One thing I like about Andrew Bacevich is the way in which he puts American political culture within the broader world. He writes, "the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments?" On a personal level, the fall of the Berlin Wall, for me, meant the end of a military career. In the immediate aftermath of the fall, there was a down-sizing of the military, and I was given what felt like an offer I couldn't refuse, a buy out with diminished benefits or the boot. I took the buy out, and moved into higher ed or the community college version of higher ed. At some level, it was a relief. Though I was a military brat and in many ways military culture was familiar, I also came of age in the early 70s, and the whole time I was in the military, I never quite fully fit. I felt, not like a square peg, more like an octagonal peg, in a round hole. I thought of myself, not as a warrior, but as a peace keeper, the other half of what really was a MAD equation, but one that kept the world, however tenuously, from obliterating itself. As a community college educator, I could now dedicate myself to a peacetime pursuit, and I really did believe in the community college mission. Politically, it bridged a gap. It had the traditional liberal belief in the transformative power of education, along with the conservative belief in the social and ethical value of work. I dedicated myself to the community college's work-force development mission with a glowing enthusiasm that slowly drained away as, more and more, I realized it was a sham. We could point anecdotally to our success stories, but in the larger context of the larger economy, we made very little difference at all, and in many ways simply reinforced the emerging class structure as writers like Suzanne Mettler have amply demonstrated.
So, when Bacevich suggested we call the interval between fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Donald Trump "America's Age of Great Expectations," he spoke to me. He has identified three themes for the Age of Great Expectations. After the fall, "in remarkably short order, three themes emerged to define the new American age. Informing each of them was a sense of exuberant anticipation toward an era of almost unimaginable expectations. The twentieth century was ending on a high note. For the planet as a whole but especially for the United States, great things lay ahead." Although, as Lora would tell you, I am much too reserved for "exuberant" anything, I did share in the over-arching optimism. "Focused on the world economy," he tells us, "the first of those themes emphasized the transformative potential of turbocharged globalization led by U.S.-based financial institutions and transnational corporations." I am pretty well decided that globalization is not solely a phenomenon of the Age of Great Expectations. From the outset of recorded history, there have been global powers. Great empires rise and great empires fall, and no reading of Gibbon will dissuade the exuberant anticipation of ever more promised by imperial expansion. While the American revolution may have marked a weakness of imperial colonial expansion, one need only scan early American history to get some sense of how the need for trade entangled the emerging nation with the empirical powers of the day, particularly Britain and France. The devil is always in the details, and it is the detail of the here and now, then and now, that differentiates each era from the past and makes the future uncertain. Still, globalization is nothing new, but as Bacevich suggests, America's position within the scheme of global power had changed. "Focused on statecraft," as he put it, "the second theme spelled out the implications of an international order dominated as never before -- not even in the heydays of the Roman and British Empires -- by a single nation. With the passing of the Cold War, the United States now stood apart as both supreme power and irreplaceable global leader, its status guaranteed by its unstoppable military might."
Or so it seemed. On the one hand, the Russian bear proved, well, a bear for the neo-liberal economic order. Around 2011, in the midst of the Age of Great Expectations, I traveled to Russia, representing our College, and community colleges in general for the Rhodes organization. Putin and Medvedev had, so to speak, swapped places. On an extended ride through the country side with a gaggle of Russian academics, I remember suggesting that, to use CNN's language,"The Kremlin's proposed game of musical chairs is the kind of change whose only purpose is to keep things as they are." I had the naive belief that the Russian people would want to shrug off the rusting shackles of an authoritarian government. The Russian academic next to me quickly corrected me. The Russian people, he explained, needed an authoritarian government, and that for them at least, it wasn't a bad thing, actually a good thing, that things had changed without changing. If not the Czars, then the Communists. If not the Communists, then the oligarchs. Change without change, and Russia endures under an iron fist. I paraphrase badly, but that was the gist, and it seems he had the right idea. As Bacevich put it, "globalization created wealth on a vast scale, just not for ordinary Americans." Although we would like to believe we are different than the Russians, that our political systems are "free" and "democratic," and all shared in the Great Expectations, it soon became clear enough that "the already well-to-do did splendidly, in some cases unbelievably so. But middle-class incomes stagnated and good jobs became increasingly hard to find or keep. " Prospective voters were indeed noticing, as Bacevich points out, "the United States looked increasingly like a society divided between haves and have-nots, the affluent and the left-behind, the 1% and everyone else." In a nation already deeply divided, however, between black and white, rural and urban, educated and uneducated, the political response was hardly uniform. Each of the major political parties sneered at the other, picking at the scabs and stitches of our wounds before they could begin to heal, and the result was our very own Putin, or perhaps more precisely our very own Putin wannabe, who with each passing day, more and more, reveals that he wants to be the CEO of America, ruling the American government with the same ham handed authority that the CEO of a privately held corporation rules their company.
On the other hand, the US might have stood apart as a supreme power, with a military capacity almost unimaginable, but instead of freeing us, it shackled us. Bacevich is in his element when he suggests that "with U.S. forces continuously engaged in combat operations, peace all but vanished as a policy objective (or even a word in Washington’s political lexicon). The acknowledged standing of the country’s military as the world’s best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led force coexisted uneasily with the fact that it proved unable to win." I want to say we didn't learn the lesson of Vietnam, but I would need to correct myself. It is perhaps instructive to remember that the Roman order fell twice, first with the fall of the Republic, second with the collapse of the Imperium. It is also instructive to note that under the Republic the legions of Rome were mostly "citizen" soldiers, if not exactly draftees in the modern sense, a close enough equivalent. As the republic collapsed and the empire grew, so too did the need for a professional standing army. The new professional Legions were conscripted by a variety of factors, not least economic need and opportunity, and they fought, not as "citizens" with a "citizens" concerns, but for the Imperium. If Vietnam taught us that "citizen" soldiers would eventually rise up and resist engaging in protracted and ultimately pointless wars, the "professional," all volunteer military would not. The "citizens" would go about their business and the military "professionals" would go about theirs in support of the American imperium. Here, I have to say that I have heard "thanks for your service" on too many occasions, and I am always slightly put off by it. The "thankers" don't want to appear ungrateful, but their gratitude always seems to carry the condescension of "better you than me," and the sanctimony of "how noble I am thanking you for serving me." If the Vietnam war had a profound affect on the citizenry, the interminable wars of the middle east clearly have not, and as Bacevich put it, "the national security establishment became conditioned to the idea of permanent war, high-ranking officials taking it for granted that ordinary citizens would simply accommodate themselves to this new reality." For the most part, we have, and because these wars are not up close and personal for vast majority of the citizenry, are not an imminent personal danger unless one is driven by economic need and opportunity to enlist, we can go on about our business without confronting the almost undeniable fact that our warfare, as Tom Englehardt put it, "doesn't work" and "doesn't solve problems." Worse yet, our warfare has become a "destabilizing force," making matters demonstrably worse, and with each new terrorist attack, no matter where in the world, brought immediately to our attention, picked at endlessly on the cable news networks, "it soon became apparent that, instead of giving ordinary Americans a sense of security, this new paradigm induced an acute sense of vulnerability, which left many susceptible to demagogic fear mongering."
The third theme, I think, Bacevich gets slightly wrong. Richard Hofsteader, I think, gets it mostly correct when he identified the paranoid style in American politics, a style which had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it-and its targets have ranged from 'the international bankers' to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers." In the opening paragraphs of his Harper's piece, "The paranoid style in American Politics," he reminds us "The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent." He cites Senator McCarthy, in particular a speech he made in June of 1951, as a defining example of the paranoid style:
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men:' ... What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence .... The laws of probability would dictate that part of ... [the] decisions would serve the country's interest.
Reading through his paragraph is instructive on a number of levels. Except for the purpose hyperbole of the rhetoric, it would well have been uttered by our president elect, and not unlike McCarthy, his promise to "drain the swamp" parlays a discontent with the government into a suspicion of those in the government. Of course, we are talking about the 1950s, as Tom Englehart put it, "that Edenic, Father-Knows-Best era that Donald Trump now yearns so deeply to bring back in order to 'make America great again.'" McCarthy's rhetoric reminds us, however, "just how scary the good times were." Part of it was, of course, the not unreasonable threats present during the Cold War, and like Englehart, I remember the 1950s version of the paranoid hysteria, and "it concerned the obliteration of the city I lived in via a Cold War nuclear confrontation (of the sort that did indeed come close to happening)" when my father, a Navy NCO and Marine medic, failed to come home one night, and my frantic mother finally put two and two together when she heard the news of the naval blockade of Cuba. Like Englehart, I remember "we kids all 'ducked and covered' in atomic drills," and I too can remember "crouching beneath my own, hands pathetically over my head, as if I could truly protect myself from an atomic attack." It was terror on a global scale, which made it seem paradoxically as inevitable and ultimately as irrelevant as the second coming. If the worst were to happen, if the rockets red glare were to reduce the world to ashes, life as we knew it would be over, including the consumer culture that was cranking into full gear -- a consumer culture epitomized and satirized by Janis Joplin in the 60s when she sang "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz." If communism threatened armegeddon, oh well, but in the meantime it also threatened a god given consumerism on an international scale, and that was a more immediate concern.
Reading through McCarthy's paragraph is also a reminder that, as Bacevich put it, "during the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily." What was one to make of McCarthy's paranoia? Anyone who has worked with people for any length of time knows that "a great conspiracy" is improbable in the extreme. It is difficult enough to get two people, each with their own ambitions and self-interests, to collude for any length of time, but on "a scale so immense as to dwarf any such previous adventure" beggared belief. Still, there was something to it. If not a "great conspiracy," then a dawning realization that the "interests" served were not necessarily "security," at least not in any way that would make personal sense for the vast majority of Americans. The "interests" served were those the likable Ike had worried over, the military-industrial complex, and for that to grow and expand, one needed, not security, but insecurity. On the international front, there was plenty of insecurity to go around as the "third world nations" here and there attempted to come to grips with their allegiances in a tri-polar post-colonial order split between US, the Soviet Union, and Red China. The international insecurity rationalized the expenditure of "vast sums on weapons purchases that somehow never seemed adequate to the putative dangers at hand." On the domestic front, however, things seemed to be going rather well, thank you very much. Yes, the H-Bombs were there, but really? It wasn't altogether clear why we should worry about Korea, and even less clear why we should worry about Vietnam. Neither seemed to affect us personally. McCarthy's hyperbolic rhetoric, his fears of communists lurking in the bureaucracy of the US government, was an attempt to bring the worry home, make the insecurity more immediate and more personal, and it worked, but not all that well, and only for awhile. It didn't become really of personal concern until the Johnson era escalation of the Vietnam war and the implementation of the draft in the late 60s, early 70s. The anti-war movement and the student protests succeeded in ways that McCarthy could not. For the great "silent majority," the students seemed to reject not only of the "putative interests of national security" on the international front, but also "our way of life," where the freedom to consume as we pleased seemed a god given imperative. The civil unrest brought the insecurity home, brought "the threat to our way of life" home, and made it seem altogether reasonable to accommodate the imperatives of national security while insisting on "law and order" at home. The end of the Vietnam war relieved some domestic insecurity. The 80s weren't quite as halcyon as the 50s, but they weren't bad. The consumer culture once again thrived, this time with a disco up-beat, and the "evil empire" remained a looming concern, enough insecurity to keep the military industrial complex up and running. All was as it should be, and would be for the foreseeable future.
Bacevich is right, "the end of the Cold War caught the United States completely by surprise." I remember sitting on the sofa, watching the Berlin Wall come down with a sense of incredulousness shared by the newscasters. I am not sure, however, that Bacevich is entirely correct in asserting that, once the Cold War ended, "the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated." That tension almost certainly existed, and the times will favor one over the other as the paranoid style takes ascendency, but the tension has existed right from the outset of our "free" republic, the Alien and Sedition Acts being a case in point, and it probably shouldn't surprise us that a large segment of our population wants "the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act of 1798), or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemy Act of 1798)." It wouldn't surprise me either, given the temperament of our new president, if he didn't move to criminalize statements "critical of the federal government (Sedition Act of 1798)" now that the GOP controls the federal government. I don't really think "reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation," as he suggests, or if they did, it was more of the same. "The removal of restraints and inhibitions," had been underway for quite some time in "modes of cultural expression [around] sexuality and the definition of the family," and it probably shouldn't surprise us that the "law and order" backlash against the 60s would generate its own backlash in the 80s. The 60s released a Dionysian Thoreau into the mainstream from Woodstock, the 80s released an equally Dionysian version of the Carnegies, both Dale and Andrew, into the mainstream from Wall Street, expressed perhaps most succinctly in the Wolf of Wall Street. The cultural expressions, coupled with the on-going threat of the "evil empire," however, obscured what was happening for most Americans -- a growing insecurity. If the prosperity of the 50s had come to seem the norm, and the realization of the American dream a national birth right, during the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the climb to get back to where we once belonged has grown ever steeper. At the turn of the millennia, it seemed impossibly steep, a sheer rock face that only a lucky few can climb. Many Americans feel as though they are dangling from frayed ropes that may give way any moment, and then, on top of that, there is "radical Islamic terrorism." For those of us raised on the great ideological conflicts, there is something at once pathetic and personal about the current about the war on terror -- pathetic insofar as it seems a poor substitution for the cold war, but personal insofar as any nutcase, fueled by resentment, justified by jihad, can really strike right here, right now. The communists really did have WMDs, and the investments in defense could be rationalized, but their "sleeper agents" didn't drive aircraft into buildings or trucks through the local Christmas bazaar. Radical Islamic terror doesn't have WMDs, and calls for defense spending at cold war levels more than a bit hyperbolic, but the jihadist wannabe's do buy up arsenals and massacre their co-workers. It's not surprising, then, that our president elect, piling one insecurity on top of another, is advocating a slightly updated version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
So, the Age of Great Expectations has morphed into the Age of Insecurities. Our globalization has gob smacked us with diminished economic expectations, particularly in those sectors of our economy dependent upon labor in a more traditional sense of the word. Our imperial reign as first among nations hasn't worked out so well empirically, the attempt to play 'whack a mole' with the awe inspiring shock of a sledgehammer has done considerable damage and the moles keeping right on popping up with increasing frequency. We seem to be living in a nation and a world coming apart at the seams, like a cheap garment "Made in Bangladesh." We have suffered a wardrobe malfunction and our insecurities are showing, and so it isn't surprising that someone would come along and promise to make Americans secure again. Here again, I think Bacevich is right when he suggests that "as a complement to these themes, in the realm of governance, the end of the Cold War cemented the status of the president as quasi-deity" -- or, perhaps, a quasi-messiah, someone to secure our daily bread and deliver us from our enemies. Having said this, however, one man's christ is another's anti-christ, and never the twain shall meet. "Within hours of Trump’s election," I like many other progressives, expressed "fear and trepidation at the prospect of what he might actually do on assuming office." His ascent to office, however, has seemed more chaotic than purposeful, not unlike his campaign, the only constant being his narcissistic faith in himself. If his cabinet picks reveal anything, they reveal the messianic need for apostles, those faithful willing to follow, more than any apostolic creed of the sort we might have expected from a Paul Ryan type. And yes, even "those who had actually voted for Trump were also left wondering what to expect," as Bacevich suggests, in part because their vote was an expression of faith in a father figure, if not exactly the heavenly father of the mormons, who most definitely inhabit the father knows best world of the 50s, then the George Michael version, who promises to take their tiny hands in his and give his faithful anything they have in mind.
Nevertheless, I still have "premonitions of incipient fascism," and like Bacevich, though perhaps less optimistically, believe Trump to be a more transitional figure, more a harbinger of our republic's factious death throes, a Caesars Palace Caesar before the emergence of an Octavian. I could be wrong, and hope that I am, but the "hopes that he will engineer a new American Golden Age are likely to prove similarly misplaced." It is interesting to note, along with Bacevich, that Trump's "is almost entirely negative." If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, it is one thing to run for office. Then, one can be wholly negative and focus one's energy on rejection, "of globalization, of counterproductive military meddling, and of the post-Cold War cultural project." And there is, of course, a good deal that should be rejected, or at least questioned in "this triad of themes." Having said this, however, it is one thing to critique governance, quite another thing to govern. It's simple, really. Governance requires commitment. When one comes to the fork in the road, one cannot simply take it. One must either sit down and the end the journey, go left, or go right. In the end, one has a headline like "Trump's education pick, lauded as bold reformer, called unfit for job." In short, it is one thing to reject, quite another thing to offer "coherent alternative[s] to the triad of themes" that run through "the last quarter-century of American history." Although Bacevich believes a "focus on the man himself" is a mistake, it should be pointed out that Trump himself, the man, seems incapable of governance. We have, as David Brooks suggests, elected the class clown, the carnival Lord of Misrule, as president. We have elected a tweeter. "His tweets are classic fool behavior," as Brooks suggests. "They are raw, ridiculous and frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture and he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet. It’s to symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional." Here, shortly, Trump will need to decide, however, whether he wants to BE and DO president, or continue being and doing the class clown routine. We should, as Bacevich suggests, focus on "the circumstances that produced him," but it is not entirely "to miss the significance of what has occurred" if one focuses as well on the man himself. As Brooks, along with many others, has suggested, "we live at a time of wide social inequality. The intellectual straitjackets have been getting tighter. The universities have become modern cathedrals, where social hierarchies are defined and reinforced" -- that is to say, "we’re living with exactly the kinds of injustices that lead to carnival culture, and we’ve crowned a fool king."
The circumstances produced the man. The man will, if current chaos is at all indicative of what lies ahead, exacerbate the circumstances. What then? "Concerns about what he may do" are "worrisome," perhaps more than worrisome. "The larger question of where we go from here," still looms before us, and if we descend further and further into chaos, if we continue to withdraw from rational argument to the snide cynicism of the tweet storm, the larger question will become harder and harder to answer. Trump may well be transitional, but transitional to what? As recent Russian history reminds us once again, social and political and economic chaos are the breeding ground of tyrants. One can agree that "the principles that enjoyed favor following the Cold War have been found wanting," but "the principles we need -- an approach to political economy providing sustainable and equitable prosperity; a foreign policy that discards militarism in favor of prudence and pragmatism; and an enriched, inclusive concept of freedom -- will have to come from somewhere else." Where? I see little evidence of it emerging here.
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