“You’re doing what??”
I’ve heard that a fair bit over the past few weeks after telling people that my wife and I had plans to travel to Atlanta, Georgia, for the closing stages of what has been a wild and weird presidential election campaign.
Most sensible people take one look at the cyclone of insanity that is US politics and head in the opposite direction.
We are like storm chasers, choosing to head the other way, into the tempest. American novelist Jenna Blum summed up that mindset best in her novel The Stormchasers, writing “information trumps fear, right”?
It’s true that our shared passion for American history and politics probably tips us into kook territory. We’re self-aware enough to recognise that.
I mean, our idea of the ultimate adventure is to one day travel to Des Moines in the dead of winter for the Iowa caucuses and watch aspiring presidential hopefuls live and die in the hand-to-hand log cabin politics of that first presidential primary.
It’s a long way from sunning on a beach in Koh Samui or renting a house in Tuscany…
We are not going just to be witnesses to history — although that alone is enough of a reason to be there. We will be volunteering for The Carter Center (established by former president Jimmy Carter) to conduct impartial poll monitoring and help verify a free and fair election.
Make no mistake, what happens on November 5 at the US polls will have seismic consequences for the country and the wider world.
It’s a reckoning of sorts for a period of American history that has seen the triumphalism of the post-Cold War order of the ’90s crumble into a morass of calamitous wars, financial collapse, economic chaos and decline, a crippling pandemic, climate distress, and an information echo system where nothing is real anymore.
As the kids would say — it’s a lot.
I was in Denver on August 28, 2008, covering the Democratic National Convention for Crikey when Barack Obama accepted the nomination to be the party’s candidate for president. At the time, it felt as if America was on the precipice of a leap forward towards realising the idealism articulated by Dr Martin Luther King in his immortal speech on the Mall in Washington in 1963.
What a foolish conceit.
Even at the time Obama was giving his acceptance speech, the tectonic plates of America’s false economy were shifting violently. In March of 2008, financial giant Bear Stearns was sold off for a cracker, as the con-job of subprime mortgage debts started to bite.
By September, just a week or so after Obama was anointed as the candidate, America’s top mortgage insurer, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was bailed out by the Bush administration who were terrified the entire economy might collapse.
Just a week or so later, investment giant Lehman Brothers bit the dust, and with it so did any fanciful dreams of a new America predicated on prosperity, diversity and optimism.
The failure to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who were the architects of the Global Financial Crisis embittered millions of people who lost everything due to their deeds.
For the first time since the Great Depression, America’s standard of living is in persistent decline. Figures from the Pew Research Center bear this out.
The widening of the income gap and the shrinking of the middle class have led to a steady decrease in the share of US aggregate income held by middle-class households. In 1970, adults in middle-income households accounted for 62% of aggregate income, a share that had fallen to 42% by 2020.
Put simply — while the economy might be getting bigger, ordinary people are receiving a hell of a lot less of it, and that has consequences.
And so there was the Tea Party revolt, which metastasised into a hardened, disillusioned politics that seeded the ground for Donald Trump’s “birtherism” and inevitably that ride down the golden escalator.
When people lose faith in the national project, it’s for a reason. These next few weeks will determine if the ragged American Dream can survive the biggest storm it has faced in living memory.
Can the American experiment be resuscitated, or is it in its final death throes? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
