When Joe Biden became President four years ago, it looked like the United States was finally on the way to becoming a decent country like most of our contemporaries in the industrialized world. He launched an ambitious agenda to spend money on public works and amenities, was able to bring down the costs of insulin and other prescription drugs, reinvigorated existing social programs and sought to introduce new ones (though "Build Back Better" didn't quite work out), set out to get the U.S. to take the lead in combatting climate change, invested in manufacturing jobs, recognized the contributions of Americans of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian origin, expanded NATO, stood firm with Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders, and put the United States on a course to become a social democracy like Canada and the nations of western Europe.
Then Donald Trump came back and reversed all of that in one week. And then some.
When I say that I don't have to leave America because America left me, this is what I'm talking about. When the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union ended with it, the United States in the early 1990s had prevailed in the struggle against communism at a great cost - the money, blood and treasure spent in proxy wars, military buildups, sophisticated weapons systems, and the national security state left our cities in ruins, our health care system a byzantine mess, our educational system in a shambles, and our public amenities in tatters. In 1992 Democrat Bill Clinton ran for President on change and "putting people first," and he came into office with many Americans like myself expecting a change for the better. Then came Newt Gingrich and the scuttling of ambitious policies like health care reform. Whatever progress Clinton did make in his Presidency was overturned by George Walker Bush. Then in 2008, our first black President - Barack Obama - was elected on a promise of hope and change, getting health care reform through but not quite what many admirers of the British, French and Canadian health care system wanted, but there was still hope for the future. For once we had a President who was talking about high-speed rail. Then came the Tea Party came into power, and after programs like high-speed rail were canceled in three out of four states planning for it, Obama never mentioned it again. And when he tried to get gun control legislation passed in the wake of the 2012 Newtown massacre in Connecticut - certainly a watershed moment like that would have led to sensible gun laws - all his efforts proved was how powerful gun culture in this country really is.
Whatever progress Obama did make in his Presidency was overturned by Donald Trump, except for the Affordable Care Act, and when Trump's reign degenerated into a pandemic and an insurrection, it seemed as if America had sunk as low as it possibly could have.
I began to grow angry and misanthropic toward my country, these United States, at about the same time Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and launched his Contract On America, and not enough of my fellow Americans gave a twit, and those that did, like a then-unknown democratic-socialist independent congressman named Bernie Sanders, were drowned out. That antipathy only grew over time, and I increasingly wanted to leave America. The Republican Party became dead-set against progress. And I'd long since realized that the "new" Democratic Party was no longer the party of the common people, and that certainly became apparent when the 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were undermined by the party's national committee, but Biden's 2020 campaign and his old-school New Deal agenda gave me hope. And I definitely felt that we were on our way to a better place once he was sworn in.
It now turns out that the Democratic Party was hardly on the same page as President Biden, who saw "centrist" Democratic senators undermining him at every turn, and Sanders was clearly his closest ally. It also turns out that Democratic bigwigs - including Obama - moved behind the scenes to defeat Sanders when he appeared to be on the verge of surging to the 2020 Democratic nomination and get other Democratic presidential contenders to drop out to help Biden. It's not that Sanders would have been better for the working man than Biden, although most progressives believe that maxim, that makes this revelation so offensive. It's that Democratic leaders would once again undermine and override the will of its own rank-and-file voters like they did in 2016. Sanders, who made the mistake of not actually becoming a Democrat, was (and remains) a threat to the party's reliance on donations from the same corporate interests that have made America a country not worth living in so much.
The Democrats and Republicans became two pro-business parties divided on the issue of women's rights. As Michael Moore, who is a knee-jerk progressive who thinks he's the smartest person in America - and sometimes he is - said in one of the times he was he smartest person in America, Democrats say one thing ("Save the planet! Bullet trains for Amtrak!") and do another - hold hands with the bastards who make America a terrible place to live. Republicans simply gave those same bastards offices in the West Wing.
And that feeling I had back in 2021, that we had hit bedrock and were on our way to a better place? Yes . . . it felt like we were finally taking off to become a more perfect Union. Trump's return to office with a plurality of the popular vote meant that we crashed right after takeoff.
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