When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present

by Nick Bryant

As the politically impossible became real on 20 January 2017, and Donald Trump raised his hand to take the presidential oath of office, the words used by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville to describe the revolution in his homeland in 1789 also matched this earth-rattling moment: ‘So inevitable, yet so completely unforeseen.’

Americans have become ‘operational liberals’ who benefit from government support but ‘ideological conservatives’ who resent government intervention.

‘Elevating policy goals to the status of rights would prove to be a crucial step in the evolution of ideological partisanship in the United States.’26

‘The number-one fact about the news media is they love fights,’ Gingrich afterwards told a group of conservative activists. ‘You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention. When you get attention, you educate.’27

To clamorous cheers from the Houston delegates, Buchanan declared, ‘There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this is a war for the soul of America.’

The day after the 1992 election, the Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole pledged to be ‘a watchdog for the 57 per cent’ of the electorate who had not supported Clinton. Republicans labelled him ‘a minority president’. Instead of a political honeymoon, he received a partisan hazing. So began the modern-day habit of losing political parties refusing to admit they had lost.

In 1964, 62 per cent of Americans had trusted Washington to do the right thing most of the time. By 1994, that figure was 19 per cent.26

Nonetheless, the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton remains seminal. The further poisoning of the Washington well. The criminalisation of the modern-day presidency. Post-truth politics. The rise of polarised news. The tabloidisation of national life. The corrosive impact of the internet.

Trump also benefited from the seedier side of Bill Clinton’s legacy: the redefinition of what constituted disqualifying behaviour for presidential candidates. ‘Slick Willie’ had dramatically lowered the bar. The double paradox of the Clinton impeachment, then, was that it made it harder for his wife to shatter the glass ceiling and easier for Donald Trump to become president. Hillary Clinton became a repeat victim of her husband’s infidelities.

Small wonder Springer complained years later that Donald Trump ‘stole my show and took it to the White House’. The members of the studio audience who chanted ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry’ and booed the unfaithful wife or the cheating girlfriend were not dissimilar to the supporters who thronged Donald Trump’s rallies and yelled ‘Lock her up!’

Americans were not asked to make many sacrifices. There was no repeat of Kennedy’s famed Cold War admonition: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’ Rather, Bush successfully pushed for another multi-billion tax cut, the second of his two-year presidency, even as the bills from Iraq and Afghanistan started to mount.

Since 1976, the number of these so-called landslide counties had doubled, proof that like-minded Americans were not just attending the same churches and clubs, but making their homes in like-minded communities.

The ‘Big Sort’ was how the political scientist Jim Bishop described this herd-like migration. ‘What had happened over three decades wasn’t a simple increase in political partisanship,’ he wrote, ‘but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division.’

‘The Left believes right-wing tribalism – bigotry, racism – is tearing the country apart,’ noted the Yale academic Amy Chua. ‘The Right believes that left-wing tribalism – identity politics, political correctness – is tearing the country apart.’37 America was experiencing a political segregation.

Healthy democracies have always relied on a prosperous middle class. Democratic decay was partly a consequence of this economic hollowing out. America’s broken politics was tied to America’s broken economy.

In the wake of Goldwaterism, the Reagan Revolution and the Republican Revolution of the ’90s, Obama’s first year witnessed the fourth wave of conservative radicalisation: the emergence of the Tea Party.

Nobody in Washington cared about the opioid crisis, or understood how it had ravaged their communities. Soon we came to realise the number of discarded syringes scattered in the gutters was as accurate a political barometer of a community’s allegiance as campaign posters in the windows or placards in the yards.

Trumpism was part of a larger worldwide malaise, as the global economic downturn was followed by a global democratic downturn.

although when I interviewed Margaret Atwood in Toronto she thought it did not require a great leap of imagination to see Vice-President Mike Pence as one of the theocratic commanders.

The Washington Post studied 13 hours of press briefings from the president, and found he spent just 4.5 minutes expressing sympathy for the victims. Rather than soothing words for relatives of those who had died, or words of encouragement and appreciation for those in the medical trenches,

One of the most heart-wrenching quotes of the coronavirus outbreak came from a man in a New York hospital gasping for breath before he died, whose last moments were consumed worrying about the cost of his treatment: ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’

Trump suspended US funding for the World Health Organization. Noting the absence of US leadership, the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt lamented, ‘This is the first great crisis of the post-American world.’

To bastardise Dean Acheson’s biting quote about Britain losing an empire and failing to find a role, America won a Cold War but could not decide how it wanted to police the planet or project its power.

With partisanship overriding everything, and with paralysis now the standard setting, America has gone 25 years without a properly functioning federal government.