Michael Lind: The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers: Each ushered in a new American era
[Michael Lind is the editor of New American Contract at the New America Foundation.]
Three calendar dates. Three anniversaries. Three eras in the history of the United States and the world...
... 11/9. 9/11. 9/15. These three dates divide three eras in recent history: the Age of Euphoria, the Age of Paranoia, and the Age of Disillusionment.
The Age of Euphoria lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the twin towers. In Washington, the fall of the Soviet Union was misinterpreted as the rise of the United States. The Gulf War of 1991 seemed to ratify American hubris. Using advanced technology designed to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. military quickly demolished the armed forces of Saddam Hussein's feeble regime. It was said that the world had gone from being bipolar to unipolar, that no force since Rome had been as powerful as America and its legions.
This was absurd hyperbole, of course. It was true that the U.S. was the only great power with power projection capabilities that permitted it to defeat weak states on the Eurasian periphery like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. But America's unmatched abilities in the new colonial warfare hardly gave it hegemony over Europe or Asia. The U.S. military budget was strained nearly to bankruptcy merely by the cost of fighting low-level wars against primitive opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some solitary superpower...
... The Age of Paranoia came to a final end with the global economic collapse that began on Sept. 15, 2008. The subject changed from the threat of terrorists with atomic bombs to the threat of bankers with financial bombs, in the form of unexploded "toxic assets" with strange names like credit default swaps and over-the-counter derivatives. There was a brief upsurge in optimism, when a young, vigorous, mixed-race senator named Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. With Democrats in control of the White House as well as Congress, many assumed that an era of sweeping change was about to begin.
But Obama soon proved to be a cautious incrementalist, not a bold reformer. He froze out innovative thinkers and assembled an economic team dominated by center-right Democrats, including some like Larry Summers who had helped to make the crisis possible by supporting the deregulation of American and global finance in the 1990s. Obama's Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said no to all proposals for serious restructuring of the financial industry that might upset investment banks and hedge funds. Every major idea for financial reform -- from forcing investment banks into insolvency and nationalizing them temporarily to restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of retail banking from casino finance and cracking down on offshore tax havens to imposing a "Tobin tax" on financial transactions -- was rejected as too radical by the best friends in the White House that Wall Street has ever had. By the fall of 2009, according to press reports Paul Volcker was considered too radical to be taken seriously by the Obama administration. Paul Volcker.
In other areas, Obama was just as timid and deferential toward the organized business lobbies who had helped cause the problems he claimed to be trying to solve. He appeased pharmaceutical companies as part of an effort to push a health reform plan that was too feeble to be truly "historic." In the name of combating climate change, Obama and the Democrats pushed a complicated cap-and-trade system that invited manipulation by industry lobbyists and Wall Street investors. In every area, the Democrats rejected bold, deep reforms in favor of incremental changes that would not upset Wall Street and other industries that showered Obama and Democrats in Congress with contributions.
It has gradually dawned on Americans that the dynamic leadership that the times require is not to be found -- not on the right, caught up in a cultish Ghost Dance movement that conflates center-right Democrats with Nazis and Communists and King George, as enemies of the people, and not in the incrementalist, lobby-dominated Democratic Party of Obama, Pelosi and Reid. Popular rage is surprisingly limited. The mood overall is one of disillusionment and demoralization, like that of the American people during the Hoover years rather than after Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration...
Read entire article at Salon
Three calendar dates. Three anniversaries. Three eras in the history of the United States and the world...
... 11/9. 9/11. 9/15. These three dates divide three eras in recent history: the Age of Euphoria, the Age of Paranoia, and the Age of Disillusionment.
The Age of Euphoria lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the twin towers. In Washington, the fall of the Soviet Union was misinterpreted as the rise of the United States. The Gulf War of 1991 seemed to ratify American hubris. Using advanced technology designed to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. military quickly demolished the armed forces of Saddam Hussein's feeble regime. It was said that the world had gone from being bipolar to unipolar, that no force since Rome had been as powerful as America and its legions.
This was absurd hyperbole, of course. It was true that the U.S. was the only great power with power projection capabilities that permitted it to defeat weak states on the Eurasian periphery like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. But America's unmatched abilities in the new colonial warfare hardly gave it hegemony over Europe or Asia. The U.S. military budget was strained nearly to bankruptcy merely by the cost of fighting low-level wars against primitive opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some solitary superpower...
... The Age of Paranoia came to a final end with the global economic collapse that began on Sept. 15, 2008. The subject changed from the threat of terrorists with atomic bombs to the threat of bankers with financial bombs, in the form of unexploded "toxic assets" with strange names like credit default swaps and over-the-counter derivatives. There was a brief upsurge in optimism, when a young, vigorous, mixed-race senator named Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. With Democrats in control of the White House as well as Congress, many assumed that an era of sweeping change was about to begin.
But Obama soon proved to be a cautious incrementalist, not a bold reformer. He froze out innovative thinkers and assembled an economic team dominated by center-right Democrats, including some like Larry Summers who had helped to make the crisis possible by supporting the deregulation of American and global finance in the 1990s. Obama's Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said no to all proposals for serious restructuring of the financial industry that might upset investment banks and hedge funds. Every major idea for financial reform -- from forcing investment banks into insolvency and nationalizing them temporarily to restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of retail banking from casino finance and cracking down on offshore tax havens to imposing a "Tobin tax" on financial transactions -- was rejected as too radical by the best friends in the White House that Wall Street has ever had. By the fall of 2009, according to press reports Paul Volcker was considered too radical to be taken seriously by the Obama administration. Paul Volcker.
In other areas, Obama was just as timid and deferential toward the organized business lobbies who had helped cause the problems he claimed to be trying to solve. He appeased pharmaceutical companies as part of an effort to push a health reform plan that was too feeble to be truly "historic." In the name of combating climate change, Obama and the Democrats pushed a complicated cap-and-trade system that invited manipulation by industry lobbyists and Wall Street investors. In every area, the Democrats rejected bold, deep reforms in favor of incremental changes that would not upset Wall Street and other industries that showered Obama and Democrats in Congress with contributions.
It has gradually dawned on Americans that the dynamic leadership that the times require is not to be found -- not on the right, caught up in a cultish Ghost Dance movement that conflates center-right Democrats with Nazis and Communists and King George, as enemies of the people, and not in the incrementalist, lobby-dominated Democratic Party of Obama, Pelosi and Reid. Popular rage is surprisingly limited. The mood overall is one of disillusionment and demoralization, like that of the American people during the Hoover years rather than after Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration...