The consequences of deregulation

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis professor emeritus at UC Berkeley.

The deregulation approved by many Democrats as well as Republicans in previous decades resulted in a series of seismic transformations of the life of the United States in the 2010s. The deregulation of the communications industry led to the tribalization of the news media, most prominently in the creation of Fox News as a semi-official propaganda organ of the wealthy, extremely conservative Republicans who rallied around President Donald Trump in 2016. Fox News and its smaller counterparts cemented the loyalties of millions of voters by disseminating a steady stream of deeply misleading and often downright false accounts of virtually every issue being contested in public life. The deregulation of the financial, fossil fuel and other industries had similarly transformative consequences, facilitating economic inequality on a scale unknown for many decades and contributing to global warming on a scale scientists found apocalyptic. President Barack Obama tried to reverse these developments when he first came into office, but it was late in the day, and too many of the leading Democrats refused to support the policies Obama tried to advance. Ultimately, it was the Democratic Party’s failure to use the political and cultural resources available to it to enact and maintain an appropriate regulatory structure as late as the mid-1990s—during the neo-liberal administration of Bill Clinton—that did more than any other single factor to determine the course of American history in the 2010s. Rarely in the history of industrialized societies had a political leadership equipped with such magnificent opportunities squandered them so spectacularly, and thus betrayed the nation of which they were entrusted to be the stewards.

Democracy under siege

Nicole Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.

Bookended on one end by Citizens United and on the other by a president impeached for inviting foreign interference in U.S. elections, the 2010s were the decade of democracy under siege. Red states instituted strict voter ID laws and purged their voter rolls, while the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Super PACs fueled dark-money politics. State-house Republicans stripped power from their rivals, and congressional Republicans broke every institutional norm in an attempt to thwart a popular Democratic president. And social media, which techno-optimists hailed as a force of democratization at the start of the decade, ended the 2010s as a dystopian hellscape crawling with wannabe Nazis and disinformation campaigns. It was also a decade of grassroots pro-democracy movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Moral Mondays to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March to March for Our Lives, reminders that some Americans were resisting democratic decline.



Many Americans found scapegoats

Eric Rauchway is a history professor at University of California, Davis.

Over the decade of the 2010s the United States, like countries around the world, recovered from the 2008 financial crisis but slowly, which aided the rise of right-wing movements. The weak stimulus policies enacted at the worst of the slump prevented a catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression. But cries for austerity and retrenchment prevented a speedy return to prosperity. As months of joblessness turned into years, arguments blaming immigrants, foreigners and international bankers (generally a thin euphemism for "Jews") gained greater support than they had since the years between the world wars. Erudite arguments erupted over whether adherents of such beliefs qualified fully as fascists, or merely as authoritarian opponents of democracy, while their principal proponents won and kept office, weakening the alliances and institutions entrusted since 1945 with keeping the peace.



We saw how our democracy would end

Elizabeth Borgwardt is associate professor of history and law at Washington University in St Louis.

2010-20 was the decade when we saw how our democracy would end. In 1989, over 100 million people around the world listened as composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein celebrated the opening of the Berlin Wall, by leading East and West Germans in an emotional rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The maestro said he liked the idea of using music and culture to tear down walls in people’s hearts. The Soviet Union soon disintegrated, but by the end of the 2010s it had become clear that the U.S. had become more like Russia, rather than the other way around. Spiking inequality, fearmongering about immigrants and the dissemination of fake news were the building blocks of these new walls.

In Brazil, Hungary, Israel, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Turkey, Russia and the United States, among other places, indicia of democratic decline included attacks on journalists and media outlets, a withering of support for multilateral institutions, attacks on immigrants and asylum seekers, restrictions on an independent judiciary, squeezing out the integrity of the electoral process, systematic defunding of development assistance and higher education, and a similar squeezing out of domestic norms supporting pluralism and tolerance. Democracy in America did not end with Trumpism, of course. But younger, smarter politicians such as Josh Hawley were taking notes even then, and as of 2020 the writing was already on that initial slice of border wall: The 2010s were when a demagogue willing to promote division, disfranchisement, and corruption first dealt himself a winning hand.

Groundwork for a Constitutional revision

Jack Rakove is a professor of history and political science, emeritus, at Stanford University. The decade of the 2010s placed the American constitutional system under the greatest stress it had known since the New Deal crisis of the 1930s. President Donald Trump demonstrated that he felt none of the “veneration” (to quote James Madison’s 49th Federalist paper) required to sustain the norms of constitutional governance. Worse still, however, was the behavior of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Under Republican control, the Senate blithely ignored the well-documented charges under which the House of Representatives had impeached Trump. For its part, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court fulfilled its long-frustrated agenda: In two leading decisions in June 2020, it gutted the Affordable Care Act and authorized individual states to impose severe limits on the right to choice secured in the 1974 decision in Roe v. Wade.

The events of the 2010s thus set the stage for the Great Constitutional Revision of 2024. Although Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, Republicans held on to the Senate and the Supreme Court retained its conservative majority. With the national government in a state of near paralysis, a coalition of blue states coalesced to demand a constitutional convention. A phalanx of 18 solidly red states, representing less than a fifth of the nation’s population, quickly rejected this proposal, keeping it two states shy of the two-thirds margin that Article V of the Constitution required. Invoking the precedent set in 1787, when the first Constitutional Convention threw out the amendment rules laid down in the Articles of Confederation, the blue states insisted that the meeting must be held. Rather than side with the smaller bloc of solidly red states, the now hotly contested states of Texas and Florida sent delegations to the Chicago convention. The dominant theme of the Convention was to make constitutional decision-making directly responsive to the one person, one vote standard. That was also how votes were allocated in the Convention itself. The resulting deliberations led to a radically revised Constitution. Among other changes, the president would now be elected by a single nation-wide popular vote. The House of Representatives was enlarged to 600 members, with all its districts designed by an AI process to be as competitive as possible. The Senate became an advisory body that could no longer vote down legislation enacted by the House, and senators were now elected on a regional basis, rather than by individual states. The Supreme Court was enlarged to 15 justices, who would serve 18-year terms on a staggered basis. When the bloc of small red states balked at ratifying the results, they were told they could form their own separate confederacy. A few months of considering how costly it would be to sustain their states government without the financial support of the far more economically productive blue states quickly led them to abandon their position.

Trump’s one inadvertent contribution to American history was to make these changes possible.