I want to give you a sense of what it's like to be a Gen Xer watching American politics change over time, because my own political journey more or less tracks the whole arc.
I was born in 1968, so I was 12 in 1980 when Reagan ran for his first term. I grew up in Fountain Valley, California, in Orange County, a very, very Republican corner of the country. Apparently, at that time, Fountain Valley had the highest percentage of registered Republicans of any city in the nation.
Reagan came to town for a campaign rally at Miles Square Park, and my grade school class was taken there to see him. As you can imagine, that was a very big deal for a 12-year-old, and it made a lasting impression. I later found out that my parents were, and still are, Democrats: conservative, Midwestern, union Democrats, but Democrats nonetheless. It didn't matter. From the time I was 12 until the events I'll describe below, I would have called myself a Republican, a young man growing up in Reagan's America.
I liked his fiscal conservatism. I liked his idea of small government, of getting government out of people's way. That really appealed to me. Little did I know what that sentiment would turn into over the next several decades.
Then came George H.W. Bush, and things were still going pretty well. The big event of his presidency was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, followed by an international coalition and a resounding victory for the United States and our allies. I liked Bush Sr. I was still in early adulthood, and so far, so good.
Then the Clinton era. Clinton was a Democrat, but as Democrats go he was famously conservative, and he enacted plenty of policies that real progressives still take issue with. I was fine with him. I was largely apolitical at that point, and the fact that he was a Democrat barely registered. As far as I was concerned, there wasn't much difference between the parties, and not much difference in who sat in the White House.
Consider what that period looked like, though. We had the dot-com boom. The country, and Silicon Valley, where I worked, were both doing exceedingly well. The government ran a surplus for the first time in a long while, and we weren't bogged down in any major foreign wars. Altogether, a very positive time for the country.
Then it's the year 2000. Al Gore, Clinton's vice president, runs against George W. Bush, and it comes down to Florida. There's a recount, hanging chads, all of it, and then the Supreme Court steps in and hands the presidency to Bush. To this day a lot of people think that was a deeply inappropriate thing for the Court to do. They stopped a recount in progress and deprived Floridians, and ultimately the American people, of knowing who actually won the state.
Be that as it may, it didn't register deeply with me either. Democrats, Republicans, presidential politics: I didn't see much difference.
Then came 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, I don't think it would have made one bit of difference whether George Bush or Al Gore was president. Bush gave a rousing speech at Ground Zero, and I believe Gore would have done the same. In the early days, our Special Forces went into Afghanistan and ran an absolutely brilliant campaign alongside local warlords to defeat the Taliban, which opened the door to deploying more troops to hunt for Osama bin Laden, whom we had pretty immediately blamed for the attacks. I believe in my heart that a Gore administration would have done the same.
But I also remember that in the days after 9/11, Bush gave a speech in which he talked about reducing our dependency on foreign oil as a way to disengage from a region where, pretty clearly, we didn't know what we were doing and weren't really welcome. So why should we be there? To the best of my recollection, he never said those words again. I believe, as do others, that the Bush family's deep ties to Saudi Arabia are why the idea vanished as quickly as it appeared.
This is where I think a Gore administration would have diverged considerably. There was a tremendous amount of support for the government and the president at that moment. The American people would have gotten behind any strategic initiative that made sense and dealt with the problem, and the problem was worldwide terrorism: people who, as it was explained to us, hate us and hate our way of life.
Two very different approaches were available. One, the approach I imagine Gore might have taken, was to harness that national pride and the idea that we needed to be self-sufficient and disengage from the Middle East. That could have become a national effort to rebuild our energy infrastructure, produce more domestic oil, and build out refinery capacity so we could be fully self-sufficient in fossil fuels. Just as importantly, or more so, we could have started investing in green energy and in upgrading the electrical grid to carry the load that green energy requires.
As we all know, that is exactly not what happened.
Instead, the Bush administration took that national pride and fervor and aimed it at a convenient enemy of the Bush family, by the way: Iraq. We defeated Iraq's military rather easily. But the administration had completely underestimated how hard the post-war period would be, and it made a series of catastrophic blunders. It dismissed the entire Iraqi army and essentially dissolved the existing government, because it didn't want Ba'athists running the country. Those two decisions together basically created the insurrection that the United States got drawn into.
The sum total, across Iraq and Afghanistan, was twenty-plus years of war, trillions and trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S. casualties, and an untold number of Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed in the crossfire.
If you've ever read up on the broken window fallacy, you know where this is going. Those trillions in military spending did goose the economy and kept the stock market moving up and to the right for a great many years. But the same money could have been spent inside the United States, building out our infrastructure and, most likely, creating a lot of green energy jobs and keeping a lot of people employed.
I strongly believe that if that had happened, the stage would not have been set for Donald Trump.
When Barack Obama took over in 2008, the economy was in shambles, run into the ground by the Bush administration's domestic policies. Obama stabilized the banks and the car companies and went on to pass Obamacare, and that led, in 2010, to a backlash that swept a wave of supposed fiscal conservatives, the Tea Party, into Congress.
Mitch McConnell famously said that the single most important thing Republicans wanted to achieve was making Obama a one-term president. Think about that. It's hard to imagine a stated goal of a party in the Senate, in the history of the country, being simply to fight the president. So it's no surprise that Obama got very little done from then on in the way of infrastructure investment or job creation. He floated several bills along those lines, and Republicans simply called them socialism or communism, or said they were too expensive for the country to afford.
So there was very little investment in the United States during this period, while a tremendous amount of money was still being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we hadn't yet pulled out of those wars.
That's when I became highly political. For the first time, I realized that it matters who the president is. It matters which party is in power. As the years went by, it became clear that Republicans were less and less interested in running the government effectively for the people, and more and more interested in carrying water for wealthy donors and corporations.
Obama did the best he could with what he had for the rest of his term. And looking back, maybe we shouldn't have been so surprised when Donald Trump won. He was the end result of decades in which our government invested its resources everywhere but at home. Add the outsourcing of jobs, and the trillions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan that could have gone into the United States and created a much different environment for its people. I think the frustration of a government that wouldn't invest in the country or its people is, in large part, what fueled the hyper-nationalism that came to define Trump's first campaign and first term.
And I don't think it had to be that way. There were a few points along the road where things went a certain way and we missed the chance to produce a better outcome for everyone.
The long and short of it is that I am now very political. I've voted in every presidential and midterm election since. I don't agree with every position of the Democratic Party, and I believe the party has lost touch with its roots as the party of the people and of workers. But I still think it's a far better alternative than what the Republican Party has become.
My political sensibilities straddled the entire evolution of that party, from the Republicans of Reagan's first run and presidency to the party of Donald Trump today. There are literally no similarities. You can hardly find a single position taken by Trump, or a single plank in the Republican platform, that a Republican of forty years ago, when I was first introduced to the party, would recognize.
So that's how I became politicized. That's how I became radicalized. It was a series of events over the past forty years in which different decisions could have been made, by people in government, but also by the people of the United States, to produce a very different outcome than the one we have now.