Getting Over the Lost Decade

Posted by Robert Zimmer on 01.06.2010

Reflections and prescriptions for 2010 -- the first true year of the 21st Century.

At the end of the Clinton administration, the nation was both prosperous and peaceful. Within eight short years, the country lay in ruins, having accumulated more debt from 2001 to 2008 than it had in the entire prior history of the nation, thanks to massive deficit spending. America mortgaged its future by borrowing from the Chinese to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, corporate welfare, and massive increases in military-industrial-complex spending in conjunction with wars both necessary (Afghanistan) and unnecessary (Iraq). By the end of 2008, 47 million Americans were without health insurance, and America's reputation as a beacon of hope, freedom, and human opportunity lay in tatters due to human rights abuses lawyered away as necessary evils in a war on terror that to date has failed to kill or capture Al Qaida's spiritual leader, Osama bid Laden. The country's dependency on foreign oil, the profits from which fund the violent misdeeds of extremist Muslims, inexplicably increased during the past ten years despite fossil fuels' unmistakable link to global warming. 9/11 and the presidency of George W. Bush created what I believe will be known as the Lost Decade, a no-man's land between the end of the twentieth and beginning of the 21st century, a calamitous dark time which was created both by the 9/11 attacks and the cynical misuse of the public trust in the wake of those attacks, in order to pursue a radical conservative agenda that has brought the United States perilously close to going the way of Rome.

The election and inauguration of Barack Obama marked the end of the Lost Decade. Obama's presidency, now barely a year old, has both been fueled by and suffered from the overwhelming, pent-up frustrations and hopes of an American public utterly bewildered and exhausted by the spiritual and economic battering endured by their nation during the incompetence, greed, moral decay, and upward wealth-redistribution that characterized the Lost Decade. Today's Republicans no longer resemble even a bad self-parody of their noble origins as the party of Abraham Lincoln. Instead, they are a minority freak show stuck stubbornly in the 20th century, seemingly unaware of or refusing to accept their responsibility for the calamities of the Lost Decade, dominated by evangelical religious fanatics, warmongers, and big-business interests who operate in an alternate reality dubbed "truthiness" by Stephen Colbert. In this fact-challenged universe, Obama is a fascist-socialist-Muslim carpetbagger born in Kenya, trying to pull a Hitler on the American people, and the complicit co-dependency of Congressional Republicans in foisting the Bush disaster on our nation is, like any good revisionist history book of the old Soviet era, conspicuously absent. No longer interested in governing, the self-appointed raison d'etre of today's GOP is simply to oppose all Obama policies regardless of their objective merit. A backlog of critical, transformative legislation essential to the salvation of our democracy's economic and moral core – addressing climate change, financial and banking system reform, ending our dependence on oil, further economic stimulus to avoid a jobless economic recovery, diplomatic initiatives across the world – is all stalled in Congress due to Republican efforts to derail meaningful health care reform at any price.

Not to say that Obama and the Democratic party haven't earned their place in this rotting stew. The Obama administration, after an early sprint of dizzying policy achievements in the first half of 2009, seemed to fall asleep at the wheel and only woke up in the summer when fringe GOP-affiliated groups staged town hall protests against health care, relying on good old fashioned inflammatory and dishonest propaganda. Democratic members of Congress, unlike their disciplined Republican counterparts, are about as easy to organize as a herd of cats on LSD -- and the president has seemed content to stand by and supervise aloofly as the archaic, stupid mess of the legislative process has been vomited all over a horrified public who, facing a collapsing economic infrastructure and 10% unemployment, cannot understand why Congress seems gifted at only one thing – fighting amongst its members for political power at the expense of our citizenry.

To me, 2010 is the first true year of the 21st century, the first year we have emerged with the possibility of escape from the Lost Decade. Where do we find the renewed hope we need? How can we maximize the chances of survival for our imperiled nation? What can be done to ensure the Lost Decade does not become the Lost Republic?

The president must return to the bold rhetoric of his campaign and match it with the same governing zeal his administration demonstrated in 2009 before it became bogged down in the health care legislative quagmire and a seemingly endless review of our strategy in Afghanistan. While I believe both health care reform and our new approach to AfPak will both be successful in the long run, Obama has seemed listless for months, and needs his mojo back. Signing health care reform into law and announcing it at the State of the Union in a few weeks would be a big, bold coup that could reinvigorate the president's agenda.

Also, the president must accept that the Republican opposition to his policies is mostly not being executed in good faith. The GOP wants only to defeat him; they have precious little substantive policy offerings besides stale ideas discredited by the Lost Decade. Obama should attempt to isolate the few moderate Republicans left in Congress, enlist their help publicly and often on all policy questions, and simply shut out the rest of the right-wing nuts that comprise the remainder of the GOP. The awful truth, despite the president's noble better intentions, is that bipartisanship is dead until the GOP emerges from the Dark Ages and finds its soul – eaten alive by the Lost Decade – once again. A hint for Republicans: Sarah Palin and the teabaggers aren't the solution.

The goals for what should be attempted by the Obama administration should never start from a cynical assessment of what is politically possible – they should end there. Bold vision comes first; compromise should only come later, and only come if necessary. The administration has been too eager to compromise its policy vision and negotiate against itself on a number of issues, failing to grasp that the opposition has no interest in compromise whatsoever – and what's more, can do little to stop the positive change if Democrats really want it. It's time to stop asking permission from a tyrannical minority to do righteous good work that is demanded by the majority.

The Senate should bring together its most responsible and bipartisan members to revise the Senate rules to prevent the filibuster from being threatened/used as promiscuously as the Republicans have employed it to block legislation, mostly health care reform. Once a sparingly used parliamentary procedure reserved for the most serious debate, the filibuster threat has been reduced to a garish stalling trick that impedes governance and has paralyzed the legislature, infuriating the American public.

Above all, it is time for cynicism to take a back seat to idealism; cooperation and interdependence should be our default choice, not the course we take only when backed into a corner. As millions face the terror of unemployment and shattered lives, we need to take extra time to ask after our neighbors, our friends, our loved ones. Living our values, instead of ordering others at gunpoint to do as we say, not as we do, must again become our cherished norm.

And most importantly, those who have nothing to offer in the way of solutions but criticism and clinging to a fiscally and culturally reckless status quo must be called out for precisely what they are – people who are rooting for the failure of their country at the time of its greatest peril since World War II. Our nation is suffering spiritually and economically. The message for the dinosaurs of the Lost Decade must be clear -- help solve the country's problems or retire back to the void with which you have cursed us.