This week marked two events that changed our country for the worse. Seventeen years ago, Islamist terrorists perpetrated the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The targets were Washington and Wall Street, symbols of our democratic, military, and capitalist power.
Ten years ago, we suffered a self-inflicted wound as a lunatic housing bubble collapsed and threatened to bring the economic system down with it. The result was a lost decade for tens of millions of innocent bystanders.
in each case, Washington and Wall Street acted in ways that made the catastrophes worse and encouraged citizens to draw the wrong conclusions about what had happened, sowing a legacy of distrust and cynicism.
After 9/11 we went to war on Iraq despite the fact that the perpetrators had nothing to do with that country or its dictator. We won the initial fight quickly, but lost the peace year after year as our misguided policies radicalized whole populations and alienated friends. We also incurred at least $2 trillion in expense, and 6,954 military deaths, 52,679 injured in Iraq, Afghanistan and various ancillary venues.
Are we safer? Perhaps, largely because of an increased emphasis on intelligence and homeland security, but also diminished in important ways. From global leader, we are now distrusted at home and abroad. New modes of attack, especially cyberwar now threaten. And the election of Donald Trump attests to the divisions that linger, since he ran on an anti-government, isolationist, conspiracy theory platform.
As for the great recession, it resulted from individual selfishness at the expense of the larger community, criminality, the invention of toxic financial instruments, and a failure to appreciate how electronically-linked and intertwined markets permitted instantaneous global contagion. This witch’s brew was made possible by an ideological faith that all regulation was bad, though robust safeguards might have prevented the folly in the first place or minimized its scope.
Now the Trump administration is dismantling the guardrails erected in the debacle’s aftermath, though the constituency for such backsliding is the malefactors of great wealth whom he ran against, not the victims whose paladin he was supposed to be.
In the case of both 9/11 and the Great Recession, the cost to ordinary citizens has been huge. Those called upon to fight were ill-served by inadequate equipment, an ill-defined mission and, as veterans, inadequate healthcare, educational benefits, and help transitioning to civilian life. The generation that came of age ten years ago has faced a poor job market from the day they entered the work force or tried to, and difficulty building capital, forming families, affording homes. Many older adults lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, and the pain was not shared equally.
No Masters of the Universe wound up in prison. All but the most toxic financial firms survived, often bailed out at taxpayer expense. To show their appreciation they foreclosed on the faulty mortgages that helped cause the mess. Again, the result was distrust of institutions, a feeling the game was rigged, and a dangerous willingness to fall for demagogues promising the moon and delivering the same hard cheese.
The country is sadder, but not necessarily wiser. We are less enthusiastic about foreign adventures, yet that may permit plotters from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, Assad and the Ayatollahs to get away with mischief because we are fed up with being the cop on the beat.
Trust of capitalist institutions is at an historic low, yet markets still rule, big money still calls the tune to which politicians dance, and the victims are still vulnerable to exploitation as the weakening of Dodd-Frank, the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other “reforms” demonstrates. And we are continuing to pile debt higher, assuring a day of reckoning will eventually come. What happened in 2008, and worse, can happen again.
And what happened in 2001 may look like a jayvee game if we fail to maintain a robust defense and alliances against failed states, rogue actors, terrorists, malign competitors, and disrupters armed with WMDs, economic and cyber weapons worse that anything Osama bin Laden could command.
It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom (and prosperity, too), but if we have lost hope and no longer believe in either, if we can’t tell truth from fiction or friend from foe, we are in serious trouble.
A century ago, the decline of the west was forecast by Oswald Spengler. He was particularly scornful of the United States which he characterized as “A bunch of dollar grabbers, no past, no future.” Are we now trying to live up to that pessimistic augury? We used to be better than that.