While there are many nominees, I believe the two largest moral-political failings of the past twenty years (i.e. prior to the pandemic) have been the Iraq war and the 2008 crash and recession. These two deliberate catastrophes remain the centerpieces of our current Gilded Age.
Built on outright lies and brute imperial force, the Iraq war squandered any good will the US had gained on September 11. The war killed over 4,000 American servicemembers and wounded thousands more, physically and psychologically. To this day, suicide, addiction, and other “deaths of despair” continue to plague Iraq (and Afghanistan) veterans, and, not unrelated, the low income communities from which they disproportionately hail. The war killed 200,000 Iraqis (which is one of the lower estimates), devastated that country, and destabilized the region, leading to more violence and terrorism, not less. In Iraq, deaths of despair continue today. Not all are directly due to US policy, but many are. The war, pursued at the same time the rich got more tax cuts, hollowed out congressional budgets and an economy that could have served or invested in the majority of Americans but did not.
Meanwhile, inflated and lubricated by Wall Street credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and other derivatives and “financial instruments,” the housing bubble grew exponentially in the late ‘90s and 2000s, until it inevitably popped in 2008, wrecking the livelihoods of millions of Americans. Banks were bailed out (and yet not broken up). Millions of working Americans were not. They were left with more austerity—their bootstraps snipped. The crash itself was not as deliberate as Iraq, but all the financial deregulation steps and chicanery along the way were. It was bound to happen. Zoomed out, with a larger historical lens, we could see the coming crash as a “no-brainer.”
“The 2003 Iraq war? The 2008 crash? The W years, right? Damn Republicans! Conservatives! Causing such trouble both then and now (Phew! We liberals are off the hook).”
We liberals are most definitely not off the hook.
As for Iraq, liberals did not execute the war, but many prominent ones gave it legitimacy. Very many liberal intellectuals and journalists in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times made the case for war. Of course Fox supported it--that was to be expected--but liberals in the liberal papers of record helped provide the Bush administration the intellectual cover it needed. Over 60% of Americans supported the war on its eve. The liberal CNN, which had brought us the made-for-TV wars in Panama and Iraq I over a decade earlier, played the role of TV-war-drama producer again, parroting Pentagon talking points and even withholding viewpoints and images from its US audience that its international audience got to hear and see (i.e. they knew exactly what they were doing). That liberal MSNBC (whose parent company was GE, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, by the way) fired the pesky Phil Donahue, who raised too many questions of the war for the network’s liking. The New York Times, the "paper of record," reprimanded veteran journalist Chris Hedges for giving a commencement speech against the war at Rockford College. (Rather than adhere to a gag rule, Hedges quit.) And oh yes, prominent liberals in the Senate, including two future candidates for president/Secretaries of State (Kerry, Clinton) and one future president (Biden), gave the war its congressional cover to commence. None of these “good liberals” lost their jobs or even suffered the smallest career consequences. Most only rose in prominence or adulation. No, they don’t need to be personally canceled—true, people shouldn’t be remembered for their worst mistakes only. But their bad ideas need to be cancelled, and for a “mistake” (or crime) that big, they should be repenting, converting, begging for forgiveness from Iraqis, from maimed US soldiers, and spending the rest of their lives making amends. At the least, stop promoting new wars. But few of these liberals have really given any genuine mea culpas or underwent fundamental worldview shifts. They blame the bad intelligence only. “Mistakes were made.”
As mentioned, Tom Friedman argued for the Iraq War. He argued for it before it happened, and not even for the official “Iraq has WMD” reasons but, he said, in order to build a progressive Middle East. After it started, he said we invaded “because we could” and that therefore we should not apologize. Friedman, “good liberal” (as opposed to “bad conservatives” Bush and Cheney, Bill Kristol and Max Boot), believed in American exceptionalism--truly believed we could save Iraq and plug it into the globalizing world, which would then have further, natural democratizing effects. Iraq would finally be able to shed its dictator-backwater-oil-fiefdom status (never mind that we cultivated that for decades). And even with his infamous “suck on this” in an interview with Charlie Rose, I will still give him, good liberal, the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t in it just for the resource extraction (set aside the premise of Charlie Rose’s “now that the war is over” question, uttered quite prematurely there in May 2003).
As for the crash, liberals executed, cheer-led, and benefited from the financial deregulation and hysteric securitization that, among other results, inflated the bubble and then crashed both the financial and real economy. With the bipartisan Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, for instance, Congress and the Clinton administration repealed part of the long-standing Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking since the Great Depression. The Clinton administration green-lighted the merger between Citicorp and Travelers. Additionally, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (2000), signed by Clinton, allowed the unregulated trading of financial derivatives. While Enron’s “smartest guys in the room” were mostly Bush’s buddies and the company imploded while he was in office, that earlier 2000 law had greased its casino wheels, even with a nice little “Enron loophole” thrown in there that had specifically exempted the company from regulation of its energy trading. And while not strictly related to Wall Street but relevant to general capital-freeing trends, there was also the deregulation of telecom, the blessing of other massive mergers and acquisitions, and of course the “free trade” deals. Meanwhile, the mainstream press and liberal intelligentsia competed with each other over who could worship (the libertarian, Reagan-appointee) Alan Greenspan, aka the “Oracle,” more. Most of us in the liberal middle class--maybe not overtly political people--swam along with this tide. We were enjoying pretty good times, so why would we have questioned them? To the degree we paid attention, we occasionally quipped, too, about how smart Greenspan was, pretending to know what we were talking about or, better, admitting we didn’t know what we were talking about and therefore leaving the economy to such experts. If we were the more overtly political type, we reserved our ire for clearer enemies: Ken Starr, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, to name a few.
In short, Wall Street hegemony was a bipartisan project. Over time, the finance economy became cartoonishly unhinged from the real economy of housing, (non-finance) jobs, (non-finance) businesses, wages, education, debt, healthcare, childcare, elder care, and transportation, i.e. where working people--and all of us--actually live.
As for Friedman, he cheer-led and celebrated the deregulation of finance, hand-in-hand with his bread-and-butter “free trade.” If there was capital out there that needed loosening, Tom Friedman was its liberal champion--the champion of “open systems” and creative “risk-takers.” When it all crashed, he like many other commentators lamented this “great unraveling” but didn’t make the connection to the frenzy they had earlier stoked.
I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words.
I also eventually returned to Friedman’s bread and butter, to what he first wooed me with so many years before in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: trade and globalization. This was around the time of Occupy Wall Street (2011, three years after the crash). While reflecting on how the mainstream media was treating Occupy, i.e. very similarly to the anti-globalization protests twelve years earlier, and reflecting on financialization-driven inequality, it hit me that most of those earlier, seemingly sophomoric, Seattle “flat-earthers” were not against globalization per se. They weren’t against technology or progress. They weren’t isolationist. They, like me and like the anti-NAFTA protesters before them, had read their Adam Smith and their econ 101 about widgets and loaves of bread and comparative advantage and the benefits of trade and probably believed in some hypothetical, where power and decision-making is shared more equally, where trade makes sense. (By the way, NAFTA in the early '90s had been negotiated and signed in secret. Its business proponents wanted to fast-track it in Congress. When labor unions and most of the non-investor populace found out what was in it, they opposed it. Labor unions along with the now-defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, in fact, offered proposals to make the trade agreement fair, but their proposals were suppressed.) The people in Seattle were attempting to force questions about power--power that was being wielded ruthlessly in the global economy but that was also being mystified by nice liberal platitudes about “bringing people together” or “change is upon us,” or even cute clichés like “golden arches.” And thus, "teamsters and turtles," indigenous peoples and farmers, Americans and internationals--hardly an isolationist or anti-cosmopolitan crew--were pushing back against the unaccountable, unelected, corporate-investor-dominated, secretly negotiating WTO. They were forcing the critical questions. A trade regime on whose terms? Globalization as defined and directed by whom? The so-called flat-earthers were trying to highlight the global economic inequality that was driven by so-called free trade. They were at least partially right:
Quite like the Occupy Wall Street of their time, [the Seattle Protests] were often mocked by critics as silly, aimless, and overly hand-wringy about the future.
The organizers were a hodgepodge of groups—unions worried about competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups worried about unsafe imports, labor rights groups worried about bad working conditions in other countries, and leftists of various stripes simply venting their anger at capitalism.
In the decade that followed, the Seattle protests came to seem as not only silly, but also misguided…. America seemed to decide that we had much more important things to protest about, and the Seattle protesters have been largely forgotten in our pop media culture. It is a shame, because the worries of the Seattle protesters have been proven right on nearly every count.
For one, competition from foreign workers has slammed the US working class, and we do not have a welfare state generous enough to support displaced workers under these deindustrializing trends. The popular narrative obscures capital's role in this massive power play and pits workers in one country against workers in another.
When the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the sister of NAFTA, was proposed, Friedman glibly and gleefully admitted to a Minnesota crowd, “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean [sic] Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” That line, delivered more than ten years after NAFTA, in the deindustrialized Rust Belt, was at best tone-deaf.
Paul Collier, who served as director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group from 1998 to 2003, criticized the economics profession for its uncritical championing of globalization and free trade in the The Future of Capitalism (as cited in Walden Bello's "The Rise and Fall of Multilateralism" in Dissent):
The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to re-establish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.
We impose “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs) and conditions on poorer countries that were never imposed on us when we were developing. For instance, we used tariffs at times to try to protect our young industries. These SAPs, the forced lowering of tariffs and quotas, debt cycles, and monopolistic agreements have made some global-south elites wealthier, yes, but they have further immiserated millions of other people. Poorer countries are at the mercy of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the Western governments that the MNCs lobby. US, European, and some East Asian governments/firms have wrenched open these powerless countries’ markets in order to sell their cheaper goods there, for instance. The Western-dominated international institutions, e.g. the IMF, require that these countries implement austerity measures and cut public goods. They have cloaked all this in the language of development, of assistance, of bringing people together, while obscuring the vast power imbalances. However, the realities of “free" trade and globalization do not operate outside history, politics, and power, and these realities continue to corrode the shiny platitudes and promises of the international liberal world order.
Why and how has Tom Friedman been so wrong on so many crucial questions? Or if not entirely wrong, why or how does he miss so much of the story? Why does he remain so obtuse? Why is he always prematurely celebrating? In addition to finance, trade, and Iraq, there’s Putin, Muhammad bin Salman, Ireland and the “Celtic Tiger,” the Afghanistan surge (if not Afghanistan as a whole), Libya, to name just a few. (On Syria, to his credit, I actually agreed with his conclusion to not militarily intervene although not with the broader Friedmanist sweep-and-schtick and Orientalist tropes he used to frame it). Why does he suffer no career consequences for being wrong? Why does he not at least slow down and write fewer “hot takes,” if not reflect on his deeper assumptions? We’re all bound to be wrong sometimes, after all, but he stays the course and rarely admits bad ideas. Instead, he just digs in and offers the “better fix” or “smarter guy needed” or “just more tech, almost there” approach. Instead, he just keeps traveling and writing about how cool Abu Dhabi internet cafes, or Tel Aviv gyms/juice bars, or Indian call centers, or Beijing hamburger restaurants, or Argentine farmers connected by fascinating cell technology are, and saying how those people are models for world peace, or something. (Here is McSweeney’s “Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column.") Friedman remains a prominent “thought leader” in the liberal world, on the TED circuit. He wins Pulitzers. He gets the ear of presidents. He regularly opines on cable news. He garners momentous speaking fees. And without any fundamental shifting of worldview--perhaps because he maintains his fundamental assumptions--he only rises in influence.
Why was I so attracted to Tom Friedman’s ideas for so long, even after he was so wrong on some very crucial questions? And by now, you are starting to wonder: “Thomas Friedman? So what? Why focus on one particular columnist? (And by the way, you’re still talking about Iraq?) And so what if he was wrong, or maybe he was right in his own way and you disagreed? Are you going to ‘cancel’ him forever? Throw out all the people whom you disagree with or who have ever been wrong? Just because he is not left or ‘pure’ or radical enough for you?”
No. However, we need to talk about Tom Friedman because he is white, coastal (yet including Chicago), suburban (if not urban gentrifying), academic bubble-town, jet-setting, opinion-page, cable news commentator, well-graduated (if not always well-educated), cosmopolitan, (presumably foodie-wino-beer-snob too), mostly woke, somewhat hip, financially in decent shape, usually professional, liberal elite America personified.
Those worlds are not bad in and of themselves. I don’t want to declare culture war on “my people." However, even if we straddle or dabble in just one of those worlds, we are Tom Friedman, and we need to take stock of how those worlds shape us and how we, in turn, shape the larger world. We liberals don’t always acknowledge the power we wield—an act of omission which makes us even more powerful. We tend not to see or admit the damage we have wrought. Or when confronted with that damage, we point to our tolerant and cosmopolitan credentials and good intentions. We feel a little bad about any collateral damage and that feeling bad in turn makes up for it, as we all the while continue the damage. Like Friedman, we’re missing some major parts of the story. Many of us are too naïve, stubborn, self-absorbed, or worse--self-interested?--to admit our role in the rot at the heart of our society. And, we are further and further removed from that rot. Instead, we make each other feel good:
Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down, imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman’s world, we’re always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.
“Friedman? The liberals?” you ask incredulously. “What about conservatives?!?”
I mean, of course. Today’s Republican party is absolutely off the rails and morally bankrupt. From the bad faith of national GOP leaders, sowing doubt on the election and therefore seeds to the January 6 violence; to the national “moderates” having no spine to stand up to its party’s brazen anti-democracy turn; to the Georgia GOP’s outright voter suppression laws; to Republicans in several states passing measures to bully transgender youth; to the Texas GOP’s deregulating its energy grid and then blaming its failures on a non-existent Green New Deal; to Fox’s business model of manufactured outrage; to even pre-Trump denial of climate change and so many other bad faith positions and policies. The Republican party--because of its potential within the most powerful country in human history--is the “most dangerous organization on earth." Four years of Trump was a horror show, each day worse than the previous. For conservatives who still dig in their heels for Trump, who if not storm the Capitol themselves still downplay, equivocate, or shift blame on such insurrections, shame on them--and where culpable in January 6 violence, they should be prosecuted. For both the true believers and the savvy cynics who play the true believers, absolute shame on them. The party’s madness would be very comical if it weren’t so deadly. Of course, they are to blame. As for non-Trump conservatives, of course they are to blame too, maybe even chiefly. After all, it was conservative godfather Milton Friedman and acolytes that forged the political economy that produced self-described liberals like Thomas Friedman (no relation), in addition to widening the socioeconomic divide and rotting out American society and then creating and mainstreaming Trump. But because so much has already been written about them (including by me, not famously, for instance) and because I am not a conservative and because I know them less (which I know is a problem and I also know that the binary is a problem in the first place), I am more interested here in the Thomas Friedmans than I am the Milton Friedmans. Among liberals is where I reside and move, and furthermore, liberals purport to give a darn about working people and the poor. That is our whole schtick, in fact: “we care.” So yes, of course, the problem is “them,” the conservatives. I don’t even suggest there is a comparison--it’s not even close. But, the problem is also us.
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