Chapter 30
A Global Nation for the New Millennium
Chapter Outline
The George W. Bush Administration
The American Place in a Global Economy
The Stewardship of Natural Resources
The Expansion of American Popular Culture Abroad
Identity in Contemporary America
Conclusion
Sites to Visit
For Further Reading
At the beginning of the third millennium, the United States was more closely connected than ever to the rest of the world. The processes of globalization—increasing trade, communication, travel, and migration—linked the nation to the rest of a world that often seemed to be torn by ethnic and religious strife. That strife from abroad impinged on Americans in a shocking new way on September 11, 2001. On a sunny Tuesday morning, 19 hijackers—four of them trained as pilots—seized control simultaneously of four large commercial jets and turned them into suicidal missiles. At 8:48 a.m., one flew into the 110-story north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center, igniting an enormous fireball. Fifteen minutes later, the second plane flew into the south tower. In less than two hours, both towers collapsed, killing the thousands of people still inside. Among the dead were hundreds of firefighters, police officers, and other rescue workers who had raced into the towers to evacuate the occupants. The third plane flew into the Pentagon. The fourth was also being directed toward Washington, apparently to destroy the White House or the Capitol Building, until it crashed in a field 75 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The carefully coordinated assaults killed almost 3,000 people, destroyed the two tallest buildings in the country’s largest city, and left a gaping hole in the headquarters of the nation’s military command. Not since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier had the United States experienced a devastating attack on its own soil. During the intervening half-century of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and other communist forces had never attempted direct aggression against the American homeland. Who was responsible for the most horrific act of terrorism against civilians in U.S. history?
The 19 perpetrators were self-styled holy warriors of a secretive, extremist Islamic organization known as Al Qaeda, organized by wealthy, charismatic Saudi Arabian expatriate Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda worked out of Afghanistan, hosted by the most repressive Islamic government on Earth, the Taliban, which rose to power in 1996 out of the chaos that followed the withdrawal of the Soviet army in 1989. The rage of bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists against the United States had been building throughout the 1990s, fueled by the presence of “infidel” American troops in Saudi Arabia since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, by American support for Israel, and by the rapid spread of secular American popular culture around the globe. At odds with moderate Islamic mainstream thought throughout the world, bin Laden announced in 1998: “To kill Americans and their allies is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able.”
At the heart of American society remained a common assumption, that the United States is a democratic country. The events on United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four doomed planes on September 11, 2001, revealed the tenacity of the belief in majority rule. After the hijackers seized control and herded the passengers into the rear of the cabin, a dozen passengers and crew members were able to communicate by phone with people on the ground. They learned that two other planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, and they realized that these hijackers—unlike previous ones who sought concrete gains and an escape—planned only destruction for them all. Face to face with imminent death and the certainty that many others would perish if they failed to act, the passengers discussed what to do. They made a plan to rush the hijackers, led by several large, athletic passengers, including Mark Bingham, a prominent gay businessperson and rugby player from San Francisco. Should they proceed? Quintessential Americans, they took a vote. GTE Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson heard the rest: “Are you guys ready?” asked Todd Beamer, a tall father of two from Cranbury, New Jersey. Screams and a sustained scuffle followed before the line went dead. The plane, headed for the heart of Washington, crashed in an unpopulated part of western Pennsylvania with no casualties on the ground.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, constituted perhaps the most significant event in American life since Japan’s surrender in 1945. People remember where they were when they first learned what had happened, and they recall vividly the terrible televised images of destruction. As citizens of the sole remaining superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Americans had grown accustomed to unprecedented global power and influence. They had no great power rival. For most of those ten years, they had experienced rapid economic growth as well. The nation, it seemed, was wealthy and secure.
The events on September 11 changed all that. The economy, already sliding into recession, accelerated its downward course. Just seven months in office, the administration of President George W. Bush responded by leading the nation into a “war on terrorism” abroad and at home. Within two years, U.S.-led efforts succeeded in overthrowing the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. Complicated, long-term military occupations ensued, with U.S. forces continuing to engage in bloody battles against insurgents in both countries. In an effort to prevent further terrorist attacks at home, Congress passed the “USA Patriot Act,” granting greater powers to the executive branch of the federal government. Authorities detained hundreds of immigrants, primarily young men of Middle Eastern descent. These policies then faced the test of public approval in the elections of November 2004.
The President and the War on Terrorism
George W. Bush did not have an auspicious record of achievement before his election as governor of Texas in 1994 and as president of the United States six years later. He grew up primarily in Midland, Texas, the grandson of a U.S. senator from Connecticut and the eldest son of a wealthy oilman, diplomat, and eventual U.S. president, George H. W. Bush. “W.,” as he was sometimes called to distinguish him from his father, attended the elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and he earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School, though his modest academic achievements hinted at the benefits of unofficial forms of affirmative action for the scions of wealthy and powerful families. His sociability and charisma earned him many friends. He avoided going to Vietnam when he was of draft age by serving in the Air National Guard, though he apparently failed to show up for much of a year of that service in 1972.
After a mixed career in business and a strong taste for the partying life, Bush gave up drinking at age 40 and became a devout, conservative Christian. This ambitious and now more serious man made his way up in Republican political circles, benefiting from family connections as well as a warm, “regular guy” personality that appealed to many working-class Americans. Despite his father’s strongly international orientation, Bush himself before his presidency had left the United States only three times to go anywhere besides Mexico. “I’m not going to play like a person who has spent hours involved with foreign policy,” he admitted during the 2000 campaign. Once president, he took a unilateralist and almost isolationist stance, to the dismay of close U.S. allies abroad. The United States rejected or withdrew from international agreements limiting global warming, weapons testing, and war crime prosecutions.
The events of September 11 stunned all Americans and gave the president a new focus. Finding and destroying Al Qaeda and its allies was now “the purpose of this administration,” Bush told his cabinet. Four weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. planes initiated the “war on terrorism” by bombing Taliban and Al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan. By October 19, U.S. special operations forces were working on the ground with anti-Taliban Afghan insurgents. Several European nations provided troops and other military assistance. By December, the Taliban had been driven from power throughout the country, and U.S. and allied forces had killed and captured hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Many of the prisoners were transferred to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be held indefinitely and interrogated as enemy combatants. Despite continued pursuit and a reward offer of $25 million, the United States was not able to find Osama bin Laden, who was assumed to be hiding in the remote, snowy mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.
Security and Politics at Home
The war on terrorism was not only a foreign affair. Just as the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s had incorporated a hunt for domestic traitors, the war on terrorism in the early 2000s included a search for potential Al Qaeda sympathizers at home. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism was framed as a long-term struggle against a maniacal, evil enemy who would not be easily defeated. Also as in the Cold War, American leaders announced that some civil liberties would have to be curtailed in order to protect the nation. The USA Patriot Act of October 2001 increased the U.S. Justice Department’s range of options for spying on and detaining citizens and noncitizens suspected of pro-terrorist activities. Determined to prevent another major terrorist attack, Attorney General John Ashcroft oversaw the arrest of hundreds of illegal immigrants and their imprisonment in what the Justice Department later admitted were often unduly harsh conditions—not unlike Guantanamo, observers noted. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in an effort to better coordinate intelligence, police, and military authorities for defending the nation from future attacks.
Beyond terrorism, George W. Bush sought to move the nation in the direction of what he called “compassionate conservatism.” One conservative activist noted that the new administration turned out to be “more Reaganite than the Reagan administration.” In the economic realm, this meant promoting the private sector and reducing federal spending on social programs for the poor. It meant reducing the government’s role in regulating health and safety issues in the workplace. And it meant pushing large tax cuts through Congress in 2001 and 2003 to the disproportionate benefit of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. The budget surpluses of Bill Clinton’s last years disappeared, as the Bush administration ran enormous annual deficits by retaining the tax cuts while sharply increasing military spending. The nation’s debt grew rapidly under Bush.
Bush’s conservatism did not include conserving natural resources. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, both former oil executives, were closely allied with corporate interests, particularly in the energy business, that sought easier access to public resources. The administration promoted oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, encouraged mining and timber clear-cutting across western federal lands, and refused to regulate carbon dioxide emissions despite powerful evidence of global warming. The administration also loosened federal regulations on industrial air pollution, on water pollution by the coal industry, and on arsenic levels in drinking water.
Sexual issues remained flashpoints of political controversy. Explicit and suggestive sexuality pervaded popular culture, including two-thirds of television shows, causing particular concern among parents of young children. At the same time, Americans were increasingly accepting of homosexual couples. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws banning private homosexual behavior between consenting adults. A year later, Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. One-third of the nation’s largest companies now offered employees in same-sex marriages or committed relationships the same benefits and supports, such as health care insurance, that they offered employees with traditional families. Marriage and family remained social institutions in transition, for better or worse: only 56 percent of adults were now married, compared with 75 percent 30 years earlier. And only 26 percent of American households consisted of a married couple with children.
The War in Iraq
President Bush’s most momentous decision was to invade and occupy Iraq in the spring of 2003. This was a very different proposition than the attack on Afghanistan. The effort to destroy Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan had widespread support in the United States and across much of the world. By contrast, invading a sovereign nation that had not attacked or even threatened the United States divided Americans and alienated most of the rest of the world. The United Nations refused to support the invasion. America’s western European allies were dismayed. Among America’s major allies, only the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair provided enthusiastic political support and a significant number of troops. Given this lack of support, why did the Bush administration invade Iraq?
Some observers pointed to personal reasons. Bush would be “finishing” the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when his father oversaw the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invading Iraqi forces but did not send troops to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam. Bush would also be avenging Saddam’s effort to assassinate the elder Bush on a visit to Kuwait. Other observers emphasized the centrality of Iraq’s oil reserves, the largest in the world after those of Saudi Arabia and Canada. The president himself claimed two primary reasons for the invasion: that Saddam possessed “weapons of mass destruction”—chemical, biological, or nuclear—and could attack the United States or its allies “on any given day,” and that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda “and was equally as bad, equally as evil and equally as destructive.” But after U.S. forces occupied Iraq, these two official reasons for the war were placed in doubt. U.S. troops found no weapons of mass destruction (though Saddam had indeed used chemical weapons on dissident Iraqi civilians 15 years earlier), and Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted there was no “smoking gun” proof of a link between Al Qaeda’s religious zealots and Saddam’s fiercely secular dictatorship. The bipartisan reports of both the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 found that the primary reasons the president gave for invading Iraq were not true.
A deeper reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq appeared to be the administration’s view of September 11 as an opportunity to preemptively reshape the Middle East into a region less hostile to the United States and Israel. A liberated Iraq, right in the center of the Middle East, might have a “demonstration effect” of pro-American capitalist democracy that would turn the rest of the region away from authoritarianism and Islamic revolution. Bush spoke of the overthrow of Saddam as “a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.” This statement represented a highly optimistic view of how Americans might bring change to the Middle East, part of a new U.S. strategic doctrine emphasizing preemptive action against the nation’s enemies. “We must take the battle to the enemy” in the war on terrorism, Bush declared in 2002, “and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”
The U.S.-led offensive in Iraq that began on March 19, 2003, was a successful military action. Some 200,000 U.S. and British troops, with a few other allied forces, overran Saddam’s defenses and occupied the entire nation of 25 million people within four weeks. The rapid military victory and the presence of so many U.S. troops initially stunned neighboring Iran and Syria into reducing aid to anti-Israeli terrorist groups. Most Iraqis celebrated their liberation from Saddam’s brutal regime, and many seemed to welcome the American soldiers. Seven months later, U.S. soldiers captured Saddam himself.
But military occupations rarely age well, especially without sufficient troops for the task. Widespread looting ravaged Baghdad, and essential services and personal security deteriorated in the aftermath of the old government’s defeat. “Baghdad,” one gasoline station owner observed, “is like the Wild West now.” Saddam loyalists, Iraqi nationalists of various stripes, and arriving foreign Islamic revolutionaries initiated a multi-sided insurgency against the American occupiers. The number of U.S. and Iraqi deaths shot upward, as did the number of American troops sent to Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed to be increasing rather than reducing the threat of terrorism to Americans and others. Indeed, some observers suggested that Osama bin Laden might be pleased to have so many U.S. troops trying to control an unhappy Muslim population for the stimulus it provided to recruiting anti-American jihadists. Sunnis and Shiites also faced off against each other in what began to look like civil war. Critics of U.S. postwar planning now included some prominent Republicans, and the commander of allied forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, told Americans flatly “we’re still at war.”
The Bush administration turned over official sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 28, 2004, with 130,000 U.S. troops remaining in the country in an effort to provide security against insurgents. “We don’t do empire,” insisted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But two months earlier, photographs and eyewitness reports were made public of U.S. troops abusing, torturing, and sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. After a week’s delay, the president finally apologized. For most Middle Easterners and for Muslims around the world, however, this was compelling evidence that Bush’s rhetoric about liberating Iraq was merely a cover for what they saw as fundamental American disdain for Muslims.
The Election of 2004 and After
President Bush entered his campaign for reelection with solid support in his own party but mixed reviews from others. Many other nations considered the U.S. attack on Iraq to be unjustified and unwise. Western Europeans resented Bush’s lack of interest in their concerns, making him probably the least-popular American president in Europe in 80 years. Less than three years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans still tended to support him on foreign policy matters. But many voters were troubled by the growing insurgency in Iraq and by a still-weak economy, and the president’s approval ratings remained below 50 percent.
The Democratic Party hoped to exploit Bush’s vulnerability by nominating Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a decorated Vietnam War hero with a moderately liberal legislative record. Bush and Kerry had graduated from Yale within two years of each other, and both had very wealthy families. Democratic party activists hoped to blunt the appeal of the president’s “war on terrorism” and emphasis on patriotism by nominating a man whose courage under fire in Vietnam contrasted with Bush’s safe spot in the Texas National Guard during that war.
It did not quite work. The president prevailed in a narrow popular-vote victory. The Electoral College outcome of 2004 hinged on Ohio, where a difference of 136,000 votes put Bush over the top. Two issues predominated in the minds of the majority of voters. One was the war on terrorism, which they tended to see as the same as the war in Iraq (despite evidence to the contrary) and on which they trusted Bush’s leadership more than Kerry’s. The second was what voters described as “moral values,” a sense that Bush—even if they sometimes did not agree with his specific policy choices—had personal integrity, a quality they were less sure of with Kerry’s nuanced views of complicated policy issues. Christian conservatives were particularly important in getting Republican voters to the polls, passing initiatives in 11 states to ban gay marriage and winning four new seats in the Senate and four in the House to give the president a larger majority in Congress.
The president’s political fortunes declined swiftly after his reelection. The situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate in 2005, as deepening ethnic and religious divisions undermined efforts to reconstruct a stable and orderly society. At home, an ethics scandal brought down the once-powerful House majority leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, and dimmed public confidence in the Republican-run Congress. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, causing hundreds of deaths and a massive evacuation of nearly the entire city. The Bush administration was criticized from all sides for what was widely seen as a slow and ineffectual response to an extraordinary human disaster. By May 2006 Bush’s approval rating dropped to 31%, the third lowest figure (after Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter) for any president in 50 years. In the November 2006 elections, the Republicans lost their majorities in both the House and the Senate.
While the president navigated difficult political waters, average Americans struggled to find and keep their place in a changing world economy. Mollie Brown James, for example, grew up in a small Virginia town west of Richmond. In 1950, at age nineteen, she moved to Paterson, New Jersey, joining the broad river of black Southerners who sought better economic opportunities and greater personal freedom in the North. She took a job in 1955 with the Universal Manufacturing Company in Paterson, with wages and decent treatment, unlike what had been available to her in Virginia. She stayed with Universal for thirty-four years. With union-negotiated wages, overtime work, and company-paid health insurance, she helped pull her family into the middle-class world of owning their own home and car and saving for retirement. But the peace of mind that came from a secure job vanished in 1989 when Universal closed the Paterson plant and moved its manufacturing operations to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande River from Brownsville, Texas.
James’s job did not disappear. It moved and was inherited by twenty-year-old Balbina Duque Granados. She, too, had grown up in a small town located in an agricultural area, in the Mexican province of San Luis Potosí, and she, too, had moved 400 miles north to find better-paying work in a booming manufacturing city. She was thrilled to land the difficult, repetitive job—her “answered prayer”—at a maquiladora, one of the foreign-owned assembly plants along Mexico’s border with the United States that wed First World engineering with Third World working conditions. Her employer was also satisfied, paying her $.65 an hour to do what James had been paid $7.91 an hour for. But Granados’s job was no more secure than James’s had been. The beginnings of successful worker organizing in Matamoros encouraged the company to shift many of its operations sixty miles upriver to Reynosa, where the union movement was weaker. A journalist asked whether she would move there if her job did. “And what if they were to move again?” she replied. “Maybe to Juarez or Tijuana? What then? Do I have to chase my job all over the world?”
The Logic and Technology of Globalization
[
Like many other workers in the United States and abroad, Mollie James and Balbina Duque Granados learned firsthand the relentlessly international logic of the economic system known as capitalism. Those who had capital—extra money—invested it in corporations, whose purpose was to produce a profit for their shareholders. A corporation’s profitability depended on keeping costs—labor and materials—down and expanding into new markets. Just as the telegraph and telephone had helped create a nation unified by rapid communication in the late 1800s, the spread of personal computers and the Internet linked Americans even more closely to other nations in the late 1900s.
At the close of the twentieth century, engineering breakthroughs sped up the process of globalization. The integration of computers into every aspect of commerce and private life increased the efficiency with which businesses could operate. Computers boosted American productivity (the amount of work performed by a person in a given time period), which had declined between 1973 and 1996, and the U.S. economy enjoyed its longest-ever expansion during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Cable News Network (CNN) offered a standardized package of world news available twenty-four hours a day around the globe. CNN was so international in its aims that it banned the word foreign from its broadcasts.
Americans were also speeding up their daily routines as the new millennium approached. The desire for immediate gratification and efficiency that had nurtured fast food and microwave ovens encouraged the spread of cell phones, beepers, fax machines, overnight package delivery, and constant news headlines scrolling across TV screens. Computers processed more information faster on ever-smaller silicon chips. Cell phones proliferated among businesspeople, students, and drivers. As prices dropped, they even reached into poorer areas. International air travel for business and pleasure quadrupled between 1980 and 1998, and international tourism vied with oil as the world’s largest industry. The spread of the Internet and the use of electronic mail (e-mail) and instant-messaging after the early 1990s epitomized the shift toward instant global communication.
Free Trade and the Global Assembly Line
The ideology of free trade underpinned the tighter meshing of Americans’ lives with the world economy. Advocates of free trade argued that global markets unhindered by national tariffs benefited consumers everywhere by giving them access to the best goods at the lowest prices. America’s NAFTA treaty with Canada and Mexico reflected this belief (see Chapter 29), as did the European Union with its newly unified currency, the euro. In the United States, by the start of the new millennium most leaders of both major political parties, corporate executives, bankers, and most other elites supported free trade.
But others objected to this internationalist economic ideology. Environmentalists and labor unions led the forces opposing unregulated globalization of the U.S. economy. Environmentalists warned of the pollution costs to the world’s environment of U.S. factories relocating to poorer and less regulated nations, such as Mexico and China. Labor organizers decried the flight of American jobs as manufacturers sought less expensive and more compliant—often desperate—workers abroad. Human rights activists spotlighted the grim working conditions in many overseas plants, including the prevalence of child labor.
A “race to the bottom” for labor and environmental standards resulted from the development of a global assembly line. With capital able to move swiftly around the world and take its factories with it, nations and localities believed that they had little choice but to compete in offering multinational corporations the most advantageous terms possible. Such terms meant minimal government regulation, little protection for workers, nonexistent pollution standards, and local subsidies in place of corporate taxes. Corporate income taxes, which had been dropping since the 1950s, shrank by another third between 1986 and 2000. The maquiladoras on the Mexican border were part of a broader pattern of the corporate search for efficiency and profit, as companies, like Mollie James’s Universal Manufacturing Company and RCA, took their production lines first to the American South and then abroad.
As a result, corporations and their products became less identifiable by nationality. Boeing Aircraft had long been the largest employer in the Seattle area, but was its new Boeing 777, manufactured piece by piece in twelve different countries, an “American” airplane? Japanese companies also moved many manufacturing plants overseas, including to the United States, to be closer to important markets. Was a Toyota made by American workers in Georgetown, Kentucky, a “foreign” car?
Who Benefits from Globalization?
The increasing globalization of the U.S. economy at the end of the twentieth century created enormous wealth while sharpening class inequalities. The stock market skyrocketed. The Dow Jones average of the value of thirty top companies’ stocks rose steadily from 500 in 1956, to 1,000 in 1972, to 3,000 in 1991. Then it more than tripled in value in just eight years, surpassing 10,000 in 1999. Wealthy Americans who owned the bulk of corporate stock reaped the most gains, but middle- and even working-class Americans with retirement funds invested in the market also benefited handsomely. The process of globalization and the steady expansion of the U.S. economy after 1992 also encouraged a growing belief among Americans, especially affluent ones, that markets alone offered the best solution to social problems. But markets and their strict dependence on the profit motive proved unable to preserve the quality of the environment, to pull the 37 million officially poor Americans above the poverty line ($19,200 for a family of four in 2004), or to preserve the security of the vast middle class that had stabilized American politics since World War II. Inequalities within the United States reflected growing global inequality as 20 percent of the world’s people (mostly in Europe and North America) consumed 86 percent of its goods and services.
American consumers enjoyed many of the fruits of the more integrated world economy. At least in industries not dominated by monopolies, the corporate quest for lower production costs, along with fierce international competition and technological innovation, reduced prices of many goods and services. Computers, airline travel, and gasoline were all significantly less expensive in real dollars (adjusted for inflation) than they had been a generation earlier. Competition abounded in the robust retail sector of the U.S. economy, including catalog and Internet shopping. Wal-Mart represented the epitome of how the globalized economy could benefit consumers. By 2000 the discount store surpassed General Motors as the largest American company, responsible for 6 percent of all U.S. retail sales. Wal-Mart’s success resulted from relentlessly cutting costs through sharp management, using cheaper imported goods and employing a nonunion workforce, and passing some of its savings along to customers in the form of lower prices.
The benefits that Americans experienced as consumers in the global economy were offset by their declining status as workers. As manufacturers moved to the Sunbelt and then overseas, high-wage, unionized jobs providing health insurance and pension benefits disappeared. Average real wages declined for more than two decades after 1973, and union membership shrank from one-third of the workforce in the early 1950s to one-tenth in 2000. Family incomes were maintained only by the addition of second and third wage earners, especially women. Americans spent more than they earned. The average household had 13 credit cards and carried $8,500 in debt on them, in addition to owing car and home mortgage payments. In 2005, the average personal savings rate dropped below zero.
Already wider in the United States than in any other industrialized nation, the distance between rich and poor continued to grow, whittling away at Americans’ self-image as a middle-class society. The share of the national income going to the richest 1 percent nearly doubled in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while the share going to the bottom 80 percent shrank. Three million Americans lived in gated communities in extremely affluent suburbs, while one of five American children grew up in poverty, and 21 million citizens sought emergency food assistance each year.
The political system, which helps determine how wealth and opportunity are distributed in a society, seemed to offer little respite from the widening gap between haves and have-nots. The fraction of eligible citizens who made the effort to vote in presidential elections declined to just half in 2000 and in off-year congressional elections to a mere third, with the likelihood of voting closely correlated to a person’s affluence. The fierce partisanship, personal attacks, and culture of scandal that came to dominate American politics in the past two decades alienated many.
Citizens were also disillusioned by the blatant manner in which money came to dominate the political process. With the average cost of a successful Senate campaign at $7.5 million and a House campaign approaching $1 million, few but the wealthy could campaign for Congress, and elected members spent inordinate amounts of time raising money from wealthy donors. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona called campaign financing “an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” The ability of business to outspend labor fifteen to one in contributing to campaigns helped ensure minimal publicity to any discussions of the gulf between rich and poor.
No issue was more global than the environment. Winds and waters did not respect political boundaries, nor did the materials borne on them. The condition of the natural environment affected all living creatures, yet the prevailing calculus of the market and private ownership did not apportion responsibility for its care. The free market system had no mechanism for offsetting, or even measuring, the costs of depleted natural resources. A generation ago, biologist Garrett Hardin had warned of “the tragedy of the commons”: that individuals’ incentives to preserve the quality of their own property did not carry over to resources held in common. Litter was an obvious example, and air, water, and ground pollution were the more serious cases. American culture had long celebrated human domination of the natural world and the benefits it brought, especially the growth in productivity that permitted living standards to rise dramatically across decades and centuries. At the same time, the ...
Januszek66