The historical moment

The historian Andrew Bacevich takes a step back from the present wailing and gnashing of teeth to look at the big picture. He should concede that there is a stochastic element to the outcome of the election, and that massive failure by the corporate media is a necessary condition for it as well. Nevertheless he has much of interest to say about the discontents that were also a necessary condition.

I am old enough to remember the existential dread of the Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction. I saw the country torn apart by Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and the countercultural movement(s) of what are usually called The Sixties, which actually lasted from about 1963 to 1974.  Then there were all the min-wars and interventions.

Bacevich's key point is that with the fall of the Berlin wall, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. elites  thought they bestrode the narrow world like a colossus.* "We" had won and now the U.S., the sole superpower, was going to lead the world into a new era of globalized  neo-liberal capitalism, and end all dispute. Instead we got one failure and disaster after another. The Clinton impeachment followed by the Supreme Court installing his witless successor. The terror attack in 2001, followed by a "mindless . . . and unsuccessful war launched on the basis of false claims and outright lies." The destruction of New Orleans. (He doesn't mention the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico.) The crash of 2008. Meanwhile the neo-liberal revolution had made rich people richer, but left everybody else behind. And the cultural revolution that started in the 1960s was threatening and disturbing to many people.

The Obama presidency seemed to hold promise for real change, but hopes were dashed. The wars ground on, wages stayed stagnant, politics became more bitter than ever. The elites of the Democratic party, Hillary Clinton and her associates, were blind to the extent and nature of disaffection. Yes, fake news and conspiracy theories, and failure of the corporate media to talk about public policy certainly hurt her. But she was the exact symbol of everything that fueled discontent: however belatedly she tried to reinvent herself, she was a known to be a champion of free trade and failed wars. And of course the cultural upheavals.

Bacevich thinks Trump is transitional, not transformative. He doesn't have a coherent ideology or program and his rhetoric is empty. It seems very unlikely he will survive re-election - or perhaps even last until then. There isn't really any such thing as Trumpism, he is just a vessel for rejection. If we can survive the next four years the question is what happens next. That we can see only through a glass darkly.








* Allusion is to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.