Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (101 page)

20
. See
chapter 3
for this act and for other information about politics in the 1970s, when partisanship had also been especially corrosive.

21
. See the following chapter.

22
. Ted Halstead and Michael Lind,
The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics
(New York, 2001), 15; Crenson and Ginsberg,
Downsizing Democracy
, 16–19; Rauch,
Demosclerosis
. For the influence of corporate interests, see Kevin Phillips,
Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics
(Boston, 1994).

23
. E. J. Dionne,
Why Americans Hate Politics
(New York, 1991); Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998), 286–93.

24
. Nye, “The Decline of Confidence in Government,” 1–18.

25
. Theda Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life
(Norman, Okla., 2003), 232–36.

26
. The measure exempted employers with fewer than fifty workers.

27
. Two years later to the day, April 19, 1995, two anti-government zealots, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, exacted revenge for the deaths at Waco, blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 people. Many conspiratorially oriented Americans believed that McVeigh and Nichols were part of a wider plot involving white supremacist groups, but as of mid-2005 no smoking gun establishing such links had yet been found.

28
.
New York Times
, March 25, 2004.

29
. Jules Witcover,
Party of the People: A History of the Democrats
(New York, 2003), 666–72; Greenstein,
Presidential Difference
, 178–82; Klein,
The Natural
, 44.

30
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 91.

31
. Shafer,
The Two Majorities
, 39–41.

32
. Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy
, 242–44.

33
. Klein,
The Natural
, 118–25.

34
. James Patterson,
America Since 1941: A History
(Fort Worth, 2000), 265–67; Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 26–28.

35
. White, a Kennedy appointee, had dissented (as had Rehnquist) in
Roe v. Wade
in 1973. Blackmun, who had been named by Nixon, had written the majority decision in that case and joined liberals on the Court in many cases thereafter. See
chapter 11
for Court decisions in 1995.

36
.
New York Times,
April 24, 2005. In 2004, Congress refused to renew the gun control law, which the National Rifle Association strongly opposed.

37
. Robert Schwartz and Marion Robinson, “Goals 2000 and the Standards Movement,”
Brookings Papers on Education Policy
7 (2000), 173–214; and John Jennings,
Why National Standards and Tests? Politics and the Quest for Better Schools
(Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1998).

38
. Between fiscal years 1987 and 1992 the annual federal deficit had risen (in current dollars) from $150 billion to $290 billion, an all-time high. The budget shortfall of $255 billion in fiscal 1993, though large, was the first significant decline in the deficit in many years and was attributed in part to delayed effects of the budget deal that Bush and Congress had struck in 1990.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 305. Fiscal years end in the year indicated.

39
. Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 212–13.

40
. Robert Collins,
More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America
(New York, 2000), 217–19.

41
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 23–26.

42
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 305.

43
. Alfred Eckes Jr. and Thomas Zeiler,
Globalization and the American Century
(New York, 2003), 252–53.

44
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 562.

45
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 35.

46
. Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 190–91, 244–47.

47
. James Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet
(New York, 2004), 178.

48
. Ibid., xvi.

49
. Melvyn Leffler, “9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy,”
International Affairs
79 (Oct. 2003), 1045–63.

50
. These eight nations were the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, India, Israel, and (it was generally believed) Pakistan.

51
. An estimated 3.6 million Americans had been engaged in defense work during the mid- and late 1980s. Defense spending had ranged between 23 and 27 percent of federal outlays between 1975 and 1990, peaking during the mid-1980s before dropping slowly to between 21 and 22 percent between 1991 and 1993. This percentage slipped further after 1993, ranging between 16 and 18 percent between 1994 and 2001. The sums for defense during the mid-1990s also decreased as a percentage of GDP, from 4.4 in 1993 to 3.1 in 1998.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 326. See also William Greider,
Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace
(New York, 1998); and Eliot Cohen, “Calling Mr. X,”
New Republic
, Jan. 19, 1999, 17–19.

52
. For Clinton and Somalia, see Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 248–66.

53
. Based on the widely read book by Mark Bowden,
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
(New York, 1999). See also James Chace, “War Without Risk,”
New York Review of Books
, March 28, 2003, 31–33.

54
. Philip Gourevitch,
We Wish to Inform You That We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
(New York, 1998), 219;
New York Times
, July 10, 2004.

55
.
New York Times
, Nov. 9, 2004. Another 20,000 were missing, and presumed dead.

56
. For Clinton and the Balkans, see Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 195–204, 283–351; and William Hitchcock,
The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945–2000
(New York, 2003), 390–403.

57
. James Traub, “Making Sense of the Mission,”
New York Times Magazine
, April 11, 2004, 32. Aristide, returning to power as president in 2001 after a disputed election in 2000, encountered violent unrest early in 2004, at which point American and French forces arrived in an effort to restore order. Aristide fled the country, accusing the United States of kidnapping him and driving him away. Starting in June 2004, U.N. peacekeepers policed the still distressed country.

58
. Later revelations in 2002, indicating that North Korea had embarked on a clandestine uranium enrichment program, suggested to some analysts that these critics might have been correct. In early 2005, North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons.
New York Times,
Feb. 11, 2005.

59
. Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 244.

60
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 38–40.

61
. See
chapter 12
for the outcome of these legal matters.

62
. Johnson,
Best of Times
, 227–39; Joseph Lelyveld, “In Clinton’s Court,”
New York Review of Books
, May 29, 2003, 11–15.

63
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 40.

64
. For the text of the Contract, see
New York Times
, Sept. 28, 1994.

65
. Berman,
From the Center to the Edge
, 42.

1
. Michael Bernstein, “Understanding American Economic Decline: The Contours of the Late-Twentieth-Century Experience,” in Bernstein and David Adler, eds.,
Understanding American Economic Decline
(New York, 1994), 3; Edward Luttwak,
The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy
(New York, 1993), 118.

2
. For a critique of such complaints, see Joseph Nye, “Introduction: The Decline of Confidence in Government,” in Nye et al.,
Why People Don’t Trust Government
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 1–18. This is the source of the phrase “democratization of insecurity.” Indictments of American consumerism include John de Graaf et al.,
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
(San Francisco, 2001); and Thomas Frank,
One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy
(New York, 2000). For trends in business and trade, see Thomas McCraw,
American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked
(Wheeling, Ill., 2000); and Maury Klein, “Coming Full Circle: The Study of Big Business Since 1950,”
Enterprise and Society
2, no. 3 (Sept. 2001), 425–60. For Wal-Mart, see Simon Head, “Inside the Leviathan,”
New York Review of Books
, Dec. 16, 2004, 80–89.

3
. Andres Duany et al.,
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(New York, 2000). For commentary on exurban sprawl see David Brooks,
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense
(New York, 2004).

4
. The number of motor vehicle registrations in the United States increased from 156 million in 1980, when the population was 226.5 million, to 189 million in 1990, when the population was 249 million, and to 221 million in 2000, when the population was 281 million.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 675.

5
. Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit
(Boston, 1992), 92. Widely noted books of the time concerned with environmental damage also include John McPhee,
The Control of Nature
(New York, 1989); and Bill McKibben,
The End of Nature
(New York, 1989).

6
.
Time
, issue of Dec. 29, 1997–Jan. 5, 1998, 92. Books of the early 1990s that discuss the effects of work in America include Juliet Schor,
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
(New York, 1991); Arlene Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty
(New York, 1994); and Jeremy Rifkin,
The End of Work: The Decline of the Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era
(New York, 1995). For problems of labor unions, see Nelson Lichtenstein,
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
(Princeton, 2002), 218–25; and Andrew Hacker, “Who’s Sticking with the Union?”
New York Review of Books
, Feb. 13, 1999, 45–48.