The response to the 2008 financial crash had a deep and profound effect on my image of my home country, the USA, in a way nothing else in my lifetime has.
Until then I'd always harbored at least some sense that the USA was different in some fundamental way from Putin's Russia, China, or other totalitarian oligarchies.
The arbitrary favoritism and obvious behind-the-scenes exercise of absolute power displayed in the reaction to the 2008 financial crash showed me otherwise. While America may have more of a functioning democratic republic on the surface, the clear message of actions such as these -- as I saw it -- was that at the top America is a nation of men and not of laws.
When people who know the right people get in trouble, laws no longer matter. Any and every measure will be deployed to bail them out, even at the expense of the long term health of the nation and of the civilian economy. We live in a nation run for the benefit of those who run it, not its people.
This has deep implications going forward.
It's a clear signal to the American people that if something really bad does happen, like a serious financial crash or worse, we must assume that the authority figures are not on our side. We can and will be sacrificed for the benefit of the connected.
Secondly, it means that we must expect the situation to worsen. As time goes on we must expect more and more of the legacy gloss of a functioning republic to flake away, revealing the machinery of arbitrary lawless power that is operating beneath. Unless something fundamentally changes we will become a classic corrupt and barbaric empire, and then rubble. We're probably still early in the process, but that's the trajectory.
I don't think this is overreaction. To me there's something different about the 2008 reaction vs. Watargate, or the overreach of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, or anything else for that matter. For all those things it was possible to make a reasonable argument that they were exceptions driven by rogue or out of control actors within a system of democratic republicanism that was still basically intact. Nixon and Hoover were "cowboys." But this is just so "business as usual," so utterly without clear authorship, that it betrays this kind of favoritism as standard procedure rather than an exception.
It's the banality of it. There was no Hoover, no Nixon, not even a 9/11 or other traumatic event to inspire emotional over-reaction. It was just an economic crunch, a particularly bad one, and there were many options that did not involve obvious cronyism. Yet these were not taken, not even entertained. The message was: "Of course you'll be sacrificed to rescue Goldman Sachs. They're members of the nobility and you're not."
I'd describe it as a total loss of confidence in my country. I no longer believe America is in any way special or remarkable. It is morally equivalent to other totalitarian oligarchies. It can only be said to be superior in pragmatic ways.
P.S. The Iraq War is a close runner-up, but as I allude to above that is somewhat "excusable" or at least explainable as emotionally driven overreach due to a traumatizing event. It can also be attributed to a list of identifiable actors -- there is someone to blame. There's still a sense that it wasn't business as usual. I do not expect that America will arbitrarily embark on another pointless invasion anytime soon, but I do fully expect that if another financial crash happens my and every other American who isn't a member of the connected nobility will have their futures sacrificed without a second thought. We now clearly have a noble class that are "more equal" than anyone else.
I also still hold out some hope that this trend can be reversed, but only if the level of political discourse in America can be elevated above naive ideological pandering and tabloidism.
Until then I'd always harbored at least some sense that the USA was different in some fundamental way from Putin's Russia, China, or other totalitarian oligarchies.
The arbitrary favoritism and obvious behind-the-scenes exercise of absolute power displayed in the reaction to the 2008 financial crash showed me otherwise. While America may have more of a functioning democratic republic on the surface, the clear message of actions such as these -- as I saw it -- was that at the top America is a nation of men and not of laws.
When people who know the right people get in trouble, laws no longer matter. Any and every measure will be deployed to bail them out, even at the expense of the long term health of the nation and of the civilian economy. We live in a nation run for the benefit of those who run it, not its people.
This has deep implications going forward.
It's a clear signal to the American people that if something really bad does happen, like a serious financial crash or worse, we must assume that the authority figures are not on our side. We can and will be sacrificed for the benefit of the connected.
Secondly, it means that we must expect the situation to worsen. As time goes on we must expect more and more of the legacy gloss of a functioning republic to flake away, revealing the machinery of arbitrary lawless power that is operating beneath. Unless something fundamentally changes we will become a classic corrupt and barbaric empire, and then rubble. We're probably still early in the process, but that's the trajectory.
I don't think this is overreaction. To me there's something different about the 2008 reaction vs. Watargate, or the overreach of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, or anything else for that matter. For all those things it was possible to make a reasonable argument that they were exceptions driven by rogue or out of control actors within a system of democratic republicanism that was still basically intact. Nixon and Hoover were "cowboys." But this is just so "business as usual," so utterly without clear authorship, that it betrays this kind of favoritism as standard procedure rather than an exception.
It's the banality of it. There was no Hoover, no Nixon, not even a 9/11 or other traumatic event to inspire emotional over-reaction. It was just an economic crunch, a particularly bad one, and there were many options that did not involve obvious cronyism. Yet these were not taken, not even entertained. The message was: "Of course you'll be sacrificed to rescue Goldman Sachs. They're members of the nobility and you're not."
I'd describe it as a total loss of confidence in my country. I no longer believe America is in any way special or remarkable. It is morally equivalent to other totalitarian oligarchies. It can only be said to be superior in pragmatic ways.
P.S. The Iraq War is a close runner-up, but as I allude to above that is somewhat "excusable" or at least explainable as emotionally driven overreach due to a traumatizing event. It can also be attributed to a list of identifiable actors -- there is someone to blame. There's still a sense that it wasn't business as usual. I do not expect that America will arbitrarily embark on another pointless invasion anytime soon, but I do fully expect that if another financial crash happens my and every other American who isn't a member of the connected nobility will have their futures sacrificed without a second thought. We now clearly have a noble class that are "more equal" than anyone else.
I also still hold out some hope that this trend can be reversed, but only if the level of political discourse in America can be elevated above naive ideological pandering and tabloidism.