Over the last few decades, the American two-party system seems to have escalated in dividing society. I know enough of history to not be fooled into thinking this is a unique occurrence, but it should still call into question popular assumptions about democracy, society, and government. I'll illustrate this with a not-especially-brief look back at what I remember from my own lifetime, but feel free to debate in the comments.
Clinton
My first memories of politics are the 1992 election contest between George H.W. Bush ("Bush Senior" now) and William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton. The Clinton victory was seen by Republicans as a defeat, but not a catastrophe. However, there were several concerns. My family was nominally Republican in the generally Democrat state of Minnesota. Dad was a Rush Limbaugh listener, we attended staunchly pro-life churches, and American exceptionalism was running high after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Gulf War had also restored some jingoistic pride following the Vietnam War where other cold war skirmishes had not.
As a family where hunting and firearms were part of the culture, Clinton's hoplophobic policies were a concern. Today, Democrats are agitating for a new version of the Clinton "assault weapon ban," despite the absence of any evidence that had any effect on reducing crime and violence the first time it was imposed. It did not ban actual machine guns, which had already been heavily regulated, taxed, and licensed for many decades. Instead, it created a Byzantine set of arbitrary regulations which could turn someone into an unwitting felon for violating various rules about cosmetic features, or mixing "pre-ban" and "post-ban" parts in the wrong way to become an "illegal" object.
Sexual morality was also already a major topic of politics, from the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the armed forces regarding homosexuality to the ongoing debates about federal funding for abortion. Public discourse also covered concerns about the impacts of federal policies on marriage, divorce, premarital sex, and sex education in public schools.
Environmentalism was also a point of contention. Contrary to caricatures, the Republican base doesn't want to see the planet strip-mined for resources, but many blue-collar workers found Clinton's regime excessively oppressive. Just ask any logger about the spotted owl debacle. The rise of regulatory intervention included debates over issues like what constituted a waterway or wetland for federal oversight, leading to clashes between property rights and assertions of "the public interest."
Militarily, Clinton engaged in a variety of small-scale interventions, with varying degrees of public support. The prior administratin had sent troops to Somalia for "humanitarian intervention," and that simmering conflict continued to simmer. Troops were sent to Haiti. The Air Force intervened in the Yugoslav wars. He bombed Iraq during the Monica Lewinsky affair, with some suggesting it was intended as a distraction. There were other smaller-scale operations as well, so the US tradition of never truly being at peace continued. By then, it seemed the cold war militarism was just continuing as normal in the post-Soviet era.
The relative economic prosperity of the 1990s was claimed by both parties. Republicans insisted it all stemmed from Reagan's policies bringing a strong recovery from stagflation as the economic foundation for prosperity and their own actions in Congress. Democrats insisted it was because Clinton pushed forward progressive civic-minded public policies. In reality, it was largely a result of technological advancement, economic progress in spite of political intervention, and some new economic bubbles. The dot-com boom and bust of the early internet was wild tech speculation like we have seen in shitcoins and A.I. more recently. The housing market also began to inflate from subsidies to housing beginning to distort the market. The costs and benefits of "free trade agreements" are hotly contested, too, and I have to ask why "free trade" requires so much bureaucracy and regulation.
Through it all, tensions seemed to rise between the parties, but there remained a sense of balance because for most of the time, there was a party divide between Congress and the executive, which seemed to reatrain the impulse to excess to a degree. Still, the ongoing demands for "reform" led to expansion of various welfare programs and irresponsible fiscal policies justified by budget surpluses and the need for more intervention from our benevolent overlords.
On the bright side, Clinton deregulated aspects of the telecommunications and financial industries. Unfortunately, the latter would be blamed for upcoming problems despite the absence of any casual relationship. Freedom is always to blame when things go wrong, after all, so if we just let the technocrats have total control, we'd all be safe and prosperous!
W
I wasn't old enough to vote in the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. (just "W," or "Dubya") Bush, but I remember attending some political stump speeches for Republicans as they squabbled over who would oppose the Democrat heir apparent, vice president Al Gore. I also remember the tensions as the outcome of the election came down to "hanging chads" in Florida, where paper ballots were examined in minute detail to see where holes had been punched and how well they had been punched. In the end, George W. Bush was deemed the winner. He campaigned on a humble foreign policy, small government, and economic freedom.
Long story short: that didn't happen.
History began on September 11th, 2001 when Osama bin Laden attacked the US for no reason whatsoever, according to the Forrest Gump account of history so common in America. Pay no attention to the prior decades of foreign intervention. Four jetliners were hijacked, targeting the Twin Towers in New York City; the Pentagon on Washington, D.C.; and another unknown target. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, apparently due to passenger resistance. This heinous act justified the next two decades of military intervention, overthrowing foreign governments, and ongoing occupation.
It also kicked off a new era of domestic surveillance, because the many blatant failures of US intelligence meant we needed new laws more than bureaucratic reform. We did get bureaucratic restructuring, especially with the new Department of Homeland Security assuming the roles of several prior departments.
The nominally anti-war and anti-police left was almost entirely squelched in the initial fervor for war and "domestic security," but eventually started to make noise again. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was one of the earliest incidents to truly shake general public perception of the new "Global War on Terror," which had swiftly expanded beyond Afghanistan into the Philippines, various African operations, and Iraq. This last country, although initially completely unrelated to the September 11th attack, was pushed into a new regime change operation anyway. Special rendition programs for torture and imprisonment, plus the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, led to calls for reform and due process for accused terrorists as inconvenient facts came to light.
W's two terms were dominated by war, but we also got lots of domestic changes. The PATRIOT Act imposed new domestic surveillance policies. Airport security got "gate rape" invasive pat-downs and "porno-scanner" machines to check for smuggled weapons. Never mind how poorly the Transportation Security Agency failed its own audits. Security theater was the new game in town. We also saw the housing bubble inflating toward its first major crash in 2007/2008, and an impending economic collapse. This isn't entirely W's fault, but he's also far from blameless, and part of being the figurehead of President means getting all the blame when things go wrong.
The simmering disputes between the libertine left and puritanical right continued, but I think the distraction of war mostly kept it from boiling over. People were more concerned about anthrax in the mail, dirty bombs, and hijackings at first. Later on, the collapsing war narrative took center stage.
The only unequivocally good thing I can say W did was more something he did not do: he did not renew Clinton's assault weapon ban when its sunset clause hit a decade after it had passed.
Obama
In 2008, America was ready for a change, and in need of hope. Barack Obama, junior senator form Illinois, campaigned on hope and change. Despite the change in personalities, the worst policies remained unchanged. The anti-war left largely seemed to go silent once their party was in power. Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay, but he didn't even manage that. He had a kill list, bombed an American teenager overseas just because of who his father was, escalated drone warfare, overthrew Libya, expanded war in Syria, and so much more.
The 2014 Ukraine "revolution of dignity" was in part a proxy for US/NATO and Russian conflict, with both sides offering clandestine support to different factions. This will not have any long term consequences at all, I'm sure.
Domestically, the response to the housing bubble popping and overall economic recession was "quantitative easing," or in other words, low interest rates and money supply inflation to re-inflate the bubble instead of allowing market correction to clear out malinvestments organically. This led to a malaise pitched as recovery, but money flowed to Wall Street and real estate more than it did into the pockets of everyday people.
Rising healthcare costs were seen as free market failure rather than regulatory failure, so the obvious solution was new subsidies and mandates coloquially called "Obamacare." This meant higher costs for young, healthy people, but so what? It's not like we were also facing a stagnant job market and rising housing costs or anything.
I honestly wish I had more to say about Obama, but despite the rhetoric, he was basically W part II, with a dash of welfare state domestic policy. He remains idolized by Democrats as a savior of Democracy, but to me, he exemplified a comment I heard from another commentator: "no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Despite this, the party divide escalated exponentially through his administration
Trump I
Republican frustration at Obama's administration led to the surprise victory of New York businessman Donald J. Trump in the Republican primary. Despite his history as a spendthrift blowhard, a philanderer, and a New York liberal-leaning personality, he was embraced by the GOP under his "Make America Great Again" slogan. The puritanical prudishness of the Republicans seemed to take a back seat to pompous posturing.
What made American great on the past? How would his policies make America Great now? What has he ever done to suggest he has the historical, economic, and political understanding to do it? Stop asking stupid questions, you libtard! Trump is our hero! Of course since the Republicans won, that could only mean MAGA was now a literal fascist coup from the perspective of the Democrats. Any and all pretexts were used to vilify him, whether grounded in reality or not. He had to be impeached! Russia, Russia, Russia! If you disagree, you're a fascist!
In reality, Trump bumbled through his first term seemingly chasing the whims of whatever seemed in vogue in the moment and the advice of whichever advisor had his ear most recently. He was a populist without any philosophical foundation, and an ego which could not tolerate being contradicted. His cult of personality carried him more than any concrete policy positions. Criticisms of Trump were quickly dubbed "Trump Derangement Syndrome" by MAGA supporters, and dismissed as unpatriotic nonsense. The party divide during the election had been severe, but escalated further over the four years of his first term.
His biggest policy in his first term was "build the wall," a plan he claimed would enhance security along the US/Mexico border with a fence, expanded patrols, and enhanced immigration restrictions. His ham-fisted policies drew objections from Democrats, who either realized the humanitarian error of Obama's policies, or else decided things were only wrong when Republicans did them. Your mileage may vary.
Trump didn't really expand on Obama's militarism, but he was in no real hurry to wind matters down, either. He started the process to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq, but he also escalated tensions. In his last days in office, he even used an airstrike to assassinate an Iranian general visiting Iraq.
Matters seemed to culminate with COVID, where Trump's refusal to immediately institute unprecedented totalitarian restrictions in response to pandemic fears were condemned as irresponsible. In hindsight, radicals like me seem to have been proven right in our skepticism toward all the restrictions, but at the time, fear dominated public discourse, with the debate restricted to total shutdown or partial shutdown. Sweden was deemed as heartless when they went about life largely unchanged while other countries locked down, but in hindsight, the were no worse off, and by many measures better off, than their regional neighbors. Similar analysis state by state in the US shows little difference between policies and adherence to them, once the totality of statistics are analyzed, but at the time, every spike in cases or deaths was blamed on dissident disobedience.
The other big news story from 2020 was the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. While it seems he was under the influence of drugs, and had been accused of passing counterfeit money, this does not justify the type and duration of police restraint used, and his death as a result sparked widespread protests in cities across America. People blocked roads, committed acts of vandalism, looting, and more. In response, police often used excessive force and dubious justifications for arrests. This also drove a wedge between the parties as what began with bipartisan calls for police reform devolved into partisan accusations of racism, and the violence connected with protests drove many on the right back to unquestioningly supporting police crackdowns in the name of "law and order."
Between COVID, protests, and the 2020 election, we saw a massive increase in online censorship. Major news stories were suppressed. Accounts were cancelled with total disregard for the terms of service for Web2 sites. Accusations of "misinformation" were used to justify banning people for the crime of suggesting ideas which would be acknowledged months later by officials, but which were denounced as blatant lies when uttered by mere mundanes when the unauthorized suggested it first. The Hunter Biden laptop story was called a hoax, and news outlets reporting on it were suppressed.
Biden
Some measures of economic health seemed to improve under Trump, but between real and fabricated scandals, concerns over COVID, and other domestic issues, former vice president Joe Biden won against Trump. At least, that's the official story. MAGA faithful insist the election was stolen by fraud.
On January 6th, 2021, demonstrations at the Capitol building during certification of the 2020 election results went in a weird direction. Trump himself was holding a rally elsewhere in DC, but the Capitol Hill protests were where the drama happened. Somehow, the doors were left unlocked, and people present say security guards all but waved some of them in. Others report there were claims of people being beaten, and they went inside to prevent whatever was going on. In any case, there were some acts of vandalism, and some were all but given a tour. In the end, it was declared an "insurrection." Democrats demanded anyone at the Capitol, whether they entered the building or not, be deemed practically a terrorist. Democrats swiftly changed their tune from, "protests are the voice of the underdog," to, "you're a traitor if you dare disagree." This hostility widened the party divide further.
Biden did finally accomplish what Trump had started, and withdrew US forces from Afghanistan. His haste to make hay politically led to a disorganized retreat and left behind a lot of military equipment while failing to adequately protect many Afghans who had collaborated with US occupation. The Taliban swiftly reclaimed the country after the interim puppet regime of the US collapsed.
Biden was also seen as having botched US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some suspecting his inaction was a result of his son's ties to Ukraine business interests as a conflict of interest. This definitely flared up out of nowhere, and had nothing whatsoever to do with old conflicts from the Soviet era, internal division in Ukraine, or secessionist attempts by ethnically Russian majority regions. Nope. Don't question it. 100% of the blame is on Russian shoulders, and Ukraine was totally innocent. But seriously, while Russia was undeniably the aggressor, it is hypocritical for the US to condemn interventionism by other countries after 20 years of its own wars of aggression framed as defense or humanitarianism.
COVID was the biggest issue of domestic policy. To the Democrats in power, anyone who questioned anything official was automatically an anti-social, illiterate science-denier. However, as COVID faded, "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" expanded, with everything from the Americans with Disabilities Act to transgender activism combined under this new buzzword umbrella. This had been pushed hard by Democrats in response to Republican puritanical moralizing for some time, and reached a crescendo during Biden's term. Republicans responded by accusing everyone and everything of "grooming" children as LGBTQ puppets. This backlash especially impacted libraries like mine where parents riled up by muckraking internet "news" seemed to think we had literal pornography in the stacks next to Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bears. A single copy of a book they hated was just more evidence of a diabolical plan to "trans the kids."
I can think of nothing positive to say about Biden's term.
His declining mental health was exaggerated by the right and categorically denied by the left. However, this finally became too much to imagine away during the 2024 election when Trump challenged him again. During their debates, Biden was so obviously confused and inept that it could no longer be swept under the rug. His vice president, former California senator and Attorney General Kamela Harris, was promptly crowned his successor by the Democratic National Committee without any actual democratic input from the party members. Her history as an attorney for the police state did her no real favors in the Democratic base. Instead, the real contest was between "Trump" or "Not-Trump."
For better or worse, Trump won.
Trump II
For only the second time in US history, someone was elected to a second non-consecutive term. After a wild election cycle including two assassination attempts against him, and the collapse of his first rival's campaign resulting in a substitute candidate, Trump managed to win both the Electoral College and the popular vote. This has been portrayed as a "landslide" by MAGA, and they claim a mandate to impose everything they want.
Trump started off on the right foot by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, a man railroaded by corrupt courts as if he were a mafia kingpin because he... ran a gray-market website? Yeah, those of us in the cryptosphere, anarchist/libertarian politics, and related fields are generally well aware of the case, and this was long overdue to remedy a grave injustice.
However, everything after that has been a disaster. Tariff wars, bombing Iran, absolute failure to resolve the Russo-Ukraine war, threats to annex Greenland, waging an unauthorized war by invading Venezuela and kidnapping their dictatorial president, and so much more. As I write this, elements of the US Navy are positioned near Iran, and war may break out yet again in spite of Trump running as the "peace candidate" based on his first term with no new wars.
Domestically, federal agents including the Border Patrol and ICE have killed several Americans, detained thousands of citizens, arrested refugees following their approved legal processes, and turned cities into police state occupation zones. MAGA supporters insist again this is all about "law and order," and immediately forgot their complaints against Biden's overreach in their zeal to justify even worse crimes committed by Trump.
We're in weird times. Party trumps principle more than ever, and tensions feel higher than they did during peak COVID. With midterm elections coming up this November, I expect unprecedented attention to US congressional races and a far stronger divide between Pro- and anti-Trump candidates to the point where Republican races could be split between MAGA and non-MAGA candidates. ICE can back down, or redouble their operations. War could break out any day as belligerent people in the administration seem hell-bent on finally toppling Iran after first floating the idea back when W first kicked off the Global War on Terror.
If you've actually read the 3500 or so words here in this long post, first, I apologize. Second, comment about your favorite dessert. Spammers will be downvoted, but real engagement is more than welcome. I truly hope my concerns about 2026 turn out to be overblown, and Trump is just relying on wild rhetoric to push people into doing what he wants. but based on what has happened since he was inaugurated a year ago, I have little hope left.
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