2. Lecture Preview
• The War on Terrorism
• An American Empire?
• The Aftermath of September 11 at Home
• The Winds of Change
• The Rise of Obama
• Learning from History . . .
64. Review
• The War on Terrorism
Focus Question: What were the major policy elements of the war on
terror in the wake of September 11, 2001?
• An American Empire?
Focus Question: How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?
• The Aftermath of September 11 at Home
Focus Question: How did the war on terror affect the economy and
American liberties?
65. Review
• The Winds of Change
Focus Question: What events eroded support for President Bush's
policies during his second term?
• The Rise of Obama
Focus Question: What kinds of change did voters hope for when they
elected Barack Obama?
• Learning from History . . .
66. MEDIA LINKS
—— Chapter 28 ——
Order Title Filename Media link
1 Eric Foner on conservatism
in the 1970s and 1980s
question134 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question13
4
2 Eric Foner on 9/11 and the
threat of terrorism
question135 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question13
5
3 Eric Foner on the origins of
the right to privacy
question133 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question13
3
4
Eric Foner on the trade-off
between national security
and civil liberties
question132 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question13
2
5 Eric Foner on the divisions
in party politics today
foner_liberty17 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/&f=foner_liberty17
6
Eric Foner on the
significance of Obama's
election
foner_liberty01 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/&f=foner_liberty01
7
Eric Foner on Obama's
victory and the end of a
political era
politics_southern
_strategy
http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/&f=politics_souther
n_strategy
67. Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
http://wwnorton.com/college/history/give-me-liberty4/
by
Eric Foner
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides
Slide Set for Chapter 28
Give Me Liberty!
AN AMERICAN HISTORY
FOURTH EDITION
Editor's Notes
Chapter 28: September 11 and the Next American Century
On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijackers seized control of four jet airliners filled with passengers. They crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York City, causing infernos that soon collapsed the center’s two skyscrapers. A third plane hit a wing of the Pentagon, the country’s military headquarters in Washington, D.C., and a fourth plane, in which passengers tried to overpower their plane’s hijackers, crashed in a field near Pittsburgh, killing all aboard. Counting the 19 hijackers, the more than 200 passengers, pilots, and flight attendants, and victims on the ground, around 3,000 people died on September 11. The victims also included nearly 400 police and firefighters who rushed to the World Trade Center and died when the “Twin Towers” collapsed.
The Bush administration quickly blamed Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, for the attacks. A wealthy Islamic fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden had joined the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and he developed a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and used U.S. funds to help build his mountain bases. But after the Gulf War, his anger turned against the United States, which retained military bases in Saudi Arabia and support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. Bin Laden and his followers also saw the United States, with its religious pluralism, consumer culture, and open sexual mores, as the antithesis of their rigid values. Bin Laden believed U.S. influence was corrupting Saudi Arabia, Islam’s spiritual home, and keeping in power the Saudi royal family, which accepted U.S. influence.
The September 11 attacks spread pervasive fear throughout America. Letters sent to prominent politicians and journalists soon afterward, which contained the deadly disease anthrax and killed five, contributed to Americans’ anxiety. The government created an alert system, and national security and a fear of terrorism stayed at the center of Americans’ consciousnesses. Immediately after September 11, the Bush administration declared a “war on terrorism.” In the next two years, the United States launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It created a new Department of Homeland Security to coordinate efforts to improve domestic security, and it imposed severe limits on the civil liberties of those suspected of having ties to terrorism and Middle Eastern immigrants. The attacks also made newly prominent ideas embedded in the nation’s past—that freedom was the central quality of American life and that the United States had a mission to spread freedom through the world and fight freedom’s enemies.
The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen above.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
Before becoming president, George W. Bush had been an oil company executive and governor of Texas. He tried to dissociate the Republican Party from anti-immigrant rhetoric of the 1990s and promoted what he called “compassionate conservatism.” His narrow margin of victory did not give him a mandate to govern, as he received fewer votes than his opponent, Al Gore, and his party had only slim majorities in the House and Senate. Yet, Bush moved quickly to implement a conservative agenda. In 2001, he pressed Congress into passing the largest tax cut in U.S. history, and keeping with Reagan-era “supply-side” economics, most of the tax cuts went to the wealthy, on the assumption they would invest their new savings in productive activity. Bush also proposed oil drilling in a national wildlife refuge and timber harvesting in national forests. But Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, a moderate Republican, abandoned his party and started to vote with Democrats, making it harder for Bush to win more legislative victories.
In foreign policy, Bush emphasized the need for the United States to act free of international treaties and institutions. In the 2000 campaign, he had criticized the “nation-building” of the Clinton administration. In office, Bush announced plans to develop a national missile defense system, in violation of the ABM Treaty of 1972, and he repudiated a treaty establishing an International Criminal Court to try human rights violators. Also controversial was Bush’s announcement that the United States would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to fight global warming—the slow rise in Earth’s temperature, which, scientists warned, could have disastrous effects on the world’s climate. Evidence of global warming first was discovered in the 1990s, as Arctic glaciers and ice started to recede. Today, most scientists argue that global warming is a serious danger to the climate that threatens to alter agricultural patterns, raise ocean levels, and flood coastal cities. With the United States the largest burner of fossil fuels in the world, Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol infuriated much of the world.
September 11 transformed the international and domestic situations and Bush’s presidency. Popular patriotism, not orchestrated by the government or private groups, spread through the nation. Popular trust in the government rose, and public servants like firemen and police became national heroes. After two decades of antigovernment rhetoric, the nation felt a renewed sense of common social purpose. The administration benefited from this, and Bush’s popularity soared. Americans looked to the federal government, and especially the president, for reassurance, leadership, and action. Bush seized the opportunity, and like previous presidents made freedom the nation’s rallying cry. In an address before a joint session of Congress only a few days after September 11, Bush said that “freedom and fear are at war” and that the nation’s enemies had attacked the United States because they “hate our freedoms.”
At this speech, Bush declared a few foreign policy principles, soon known as the Bush Doctrine. The United States would launch a war on terrorism. But unlike previous wars, this war had a vaguely defined enemy—terrorist groups around the world that might threaten the United States or its allies—and no timetable for victory. The U.S. government would not distinguish between terrorists and the governments that harbored them, and it demanded that other nations in the world either ally with the United States or prepare for war. Bush demanded that Afghanistan, which was ruled by Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban, surrender Osama bin Laden, who had a base in that country. When the Taliban refused, the United States, in early October 2001, launched air strikes on their strongholds. Bush called the operation in Afghanistan “Enduring Freedom.”
By the end of 2001, U.S. bombing and ground fighting by anti-Taliban forces drove the regime from power. A new government, friendly to and dependent on the United States, took its place, repealing Taliban laws that denied women’s rights to education and banned movies, music, and other aspects of Western culture. But the new government failed to fully establish control over the country, bin Laden was not found, and Taliban supporters continued to fight the government. By early 2007, the Taliban had reasserted its power in parts of Afghanistan.
September 11 transformed U.S. foreign policy, inspiring policymakers to reshape the world in terms of U.S. ideals and interests. To facilitate military action in the Middle East, the United States put military bases in Central Asia, including former Soviet republics. The administration sent troops to the Philippines to help troops there fight an Islamic insurgency, and announced plans for a military presence in Africa. The United States solidified ties with the governments of Indonesia and Pakistan, which faced Islamic fundamentalist rebels. Bush said the defeat of the Taliban was only the beginning of the war on terror. In early 2002, Bush accused Iraq, Iran, and North Korea of harboring terrorists and developing “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, and biological—which posed a potential threat to the United States. He called these three countries an “axis of evil,” even though no evidence connected them with the attacks of September 11 and they had never cooperated with one another.
In September 2002, the Bush administration released a document called the National Security Strategy, marking a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy. The document began by defining American freedom as political democracy, freedom of expression, religious toleration, free trade, and free markets. It proclaimed that these universal ideals were “right and true for every person, in every society.” It committed the United States to spreading freedom and its benefits by fighting terrorists and “tyrants” everywhere. The document insisted that to protect and extend freedom, the United States must maintain an overwhelming preponderance of military power, not allowing any other country to challenge its dominance in any region of the world. To replace the Cold War doctrine of deterrence, the National Security Strategy announced a new policy of “preemptive” war—if the United States believed that a nation posed a possible future threat to its security, it had the right to attack that nation before the threat materialized.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
The Bush administration’s foreign policy statements shocked the world. Immediately after September 11, much of the world sympathized with the United States and supported the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan as a legitimate response to terrorist attacks. By late 2002, however, many feared that the United States was claiming the right to act as a world policeman, in violation of international law. Some warned that relations between Europe and the United States were worsening, because the United States was dismissing the perspectives of other nations. Some critics wondered if U.S. strategy was repeating the mistakes of the Cold War, and they argued that anti-Americanism was rooted not in hatred of American freedoms, but in opposition to specific U.S. policies—toward Israel, the Palestinians, the corrupt and undemocratic regimes in the Middle East. The war on terrorism also seemed to bring the United States closer to repressive governments like Pakistan and the republic of Central Asia.
Some critics charged that the United States was bent on becoming a new global empire. September 11 showed, not just U.S. vulnerability, but also the nation’s overwhelming strength. The United States, in economic, cultural, and military terms, was far ahead of the rest of the world. Its defense budget exceeded that of the twenty next nations combined. It maintained military bases throughout the world and had a navy on every ocean. After September 11, the word empire, once a term of abuse, came into widespread use. Some argued that the United States had to shoulder the burdens of empire, talk that worried those at home and abroad who felt the United States should not reshape the world in its image.
The Bush administration’s next initiative intensified these tensions. The Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein survived its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, and his opponents charged Hussein with developing new weapons, in violation of UN resolutions. From its start, the Bush administration included a group of conservative policymakers including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who were determined to remove Hussein from power. They developed a military strategy to accomplish this—massive air strikes followed by a small ground invasion. They believed Iraqis would welcome the U.S. Army as liberators and quickly establish a democratic government, allowing the United States to withdraw its troops. This group seized on September 11 as an opportunity to implement this plan, and President Bush adopted their outlook. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought the conquest and stabilization of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops and should not be attempted without allies, became marginalized.
Though Hussein was not an Islamic fundamentalist and no known evidence linked him to the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration announced its intent to accomplish “regime change” in Iraq. Administration spokesmen insisted Hussein should be removed from power because he had developed an arsenal of chemical and bacterial “weapons of mass destruction” and was trying to acquire nuclear arms. U.S. newspaper and television journalists repeated these claims without investigating them. The UN Security Council agreed to step up weapons inspections, but the Bush administration argued that inspectors would never uncover Hussein’s arsenal. Early in 2003, despite misgivings, Secretary of State Powell made an address to the United Nations claiming that Hussein possessed chemical weapons and was trying to acquire uranium in Africa to build nuclear weapons. (Every one of these claims turned out to be false.) Shortly after Powell’s address, the president announced his intention to go to war with or without the approval of the United Nations. In response, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to use force.
The U.S. decision to go to war split the Western alliance and inspired massive antiwar protests around the world. In February 2003, between 10 and 15 million people across the world protested imminent war. Large-scale protests in the United States brought together those who believed that a war against a nation, just because it might pose a security threat in the future, violated international law and the UN Charter. Foreign policy “realists” warned that the administration’s obsession with Iraq distracted the United States from its real foe, Al Qaeda, which could still launch terror attacks, and insisted that the United States could not unilaterally transform the Middle East into a bastion of democracy, as the administration claimed was its long-term aim. Both traditional foes of the United States like Russia and China and traditional allies like Germany and France refused to support a “preemptive” war against Iraq.
Unable to get UN approval for attacking Iraq, the United States went to war anyway in March 2003, with Great Britain as its single significant ally. President Bush called the war “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and said its goal was to “defend our freedom” and “bring freedom to others.” Hussein’s government quickly fell to U.S. military forces. Hussein, after hiding for several months, was captured and put on trial. In 2006, he was found guilty of ordering the killing of many Iraqis during his rule, sentenced to death, and executed.
Soon after Baghdad’s fall, President Bush appeared on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” and declared the major combat over. But after Hussein’s fall, everything seemed to fall apart. Rather than welcome American liberators, Iraqis looted libraries, government offices, museums, businesses, and seized weapons. An insurgency soon developed that targeted U.S. soldiers and Iraqis cooperating with them. Sectarian violence soon swept through Iraq, with Shiite and Sunni Muslim militias attacking each other. (Under Hussein, the Sunni minority had dominated the government and army; now the Shiite majority wanted power and revenge.) Despite several elections in Iraq, the United States found it impossible to establish a government in Iraq strong enough to impose order. By 2006, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Iraq had become what it was not before the U.S. invasion—a haven for terrorists bent on attacking Americans.
Fewer than 200 U.S. troops died in the war’s first phase. By the end of 2006, with Iraq on the verge of Civil War, 3,000 U.S. troops had died and 20,000 more were injured. U.S. and Iraqi scientists estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, had also died, and tens of thousands had fled seeking safety. The Bush administration at first argued that the war would cost $60 billion and would be paid by Iraq’s own oil revenues. In 2006, the war had cost $200 billion, and the insurgency had prevented Iraq from resuming oil production. Some economists believed the war would cost the United States a total of $2 trillion. With no end in sight, the war invited some to compare it to Vietnam. Despite significant differences, both wars were started by U.S. policymakers who had little or no knowledge about the countries to which they were sending troops. The war’s architects preferred to get their knowledge of Iraq from Hussein’s exiled opponents, who exaggerated their own popularity and popular support for an invasion. Administration officials little considered postwar plans.
The war was a departure in U.S. foreign policy. The United States had intervened often in Latin America, but outside of the Western Hemisphere it had used military force most often as part of an international coalition. While the United States exerted much influence in the Middle East after World War II, it had never occupied a nation in the center of the world’s most volatile region. Rarely in U.S. history has the country been so isolated from world opinion.
In the United States, at first the war was popular. The administration asked no sacrifice from citizens in terms of tax increases or a draft. Many Americans believed the administration’s claims that Hussein had something to do with September 11 and had weapons of mass destruction, and realizations that Hussein had no such weapons discredited the rationale for war. Subsequent investigation showed that intelligence reports that differed from administration claims were sidetracked or ignored. The Bush administration more and more defended the war as an attempt to bring democracy to Iraq. But by early 2007, polls showed that most Americans thought the invasion was a mistake and the war a lost cause.
Many outside the United States now saw it as a superpower unwilling to follow international law. In 2003, a survey found that even in western Europe, people viewed the United States as a threat to world peace. The fact that Iraq possessed the world’s second-largest reserves of oil reinforced beliefs that U.S. motives had more to do with self-interest than freedom. The war strained the UN and Western alliance created after World War II, but for a third time in less than a century, the United States had launched a crusade to remake the world order.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
The war on terrorism raised the problem of balancing security and liberty. Right after the attacks, Congress rushed to pass the USA PATRIOT Act, a huge bill that few members of the House or Senate actually read. It gave unprecedented powers to law enforcement agencies charged with preventing the new, vaguely defined crime of “domestic terrorism,” including the power to wiretap, spy on citizens, open and read communications, and obtain personal records from third parties like universities and libraries without the suspect’s knowledge. While the Bush administration discouraged anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment, at least 5,000 foreigners with Middle Eastern connections were rounded up and 1,200 were arrested. Many people with no link to terrorism were held for months, without a formal charge or public notice of their fate. The administration created a detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for persons captured in Afghanistan or otherwise accused of terrorism, and more than 700 were detained there.
In November 2001, the Bush administration issued an Executive Order authorizing secret military tribunals for noncitizens deemed with assisting terrorism. In such trials, traditional constitutional protections would not apply. A few months later, the Justice Department declared that American citizens could be held indefinitely without charge and not allowed to see a lawyer, if the government deemed them to be “enemy combatants.” Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that criticism of the administration’s policies aided the country’s terrorist enemies.
In this new atmosphere of security, court orders and regulations of the 1970s, inspired by abuses of the CIA, FBI, and local police, were rescinded, allowing these agencies to resume surveillance of American citizens without evidence that a crime had been committed. Some of these measures were approved by Congress, but the president implemented many unilaterally, claiming authority to ignore laws that restricted his power as commander-in-chief in wartime. Soon after September 11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on American citizens’ telephone conversations without a court warrant, which clearly violated laws limiting the NSA’s powers. Although previous administrations had extended their power in wartime and threatened civil liberties, no other president had so dramatically asserted the power to violate long-standing constitutional principles and any law he chooses during wartime. Most Americans seemed willing to accept the administrations’ belief that restraints on civil liberties were necessary to fight terrorism, although others pointed to the past and warned about the dangers of surrendering liberties during war.
Bush administration officials also argued that in the war on terror the United States should not be bound by international law. They ignored the Geneva Conventions and International Convention against Torture, which regulate the treatment of prisoners of war and prohibit torture and other forms of physical and mental coercion. The government, in early 2002, produced a memo stating that these rules did not apply to captured members of Al Qaeda, since they were “unlawful combatants” and not members of regular armies. In early 2003, President Bush ordered that Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners would not have Geneva protections. Later in 2003, facing protests within the administration and among military officials that this policy would provoke mistreatment of U.S. prisoners of war (POWs), the president prohibited torture except when special permission was granted. Yet, the Defense Department approved interrogation methods that most observers considered torture. The CIA also set up jails in foreign countries, outside the traditional chain of military command, and took part in the “rendition” of suspects—that is, kidnapping them and taking them to prisons in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and former communist states in eastern Europe where torture is practiced.
In such an environment, some U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and at Guantanamo severely abused prisoners, subjecting them to shocks, attack dogs, and sexual humiliation. Some prisoners died from the maltreatment. Some U.S. personnel took photographs, which were exposed in the media and undermined the reputation of the United States as a country that adheres to standards of civilized behavior and the rule of law. But only a few low-level soldiers were punished, and Congress banned torture in 2005 only after much debate. (President Bush signed the bill but issued a “signing statement” reaffirming his right as commander-in-chief to set rules for the military himself.) Documents were released in 2007 and 2008 that indicated that torture had been approved at the highest levels of government.
In the 2002 congressional elections, Bush helped the Republicans win small majorities in the House and Senate. Continuing chaos in Iraq began to undermine support for Bush’s foreign policy, but the main threat to his reelection seemed to be the condition of the American economy. In 2001, the economy entered a recession. Growth resumed at the end of the year, but with business reluctant to make new investments, few new jobs were created.
The sectors that expanded the most in the 1990s contracted rapidly, and massive job cuts shook the computer, advertising, and telecommunications industries. Yet, most jobs lost in the 2001–2002 recession were in manufacturing. Despite renewed patriotism, deindustrialization continued, with production and factories closing in the United States and moving to Mexico, China, and India to take advantage of cheap labor. Even when economic recovery began, the problems of traditional industries continued. Employment in steel and auto plummeted, and major companies moved to eliminate what was left of the post–World War II social contract, in which industries had provided manufacturing workers with high wages and promises of old-age support. Many employers cut or reduced pensions and health benefits for retirees. Minorities who benefited from the 1990s economic boom particularly suffered as jobs were cut.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
With the jobless recovery and the Iraq war harming Bush’s popularity, in 2004 the Democrats thought they could retake the White House. They nominated as their candidate John Kerry, a Massachusetts senator and decorated Vietnam combat veteran who had joined the antiwar movement. The party hoped that Kerry’s military experience would deflect attacks that the Democrats were too weak to be trusted to protect the United States from terrorism, while his antiwar credentials from the Vietnam era would appeal to those who opposed the Iraq war. But Kerry proved ineffective, lacking charisma and unable to produce enthusiasm. Kerry was unable to explain why he had voted for the war in the Senate and then later denounced it. The mobilization of the Republican conservative base by Karl Rove, Bush’s chief adviser, on cultural issues, particularly opposition to gay marriage and abortion, also weakened the Democrats.
Bush won only narrowly, with a margin of 2 percent of the popular vote and thirty-four electoral votes. The results revealed electoral stability. Both sides spent tens of millions of dollars and mobilized 20 million new voters, but in the end, only three states voted differently than in 2000. Although some commentators argued that the election was determined by “moral values,” the election was decided by the war on terror and Americans’ interest in maintaining leadership during wartime. The Bush campaign consistently and successfully appealed to fear, with constant reminders of September 11 and warnings of future attacks. The Republicans also slightly increased their majorities in the House and Senate, but the most striking feature of congressional races was that both parties, by redrawing district lines in state legislatures, had made most seats “safe.”
At his second inaugural, Bush promised to use American power to end “tyranny in the world,” and again repetitively invoked freedom and America’s mission to spread it throughout the world. Republicans were overjoyed by Bush’s triumph. But continuing chaos in Iraq, coupled with corruption scandals among Republicans in the Congress and White House, eroded Bush’s standing. Vice president Cheney’s chief of staff was convicted of perjury in connection with an investigation of the illegal “leak” to the press of the name of a CIA operative whose husband had criticized the manipulation of intelligence before the Iraq invasion. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, was indicted for violating campaign finance laws, and Jack Abramoff, a Republican activist and lobbyist, pleaded guilty to defrauding clients and bribing public officials. Bush’s popularity declined steadily. Though Bush had Congress renew the Patriot Act with a few additional safeguards for civil liberties, the first two years of his second term lacked any achievements. Though he tried to “reform” the Social Security system by allowing workers to set up private investment accounts, it got nowhere, and Congress rejected Bush’s proposals to drill for oil in an arctic wildlife refuge and eliminate the estate tax, which affected only the richest 1 percent of Americans.
The Bush administration suffered another blow in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans is vulnerable to flooding, and despite scientists’ warnings, the levee system had not been reinforced by the federal government. The levees broke when the storm hit on August 29, and nearly the entire city, with a population of half a million, was flooded. Nearby areas of the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast were also hard hit. This natural disaster was quickly compounded by mistakes made at all levels of government. The mayor had ordered evacuations too late, and not provided for those unable to leave the city. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was directed by an official with no experience in disaster management. Although warned about the storm, FEMA had done almost nothing to prepare for it. President Bush seemed unaware about the devastation and unable to do anything about it.
For days, thousands of people, mostly poor African-Americans, were abandoned in the floodwaters. Government officials seemed unaware that thousands were still in the city and without food, water, or shelter. Bodies floated in streets and people died in city hospitals and nursing homes. When aid started arriving, the storm had caused $80 billion in damage, killed 1,500 people, and displaced two-thirds of the city’s population. The storm made Americans aware once more of the extent of poverty in the world’s richest nation. Decades of state and local policies of pursuing economic growth through low-wage, nonunion employment and low investment in education, health, and social welfare had produced a large poor population in the South. Once a racially integrated city, New Orleans was now segregated. Blacks made up two-thirds of the city’s population, which was surrounded mostly by white suburbs. While Bush declared the need to act against poverty and persistent discrimination, the Republican Congress cut millions of dollars from Medicaid, food stamps, and other social programs to help rebuild the Gulf Coast. A year after the storm, the population of New Orleans was still only half of what it was before the storm, and reconstruction had barely begun in many neighborhoods. The storm also stopped oil production in the Gulf and increased oil prices, leading Americans to buy more fuel-efficient foreign-made cars, thus further hurting the U.S. auto industry.
In early 2006, the debate over immigration exploded. The immigration reforms of 1965 had dramatically transformed immigration patterns, and especially contributed to the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, and immigration grew in the first years of the twenty-first century. Many new immigrants bypassed major cities and moved into small cities and towns in the Midwest, New England, and Upper South. Racial and ethnic diversity was now a fact of life in the American heartland. Undocumented newcomers, mostly from Mexico, also came to the United States. By 2005, it was estimated that 11 million illegal aliens were in the United States, with 7 million of them in the workforce. Economists disagree about their impact. While it seems clear that large numbers of uneducated and low-skilled workers pushes down wages at the bottom of the labor market, on the other hand, both legal and illegal immigrants receive wages, spend money, and pay taxes, and work at jobs for which American workers seem unavailable, given the low wages. Some estimate that one-fifth of all construction workers, domestic workers, and agricultural workers are in the United States illegally.
In 1986, the Reagan administration had granted amnesty—the right to remain in the United States and become citizens—to 3 million illegal immigrants. In the 1990s, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants called for a crackdown on illegal immigration. By 2006, with many Americans convinced that the United States had lost control of its borders and that immigration was depressing real wages, the House of Representatives approved a bill making it a felony to be in the United States illegally and a crime to offer aid to illegal immigrants. The bill sparked a massive series of demonstrations in the spring of 2006 by hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal immigrants and their allies, demanding the right to remain in the country as citizens. The House rejected an alternative Senate bill that tightened border security but offered a path to citizenship for illegal aliens. Congress agreed only to build a 700-mile long wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
After September 11, 2001, religious liberty in the United States came under attack from domestic pressures. Five years before 9/11, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published a widely noted book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, which argued that a new conflict between Western and Islamic “civilizations” was coming to fill the void left by the end of the Cold War. The whole idea of such an impending clash is unhistorical because it is so overly simplistic that it follows one area of society without any context or connection to additional variables and factors. Furthermore, the book makes a forever argument—that something has been going on exactly the same forever, and will continue on the same path forever—historians do not examine events in such a manner because nothing lasts exactly as it has…forever. Nevertheless, Huntington’s model became very popular because it was easy to digest and appeared to offer a simple explanation for the terrorist attacks.
Thus, even though President Bush insisted that the war on terror was not a war against Islam, many Americans found it difficult (or refused) to separate the two. Most Muslim Americans were appalled by the terror attacks. Even so, in a number of states politicians practiced anti-Muslim demagoguery by appealing to voters through fear baiting. In 2010, for example, a heated debate arose over plans to build an Islamic Cultural Center near the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. While the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, supported the project, and the city approved the project, as late at 2012 the construction had yet to commence.
As in the two previous decades, conservatives were far better at implementing their economic and foreign policy than their cultural views. Supreme Court rulings in 2003 showed how the social revolution wrought by the 1960s was not going to be undone. Ruling on challenges to the University of Michigan’s admissions policies, the Court upheld the right of colleges and universities to take race into account in admissions decisions, arguing that these institutions had a legitimate interest in creating diverse student bodies to enhance education. The Bush administration had encouraged the Court to reject affirmative action. In a second decision, the Court struck down a Texas law that made homosexual acts a crime. The decision validated feminist and gay movements’ campaigns to extend freedom into personal life, and repudiated conservative views that constitutional interpretation must rest on the founding fathers’ “original intent” or a narrow reading of the document.
The Court also did not welcome President Bush’s claim of authority to disregard laws and treaties or suspend constitutional protections of individual liberties. In a series of decisions, the Court reaffirmed the rule of law both for American citizens and for foreigners imprisoned by the United States. In 2004, the court allowed a British citizen held at Guantanamo Bay to challenge his incarceration in federal court. It also ruled that an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in a military jail in South Carolina without charges or a right to see a lawyer had a right to a judicial hearing. Even the most conservative justices rejected the president’s claim of authority to imprison U.S. citizens at will. Even though the Court became more conservative, with President Bush’s appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Jr., the Court again repudiated the Bush administration, this time rejecting its assumptions that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners captured in the war on terrorism, that presidents can unilaterally create secret military tribunals in which defendants have few if any rights, and that the Constitution did not apply at Guantanamo.
In 2006, the reach of the president’s powers to detain and punish suspects outside of normal legal procedures was still unclear. That year, Congress enacted a bill authorizing the establishment of special military tribunals to try accused terrorists and giving the president authority to imprison without charge anyone he deemed an “illegal enemy combatant.” The law authorized harsh treatment of prisoners and allowed evidence to be used in court that had been obtained in coercive interrogations. Many military officials and lawyers objected to these provisions, fearing that captured U.S. soldiers might be subjected to the same treatment. Then, in 2008, for the third time in four years, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s strategy of denying detainees at Guantanamo Bay normal protections guaranteed by the Constitution. This decision affirmed the rights of detainees to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
President Bush’s dropping popularity due to the Iraq War, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and scandals in Congress provoked widespread public discontent in 2006, and that year Democrats won major gains in congressional elections. Voters, repudiating the administration, gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994. Bush’s popularity ratings sank to historic lows, even though in November 2008, the United States and Iraq approved an agreement providing for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2011. By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007 and by forging alliances with local tribal leaders, the administration had reduced violence in Iraq, making U.S. withdrawal seem possible. When Bush left office, more than 4,000 U.S. troops had died in Iraq. In January 2009, when Bush left office, only 22 percent of Americans approved of his performance in office—the lowest figure since these polls began in the mid-twentieth century. It was difficult to see many achievements in Bush’s eight years. His foreign policy had alienated much of the world and left the United States militarily weakened and diplomatically isolated. His tax cuts for the wealthy and the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed budget surpluses into enormous deficits. His reforms of immigration and Social Security went nowhere, and the number of Americans living in poverty and those without health insurance rose during his term.
In late 2007, the economy entered a recession. In 2008, the U.S. financial system was on the verge of total collapse and threatened to plunge the national and world economy into another Great Depression. The roots of the 2008 crisis lay in a combination of public and private policies that favored economic speculation, wild spending, and get-rich-quick schemes over more traditional paths to economic growth and advancement.
For years, the Federal Reserve had kept interest rates at very low levels to help the economy recover and to enable Americans to borrow money to buy homes. The result was a new bubble, as housing prices rose rapidly. Consumer debt rose dramatically as people who owned houses took out second mortgages or spent to the limits on their credit cards. In mid-2008, the average American family owned an enormous amount of debt. All of this borrowing fueled increased spending, as Americans spent more, saved less, and saw more jobs shipped overseas, even while household income stagnated. China helped finance America’s spending spree by buying billions of dollars of federal bonds, effectively loaning money to the United States so it could purchase Chinese-made goods. Banks and other lenders issued more and more “subprime mortgages”—risky loans to people who lacked the income to meet monthly payments. The initially low interest rates on these loans eventually rose dramatically in a year or two, and banks assumed home prices would continue to rise. Wall Street bankers created complex new ways of repackaging and selling these mortgages to investors. Insurance companies, including the world’s largest, American International Group, insured these new financial products against future default. Leaving the market to regulate itself, the Federal Reserve Bank and other regulatory agencies did nothing to slow the speculative frenzy, as banks and investment firms reported billions of dollars in profits and rewarded executives with unprecedented bonuses.
By 2006 and 2007, excess housing construction caused home prices to begin to fall. As more and more home owners defaulted—were unable to pay—on their monthly mortgage payments, the value of new mortgage-based securities fell quickly. Banks suddenly found themselves with billions of dollars of worthless investments, and in 2008 the situation reached a crisis stage, as banks stopped making loans, business dried up, and the stock market collapsed. Some $7 trillion in shareholder wealth disappeared. Lehman Brothers, a venerable investment house, recorded a $2.3 billion loss and disappeared, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Leading banks seemed about to fail.
With their home value and stocks falling, Americans reduced spending, which led to business failures and a rapid rise in unemployment. By the end of 2008, 2.5 million jobs had been lost—the most in any year since the end of World War II. Unemployment was centered in manufacturing and construction, sectors dominated by men, and so in the middle of 2009, for the first time in U.S. history, more women than men in the U.S. held paying jobs. The gross domestic product of the United States contracted dramatically. Most damaged was Americans’ confidence as they lost their homes or jobs and watched their retirement savings and pensions, if invested in the stock market, disappear. In April 2009, the recession that started in 2007 became the longest since the Great Depression. In an era of globalization, economic crisis spread across the world, causing higher unemployment and economic collapse in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” This seemed to describe the behavior of leading bankers and investment houses whose greed helped to bring down the U.S. economy. Like others before, Bush-era scandals damaged confidence in the ethics of corporate leaders and seemed to repeat the get-rich-quick ethos, connection between business and government, passion for deregulation, and corruption that had contributed to earlier economic crises. Public anger at bankers and stockbrokers skyrocketed as Wall Street firms fired thousands of employees but paid out $20 billion in bonuses to top executives.
The crisis showed the dark side of market fundamentalism—the ethos of deregulation that dominated world affairs in recent decades. Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank from 1987 to 2006, had steered the U.S. economy through multiple crises and presided over much deregulation, artificially low interest rates, and excessive borrowing and spending. He and his successors had promoted the housing bubble and allowed speculation to flourish without government intervention, effectively allowing securities firms to regulate themselves. In 2008, Greenspan conceded to Congress that there had been a “flaw” in his belief that free markets automatically produced the best results for all and that regulation would damage banks, Wall Street, and the mortgage market, and he said he was “shocked” by the crisis. His testimony seemed to mark the end of an era, in which every president from Reagan onward had told the world to adopt the U.S. model of unregulated economic competition. Now the U.S. model lay in ruins, and a new role for government in regulating the economy seemed inevitable.
In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration seemed unable to address the crisis. Sticking to free market principles, it allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, but this sent the stock prices of other banks and investment houses into a free-fall. The administration quickly reversed course. It persuaded Congress to appropriate $700 billion dollars to bail out failing firms. Insurance companies like AIG, banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, and giant financial companies like the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and the Federal National Mortgage Association (popularly known, respectively, as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae), which insured most mortgages in the country, were deemed “too big to fail”—they were so interconnected with other institutions that their failure would cause a depression. Through the federal bailout, taxpayers in effect took temporary ownership of these companies, absorbing their massive losses. But bailout funds were distributed with no requirements about their use. Few of the rescued firms used public funds to assist home owners, and giant banks and investment houses redirected some of the public funds to enormous bonuses for top employees. Despite this bailout, the banking system’s health was still fragile, as firms’ balance sheets had billions of dollars in worthless loans.
The crisis also exposed the paucity of the U.S. safety net compared with other industrialized nations. In western Europe, laid-off workers received many months of unemployment insurance. In the United States, only a third of the jobless even qualified for unemployment insurance, which ran out for most in a few months. The abolition of “welfare” during the Clinton administration left only a patchwork of national aid programs, like food stamps, for the newly poor, and state funds for poor relief were quickly exhausted as tax revenues disappeared.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
Democratic victory in the 2008 elections seemed quite possible, given the multiple crises facing America. To the surprise of many, the Democratic presidential nomination went not to Hilary Rodham Clinton, the initial favorite, but Barack Obama, a relatively unknown forty-seven-year-old senator from Illinois when the campaign began. Obama was the first black candidate to win the nomination of a major party. His triumph was a tribute to his speaking and campaigning skills and to how America had changed.
Obama’s life embodied changes in America since the 1960s. Without the civil rights movement, his election would not have been possible. He was the product of an interracial marriage between a Kenyan immigrant and a white American woman. When Obama was born in 1961, their marriage was still illegal in many states. Obama attended Columbia College and Harvard Law School and worked in Chicago as a community organizer before going into politics. He wrote two best-selling books about growing up in Indonesia, where his mother worked as an anthropologist, and Hawaii, and his search for a sense of identity given his background. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and first gained national attention with an eloquent speech at that year’s Democratic convention.
Clinton sought the Democratic nomination by emphasizing her experience. But Obama realized that voters wanted change more than experience, and while Clinton’s nomination would have been path-breaking (no woman has ever been the presidential candidate of a major party), Obama made her seem like a representative of the status quo, especially given his early opposition to, and her early support for, the Iraq War. Obama’s antiwar politics mobilized antiwar forces in the Democratic Party, and his race and youth galvanized black and young voters. He also used the Internet to mobilize voters and run his campaign as no one had before, using modern technology to mount the twenty-first century’s first political campaign.
Obama faced the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, in the general election. At age seventy-two, McCain was the oldest man ever to run for president, and he seemed to represent the old politics more than Clinton. McCain, breaking with the Republicans on issues like campaign finance reform, tried to portray himself as a “maverick,” and he surprised everyone by choosing as his running mate Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, as part of his attempt to win over women voters disappointed by Clinton’s rejection. Palin quickly attacked Democrats for being unpatriotic, lacking traditional values, and not representing the “real America.” While this was very popular with the Republican base, her performance made it clear that she lacked knowledge of many domestic and foreign issues that a new administration would confront, and many Americans questioned McCain’s judgment. But McCain faced President Bush’s sinking popularity and the financial crisis, which reached new depths in September and October. Obama’s promise of change carried the day, and he won 53 percent of the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college. The election redrew the nation’s political map. Obama carried both Democratic strongholds in New England, the mid-Atlantic, the industrial Midwest and the West Coast, but also Republican states, such as Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Indiana. Obama assembled a diverse coalition, winning almost the entire black vote, many Hispanic voters, and many young voters. He was elected with only 43 percent of the nation’s white vote.
Obama’s election seemed to signal the end of a political era that began with Nixon’s “southern strategy.” Instead of using the South to build a national majority, Republicans now seemed in danger of becoming a regional and marginalized southern party. Amid war, economic crisis, and the enthusiasm of Obama’s campaign, Republican appeals to patriotism, low taxes, and resentment against social change seemed outdated. Democrats also won 60 of 100 seats in the Senate and a large majority in the House. Groups carried by Obama, such as young voters, Hispanics, and suburbanites all represented growing parts of the population. In an increasingly multi-ethnic, multiracial nation, winning the majority of white votes no longer ensured national victory. Whether this election had completely realigned national electoral politics, however, remained to be seen.
Few presidents have faced a set of challenges as serious as those Obama faced on taking office. The economy was in crisis and the country was involved in two wars. But many Americans saw Obama’s election as a cause for optimism. Two days after his victory, a poll found two-thirds of Americans describing themselves as proud of the election result, and 60 percent excited at the prospect of the Obama administration.
On January 20, 2009, Obama was inaugurated as president, with more than 1 million people traveling to Washington, D.C., to view the historic event. In his inaugural address, Obama rebuked eight years of Bush’s policies and the assumptions that had shaped government since Reagan’s election. He promised a foreign policy based on diplomacy, pledged to protect the environment, spoke of the need to fight income inequality and ensure access to health care, and blamed a culture of “greed and irresponsibility” for contributing to the economic crisis. He also promised to respect the Constitution. Unlike Bush, Obama said little of freedom in his speech, stressing instead community and responsibility. His speech harked back to the revolutionary-era ideal of putting the common good before individual self-interest.
Obama’s first initiatives lived up to his promises for change. In his first three months, he announced plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, banned torture, launched a diplomatic initiative to repair relations with the Muslim world, reversed previous orders limiting women’s reproductive rights, and abandoned Bush’s rhetoric about a divine U.S. mission to spread freedom throughout the world. Obama named to the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman ever to serve on it. His first budget recalled the New Deal and Great Society, anticipating active government support for health care reform, clean energy, and public education, part of which would be paid by allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to expire in 2010. He pushed through Congress a “stimulus” package of $800 billion in new government spending for construction, unemployment benefits, and aid to states to help them balance their budgets. The largest single spending bill in U.S. history, the bill was meant to inject money into the economy to save and create jobs and spark a recovery.
A year into the Obama presidency, in spring 2010, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in U.S. history occurred—a BP (British Petroleum) oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and spewed millions of gallons of oil in the sea. The disaster illustrated some of the downsides of deregulation and the limit of government and regulatory reach in a global economy. The rig, built in South Korea, was operated by a Swiss company contracted by BP and was registered in a the impoverished Pacific island nation—the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The complicated web of business interests and responsibility mixed with past U.S. policies of deregulation of corporate and environmental oversight added to the legal realities of separate nation-state autonomy meant that the Republic of the Marshall Islands was where much of the safety responsibility had technically lay, even though the spill occurred off the U.S. Gulf Coast. The oil washed up on beaches from Texas to Florida, killing marine life, birds, and other animals and devastating local economies reliant upon Gulf tourism. It took months to stop the oil leak, much longer to restore the beaches, and the extent of the larger environmental and health issues connected to the spill had yet to be determined as of 2013.
Additionally, most of the first year of the first Obama presidency saw intense congressional debate over restructuring the nation’s health care system in order to give insurance to the millions who lacked it and stop abusive practices by insurance companies. In March 2010, after months of bitter debate, Congress passed a sweeping health care bill that required all Americans to purchase health insurance and most businesses to provide it to employees. It also gave some subsidies to those with low incomes so they could afford the insurance. This was the most far-reaching piece of social legislation since the Great Society of the 1960s, and it aroused intense opposition from some who called it a “government takeover” of health care (even though plans for a government-run insurance program were dropped from the bill). Every Republican in Congress voted against it.
Technically, the recession ended in mid-2009, yet economic growth was slow and unemployment remained high through Obama’s first term (2009 through 2012). State and local governments (which counted for almost one-sixth of all jobs in the United States cut employments sharply to save money. The poverty rate in 2011 exceeded 15 percent, the highest in twenty years, and housing prices continued to fall. Because of the drastic economic decline, many Americans cut back on spending and borrowing—adding to the economy’s malaise. The majority of job growth occurred in the high and low ends of the pay scale, and manufacturing jobs for (mostly male) those with limited education, but that offered middle-class incomes, started to rebound from the low point in 2009 but still waned. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, among other things, that the wealth possessed by the family who owns Wal-Mart was equal to that of the sum of the wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans.
Sadly ironic, under the nation’s first black president, African-Americans suffered the most severely from the recession. Often, family wealth was invested in their homes instead of in stocks, and thus any stock market recovery was not any help in bouncing back during the nation’s slow climb out of the recession’s low point. In 2011, the median family income for white families was $92,000, but that of black families was only $4,900.
The most dramatic foreign affairs achievement of Obama’s first term was ending American involvement in the Iraq War, and by the end of 2011 the last American soldiers were home from Iraq. Yet, Obama did not dismantle some of the presidential powers Bush had accumulated. In the first weeks of office, he banned the use of torture, but he reversed his promise to abolish military tribunals Bush had established. While Obama completed his campaign pledge of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, he dispatched almost 50,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
In May 2011, to wide acclaim in the United States, Obama authorized an armed raid into Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. Additionally, he signed a four-year extension of the Patriot Act originally signed into law by George W. Bush. That same year, Obama sent the air force to participate in the NATO campaign to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. Also, 2011 saw a number of popular revolts sweep through the Middle East, which brought millions into the streets and the toppling of long-serving dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
More controversially, Obama claimed the right to order the assassination of American citizens in foreign countries if evidence indicated their connection with terrorism.
In nearly all midterm elections in American history, the party in power has lost congressional seats, but Democrats found it unusually difficult in 2010. Grassroots Republicans were energized by hostilities toward Obama’s sweeping legislative enactments. The Tea Party, named as a reference to the Boston Tea Party of the 1770s and inspired by its opposition to taxation by a far-away government, mobilized grassroots opposition to the administration. Leaders of this conservative Republican faction used nativist rhetoric and claims, for example, that Obama was not legally POTUS (they argued he was born in Africa instead of the reality that he was born in Hawaii).
Republicans reduced the Democrat’s majority in the Senate (but did not remove it), gained a number of gubernatorial seats, and the following two years in Congress was categorized more by gridlock than any other theme. Obama and congressional Democrats could no longer get any significant legislation through Congress, but neither could Republicans because of the Democratic majority in the Senate. Instead, Tea Party-inspired Republicans took their political agenda to the state level, and a number of states had legislation passed that limited voting rights, public employee union rights, abortion rights, and that took aim at undocumented immigrants.
While much of the grassroots activism in 2011 and 2012 came from the right, these years also witnessed an emergence of a movement that targeted the depredations of Wall Street banks. The Occupy Movement begun with a few young protesters camping in Zuccotti Park in the heart of New York’s financial district on September 17, 2011. Over the next weeks, hundreds of people camped in the park and took part in rallies organized by the Occupy Movement in cities nationwide. While the protesters began to be evicted by city authorities in the spring 2012, much of the rhetoric protesting the control of “the 1 percent” (the very richest Americans) over the U. S. economy and connectedly national and international power structures had entrenched itself into the national political vocabulary.
Despite the continuing economic crisis, sociocultural issues played a majoring role in the campaigning for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. GOP candidates vied for the support of evangelical Christians who formed the party’s base and worked to bring in support from the Tea Party faction. Mitt Romney won the GOP’s presidential nomination and Paul Ryan won that of the vice presidency. Obama retained the Democratic Party’s nomination for reelection. Despite a number of political liabilities gained during his first term, Obama won the 2012 POTUS election with 51.1 percent of the popular vote (to Romney’s 47.2 percent). And while this may appear close, Obama was the first president since Eisenhower to pull more than 50 percent in both elections, and recent presidential races had produced election wins with much less of a popular vote margin. Obama’s amount of the electoral and state-by-state pie added up to 332 electoral college votes winning 26 states and the District of Columbia.
One of the most striking realities of the year’s federal elections was that Political Action Committees (PACs) were allowed to spend as much as they wanted on campaigns, thus bringing the joint cost of presidential and congressional campaigning that year to over $6 billion.
It is still too early to evaluate the full impact of September 11 on American life and the long-term consequences of the changes at home and abroad it sparked. At the end of 2012, the world seemed far more unpredictable than anyone would have imagined at the end of the Cold War. An end to war on terror seemed distant. The future paths of Iraq and Afghanistan were uncertain, while Pakistan, the closest ally of the United States in that region, was unstable. No settlement of the simmering and explosive conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors seemed in sight. Iran, with its power in the Middle East enhanced by the U.S. removal of its enemy in Iraq, seemed intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, which the United States pledged to prevent, inviting future conflict. North Korea had acquired nuclear weapons and rejected world pressure to give them up. China’s rapidly growing economy posed a challenge to U.S. predominance. Latin American countries elected presidents who rejected the doctrines of globalization and free trade advocated by the United States.
No one knew how any of these or future crises would be resolved. Some predicted a “multipolar” world in which countries like China and India will also be major powers, challenging the United States. The final impact of the global financial crisis was still unclear.
What is clear is that September 11 and its aftermath drew attention to essential elements of the history of American freedom. Freedom is still essential to Americans’ sense of themselves and their nation, and they continue to debate issues in a political landscape shaped by ideas of freedom. Freedom remains an evolving concept, its definition open to disagreement and its boundaries never fixed. Freedom is neither self-reinforcing nor self-correcting, and its preservation requires eternal vigilance, especially in times of crisis.
