United States: From Roosevelt to Obama

“United States: From Roosevelt to Obama” is a new book by Alain Frachon

November 2008 was not a fleeting victory. Four years later, Barack Obama was re-elected for a second term in office. America voted for continuity and sent back to the White House a man who embodies diversity. The election of 2012 is, above all, a reflection of the demographic upheaval that the country is experiencing. 21st century America is nothing like the U.S. of 1945 when this book begins.

Minorities of “non-European” origin are becoming more and more visible: 15 percent of the population is Latino (some 313 million inhabitants); 13 percent is Black or African American; five percent is Asian. By 2050 these “minorities” will be majorities … During the 2012 presidential election, they identified with the first black president in the history of the country, instead of with the white male Republicans. They elected Barack Hussein Obama. The African-American vote was 93 percent in favor of the Democrats, 71 percent for Latinos and 73 percent in the case of Asians. In the overall population, more than 60 percent of those under 30 voted for Barack Obama.

However, thanks to a cut in constituencies favoring the ‘outgoing’ party, the 129 million Americans who voted on Nov. 6, 2012 sent a solid majority of Republican representatives back to the House. Is this electoral schizophrenia? Perhaps it is a sign of political confusion. Political scientists will deliberate this. The diagnosis of the U.S. press assures a mentality of confusion, not to mention depression. They portray a country that is skeptical about the challenges ahead.

Shaken Political Imperium

The financial crisis of 2008 revealed the failures of a Wall Street-style capitalist system — speculative, unregulated and immensely unequal. Obama struggled to put the pieces back together. But growth remains mostly poor. The White House, Congress, Democrats and Republicans are always struggling to define a serious strategy together to tackle the illness that is eating away at America: debt — the abyss of a debt accumulated by a country that consumes more than it produces and spends more than it earns.

The challenge is also external. The largest of the industrial democracies is no longer assured of its top position in light of its competition with China, the second biggest economy on the planet. Its political imperium is shaken. The start of this century saw several emerging powers — India, Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey — that, in the wake of China, will challenge U.S. leadership.

The country’s mood is no longer as it was post-Cold War, when the U.S. saw itself as a superpower after coming out victorious from its dispute with the USSR. It exerted almost total control over economy, science, culture and, more so, over military power. The time of almost absolute supremacy came to an end after the Sept. 11 attacks. The two wars that followed showed the U.S. the limits of its military power and the financial meltdown of 2008, the limits of U.S. capitalism.

The Americans, who normally have rather optimistic expectations, voluntarily take refuge in the nostalgia of the “good old days.” They embellish the 1950s and 1960s and forget about the dramas that marked the 1970s. They mourn the Reagan years of 1980 to 1988 and look back on Bill Clinton’s term, from 1992 to 2000, with happiness. In those times, Republicans were not at the mercy of an extremist group and the two large parties came to some sort of an understanding on the country’s problems.

Long gone are the times of consensus, grand, bipartisan laws and political centrism that the two branches of Congress seemed to share. Something has gotten lost along the way, an empirical way of making policy.

Mr. Obama has promised to resolve this. Despite the strong arguments suggesting U.S. withdrawal, this is not something that Obama believes in. After all, a fear of decline has been haunting the U.S. for a long time: Cracks are appearing on the surface at this moment in U.S. history, as this book reveals.