4

The Three Convulsions

Almost as much a futurist as a politician, Al Gore appeared uniquely well qualified to serve as president at the outset of the new millennium. His prescience on global warming, the most urgent issue facing the planet, was imprinted on every page of his 1992 bestseller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. From the 1970s, first as a congressman and then as a senator, he had promoted high-speed telecommunications. All the key legislation paving the way for the ‘information superhighway’, a phrase he made part of the political lexicon, originated from his office. Though he could not claim to have invented the internet – in fairness to Gore, who was prone to truth-twisting, he never did – no lawmaker anywhere in the world had done more to bring it into existence.

Throughout the 2000 campaign, however, the vice-president made the patronising mistake of thinking voters were incapable of differentiating between the good, the bad and the squalid of the Clinton years. Rather than presenting himself as the continuity candidate best placed to bestow even more peace and prosperity upon the American people, he distanced himself from the Clinton record. Ditching his one-time running mate also meant jettisoning Clintonism, the centrism Gore had advocated throughout his political life.

Instead, he cast himself as a faux populist, proclaiming, as the commentator Michael Kinsley brilliantly paraphrased it, ‘You’ve never had it so good and I’m as mad as hell about it.’ This ‘us versus them’ class-warfare message seemed better suited to the start of the twentieth century than the beginning of the twenty-first – although, as recent history has proven, perhaps here, as well, he was ahead of his time.

This ‘I’m-no-Bill-Clinton’ shtick even extended to subjecting his poor wife, Tipper, to a screen kiss at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that made Clark Gable’s ‘You need kissing badly’ embrace of Vivien Leigh seem almost loveless. In the press box that night, as the Jumbotron screens in the Staples Center turned unexpectedly into a giant kiss cam, our universal reaction was ‘Yuk!’

Gore was a hapless campaigner. After Bill Clinton’s touchy-feely presidency, this technology-obsessed technocratic came across as an automaton, a Buzz Lightyear of a politician programmed by consultants to deliver vapid soundbites devoid of emotion or spontaneity. Even the kiss seemed pre-set, although its length and lustiness suggested a software malfunction.

Gore suffered, too, from snarky journalists handicapping the race in favour of George W. Bush, who was inarguably the less qualified candidate of the two. Not only were liberal-leaning reporters determined to demonstrate their impartiality by holding Gore to a higher standard – a problem Hillary Clinton encountered in 2016 – they were prone to ‘better story bias’. The Texan possessed more entertainment value than the Tennessean. A Bush restoration, with all its historical echoes and Oedipal overtones, offered a more seductive storyline than a third Clinton term with a dull understudy as lead. The coverage of the 2000 campaign revealed a recurring journalistic dereliction: how reporters commonly produce narratives that comport with the kind of race they ideally want to cover, with a bias in favour of the candidate who delivers the best story arc.

What was also striking about the coverage of Gore was how often he came to be judged on his presentational shortcomings. Those sighs and audible harrumphs during the first presidential debate while his opponent was speaking. His make-up in the second debate, so heavily applied that he resembled the Lord High Executioner from an amateur production of The Mikado. His tendency to sweat through his shirts during campaign speeches, creating small archipelagos of perspiration around his ribcage. Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could hardly be described as natural campaigners, but nonetheless had other skills and qualities to offer. In the age of the performative presidency, where image management was all, no longer were those attributes so highly valued.

The early stages of the Republican race had offered a stirring narrative, for after the toxicity of impeachment, the candidacy of John McCain felt like a cleansing stream. Thundering around New Hampshire aboard his campaign battle bus the ‘Straight Talk Express’, a gaggle of reporters hanging on his every unfiltered word, he railed against the corrupting influence of big money and called for an overhaul of the campaign finance rules.

Character became his main selling point, and traits political consultants had to fabricate for lesser candidates, McCain had in spades. The former navy pilot also tapped into the newfound respect for old warriors. His personal story, of selflessly turning down the chance of early release in the Hanoi Hilton, which consigned him to nearly five more years as a POW, provided the core of his stump speech. Even veteran reporters went weak at the knees in his presence, which explained why McCain called the travelling press corps his base. New Hampshire voters, who packed his town-hall meetings, adored him too.

Other than being the establishment favourite, George W. Bush, McCain’s main rival, seemed everything his father wasn’t. Charismatic. Focused on domestic policy – the early hot take on the Texan governor was that he was a policy wonk with a granular grasp of education policy. A born-again Christian, with a bona fide come-to-Jesus moment – the morning after his 40th birthday, when he woke up vowing never to let liquor pass his lips. A true son of the south who revelled in its good ol’ boy politics. To win the Lone Star governorship, Bush had even vanquished his father’s tormentor Ann Richards, who had mocked Poppy at the 1988 Democratic convention for being born with a silver foot in his mouth, a zinger for the ages.

‘The biggest difference between me and my father,’ said George W., in what became a stock line, ‘is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.’¹

Just as his embrace of the south made him more attuned to the modern-day Republican Party, so, too, did his religiosity. Bush spoke in the tongue of the mega-churches, and happily testified to his faith. Asked during a Republican debate to name his favourite philosopher, he answered, ‘Christ, because he changed my heart.’

Bush Sr, thinking his son had committed an egregious gaffe, called the next day to console him. ‘Don’t worry, son. I don’t think the Jesus answer will hurt you very much.’² Yet the conversation revealed GHW’s blind spots rather than his son’s: his failure to appreciate the extent to which the GOP had become a faith-based movement.

George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was intended to soften the cold-heartedness of Gingrichism, just as his father’s kinder, gentler politics was meant to take the rough edges off Reaganism. Moving towards the centre was also an act of political necessity for a party that had gained a paltry 37 per cent of the presidential vote in 1992 and just 40 per cent four years later. This pitch to the political middle also looked like a vote winner. When Clinton first heard the alliterative phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’, he thought the Democrats were in trouble.³

Bush showcased his new-look GOP at the convention in Philadelphia, which was stage-managed to draw attention to the racial inclusivity of the party. Primetime speaking slots were allotted to his future Secretary of State Colin Powell, and also to his future National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. So many black preachers delivered invocations, and so many African-Americans performed musical numbers on stage, that a BBC colleague thought it necessary to remind viewers they were indeed watching the Republican convention and there was no need to adjust their sets. Bush was attempting to create a multiracial coalition of the faithful, to make the GOP a bigger, more welcoming tent.

Just as George H. W.’s kinder, gentler politics speech did not stop him from savaging Michael Dukakis, so George W. reached for the machete after McCain trounced him in the New Hampshire primary. As the race moved to South Carolina, the home state of Lee Atwater, it seemed his entire campaign was paying homage to the Republican Party’s master of the dark electoral arts.

Bush fringe groups and surrogates bombarded South Carolinians with robo calls and false messaging that smeared McCain’s character. The war hero had not fought hard enough for fellow POWs left behind in Vietnam. His wife, Cindy McCain, had an addiction problem. The senator had fathered an African-American love child.

Then there were his policy sins. McCain had opposed tax cuts. The National Right to Life Committee accused him of being soft on abortion. Bush, meanwhile, brazenly pursued an updated version of the southern strategy. First, he re-launched his troubled campaign at Bob Jones University, an evangelical campus in Greenville where interracial dating was still banned. Then, championing states’ rights, he endorsed the flying of the Confederate flag above the South Carolina Statehouse, which back then was a hugely contentious issue (McCain did so too, though he afterwards apologised for his cravenness).

Not until 2016 did I cover a viler campaign, for in South Carolina we witnessed so much of what had become fetid about American politics. The relentless negativity, the personal destructiveness, the pandering to prejudice, the culture wars dog-whistling, the infusion of unregulated money and the trampling of truth.

More depressing still, all those tactics worked. Bush won in a landslide, and went on to wrap up the nomination. ‘In retrospect, McCain’s 2000 campaign may have represented the last off-ramp for the GOP on the road towards the confrontational and tribal conservatism that has transformed the party over the past two decades,’ wrote the political commentator Ron Brownstein afterwards.⁴

Gore versus Bush should have been a battle of the centrists, but just as McCain had pushed Bush to the right, so Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky had the effect of pushing the vice-president to the left. A supposed compassionate conservative and a one-time New Democrat ended up producing one of the most polarising election results in recent history.

The country awoke after Election Night to the sight of yellow police tape stretched across the entrances of polling stations in Florida, as if some terrible crime had been committed. So began a 36-day legal and political fight that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Nationally, Gore won 500,000 more votes than Bush – he actually polled more votes than any other Democrat in history, while only Reagan in 1984 had got more – but Bush had seemingly won the Electoral College.

After the melodrama of the Clinton impeachment came the slapstick farce of the Florida recount, another civics lesson from hell. Electoral officials peered at ballot papers with giant magnifying glasses, as if studying species of endangered butterflies. Foreigners looked on askance, as if viewing America through a hall of fairground mirrors. At one point, as the road to the White House careered through various appellate courts, a diplomat from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe suggested sending international observers to oversee the recount.

Maybe it should have come as little surprise that the election ended in a statistical deadlock, with the candidates separated in Florida by just 527 out of six million votes cast, because America had become so evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. From the early ’50s until Reagan’s first victory in 1980, there had been 15 per cent more registered Democrats than Republicans. In the years after the Reagan landslide that advantage shrank to just 3 per cent.⁵

The United States had become a 50/50 country, which also went a long way towards explaining the trench-warfare dynamic in Washington. The political middle had become something of a no-man’s land of emptying electoral terrain.

In the Reagan years, independent voters who did not identify with a party made up a quarter of the electorate. By 2000, it had shrunk to just 6 per cent. Commentators had started talking about the incredible missing middle.

When a magnifying glass was held up to the American model of electing a president, it showed a voting system in a chronic state of democratic disrepair. The butterfly ballot which had flapped its wings in Palm Beach County and caused so much chaos revealed one of its stranger idiosyncrasies: the lack of uniformity in voting, not just between states, but also between the districts within them.

Elderly voters found this particular ballot, designed by a Democratic election supervisor, especially confusing, prompting hundreds of Jewish seniors to vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake. As for those infamous pregnant and hanging chads, they highlighted the inability of antiquated voting machinery to record voting intentions accurately. Republican-leaning districts had more up-to-date technology that produced fewer ballot-reading errors. Malfunctioning machines were most commonly found in the poorer counties of Florida, with a higher proportion of minority voters. Those Democratic vote banks were short-changed.

The closer journalists looked, the more abnormalities we found. In the run-up to the election, Florida officials sent out to the state’s 67 counties a list with 50,000 names of ex-felons barred from voting. More than 12,000 of those names were wrong, and almost half of them belonged to African-Americans.⁶ Among those blocked from voting was Willie Steen, a veteran from the Gulf War who had gone to vote with his ten-year-old, only to be humiliatingly turned away.

When the US Commission on Civil Rights crunched the numbers, it calculated Al Gore had been deprived of 4,752 black votes, nine times more than his opponent’s margin of victory.⁷ Given the presence in the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee of George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, this felt more like a conspiracy than a cock-up. His Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, a Cruella de Vil lookalike who certified the election results in Florida and became an unlikely star of the recount, seemed like his accomplice.

Rather than letting democracy take its course with a state-wide manual recount, Florida turned into an electoral version of the O. J. Simpson trial. From across the country came armies of attorneys, parachuting in like screaming legal eagles; among them were future conservative luminaries such as John Roberts (whom George W. Bush eventually made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), Brett Kavanaugh (another future Supreme Court jurist), and a 29-year-old Texan who had clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist called Ted Cruz, who put the team together. For every dollar the Democrats spent on legal fees in Florida, the Republicans spent four.⁸

At times, the Florida recount became an extra-judicial fight. In what became known as the Brooks Brothers riot, a flash mob of paid conservative activists stormed an administrative office to stop the recount in Miami-Dade County, a Democratic bastion. The leader of this chino-clad militia was that self-styled ‘GOP hitman’, Roger Stone.

Perhaps the most audacious electoral heist was carried out by five elderly jurists dressed in black flowing robes, who halted the manual state-wide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that Republicans feared would hand Al Gore the presidency. Instead, the Supreme Court justices decreed that the disputed election should be settled in the highest court in the land. Gore v. Bush resulted in a 5–4 ruling, split along ideological lines, in favour of the Texan.

In an especially mendacious twist, given how many African-American voters had been blocked from voting in Florida, the five justices grounded their decision on the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War to safeguard the rights of former slaves. Perhaps embarrassed by their illogic and inconsistency, they did not put their names to their work, and recommended it should be ‘limited to the circumstances’ of the 2000 election and therefore not be used as a precedent.

The dissenters in the minority essentially accused their conservative colleagues of an electoral smash and grab. ‘Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election,’ wrote John Paul Stevens, a liberal jurist nominated by Gerald Ford, ‘the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.’

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who as time went on looked to her liberal admirers like Clinton’s greatest legacy item, drew attention to the rank hypocrisy of Antonin Scalia and his originalist colleagues. In overruling the Florida Supreme Court, they had wilfully interfered in a state’s interpretation of state law, an approach diametrically opposed to their judicial philosophy. Like her three colleagues, Ginsburg ended by almost spitting out the words ‘I respectfully dissent’.

2000 became a before-and-after moment for US democracy. From the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act until the end of the twentieth century, there was common agreement that everyone should be allowed to vote and that deliberately preventing them from doing so was unscrupulous and immoral (prior to 1965, Jim Crow laws, such as literacy tests, had been used across the south to prevent blacks from voting).

After 2000, however, suppressing turnout became as central to electoral strategy as maximising turnout, especially for the Republicans. Half of the states have passed legislation making it more difficult to vote. Between 2011 and 2015, 468 voting restrictions were introduced. Under the guise of combating voter fraud, Republican state legislatures especially have passed a panoply of laws restricting early voting opportunities, closing polling stations, penalising voters who skipped just one election and tightening ID regulations. (In Texas, for instance, a gun licence is considered an acceptable form of identification, while student ID cards are not.)

Big turnouts bringing out minority and young voters favour the Democrats, which is why the Republicans have devoted such legislative energy to barring minorities from voting. In this concerted attempt to suppress turnout, Republican governors and state legislatures have found an active ally in the Supreme Court, which repeatedly rubber-stamped anti-democratic practices.

This culminated in 2013, in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, when the Supreme Court weakened dramatically the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by invalidating a practice known as ‘preclearance’ that prevented local jurisdictions from making changes to voting without federal approval, which had proved effective in protecting minority enfranchisement in counties with a history of discrimination. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court reasoned preclearance was no longer needed because it had been so successful, a train of thought that Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened to discarding an umbrella because you were no longer getting wet. America had become a democracy where qualified voters were actively barred from voting.

Just as the 2000 recount magnified the mechanical inefficiencies in the voting system, so it also exposed the architectural flaws in the electoral system. The founding fathers, for all their cleverness and erudition, made a terrible hash of deciding how to elect their head of state. To safeguard the office of the presidency from mob rule, the much-feared ‘passions of the people’, they decided designated electors rather than voters should pick the president, an Electoral College chosen by the states under criteria decided by the states.

By the 1820s, most states enacted laws establishing a winner-takes-all principle based on a state-wide popular vote (although, to this day, Nebraska and Maine remain holdouts). It became possible, then, for a successful candidate to amass a majority in the Electoral College without winning the nationwide vote, as happened in 1824 (John Quincy Adams), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison), 2000 (George W. Bush) and, later, 2016 (Donald Trump). In closely fought states, a candidate could also win all the electors with the slimmest of pluralities. In Florida, Bush pocketed all 25 electoral votes, despite winning the state by less than 0.1 per cent of the vote.

Much as the US Senate betrayed a small-state bias, with each state getting two senators regardless of population size – the New York borough of Queens has a bigger population than 16 states – so, too, did the make-up of the Electoral College. Just 4 per cent of the country’s population controlled 8 per cent of the Electoral College votes.

Another defect that revealed itself over time was the dearth of competitive states – only a dozen or so by the turn of the century, which did not include some of the most populous states in the land, including California, Texas and New York.

Defenders of the status quo argue that deciding the presidency through a nationwide popular vote would create an urban bias, and unfairly marginalise rural voters. Yet abolishing the Electoral College would bring about a parity of influence for voters everywhere. Besides, presidential candidates who campaign in rural states invariably focus their attention on urban centres, rather than waste precious time campaigning in the sparsely populated countryside. Already there is an urban bias.

Changing the system inevitably means challenging the near-sacred belief the founding fathers were blessed with something akin to papal infallibility, and that the US Constitution they produced was near-perfect. This cherished view, fortified by the conservative creed of constitutional originalism and a conviction that the pages of the Constitution are like biblical tablets, has long acted as a bulwark against change. So, too, has the now outdated notion that America is a young and thrusting republic, when in actual fact it is the oldest democracy in the world, and showing signs of age.

Vitally, the framers themselves looked upon their new republic as an experiment in democracy subject to refinement and improvement, which explains why there was a Bill of Rights immediately afterwards and 17 additional constitutional amendments that followed – including the abolition of slavery, the direct election of senators by popular vote and female suffrage. The problem is that the framers made the Constitution notoriously hard to alter – a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states.

The Florida debacle, and the Supreme Court’s nakedly partisan intervention, meant the new century began with a democratic and constitutional convulsion that divided the country even more deeply than the impeachment crisis.

The 2000 election also produced a new nomenclature to describe this rupture, for it was the first time all the US networks agreed on a colour scheme for their electoral maps. In the on-screen graphics, Republican states would be shaded red, Democrats blue. ‘The result was a brand new shorthand,’ wrote Steve Kornacki, ‘that would define American political culture in the new century.’⁹

With the country deadlocked, David Letterman joked, ‘George W. Bush will be the president for the red states and Al Gore will be the president for the blue states.’¹⁰ With uncanny timing, The West Wing TV series, which debuted in 1999, presented disgruntled Democrats with an alternative occupant of the White House. ‘Jed Bartlett is my president’ T-shirts, featuring the ‘made-for-Mount-Rushmore’ features of the actor Martin Sheen, became de rigueur in the liberal enclaves of Washington. Right-wing critics soon labelled the show ‘The Left Wing’.

Though the real new president-elect promised to be ‘a uniter not a divider’, the Bush team came up with a political plan for his first term in office that prioritised energising the base over persuading swing voters – what the political commentator Ron Brownstein called ‘the 51 per cent solution’.¹¹ It was a separatist strategy for a separating country: red and blue America.

For a time it seemed modern America’s most awful day might be the catastrophe that returned a sense of civility to national politics, halted the slide into tribalism and unified the country. Under the now silent skies in the days after September 11, stores sold out of the Stars and Stripes, tens of thousands queued for hours to donate blood and people of all ages, faiths, skin colours and political persuasions shed tears together at candlelit vigils.

On Capitol Hill, as bodies were still being dragged from the Pentagon, more than 150 Republican and Democrat lawmakers congregated on the steps of the East Front, where they broke out unexpectedly into a rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’. Within days, Congress had passed a bipartisan bill to provide $40 billion for anti-terrorism measures and victim aid, a defiant statement of cross-party intent.

George W. Bush, after struggling in those initial chaotic days to summon words that reflected the magnitude of the attacks, finally asserted himself as a national leader. With bullhorn in hand, amidst the tangled wreckage of Ground Zero, he spontaneously came up with some stirring language. ‘I can hear you,’ he responded, when a fireman complained his words were being drowned out by the clank of heavy machinery. ‘The rest of the world hears you. And the people – and the people who knocked down these buildings will hear from us soon!’

Six days after the attacks, in a well-timed act of ecumenism, he also visited the Islamic Center in Washington DC, where he affirmed ‘the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam’ and attested to how Muslims ‘love America just as much as I do’.

His most commanding performance came before a joint session of Congress on 20 September, when he sought to reassure his shell-shocked compatriots and to outline a new national mission. ‘We will direct every resource at our command – every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war – to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network.’

After his speech, as the chamber stood in unison to applaud, he exchanged bear hugs with the most senior Democrats in the chamber, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt. Patriotic bipartisanship had returned to Capitol Hill, and with it an understanding the national interest was again paramount.

As the attacks unfolded on the east coast, I was out west, asleep in Seattle of all places. I awoke to a changed world, and a career severed in two, the before and after of my working life. With the airspace closed, it took me three days to return to Washington, and by the time I reached the still smouldering Pentagon, the reporters from the US networks I found myself stood alongside had affixed flag pins to the lapels.

Much like Los Angeles on my first trip to America, it was hard not to be swept up in the patriotic wave, and for a time many reporters sounded more like participants in the war on terror than its chroniclers. Normal service eventually came to be resumed, but the suspension of journalistic scepticism across large swathes of the media continued largely unabated until after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square.

In the weeks following the attacks, there was an ugly thirst for revenge. Despite Bush’s best efforts, American Muslims became the target of a spate of Islamophobic reprisal attacks – within the first ten days, some 600 anti-Muslim incidents were recorded. A Pakistani grocer was murdered in Texas. A gunman in Arizona, hunting down Muslims to slaughter, murdered an Indian-born Sikh. In this climate of fearful recrimination, the culture wars flared up as well, as a number of leading evangelicals claimed that a vengeful God was punishing America for its permissiveness.

‘I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] ... all of them who have tried to secularise America,’ declared the Moral Majority preacher Jerry Falwell Sr. ‘I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.’’’ For the most part, however, ‘United we stand’ truly meant that, as tragedy nourished togetherness.

Polls offered proof of this political coming together. In the final Gallup survey before the hijackers boarded those four planes, Bush had an approval rating of 51 per cent, which reflected America’s 50/50 split. Afterwards, as Americans rallied around their commander-in-chief, it surged to 86 per cent. If not entirely forgiven, the acrimony of the Florida recount and Supreme Court was temporarily forgotten. Two weeks after 9/11, almost nine out of ten Democrats and independents approved of his presidency.¹² As the leader of a country united once again by a common enemy, Bush finally gained legitimacy.

Unified government, however, did not necessarily mean good governance, and whereas the legislation of the Cold War years made the country stronger, the response to 9/11 sometimes had a self-destructive effect. In the legislative rush to respond to the attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act by the end of October, hurried legislation agreed to without sufficient oversight – many lawmakers did not even have time to read its contents – granting the federal government sweeping and draconian powers.

Sneak-and-peek powers enabled FBI agents to search homes or businesses secretly without informing the owners. It became easier for the federal government to scoop up data, such as web-surfing histories and medical records. When investigating a single person, the FBI could seize a hospital’s entire database.¹³ For now, however, security trumped liberty, scratching at a sacred American ideal.

By the end of November, Bush took further advantage of the blank chequebook he had been handed by issuing a military order decreeing that terror suspects would not be put through the US criminal justice system. Instead, they would be tried and sentenced by military commissions. The breadth of the order, which swept aside US courts and longstanding legal protections including habeas corpus, raised obvious constitutional red flags. All that was needed to hold a non-citizen indefinitely was the ‘reason to believe’ that they were involved in terrorism.

Even Bush’s hard-line Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was shocked by the lack of due process. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he responded, after reading the draft plan for military commissions, which sidelined the Justice Department and came under the purview of the Pentagon.¹⁴ Senior Democrats expressed concerns about the lack of consultation and weakening of constitutional protections, but knew, too, the public was on the president’s side, which muffled their opposition.¹⁵

Next came the establishment in January of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay: ‘the legal equivalent of outer space’, as one government official put it. This Cuban outpost was chosen precisely because terror suspects would not be able to apply for protections under US criminal law. ‘Gitmo’ came to be viewed as an American gulag, but when it first opened there was little outcry from Democrats.¹⁶

When I visited Guantánamo, an unexpectedly picturesque outpost hemmed in by Cuban minefields and watchtowers, we were told the detainees were given ‘Happy Meals’ from the McDonald’s on the base if they delivered actionable intelligence, but they were also subjected to torture.

There was near unanimous support for the opening phase of the war on terror, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which led to the ousting of the Taliban after it refused to hand over the Al Qaeda leader. Operation Enduring Freedom had broad international backing and cross-party agreement. Only when the war on terror moved from the necessary war in Afghanistan to the unnecessary war in Iraq did national unity seriously begin to fray. It was then that the Bush administration started to politicise its response to 9/11, turning this national tragedy into a partisan wedge issue.

The strategy was set in January 2002, ahead of that year’s midterm congressional elections, when Bush’s political Svengali, Karl Rove, told the Republican National Committee that candidates ‘can go to the country on this issue [Iraq]’ because voters ‘trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America’.¹⁷

So whereas George H. W. Bush had waited until after the midterms to seek war authorisation from Congress for the first Gulf War, his son demanded a rubber stamp in October 2002, on the eve of the election, in a brazen attempt to corner sceptical Democrats. The authorisation vote passed, and the midterms became a khaki election. For only the fourth time since the Civil War, the president’s party improved its showing in the House.

Pushing for war in Iraq came at the cost of national unity. Whereas three-quarters of Americans backed military action in Afghanistan, only half supported the invasion of Iraq. A year after 9/11, the president’s approval rating among Democrats plummeted to 50 per cent – 42 per cent lower than among Republicans, which showed how the partisan breach had reopened. By January 2004, less than a quarter of Democrats thought Bush had been right to strike Iraq.¹⁸ Impending war had turned America red and blue again.

In the lead-up to the war, which began with the shock-and-awe bombardment of Baghdad in March 2003, the welter of false and misleading justifications showed how much America was moving away from being a fact-based polity. Rejecting claims repeatedly made by the Bush White House, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded afterwards that Iraq had no cooperative or corroborative relationship with Osama bin Laden with regard to the September 11 attacks. Nor were stockpiles of any weapons of mass destruction ever found, demolishing the main justification for military action. Small wonder ‘Bush lied, people died’ became the chant of his critics.

Never was the White House embarrassed by its truth-twisting. Instead, it became part of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror swank. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,’ a Bush administration aide, widely thought to be Karl Rove, told Ron Suskind of The New York Times. ‘And while you’re studying that reality ... we’ll act again, creating other new realities ... We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

The Bush administration was trying to define public reality. Aided by a pliable press, it did so with effortless ease. On the front page of The New York Times came alarming stories written by Judith Miller giving prominence to the administration’s falsehoods and bolstering the case for war, which most of us, myself included, ended up regurgitating.

After coming up with a dubious casus belli for invading Iraq, Bush delivered a false declaration of victory. He did so, of course, from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, after landing hours before, Top Gun-like, in green flight fatigues, having briefly taken the controls mid-flight of a Viking warplane. Sailing back to California from the Persian Gulf having completed the longest naval deployment since the Vietnam War, it was the ship’s crew that hung the notorious ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign.

Yet White House image-makers, happy with staging that looked like the handiwork of Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down, Top Gun), kept it as the backdrop. ‘Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,’ declared the president. Here again, the White House created its own reality, to claim success on the war on terror and also to win an election. The flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln became the launch-pad for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

Had the mission truly been accomplished, history could have been very different. At that time, 104 US troops had lost their lives, a small fraction of the final death toll of 4,424. As it was, Bush turned the American liberators of Iraq into the American occupiers of Iraq, a strategic error of immense scale, an overextension of US power for which the country continues to pay an enormous price.

Military chiefs, such as General Tommy Franks, expected the US military involvement in Iraq to be limited to 90 days. Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department had been instructed to plan for an open-ended US presence in the country. What followed was calamitous, just as old-timers from the first Gulf War, such as Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and General Norman Schwarzkopf had predicted. Once again, America suffered from the shift in leadership at the end of the Cold War away from its greatest generation.

During this period of maximum peril, when the country needed another FDR, America was instead led by a foreign policy neophyte, whose world view was simplistic and uninformed, and whose initial bond with his first National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was forged through their shared love of American football and the realisation during a get-to-know-you session at Kennebunkport that they both spoke in sporting idioms, such as ‘slam dunk’.

Almost 20 years on, after the mistakes of Iraq have been litigated endlessly, the incompetence, the strategic short-sightedness, the blind faith and imperial hubris still beggar belief.

There were the errors of language: the Manichean ‘good versus evil’ frame purloined from the conservative intellectual Samuel Huntington that implied a clash of civilisations between the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic worlds. There was the all-embracing term ‘war on terror’, which instantly made every pound-shop jihadist feel part of a worldwide Holy War and also implied that the conflict would be ceaseless and open-ended. There was the bellicose invective of Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ 2002 State of the Union address targeting Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which suggested his unilateralism had no bounds and which accelerated attempts in Pyongyang and Tehran to develop nuclear weapons.

There were the mortifying lapses in knowledge – as he waded into Mesopotamia, Bush did not even understand the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims, the sectarian line that now divided the Arab world. There was the arrogance of the neo-conservatives pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who believed the second Gulf War would be a ‘cakewalk’. There was the criminal lack of post-war planning and foresight. After being briefed for the first time by Jay Garner, the former general put in charge of the reconstruction effort, all Bush inquired about was whether he came from Florida. Then, after asking no more questions, the president wished him well with a backslapping ‘Kick ass, Jay!’

There was the flawed notion that the Iraq War would curb terrorism, when actually it became a ‘cause celebre for jihadists’, in the words of a US intelligence report, that was ‘shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives’.¹⁹ There was the misplaced messianic belief it was possible to create western-style democracies in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq without an electoral tradition. Covering the first presidential election in Afghanistan brought this home. Stirring though it was to see lines of burqa-clad women queuing up outside the polling stations to use their suffrage for the first time, many of them had been browbeaten into voting for certain candidates by their husbands, who themselves had been browbeaten by local warlords or imams. Afghanistan, like Iraq, was a mess, with the Taliban resurgent. In 2008, the final year of Bush’s presidency, its black-turbaned holy warriors operated still in 33 out of the country’s 34 provinces, and managed to detonate some 7,200 improvised explosive devices (IEDs). That year, 153 US military lost their lives, the most since the Afghan war began. In 2009, fatalities more than doubled to 310.

The situation in Iraq was far worse. The war and its aftermath claimed the lives of 110,600 Iraqis, though many estimates put that number even higher. More than two million Iraqis were forced to flee the country. In addition to the more than 4,000 Americans who lost their lives, 31,952 were wounded in action.

The human cost to the homeland of all those broken bodies and tortured minds is still being tallied. In Afghanistan I saw for myself the fear on the faces of young soldiers who went out on foot patrols knowing they could be ambushed any instant by Taliban snipers; whose convoys of Humvees ventured down tracks regularly booby-trapped with IEDs; who went to surf-and-turf night in the mess hall dressed in their combat helmets and body armour, knowing their steak and lobster dinners could be interrupted by incoming shellfire from insurgents who had learned the dinner tables would be especially crowded those particular evenings.

The US military tried to provide for their troops the comforts of American life, from Seattle-style coffee shops to pizza parlours and burger joints. But this was a bloody war zone. Homecomings could be just as traumatising. Up to a fifth of Iraq War veterans suffered from PTSD. Military suicides started increasing in 2006, and rose to a new record in 2009, when 310 servicemen and women took their own lives, the same number lost in combat that year in Afghanistan. All too frequently we reported on returning servicemen who had either killed themselves or murdered loved ones.

As well as the blood, there was the treasure. The cost of the Iraq War to American taxpayers has been estimated to be between $1.5 trillion and $3 trillion. Books balanced when George W. Bush entered the White House now were drenched in red ink. By 2005, America was borrowing $2 billion a day from abroad.²⁰ The final budget of the Bush presidency showed a deficit of $1.4 trillion, with the military now accounting for 20 per cent of government spending, or more than 5 per cent of GDP.²¹ With America in need of a credit line, China, its geopolitical rival, would come to hold $1 trillion of US debt.

The opportunity cost was incalculable. Dollars allotted to nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq – the Pentagon banished that term, but constructed roads, schools and communications systems nonetheless – could have been spent on nation-building at home. The social-security system might have been refinanced. America’s decrepit electricity grid, revealed to be so fragile during the north-east blackout of 2003, which many of us in New York that day feared was the start of a second wave of terror strikes, was in chronic need of repair. Bridges were collapsing – a report in 2019 found that 47,000 were structurally deficient, including the Brooklyn Bridge – and roads crumbling. In the ’50s, the entire US interstate highway system had cost the equivalent of $540 billion to build, a third of what was spent in Iraq.²² It was not just the debt burden of the Iraq War that ended up having such dire economic consequences. The soaring price of oil, which went from $20 a barrel to $140, ignited a financial chain reaction. With the United States forced to pay so much more for oil, the Federal Reserve had to cut interest rates to guard against an ‘oil shock’ recession. Awash with so much cheap money, the housing bubble became even more dangerously inflated. Soaring petrol prices were a body blow to the US auto industry. Consumers stopped buying sports utility vehicles, the gas-guzzling SUVs that clogged suburbia but kept Detroit solvent.

The diplomatic cost is well chronicled. 9/11 had presented the opportunity to revive US global leadership, as America became the recipient of a torrent of ‘nous sommes tous Américains’ goodwill. In prosecuting the war on terror, however, the Bush administration opted for extreme unilateralism. The Bush doctrine came to be based on a crude loyalty test: if countries were not with the United States, slavishly and unquestionably, they were, by definition, against it. Close allies such as France, whose then president, Jacques Chirac, had been the first international leader to visit Ground Zero, were pilloried when they refused to support the Iraq War. Even Air Force One served ‘Freedom Fries’ rather than French fries, aping The Simpsons-inspired ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ jingoism of the New York tabloids.

While close allies were shunned, Vladimir Putin, a leader deemed to be in the ‘with us’ camp, was granted carte blanche to conduct his own brutal war on terror in Chechnya. The White House also averted its gaze as Putin – whose soul had been peered into by the president and given a clean bill of moral health – started reversing Russia’s democratic reforms and consolidating his authoritarian power.

A president who entered office promising a strong but humble foreign policy flouted the international norms and institutions created and enforced by America after the war. Bush bypassed the United Nations Security Council when it refused to pass a resolution authorising the war in Iraq. He violated the Geneva Conventions by subjecting ‘enemy combatants’ to various forms of torture, including waterboarding. Top-secret CIA black sites, used to interrogate enemy combatants, dotted the world. America was acting, in the words of the historian Michael Burleigh, ‘like a rogue state under the flag of high principles’.²³

None of this troubled Bush or Dick Cheney, who now acted more like a co-president. ‘The only legitimacy we really need comes on the back of an M1A1 tank,’ the vice-president affirmed during an internal White House debate over Iraq.²⁴ Raw power, however, was not the same as authoritative power. Other than the most unquestioning allies, Tony Blair, who was dubbed ‘Bush’s poodle’, and John Howard, who described Australia as the US ‘deputy’ of the Asia-Pacific (Bush later promoted it to ‘sheriff’), few countries were saying ‘nous sommes tous Américains’ any more.

To America’s international reputation the collateral damage was immense, whether it was incurred by the grotesquery of Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were tortured, raped, sodomised and humiliated, and which the Vatican described as ‘a more serious blow to the United States than September 11th’, or the Haditha massacre, when a group of US marines shot dead 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in November 2005, a modern-day Mai Lai, the horrific mass murder during the Vietnam War.²⁵ For millions of international onlookers, and especially those in the Muslim world, the watchtowers and orange jumpsuits of Guantánamo Bay became as much a symbol of post-9/11 America as the Statue of Liberty.

What was most surprising perhaps was how little 9/11 directly changed the everyday lives of Americans themselves. After the decadence of the ’80s, the irrational exuberance of the ’90s, the frivolity of impeachment and the smugness of the millennial celebrations, it seemed inevitable that the shock of 9/11 would end what the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called its ‘holiday from history’.²⁶

But for all Bush’s rhetorical efforts to imbue the country with a sense of national purpose similar in scope and ambition to the Cold War, there ended up being a gaping discrepancy between the seriousness of the moment and the demands made of the American people by the president. New security measures brought some mild inconveniences – Americans had to queue for longer when they took a flight, making some travellers more afraid of airports than of flying. The Patriot Act curtailed certain civil liberties, not that it generated much concern or outrage.

In the main, however, Americans were not asked to make many sacrifices. There was no repeat of Kennedy’s famed Cold War admonition: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’ Rather, Bush successfully pushed for another multi-billion tax cut, the second of his two-year presidency, even as the bills from Iraq and Afghanistan started to mount.

When Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, raised concerns about enacting a $350 billion tax cut in the midst of a costly war, he was fired. ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,’ O’Neill was told by Dick Cheney in late 2002,²⁷ a comment that spoke of the obsession with tax cuts and durability of the cult of Reagan.

Over the next ten years, the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 took $3.2 trillion out of the economy, which is partly why Barack Obama took office facing an annual $1 trillion deficit. As a result, between 2001 and 2010 the national debt saw its biggest decade rise in US history. Moreover, these tax cuts aggravated the problem of income inequality. Up to 45 per cent of the 2001 tax cuts went to the top 1 per cent.²⁸

Even as Bush expanded and extended his war on terror, conscription was never seriously considered – although the Harlem congressman Charles Rangel introduced a call-up bill to make the political point that black boys from poor neighbourhoods would be doing much of the fighting. Though far too many Purple Heart families were created by the post-9/11 wars, less than half of 1 per cent of Americans experienced active duty in the decade after the attacks.²⁹ Army recruitment actually fell by late 2005 to its lowest levels in 25 years, because new recruits understandably were deterred by the bloodshed in Iraq.

The Pentagon was forced to offer cash inducements and the fast- tracking of citizenship for immigrants prepared to sign up. There was an increase, too, in the number of moral waivers granted to convicted felons, which often meant it was easier to fight in Iraq than to vote to select the next commander-in-chief.

Such was the myopic focus on counter-terrorism that other pressing problems were neglected or made worse. This was true of the national debt crisis, climate change (which, in any case, the Bush administration showed little interest in combating) and the response to the workplace revolution wrought by information technology. Other problems, such as the mass-shooting epidemic, Bush actively made worse, in this instance by allowing the ban on assault weapons to lapse in 2004. The 1994 law brought in by the Clinton administration, which had contributed to a drop in gun fatalities, banned the military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a weapon the NRA promoted as ‘America’s rifle’ that was used with such murderous effect at Aurora, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and Parkland, among other mass shootings.

After a brief remission, which did not even last until the first anniversary of September 11, it was extraordinary how quickly normalcy returned to American life. And normalcy meant polarisation. The experience of the Texan bluegrass band the Dixie Chicks served as a post-9/11 parable. In January 2003, the group had performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Then in March, during an appearance in London, the band’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, dared to criticise George W. Bush over Iraq. ‘We do not condone this war,’ she said, to cheers from her British audience. ‘And we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.’ Within weeks, the Dixie Chicks faced a boycott, with their songs removed from the playlists of country and western radio stations. In blue America, they became folk heroes. In red America, they were persona non grata. The Bush administration’s ‘for us or against us’ doctrine now permeated almost every aspect of national life.

After five manic years covering the presidencies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in late 2003 I left America, but not the 9/11 beat. I headed to South Asia to cover the war on terror from the sharp end, that tip of the spear in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Just before I headed to the departure lounge, however, there was one final American curio to report on: the gubernatorial race in California, which ended with another movie star occupying the Governor’s Mansion.

The rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger did not offer a frame-by-frame preview of Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency. For a start, ‘The Governator’ was a moderate Republican: a champion of climate change who was sympathetic towards Mexican immigrants. Yet he, too, benefited from the fusion of politics and celebrity, and from a voter revolt against the establishment.

In this instance, it was the Democratic Governor Gray Davis, a bland, identikit career politician who suffered the rare humiliation of being recalled, a provision under Californian state law that allowed voters to unseat unpopular governors midway through their term, following a petition of angry citizens. The movie star made himself the face of the recall, after he announced his intention to run on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Just as Trump claimed only a businessman could mend Washington, so Schwarzenegger sold the idea it would take an action hero to save Sacramento.³⁰

With Iraq in such a mess, and Osama bin Laden still at large, I flew out of a country facing still the gravest of national challenges. Once again, however, politics seemed frivolous and unserious.

I watched America Decides 2004 from Islamabad, having travelled there in the expectation that Osama bin Laden would make a last-minute intervention in the election. This the Al Qaeda leader duly did four days before polling day by releasing a 15-minute video, delivered to the nearby Al Jazeera bureau in the Pakistani capital, which mocked George W. Bush for continuing to read The Pet Goat to schoolchildren, even after the Twin Towers were aflame. Rather than damage the president, it produced a late surge in his favour that may well have lifted him to victory.

By turning his 500,000-vote deficit from the 2000 election into a two million-vote plurality, Bush became the first presidential candidate since his father to poll more than 50 per cent. His winning margin, though, was slim: the narrowest, at just 2.4 per cent, of any incumbent in history. Had 60,000 votes shifted in Ohio, the Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, whose initials were also JFK, would have become president. When voter irregularities were uncovered in Ohio, the GOP was accused of stealing the election. For a second time, Bush’s legitimacy was brought into question.³¹ Again, the Democrats found it hard to accept they had truly lost.

Monitoring all this from South Asia was easier than expected, partly because the recreation halls of US bases in Afghanistan piped in Fox News and other cable channels from home, but also because so much of the 2004 campaign played out online. The unexpected rise of the early Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean, a little-known doctor from Vermont who successfully harnessed mounting anti-war sentiment among Democrats, was an internet phenomenon. It showed that in the hands of an insurgent like Dean, who raised money online and also built a nationwide virtual network, the web was something of a magic carpet.

What the internet maketh, however, the internet could just as easily taketh away. The ‘Dean scream’, that primeval howl disgorged after he trailed a disappointing third in the Iowa Caucus, became the world’s first political meme, a viral sensation on the new video-sharing website YouTube. For Dean, death came by a million views.

During the general election campaign later in the year, the Democratic nominee John Kerry also fell victim to the malignancy of the web, when a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth slandered his service in the Vietnam War by claiming, speciously, that he had made exaggerated claims about his bravery. His ‘swiftboating’ introduced a new neologism into the political lexicon, shorthand for a smear campaign based on mistruths. It also illustrated how efficiently the internet could propagate defamatory disinformation.

On television spots for their original attack ad, Kerry’s accusers spent just $500,000, chump change in the midst of what became the first billion-dollar presidential campaign. Then, free of charge, they watched their ad light up the web. Soon the Swift Boat Veterans website was receiving more traffic than the John Kerry home page, crashing its servers.

Republicans were especially quick to grasp the potential of this new medium in marrying data acquisition and traditional canvassing techniques. This allowed for customised messaging targeting individuals – the hacking, in effect, of voters based on invading their privacy and both mirroring and altering their behaviour. Though only in its infancy, the internet was already upending politics at breakneck speed and in ways we didn’t fully comprehend.

During the campaign, Bush pursued his 51 per cent strategy, after heeding advice from his pollster Matthew Dowd, who had been struck by the vanishing middle in presidential elections. ‘It’s about motivation rather than persuasion,’ Dowd told Karl Rove. ‘We maximise the number of Republicans on Election Day and we win.’³²

Bush therefore moved to the right, and mobilised the conservative base by speaking out strongly against gay marriage in his 2004 State of the Union address. Afterwards, he endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. True to his 51 per cent strategy, Rove fought an aggressive ground war, building an organi­sation of 1.4 million volunteers to boost conservative turnout. The Democrats, by contrast, could only muster 233,000 helpers.³³ Bush won by 52 per cent of the vote.

Close though the nationwide result was, the election saw more than a thousand local landslides. Either Bush or Kerry carried a majority of the nation’s 3,153 counties by a margin of at least 20 per cent. ‘Never before in modern times,’ noted The Washington Times, ‘has so competitive a national election been the sum of so many uncompetitive parts.’³⁴ Since 1976, the number of these so-called landslide counties had doubled, proof that like-minded Americans were not just attending the same churches and clubs, but making their homes in like-minded communities.³⁵

The Democrats were clustering in the cities and suburbs. Republicans were congregating in rural areas and the ‘exurbs’, neighbourhoods beyond the suburbs in the countryside. The ‘Big Sort’ was how the political scientist Jim Bishop described this herd-like migration. ‘What had happened over three decades wasn’t a simple increase in political partisanship,’ he wrote, ‘but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division.’³⁶

Political allegiance could now be predicted not just by whether a voter shopped at Walmart or Wholefoods, listened to National Public Radio or Rush Limbaugh, drank Chardonnay or Coors Light or drove a pick-up truck or a Prius, but also by their postcode. And though the country looked more homogeneous, with its soulless strip malls and ubiquitous Starbucks, Home Depots and Toyota dealerships, the Big Sort was creating two parallel Americas.

As the century progressed, these tribal groups became more ideologically unswerving, with liberals and conservatives embracing liberal and conservative views across a range of issues. Also they became ever more suspicious of each other and antagonistic. ‘The Left believes right-wing tribalism – bigotry, racism – is tearing the country apart,’ noted the Yale academic Amy Chua. ‘The Right believes that left-wing tribalism – identity politics, political correctness – is tearing the country apart.’³⁷ America was experiencing a political segregation.

The process of gerrymandering, where electoral boundaries were manipulated to favour one party, became an accelerant of polarisation because it increased the number of uncompetitive seats in the House of Representatives. Assured of victory in the general election, incumbents adopted more doggedly partisan positions to guard against a primary challenge from more extreme members of their own party. Moderates who reached across the aisle to forge bipartisan compromise became especially vulnerable, which depleted the already dwindling ranks of pragmatists on Capitol Hill. Gerrymandering was not the primary cause of polarisation, but its effect was to reinforce political tribalism, especially when overlaid with the self-gerrymandering effect of the Big Sort.

Still there were blue states with Republican governors, such as California, New York and Massachusetts, and red states, such as Oklahoma and Montana, run by Democrats, but the 2004 election underscored the trend-lines of recent campaigns: blue states were becoming bluer; red states were becoming redder. The south was becoming more Republican, with Lincoln’s Grand Old Party picking up five Senate seats in the states of the Old Confederacy, and leaving Mary Landrieu of Louisiana as the Democrats’ sole Deep South senator. The new Congress also reflected this divisiveness. According to Congressional Quarterly, 2005 was the most partisan year on Capitol Hill since it had started taking a measure.³⁸

For all the talk in 2004 of the rise of a digital democracy, one of the year’s most portentous political developments came on television and did not involve a politician. For a season finale of his hit show Survivor: Marquesas, the TV producer Mark Burnett hired the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park, which Donald Trump had renovated in the ’80s. Seeing the tycoon in action, Burnett had the idea of making him the frontman in a new format.

The challenge – and, remarkably, it did require persuasion – was getting Trump to sign up. Reality television was ‘for the bottom-feeders of society’, the tycoon had sneered. His agent – who, fittingly enough, was fired not long afterwards – warned him against doing it. After meeting in Trump Tower, though, the two men shook hands on a deal. Originally, Trump’s screen-time would be limited to a brief cameo at the end of each episode. Then, in future seasons, other celebrity entrepreneurs, such as Richard Branson and Martha Stewart, would supersede him. When executives at NBC watched the rushes from Trump’s first boardroom scene, however, they realised he, rather than the contestants, should be the star.³⁹

Back in Washington, season two of the Bush administration featured a re-emboldened president claiming an emphatic mandate. Along with the White House, the Republicans controlled the Senate, the House and a majority of governorships. The talk again was of that great white whale of American politics, the permanent Republican majority.

‘The people made it clear what they wanted,’ Bush declared in his first post-election press conference. ‘I earned capital in the campaign, political campaign, and I intend to spend it.’

Remodelling social security through partial privatisation became his top domestic priority. This proved to be the first mistake of his error-strewn second term. The harder Bush tried to sell his reform proposals, the more public and congressional support dwindled. By the summer, Bush’s plan was flat-lining. After Hurricane Katrina came ashore in August, and caused the flooding that marooned his presidency, it never stood any hope of resuscitation.

That summer the nation’s attention, if not initially the president’s, was on New Orleans, where the same fatal incompetence that beset the post-war effort in Iraq pervaded the federal disaster response along the battered Gulf Coast. With military helicopters buzzing overhead and columns of Humvees barrelling through the putrid floodwater, the Big Easy became a Baghdad on the Bayou. America’s commander-in-chief, however, was AWOL.

When the storm made landfall, Bush was at his Texan ranch on the 27th day of his summer vacation. Then, he flew to sunny San Diego for a few days rather than the Gulf shore. Still in holiday mode, he did not even turn on his television to see the same jolting footage that had horrified the country: of residents stranded on rooftops pleading for help and of the hellish scenes inside the Louisiana Superdome, which was now a lawless thunderdome.

Not until aides compiled a video splicing together these distressing images did Bush begin to get a sense of the horror unfolding on his watch. En route to Washington, Air Force One flew over the devastated area, a change in flight path intended to evidence concern. Instead, the photographs of him taken on board peering through a plane window at the devastation down below underscored his physical and emotional detachment.

Bush’s belated visit to the flood zone turned into an even bigger PR disaster when he praised the hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown with the immortal words, ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.’ Thus, he added disaster relief to the lengthening list of functions the US government used to perform competently but now made a hash of. The Republican critique about the ineffectiveness of government had been authenticated by a Republican administration.

The Bush White House tried to shift the blame onto the Demo­cratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana, which meant partisan point-scoring impeded the relief effort. Calls to the West Wing from Governor Kathleen Blanco went unanswered, she later complained, so she could be scapegoated. Partly in retaliation, Blanco resisted Bush’s attempts to federalise the National Guard. ‘I’ve got thousands of people here in the trenches,’ Blanco told Bush in an angry phone call, ‘while you play politics.’⁴⁰ A total of 1,836 people ended up losing their lives.

Hurricane Katrina revealed how the disaster in Iraq had knock-on effects at home. In an early teleconference with FEMA officials, Bush displayed his customary lack of curiosity by failing to ask any questions. Then, he hurried off to prepare for a speech to the nation on Iraq, his overriding priority.⁴¹ The problem, as Michael Brown testified afterwards to Congress, was that Katrina was a natural disaster rather than a terror strike. This made it harder to mobilise a federal government fixated by 9/11.

Whether it was Katrina, Iraq or his failure to elevate a Bush loyalist, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, the president looked powerless. All the political capital accrued through his re-election was now rendered worthless. Less than a year into his second term, he had lost control of his presidency. At the midterm congressional elections the following year, Bush attempted once more to portray his opponents as soft on the war on terror by labelling them the party of ‘cut and run’ in Iraq. In what was the bloodiest year of the conflict so far, this played into the Democrats’ hands by turning the election into a referendum on his wartime leadership. The GOP lost both the House and Senate, and Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker in the country’s history. The permanent Republican majority had swum off again into the deep.

When the new Congress convened, Bush eyed immigration reform as an area of possible cross-party consensus. Therefore he pushed the biggest overhaul of immigration in 20 years, bolstering border security while at the same time offering the chance of legal status to the 12 million undocumented immigrants. Yet the politics and economics of immigration had changed. Automation meant the business lobby, the most pro-immigrant constituency within the conservative movement, no longer needed so much cheap labour. After the end of the Cold War, taking in refugees from ideological combat zones such as Vietnam and Cuba was no longer such a moral imperative.

The attacks of September 11 heightened suspicions of immigrants, while the influx of unauthorised Hispanics over the southern border aroused nativist concerns and emboldened Republican restrictionists. Right-wing talk-show hosts, who did so much to shape the debate, immediately called Bush’s immigration plan, and the path it offered to citizenship, a ‘shamnesty’. ‘We will not surrender America!’ became the talk-show rallying cry.

Washington politics, and the dearth of bipartisan goodwill, played a part in killing off Bush’s proposals. Democrats, including the freshman Senator Barack Obama, paid lip service to reform but loaded the White House bill with amendments they knew would destroy it. With only 12 of the 49 Republican senators supporting the president, it was defeated. Bush could have done more to pressure Republican lawmakers into backing reform, but shied away from confronting the right wing of his party. Conservative moderation had suffered another crushing defeat. Hopes the GOP could become a more racially plural party were dashed. Bush and Karl Rove’s multiracial coalition of the godly would never come to fruition.

With the failure of compassionate conservatism and the discre­diting of neo-conservatism, the muscular and militaristic strain of thought that propelled America into Iraq, the Republican Party faced an intellectual crisis, not that it saw it as such. The thought vacuum came to be filled by what might be called the loudmouth right: talk-shown hosts such as Rush Limbaugh; anchors on Fox News, like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; polemicists such as Ann Coulter, the author of How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) and Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn our Country into a Third World Hellhole; and online agitators such as Andrew Breitbart, the founder in 2007 of Breitbart News, and Steve Bannon, his alt-right colleague. Ideas were now less important than talking points and articles of faith. Winning whatever was the cultural battle of the hour was paramount. The more extreme the commentary, the more money it made, which prompted the conservative intellectual David Brooks to opine: ‘Conservatism went downmarket in search of revenue.’⁴² All of these thought leaders, the new profit-driven prophets of the right, led the conservative movement further down the nativist and populist path.

For millions of Americans, the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 had a more immediate and lasting impact than the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In some ways, the psychological wreckage was more devastating. Ten million people lost their homes. Unemployment hit double figures, and did not fall below 8 per cent until 2012. Three years after the crash, US house prices were still a third below their peak, and a quarter of homeowners languished in negative equity.⁴³ Many Americans felt like castaways in a global economy they found increasingly hard to fathom, let alone navigate and prosper from. Just as 9/11 undermined faith in the country’s national security, so the financial collapse shattered confidence in its economic security. Twin emotions of fear and desperation were there waiting to be exploited.

This was an especially biting recession, the worst since the Great Depression. Those thrown out of work found it harder to re-enter the labour market. From World War II until 1991, it had ordinarily taken eight months for employment levels to return to their old peak after the trough of a recession. After 1991, it took 38 months, according to Raghuram Rajan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. Following the Great Recession, it was expected to take five years or more.⁴⁴

In an increasingly automated economy, the downturn provided an excuse for firms to replace workers with robots. Businesses restructured their operations to make them less reliant on human beings. Many Americans found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, exposed to competition from low-wage unskilled workers abroad and also, for the first time, from low-wage high-skilled workers.

Before the recession, the construction industry absorbed a lot of unskilled labour. The housing crash wiped out those jobs. In an economy configured around highly skilled workers and those with very few skills at all, the MIT economist David Autor identified what he called the missing middle. Inexorably, employment polarisation fuelled income segregation. Between 1999 and 2007, income for the top 1 per cent grew by 275 per cent. For the bottom fifth it was a measly 18 per cent.⁴⁵

America’s post-9/11 climate of fear also acted as a brake on recovery. Because of visa restrictions brought in to combat terrorism, it became harder for international students to remain in America after completing their studies, depriving Silicon Valley of some of the finest foreign brains. In a century when America could only hope to maintain its dominance through innovation, creativity and brainpower, visa clampdowns blocked high-end talent. Anxieties about allowing another Mohamed Atta, a ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, into the country made it more difficult, as the commentator Fareed Zakaria observed, for the next Steve Jobs, the son of a Syrian refugee, to make a new life in America.

When the economy did start to recover, the growth was unevenly spread geographically. After the Great Recession, half of new business creation occurred in just 20 counties. Three-quarters of the venture capital went to just three states – California, Massachusetts and New York – all of them reliably Democratic. Just 31 of the country’s 3,000-plus counties came to account for a third of GDP. ‘It’s now clear that geographic inequality is creating another 1 per cent problem,’ wrote the journalist Alan Greenblatt, an inequality that could be mapped and which matched the growing political red/blue split.⁴⁶

The missing middle. Job polarisation. A rural-metropolitan divide. The language of economics now mirrored the language of politics. This was no coincidence, for the two were symbiotic. Since the mid-’70s, the widening partisan divide tracked closely with the expanding income divide. Healthy democracies have always relied on a prosperous middle class. Democratic decay was partly a consequence of this economic hollowing out. America’s broken politics was tied to America’s broken economy.

The Bush administration, like the Federal Reserve, had been slow to see the financial crash coming. When the Treasury Secretary, Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson, belatedly realised Wall Street was on the verge of a full-blown financial meltdown, he started bailing out the most vulnerable institutions. First, in the spring of 2008, the federal government rescued the investment bank Bear Stearns, which was taken over by JPMorgan Chase. Then in September, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the country’s biggest mortgage lenders, were saved from bankruptcy through the largest federal intervention in business since the Great Depression.

When Lehman Brothers faced bankruptcy, however, Paulson refused to intervene, a decision some on Wall Street put down to the firm’s longstanding rivalry with his former employer, Goldman Sachs (although the Treasury Secretary claimed that, unlike Bear Stearns, a buyer could not be found). The Bush administration surmised that the 158-year-old investment bank was not too big to let fail, and that the financial fallout could be contained. This was Paulson’s fateful blunder. The fall of Lehman Brothers triggered panic around the world.

In handling the financial crisis, President Bush was torn. A drum major for free enterprise and a self-professed Reaganite, he was ideologically averse to government intervention. His instinct, therefore, was to let financial institutions fail. If the federal government continually rode to the rescue, moreover, moral hazard would cease to exist. His overriding fear, however, was of the total collapse of the US financial system: not so much a domino effect on Wall Street as a catastrophic house of cards. Besides, with an eye on history, he preferred to be seen as a modern-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than Herbert Hoover, the Republican president at the onset of the Great Depression. ‘I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system,’ pleaded the president in his defence, not that the argument cut much ice with the Republican right.

For hard-line conservatives, the bailouts were a betrayal. When Paulson proposed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP as it became known, not even Dick Cheney could sell it to a sceptical Republican Caucus. In a House vote, 113 Republicans voted against – compared with 65 in favour – which condemned it to defeat. Two days later, with the country on the verge of a financial abyss, 24 Republicans agreed to set aside their reservations to back the president. Still, it needed the support of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and her fellow Democrats for it to pass.

Even when US capitalism faced its doomsday scenario, Republican diehards, who venerated the supply-side economics of Milton Friedman, could not bring themselves to embrace a Keynesian, big government solution. Small wonder the official history of the Tea Party movement locates its origin story on 3 October 2008, when Bush signed TARP into law. The president deserves credit for facing down these recalcitrants. ‘Ideology was replaced by pragmatism,’ noted his biographer, Jean Edward Smith, who concluded, justifiably, that 2008 marked his high point as president, even though his approval ratings plummeted to an all-time low, a miserable 26 per cent. Had a more doctrinaire Republican occupied the White House, one who refused to bring the might of the federal government to bear, the US economy could have disappeared down a mammoth sinkhole.

To the victims of the Great Recession, the Bush bailouts were manifestly unjust. As economists such as Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they socialised losses and privatised gains. Even more galling was the news not long afterwards that Wall Street financiers were basking once again in bonus money. Executives at the insurance giant AIG, which had received $85 billion in taxpayer bailout, awarded themselves $165 million in bonuses.

The lack of accountability aggravated the sense of injustice. Prosecutions had followed the collapse of Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, but none of the chief executives who ran companies responsible for the financial crisis was punished. The ‘too big to fail’ philosophy at the US Treasury was matched by a ‘too big to jail’ mentality at the US Justice Department, which extended into the Obama administration. A mid-level banker from Credit Suisse, Kareem Serageldin, became the only Wall Street banker to be criminally prosecuted for fraudulently manipulating bond prices. Much bigger crimes went unpunished.

By the end of his presidency, Bush was so unpopular that he became the first sitting president since Lyndon Johnson not to attend his own party’s convention – ironically, a hurricane led to the cancellation of the first night of the GOP convention in Minneapolis-St Paul, which meant, much to the relief of the McCain campaign, that Bush lost his speaking slot.

A video shown to the Republican faithful about 9/11 made no reference to the president.⁴⁷ Liberals had long derided Bush as a gun-slinging unilateralist, a toxic Texan, an inarticulate dunderhead, a wide-eyed evangelical and a puppet of his deputy. Now, though, he was castigated from within the conservative movement for being too liberal.

Right-wingers viewed his eight years in office as a wasted opportunity. They resented his ‘No Child Left Behind’ education reform, because it expanded the reach of the federal government into classrooms and was passed with the help of Ted Kennedy. His Medicare prescription drugs benefit brought about the biggest expansion of this government entitlement since its foundation in the mid-’60s. His immigration proposals were too bleeding-heart. The bailouts offered undeniable proof he was a ‘big government conservative’.

The younger generation of conservatives making waves on Capitol Hill was especially critical. ‘Republicans controlled Washington from 2001 to 2006,’ complained Eric Cantor, a rising star of the congressional party. ‘They did some good things, but they also did a lot to give conservatism a bad name.’⁴⁸ Kevin McCarthy, another future leader in the House, complained about the Republicans’ failure to ‘rein in spending or even slow the growth of government’.⁴⁹ Just as George H. W. Bush’s moderation spawned Gingrichism, so George W. Bush’s pragmatism fuelled the rise of the Tea Party. As E. J. Dionne has observed: ‘The Bush years are central to understanding why conservatism took such a hard right turn during the Obama years.’⁵⁰

As the Bush administration collapsed, it became fashionable to draw parallels between the decline of George W. Bush’s America and the fall of imperial Rome. A plethora of books appeared likening the president to the emperor Diocletian wrapped in a star-spangled toga. While America fiddled, China caught fire, achieving levels of economic growth without historical precedent. Unlike the Soviet Union, which had the population to challenge America but not the economic system, or Japan, which had the economy but a population of only 120 million, a resurgent Middle Kingdom, with its authoritarian capitalism, possessed both.

Globalisation had hastened its rise. Prior to joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, China had a 4.8 per cent share of manufacturing. By 2010, it was 15.1 per cent, while it had risen again by 2014 to 18.3 per cent. China was on its way to becoming the world’s largest trading nation, a milestone it reached in 2012. Curiously, even the rise of China ended up having a polarising effect on US politics. Republican congressional districts with the most trade exposure to China, found the MIT economist David Autor, were more prone to elect hard-line conservatives. Those in Democratic hands were more likely to elect Democrats from the left of the party.⁵¹

In the summer of 2008, China celebrated its international coming out with an opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics that made the festivities in Los Angeles look like a low budget B-movie with third-rate special effects. George W. Bush flew in to cheer on the American athletes, but his visit inevitably conferred further global approval on a regime with a horrifying human rights record. Team USA ended up with the most medals, but crucially it was China that won the most golds. Less than ten years in, the twenty-first century already looked like becoming the Chinese century. This long dormant giant was experiencing its own summertime of resurgence.

My New York commute to work takes less than 25 minutes, but skirts the broad outlines of almost 250 years of American history. After a short walk through the cobbled streets of Dumbo, I take the ferry that leaves from the wharf under Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering feat that was to the nineteenth century what the moonshot was to the twentieth. Then I cross the mouth of the East River, the swirling waters through which George Washington evacuated some 9,000 men, right under the noses of the British, when the Continental Army was reeling in the aftermath of the Battle of Brooklyn, an escape pivotal to the outcome of the Revolutionary War. On the port side of the ferry is the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French to symbolise freedom and democracy and a beacon of hope for millions of arriving immigrants. On the starboard side, framed by the sturdy stone towers of the bridge, are the skyscrapers of Manhattan, those emblems of New World ambition.

From the ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan, I walk up Wall Street, passing Federal Hall, the site where Washington was inaugurated as America’s first president. Directly across from the general’s bronze statue is the New York Stock Exchange, where the market crashes of 1929 and 2008 spread such panic at home and around the world. The intersection between these two pillared buildings was the starting point for the Hard Hat Riot in 1970, when, days after the Ohio National Guard shot dead four unarmed anti-war protesters on the campus of Kent State University, construction workers beat up the hippies and school students protesting against the war in Vietnam, on the orders of their union bosses.

Across from Wall Street is the cemetery of Trinity Church, where one of the most storied founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, is interred. Then I turn right onto Broadway, with the gothic turrets of the Woolworth Building, which was once the world’s tallest tower, in front of me, and the Art Deco halo of the Chrysler Building shimmering in the far distance. A left takes me into Zuccotti Park, which in 2011 became the tent-strewn home of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Then I walk the final short stretch, to the edge of a busy but quiet plaza scattered usually with people talking in hushed tones. There, two square sunken reflecting pools mark the footprints of the Twin Towers.

Now the skyline of Lower Manhattan has been repaired. A new tower with a spire at its peak, One World Trade Center, soars to 1,776 feet, a bow to the year of the Declaration of Independence. Below ground lies a catacomb-like museum with unexpectedly sculptural exhibits – a wrecked fire truck, a burned-out jet engine, twisted girders, a concrete staircase used by survivors to flee – and the ‘In Memoriam’ tributes to the 2,983 lives lost on 9/11 and in the first attack on the World Trade Center eight years earlier. Inscribed with the names of the dead, the parapets of the sunken pools serve almost as altars. Bereaved relatives come from all over the world to place flowers and small flags, and to voice their quiet prayers. More than 90 countries lost citizens on 9/11.

This place has become a global gathering spot to mourn a changed world. Always there are roses and carnations. Always there is an atmosphere of binding reverence. But it is hard to pass through Ground Zero to my bureau on the far side of the memorial without thinking of the destruction of life and the loss of opportunity. All too fleeting was that rousing moment when American politics was briefly defined by a sense of togetherness. All too quickly it gave way to the destructive emotions of vengefulness and anger so dominant ever since. Even 9/11 did not slow the infernal cycle of disunion. Rather the attacks of September 11 and the financial crash of September 15 eventually made fear the great driver of US politics.