A look back at the concluding decade through a civilizational-health lens
You’re likely going to be seeing an ample supply of retrospectives as the decade draws to a close. That’s the impact of a base-ten numerical system on our approach to our history. I don’t know that I’m even getting much of a jump on the trend, although I personally haven’t seen any yet. Maybe my entry is timely enough to distinguish itself for the angle it employs: How has the period 2010 - 2020 affected the health of our civilization?
A theme runs through the various levels of examination that are undertaken when looking at the matter this way. Over the last ten years, we have increasingly based public policy as well as social norms on utter delusions.
To get a really comprehensive take on the flow of events and developments over the last ten years, one must go back a little further and set the table. The polarization of America was well under way by January 1, 2010. The argument could be made that that trend got its start in 1968, with the Columbia University administrative-offices takeover that served as the prototype for the mainstreaming of such hooliganism in the decade being discussed here, on campuses such as the University of Missouri (“we need a little muscle over here”) and Dartmouth, as well as the turnabout in public opinion regarding the Vietnam War based on CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite’s editorializing in the wake of the Tet offensive. The tumult of that watershed year was quickly followed by the Stonewall Inn riot, the first Earth Day, and the rise of the Steinem-Freidan-Millett-Brownmiller wave of feminism.
In any event, by the middle of the decade preceding the 2010-2020 period that is the focus here, the polarization was well underway. Echoing the Cronkite exercise in public opinion manipulation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that the US was losing the war in Iraq just as the surge was moving things in the opposite direction.
Al Gore’s ridiculous exercise in apocalyptic fantasy, An Inconvenient Truth, was released in 2006, and, while utterly farcical in its claims, provided much fuel to the element within American society that harbored a fundamental hatred of human advancement.
The diversity-and-inclusion push in corporations and on campuses was well underway by 2010, as were speech codes.
By that New Year’s Day ten years ago, the Obama era had been underway for a year.
There’s this tendency to put all presidents on a certain kind of plane of normalcy by virtue of their having attained the office. But the current occupant and his immediate predecessor have been anything but, and that must be emphasized. The ways in which Trump is outside the norm are well-noted and will garner much discussion over the next year, but a review of how different Barack Obama was from any of his predecessors needs to be reviewed here.
The fact that he was half-black is really the least of the ways in which this is true. What is truly salient about the Most Equal Comrade is the degree to which he made the hard-left radicalism spawned in the above-mentioned 1960s central to the Democratic Party’s essence.
Once radicalism’s take-it-to-the-streets phase was over, circa 1970, it took two divergent paths. One went deeply underground, in the form of bank-robbing gangs and bomb-making-and-planting cadres. The other undertook a Gramscian long march through the institutions, returning to campus to study law, education, the arts, and even religion and business, and then embark on careers in those fields. This latter path had Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven as guides.
The two strains of post-1960s radicalism came back together in the living room of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in Chicago’s Hyde park neighborhood in 1996. That couple hosted the coffee that launched Obama’s political career.
Obama had been straddling the two strains up to that point. He was mentored by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis as a youth in Hawaii. By the time John Drew met Obama at Occidental College in 1980, Obama was, as Drew recalls, an advocate of violent revolution. After beginning studies at Columbia University, Obama attended a socialist scholars’ conference, which fired his imagination to the point that he returned the next year. When he got to Chicago for his community-organizing phase, he fell in with the web of radical socialist players and organizations situated there: Heather Booth, Robert Creamer, Greg Galluzzo, the Midwest Academy, Public Allies, and the Annenberg Challenge.
Dorhn and Ayers had come above ground in the early 1980s, serving slap-on-the-wrist sentences for their activities and then going on to careers as law and education professors, respectively.
At a 2003 dinner party in honor of Israel-hating scholar Rashid Khalidi, Obama glowingly reminisced about conversations at Khalidi’s dinner table that opened Obama’s eyes to his “blind spots.”
At a 2008 AFL-CIO conference on women’s, civil and human rights, Barack Obama said, “I happen to be a proponent of universal health care.” Not exactly a shocking position to declare from the hindsight of the era of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but something that was way outside the norm at the time.
So that’s the man who had presided over the nation’s executive branch for a year as December 2009 gave way to January 2010.
It was not quite universal health care, but the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was cobbled together by Democratic Congressional majorities and enjoyed such enthusiastic support from Obama that its shorthand moniker came to bear his name, would be signed into law in March of the new year.
The costs, complications, and upheavals in coverage that resulted from the ACA are legion and merit ongoing examination. But the core significance of the act was its effect on basic human freedom. The government made citizens buy a particular product, and there was a penalty for not doing so. Furthermore, the government made all companies in the business of selling this product distort the product’s market value by making them sell a version of it that included features that government had deemed essential.
And the whole thing was predicated on something that is by definition impossible: health care being a right. One cannot have a right to anything that requires one’s fellow human being to do something. How did people in the year 1300 exercise their right to a triple bypass? They didn’t, because the triple bypass became a real procedure due to the volitional exercise of human ingenuity. The ACA was an attempt to fit the square peg of rights into the round hole of human wishes.
The orientation towards the Middle East that Obama had signaled at the above-mentioned dinner party played itself out in ways ranging from making Benjamin Netanyahu wait while Obama went upstairs at the White House to have dinner with his family to apologizing for US “arrogance” in speeches in Muslim nations to sending John Kerry and Wendy Sherman to a grinding and humiliating series of negotiations in Geneva and Vienna with Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Zarif, which culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which, on paper, delayed Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear arsenal by ten years, but did nothing to stop Iran’s building of missiles of various capacities, sponsorship of radical groups such as Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and Iran’s seizing of the crew of a US naval vessel the day of Obama’s State of the Union address.
Obama also reversed, in 2011, the momentum toward Iraqi stabilization catalyzed by the above-mentioned surge. Iraq has struggled with regaining its sovereignty and political footing ever since.
2015 was a watershed year for the abandonment of a norm that had universally characterized human societies since the dawn of our species. There had never been a definition of marriage in any culture anywhere that include the union of two people of the same sex. That all changed with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and the definition of family has been undergoing a bizarre distortion ever since.
That was also the year in which the assertion that government couldn’t make a citizen conduct business in violation of his or her faith came under savage attack. Several state governments enacted religious-freedom laws in the wake of court cases involving homosexual couples trying to make wedding-service providers supply them with cakes or photographs or a venue for their ceremony. In Indiana, in particular, the firestorm was vicious. A South Bend television reporter got a Christian pizza parlor owner to answer a hypothetical question about providing pizzas for a homosexual wedding, which led to social-media calls for the establishment to be burnt to the ground.
On the other side of the issue, several Indiana institutions of higher learning, such as Indiana University, Butler University and Wabash College voiced support for the opposition to the law, as did some major Indiana corporations, such as the Ball Corporation, Salesforce, Angie’s List, and Cummins.
Much civil unrest ensued in the wake of a situation in Ferguson, Missouri, in which eighteen-year-old Michael Brown - who happened to be black - robbed a convenience store, and police officer Daren Wilson, responding to a call about the robbery, found Brown walking in the street. Wilson, not yet sure that Brown was a suspect, asked Brown to walk on the median grass. Brown charged Wilson, reaching inside his patrol car and trying to grab his gun. Wilson shot Brown in self-defense, a conclusion reached by the Obama Justice Department and a grand jury. No matter. Ferguson erupted in flames, and unrest broke out elsewhere. A somewhat similar situation in Florida, in which a resident of a community appointed by his homeowners’ association to conduct a crime-watch patrol was thrust to the ground and had his head slammed on the pavement for asking a non-resident teenager who was passing through what he was doing. The crime-watch resident shot the teen - who happened to be black - in self-defense.
These and some other similar incidents led to the spread of the false notion that police shootings of unarmed young black men was some kind of national epidemic. This in turn led to grandstanding among black college and professional athletes, which primarily took the form of refusing to stand for the national anthem before games.
Early on in the Obama era, conservative concern about the unprecedented level of federal debt, as well as Democrat zeal for taxation, led to what came to be called the Tea Party movement. While it sent enough of a signal to the Republican Party that leading GOP figures felt compelled to give cut-the-size-of-government speeches to conventions of groups such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, nothing that would really move the needle came out of Congress.
Those in the Tea Party, who had been noted for leaving the sites of their rallies spotless and for employing dignified rhetoric to make their case, grew increasingly frustrated. Many were on the verge of abandoning the political field altogether when, in the summer of 2015, Donald Trump, who was generally referred to as a real estate developer, but who was really in the business of brand-hustling (which left his trail littered with such short-lived product lines as Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka and an airline bearing his name), began teasing the American public about a run for the presidency. He brought his signature narcissism to his equivocation, telling the populace that his businesses were doing so fantastically that he didn’t know if he could step away from them.
Alas, he did, and protectionism (‘bring the jobs back here from overseas”) and nationalism (“it’s time to get out of these endless wars and put America first”) quickly came to be the defining characteristics of his campaign.
He has not repaired the damage Obama did to America’s standing in the world (with one exception; Trump has indeed repaired the US - Israel relationship). European allies shake their heads in wonderment at his erratic way of relating to them. Adversaries such as Turkey under Erdogan and Russia under Putin are similarly confused, but see an opening for being able to manipulate Trump in the disrespect he has shown to those aforementioned allies. Asian allies, such as South Korea and Japan, have been driven into closer relationship to China as a result of Trump’s demand that they put up considerably more money to host US troops. That is indeed a strange thing to insist upon, given nuclear-armed North Korea’s continued belligerence, only briefly interrupted by an attempt at appeasement that included three Trump-Kim summits.
Trump has also not been able, through exhortation of Congress or any executive maneuvers, to reduce the federal government’s debt and deficit. Quite the contrary; he just signed a pair of spending bills totaling $1.4 trillion.
The rifts that had been making American society increasingly brittle have multiplied this year to include fissures within evangelical Christianity. The respective editorial positions of Christianity Today and The Christian Post serve well to exemplify the split. Put simply, the argument is over whether Donald Trump, who has never expressed contrition for his sybaritic past, deserves the support of Christians who adhere to sound doctrine. The side that asserts that he does has gone on to insist that to do anything less than full-throatedly and unwaveringly trumpet the Very Stable Genius’s supposed glories is to be a de facto supporter of the radical leftism of the Democrats.
The decade now entering its last hours has been one in which post-America has operated under a stream of delusions - that Iraq was a lost cause, that Barack Obama was within the mainstream of American political life, that health care is a right, that Iran could be dealt with as a legitimate regime, that two people of the same gender can be married, that there is systemic racial bigotry in the nation’s law-enforcement sector, that the global climate is in a state of crisis, and that someone with absolutely no core set of guiding principles can be an effective leader of the conservative movement.
Is there time for America and the West generally to wipe its glasses and begin basing plans for the way forward on obvious truisms before the fruits of these delusions come to their final stage?
Don’t bet the rent. But do pray.