A TUMULTUOUS DECADE

Now that the 10's are officially over, looking back on the decade shows a time of conflict, chaos and wild changes in this country politically; the cliff notes version is we had six years of sanity, and four years of insanity.  It should be pointed out that the 10's were lacking in the huge changes that the 0's had: there was no 9/11 terrorist style attacks (although some smaller terrorist attacks did occur), nor was there any massive economic collapse, like what happened in 2008.  The Iraq war petered out, proving that the whole thing was a mess, while the war in Afghanistan lingered on, becoming the longest running war in American history, but drawing less and less media attention as it continued.  Even a recent document release that showed that George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all misled the American people on how the conflict in Afghanistan was going didn't really change the nation's attitude.  Somehow, an invasion that began as revenge against Al Qaeda for the
9/11 attacks has morphed over almost twenty years into an occupation of a foreign country that's vaguely justified as preventing terrorism in the future.   Because it involves only a small number of American troops and lacks any real exit strategy, it's entirely possible that the war will drag on for years to come with most Americans hardly acknowledging it.

For the world overall, the 10's were actually a good decade:  as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out, extreme poverty and illiteracy rates have been going down consistently in this decade.  And as Steven Pinker wrote in his highly entertaining 2012 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", the human race on the whole has never been better, with more and more people living in relatively peaceful democracies.  Although climate change has become a serious and huge challenge (and the rise in powerful hurricanes, droughts and forest fires in the past decade has made denying it much harder), the planet is still a better place to live in for the average person in 2020 than it was in 2010.
As for the US, well, it's been a crazy decade.  It kicked off in 2010 with the resurgence of the Republican party, as a backlash against the first two years of the Obama presidency resulted in the Republicans retaking the House of Representatives, picking up seats in the Senate  and winning many state wide elections.  While this handcuffed much of what Obama could do for the rest of his presidency, his winning reelection in 2012 seemed to show that the country was moving slowly leftward; it was one thing for him to win in 2008, when the Republican party was deeply unpopular due to both the Iraq war and the economic collapse, but for him to win four more years in 2012 showed that he had brought enough economic recovery and peace to win the country over.  For one brief shining moment, the Republican party even looked ready to start making compromises with the Democrats, with even some conservative commentators saying that the Republican party might never win another presidency as long as they failed to find a way to appeal to younger, non white voters.  The fact that gay marriage was ruled constitutional in 2015, and has been supported by larger and larger majorities of the American public was also another important milestone in the decade.

And then, as we all know, Trump changed everything in 2016.   Somehow, a reality TV star with no political experience won the White House.  While there are a number of factors that went into his victory, from Russian interference to the absurdity of the Electoral College, one important statistic seems to be at the root of his unlikely win: Barack Obama did not receive a majority of the white vote in either of his elections, not even in the blue state of California.  Sadly, there were millions of older white people in this country who were horrified at the sight of an African American in the White House, even if  that African American was one who had a calm and thoughtful demeanor ("no drama Obama") like Obama.  And as they seethed in anger, they found a champion in Trump, a major media figure who repeatedly said that Obama was not born in this country, may secretly be a Muslim and as his ugly campaign raged on, would make outrageous statements like saying that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the cofounders of ISIS!
And so for the past four years the country has been at the mercy of a psychopathic, childish bigot with a downright messianic self image, who has done everything to erase the Obama presidency, reassuring his voter base that white men are back in charge where they belong.  (Not surprisingly, no president since Ronald Reagan has had a cabinet made up of so many white men).  The Paris Climate change Accord, the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Transpacific Trade Partnership were all carefully crafted agreements passed by the Obama administration that Trump just tossed into the garbage, along with any environmental protections.  He also has packed the courts with conservative judges (many of them ruled as unqualified by the American Bar Association), passed a massive tax cut for wealthy businesses and started a trade war with China that has hurt American farmers.  And while gay marriage still remains legal, members of the Trump administration recently argued in front of the Supreme Court that it  should be perfectly legal for a person to be fired from his or her job just because they are gay or lesbian.
Trump's impulsive ways has somewhat inevitably led him to openly try to get a foreign country to help him win reelection by with holding government aid until an investigation into his likely 2020 opponent Joe Biden's son is announced.  In doing so, he has   become only the third president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.  While this is a good thing, there is virtually no one way that the Senate will vote to remove him, which to him will mean complete vindication and another round of bragging and lying in his speeches.  The only way to take Trump out is for him to lose in 2020.  Sadly, with strong support from his Republican base and a healthy economy, Trump may very well win four more years in the White House, meaning that this decade may be much worse for the both the country and the planet than the last one was.