorally for his infidelities. Obama was nominated, and oddly chose as his running mate the malapropistic senatorial wheelhorse Joseph Biden of Delaware. The Republicans met in St. Paul, Minnesota, 10 days later, and nominated Senator John McCain, who had run George W. Bush a good race in 2000. McCain had been a valiant POW in North Vietnam and was a cantankerous and often maverick senator, and generally a fairly orthodox conservative on most issues. For vice president, he took the comely (in the way of a sexy librarian) Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, a capable debater and campaigner, though exposed in interviews to be thin on some foreign policy areas especially. But she was an imaginative choice and brought a lot of attention to the Republican ticket and she more than held her own with Biden in their debate.
As the economy imploded, Obama did not have to do much, as the times, the Zeitgeist, and the contrast between his own youth (44) and fluency and the shopworn quality of his opponent were all strong advantages for the challenger. When the economic crisis cracked open, McCain at first declared, in (Herbert) Hooverese, that the economy was sound (which it wasn’t), on Monday; then excoriated corporate greed (as did almost everyone in both parties) on Tuesday; demanded the dismissal of the head of the SEC on Wednesday; suspended his campaign on Thursday to return to Washington for a White House emergency meeting about it on Friday; and said nothing at the meeting. He was a blunderbuss candidate whose time had passed, and all the stars were aligned for Obama. On election day he won, 69.5 million (52.9 percent) and 365 electoral votes from 28 states and D.C., and one from Nebraska (where three counties vote separately and directly choose a member of the Electoral College) to McCain’s 59.9 million (45.7 percent) and 173 electoral votes from 22 states. The Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.
George W Bush left office quite unpopular and rather disdained for his bungled syntax, Texas mannerisms (as LBJ had been), and acoustically jarring diction (“the war in Eye-rack”). He had avoided a recession and led the nation effectively after the 9/11 attacks. He undoubtedly did terrible damage to the terrorist organizations, especially al-Qaeda, and the terrorist recurrences were much less serious and frequent than bin Laden and others had promised and many had feared. His next most important strategic initiative, and a very good one, was the July 2005 nuclear agreement with India, which broke the ice in that relationship and was topped up by a very successful presidential visit to India in March 2006. He was much disparaged in Europe, though so are most American presidents if there is any opportunity to do so (all the presidents since Roosevelt except Kennedy and, for a time, Nixon were frequently mocked in Europe). He had no idea of economic matters and completely abdicated when they suddenly boiled over. He did act generously to combat AIDS in Africa, but was often a somewhat dysfunctional president. He was far from great, but there have been many with fewer qualities and successes. And if Iraq finally emerges with any sort of reasonable power-sharing, his strategic influence, with democracy finally advanced by a major Arab country, could be quite positive and significant (though at time of writing, such an outcome did not appear the most likely).
Barack Obama chose his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, and entered office with a broad mandate, though, as he did not have to say anything very precise in the campaign, an unspecific one. He continued, with apparent success, the withdrawal of forces from Iraq, but built up force levels in Afghanistan and revitalized the discouraged NATO effort there. And he approved the raid into Pakistan in 2011 that killed bin Laden, a long-sought and eminently justifiable objective of Americans. He was the most popular American president in Europe since Kennedy, but his appeasement of Iran, even as it hastened toward a nuclear military capability; his simplistically equivocal views on Israel; his apologies for some of his most esteemed predecessors (including, in different respects, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower); his promises of emulating European socialism; and his failure to produce any coherent Alliance policy all disappointed his countrymen. And four years of $1.5 trillion federal budget deficits took the national debt from the $10 trillion he inherited after 232 years of American history to $16 trillion in four years, although employment declined by five million jobs and there was no real economic recovery.
Unease grew that Obama did not really appr
eciate the highest qualities of America and was to some extent a factional and not national leader, as the office requires. His response to the economic crisis was a mighty Christmas cake of a “stimulus” package ($800 billion) for the delectation of the Democratic congressional committee chairmen, which did not prevent them from being dumped as the majority party in the House of Representatives in 2010 as the Republicans gained 66 congressmen. Obama’s great transformative measure was a terribly expensive and controversial health care bill that broadened coverage but increased medical care costs for many, that was misrepresented as cost-neutral, and that generated a bitter legislative battle that produced little benefit for the governing party. American medical care was excellent for the 70 percent of people who had full-service coverage paid for by their employers but very patchy for the 100 million others, and the cost of American health care was $4,000 per capita more than in other advanced countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K., whose overall health care standards were not inferior to those of the U.S.). The federal budgetary deficit was anticipated to continue unabated for a decade, and had all the characteristics, if not the official description, of an annual money-supply increase of 100 percent over the money supply when Obama was inaugurated. A demeaning chicken game between the administration and the Republican House of Representatives unfolded over several years about the competing merits of raising taxes and reducing expenditures.
Since gold had been entirely demonetized (by Nixon in 1971, Chapter 15), the major currencies had no value except against each other, and all the more-circulated currencies, led downward by the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen, were crumbling together. Imports of foreign-sourced oil grew from the 20 percent Richard Nixon viewed with alarm in 1973 (not to mention the 10 percent that worried Eisenhower in 1956) to 60 percent of a much larger level of consumption at five times the price less than 40 years later, but did decline to about 45 percent under Obama because of advanced drilling techniques, tighter fuel efficiency standards, and some conservative measures. Predictions for petroleum imports were optimistic, which indicated declining income for the world’s most mischievous countries. But world markets soon showed a lack of confidence in the ability of the Obama administration to cope with these problems even as the financial stability of the Eurozone wobbled badly, and France stepped backward by electing a nondescript Socialist (François Hollande), on a platform of raising taxes and lowering the retirement age.
Obama seemed to think that by signaling that the United States was no longer under white Christian senior management, all countries that were not white and/or Christian could set aside their differences with it, as if international affairs were ever resolved on any basis except national interests. After the “shellacking,” as he called the 2010 elections, voters were now turning the rascals out every two or four years.
5. SEEING AMERICA PLAIN
Barring a miraculous renascence of Obama’s administration, which was fairly narrowly reelected in 2012 over another diffident republican challenger, W. Mitt Romney,212 the United States seems to have lost its vocation for greatness in the absence of any rivals to it. After 1991, there wasn’t much American strategic policy, because there wasn’t much need for one. From 1756 to the end of the War of 1812, American leaders were establishing their country as a stable fixture in the world. Then, until the end of the Civil War, they were deferring or winning internal conflicts, preserving the Union. For the next 60 years, with the brief diversion of Woodrow Wilson’s foray to turn the German emperor’s provocations into the attempted evangelization of the world for democracy and world government, America was just growing, rapidly and by all measurements—the natural, thrusting, irrepressible growth of what the whole world now knew to be a predestined nation. And from the depths of the Great Depression to the end of the Cold War was what its greatest modern leader called America’s rendezvous with that evidently approaching (though not exactly manifest) destiny. One adversary after another was laid low: economic and psychological depression, the threats of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and then international communism. The country had run out of adversaries, except within, and a ragtag of terrorists abroad.
Almost two years before Richard Nixon enumerated his geopolitical reasoning for the outreach to China, he told Americans (in his Silent Majority speech of November 3, 1969) that North Vietnam “cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” This was the real challenge to American supremacy, the ability of the United States to sustain a will to greatness when it had nothing left to prove, no foreign power to surpass, and no serious direct or even remote threat from any other nation or coalition of nations. And this has proved a doughty challenge in the 20 years since the end of the Soviet Union.
The United States in 2012 was in full decline by all normal measurements. Its economy was sluggish, misoriented to discarded criteria of mindless consumption, low investment, and no savings; its justice system was corrupt and oppressive and produced 6 to 12 times the per capita number of incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, on behalf of a war on drugs that is an exercise in hypocrisy and futility in which America has been more decisively defeated than in any war it actually waged. A rogue prosecutocracy terrorizes the country; it wins 99.5 per cent of its cases, 97 percent without a trial, so stacked is the judicial deck and withered the guarantees of individual liberties in the Bill of Rights. Forty-eight million Americans have a criminal record and there is minimal general recognition of the evils of the system.213 It is less, but still significantly, dependent on oil-exporting countries that do not wish it well and use their price-gouging to promote worldwide anti-Western and particularly anti-American activity. Public education standards have eroded drastically, and most recent immigration has been illegal and of unskilled labor, as the springs of American ascent in the world, the more easily assimilable and comparably cultured Central and Eastern Europeans, have dried up, and in any case had the gate slammed in their face tragically, starting in 1925. American democracy is corroded, is based on the agitation of self-serving interests, and is in permanent election campaign, and presidential campaigns now require $1 billion or more for each side. The quality of national candidates and congressional leaders has declined precipitously.
In sum, American exceptionalism, which was always to a degree a fraud (because of the mistreatment of African Americans and the comparable democratic rights of the British, Dutch, Swiss, and Scandinavians), is now only a matter of the country’s immense scale, and of the continuing credulity and dedication of the American masses. Dissident conservatives still celebrate the Tea Party, unaware of the questionable purposes of the original; most Americans still work hard and believe in the revolutionary purity of their origins and the unique democratic values of their country. They are generally aware that America made democracy the dominant world political system, but not that the United States is not now a very well-functioning democracy itself.
But the United States has taken a good time for a setback. It has no rivals, and China will hit the wall of false financial reporting and unsustainable official corruption long before the difficulties of the United States induce any irretrievable decline in that country’s status. America missed the opportunity to be more tightly connected to the rest of the Americas and thus have a more comparable demographic bloc for its economic progress than China or India. It could have had effective federal union with large parts of the hemisphere had it wished it, at different times and in different ways, including Canada and Mexico, by which acts it would have added 50 percent to its population and 150 percent to its treasure house of natural resources. But most of Latin America and certainly Canada are steadily gathering strength and are fairly well-disposed, or at least unthreatening, neighbors, but have no interest in being too intimately associated with the United States.
The United States is a country that takes less account of corruption and hypocrisy and is more susceptible, in Napoleon’s phrase, to “lies
agreed upon,” than many other prominent nations (the Europeans and Japanese, after their appalling barbarism in the twentieth century, seem to have faced and accepted their guilt and shame). The United States remains incomparably the greatest and most successful country there has ever been. And though it is vulgar, banal, slovenly, and complacent, and most of its leadership cadres have failed it, it is neither lazy nor driven by a death wish. Historically, when the United States has needed strong leadership, it has found it. It does need leadership now, and it is not easily visible in the present sea of mediocre strivers. But America is threatened only by itself, and Americans, collectively, like themselves, and the country will come round. Someone will lead it on with a new purpose more galvanizing than just borrowing for the bovine satiety of fickle appetites, in politics as in consumer goods.
Richard Nixon was correct that only Americans can defeat and humiliate the United States, and eventually, when they see it plain and have some serious leadership again, they will recognize the impulse to self-destruction as un-American, and turn it into one of national renovation. God, Providence, fate, or the Muse have not withdrawn His or its blessing, and the Americans will return to the manifest destiny of being a sensibly motivated and even exemplary country again, long before they have forfeited to any other long-surpassed nation the preeminence in the world for which America long strove, which it richly earned, and which it has more or less majestically retained.