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As one politician, all too sadly, returns to Washington -- and you know just who I mean -- another, all too sadly, is leaving. Call it, if not the end of history, then at least the end of something that matters (and, of course, the beginning of who knows what else). Departing is Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She will be remembered forever (at least by me) for, in the immediate wake (and that's an all-too-appropriate word) of the 9/11 attacks, casting the only vote in Congress -- yes, the only one! -- against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that the rest of the House and Senate passed (420 to 1). It essentially turned the constitutional right to war-making over to the president just as what came to be known as the Global War on Terror began.
For refusing to give George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him a blank check when it came to disastrous rounds of future war-making, she suffered much criticism and abuse. She was called a traitor, even a terrorist. One newspaper labeled her "a long-practicing supporter of America's enemies." As she said, looking back years later, "It was a very difficult decision, but I knew that I couldn't vote for that. And also I knew that, based on my background in psychology, you don't make hard decisions when you're upset, when you're in mourning. You have to think through the implications of any type of major decision. And then I was concerned about the issue of forever wars. It set the stage, and I knew it was going to do that. The military option could be the first option before we tried any other option to settle disputes, to respond to terrorist attacks."
In some sense, you might say that the vote to send us into that Global War on Terror would end the moment in history following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, when American officials came to consider the U.S. the "sole superpower" on Planet Earth. And you might even say that, so many years later, it also helped set the stage for Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement and his first presidency. With the departure of an antiwar congressional great and the return of Trump to the White House -- you know, the man who, on January 6, 2020, tweeted to his followers, who had stormed Congress in the wake of his electoral loss, "We love you. You're very special!," then adding, "Remember this day forever!" -- let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of the novel Ravens on a Wire (a vivid look at the post-Vietnam American military), consider what History may now be signaling to us. Tom
Surprise!
What I Learned After "The End of History"
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so.
Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history's actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it's downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).
Let's consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I'm thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very moment. An admission: I, too, once believed that the unfolding events during those long decades I was living through told a discernible story. Although not without its zigs and zags, so I was convinced once upon a time, that story had both direction and purpose. It pointed toward an ultimate destination -- so politicians, pundits, and prophets like Dr. King assured us. In fact, embracing the essentials of that story was then considered nothing less than a prerequisite for situating yourself in the ongoing stream of history. It offered something to grab hold of.
Sadly enough, all of this turned out to be bunk.
That became abundantly clear in the years after 1989 when the Soviet Union began to collapse and the U.S. was left alone as a great power on Planet Earth. The decades since then have carried a variety of labels. The post-Cold War order came and went, succeeded by the post-9/11 era, and then the Global War on Terror which, even today, in largely unattended places like Africa, drags on in anonymity.
In those precincts where opinions are manufactured and marketed, an overarching theme informed each of those labels: the United States was, by definition, the sun around which all else orbited. In what was known as an age of unipolarity or, more modestly , the unipolar moment, we Americans presided as the sole superpower and indispensable nation of Planet Earth, exercising full-spectrum dominance. In the pithy formulation of columnist Max Boot, the United States had become the planet's "Big Enchilada." The future was ours to mold, shape, and direct. Some influential thinkers insisted -- may even have believed -- that History itself had actually "ended."
Alas, events exposed that glorious moment as fleeting, if not altogether illusory. For several reasons -- Washington's propensity for needless war certainly offers a place to start -- things did not pan out as expected. Assurances of peace, prosperity, and victory over the foe (whoever the foe it was at that moment) turned out to be false. By 2016, that fact had registered on Americans in sufficient numbers for them to elect as "leader of the Free World" someone hitherto chiefly known as a TV host and real estate developer of dubious credentials.
The seemingly impossible had occurred: The American people (or at least the Electoral College) had delivered Donald Trump to the pinnacle of American politics.
It was as if a clown had taken possession of the White House.
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