APUSH Chapter 31/32

Neo-Conservatives

A second element of the Reagan coalition was even smaller, but also disproportionately influential: a group of intellectuals commonly known as "neo-conservatives," a firm base among "opinion leaders." Some of these people had once been liberals and, before that, socialists. But during the turmoil of the 1960s, they had become alarmed by what they considered to be the dangerous and destructive radicalism that they believed was destabilizing American life. Neo-conservatives were sympathetic to the demands of capitalists, but their principal concern was to reaffirm Western democratic, anticommunist values and commitments. Some neo-conservative intellectuals went on to become important figures in the battle against multiculturalism and "political correctness" within academia.

Ronald Reagan

Another factor in the revival of the right was the emergence of a credible right-wing leadership to replace the defeated conservative hero, Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan, a well-known film actor turned political activist, became the hope of the right. As a young man, he had been a liberal and a fervent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt. But he moved decisively to the right after his second marriage, to Nancy Davis, a woman of strong conservative convictions, and after he became embroiled, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, in battles with communists in the union. In the early 1950s, Reagan became a corporate spokesman for General Electric and won a wide following on the right with powerful speeches in defense of individual freedom and private enterprise. In 1964, Reagan delivered a memorable television speech on behalf of Goldwater. After Goldwater's defeat, he worked quickly to seize the leadership of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In 1966, with the support of a group of wealthy conservatives, Reagan won the first of two terms as governor of California. The presidency of Gerald Ford also played an important role in the rise of the right, by destroying the fragile equilibrium that had enabled the right wing and the moderate wing of the Republican Party to coexist. Ford touched on some of the right's rawest nerves. He appointed as vice president Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican governor of New York and an heir to one of America's great fortunes. This appointment was offensive to many conservatives. Ford proposed an amnesty program for draft resisters, embraced and even extended the Nixon-Kissinger policies of détente, presided over the fall of Vietnam, and agreed to cede the Panama Canal to Panama. When Reagan challenged Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries, the president survived, barely, only by dropping Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket and agreeing to a platform largely written by one of Reagan's allies.

Budget Surpluses

Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president to win two terms as president since Franklin Roosevelt. He still faced a hostile Republican Congress. He proposed a modest domestic agenda, consisting of tax cuts and tax credits targeted at middle-class Americans to help them educate their children. He also negotiated effectively with the Republican leadership on a plan for a balanced budget, which passed late in 1997. By the end of 1998, the federal budget was generating its first surplus in thirty years.

Bush Tax Cuts

Bush's principal campaign promise had been that he would use the predicted budget surplus to finance a massive tax reduction. He narrowly won passage of the largest tax cut in American history-$1.35 trillion over several years. Having campaigned as a moderate adept at building coalitions across party lines, Bush governed as a staunch conservative, relying on one of the most orthodox members of his own party for support. The president's political adviser, Karl Rove, encouraged the administration to take increasingly conservative positions. Bush appealed to the gun lobby by refusing to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban that Clinton had enacted. He proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The Bush administration was part of a broad and successful effort to mobilize evangelical Christians as an active part of the Republican coalition. But almost from the beginning, the aftermath of the September 11 attacks dominated both Bush's presidency and the nation's politics.

Evangelical Christianity

But the most important impulse of the religious revival was the growth of evangelical Christianity. Evangelicalism is the basis of many forms of Christian faith, but evangelicals have in common a belief in personal conversion (being "born again") through direct communication with God. Evangelical religion had been the dominant form of Christianity in America through much of its history, and a substantial subculture since the late nineteenth century. In its modern form, it became increasingly visible during the early 1950s, when evangelicals such as Billy Graham and Pentecostals such as Oral Roberts began to attract huge national (and international) followings for their energetic revivalism. By the 1970s, more than 70 million Americans described themselves as "born-again" Christians-men and women who had established a "direct personal relationship with Jesus." Christian evangelicals owned their own newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television networks, and later Internet-based forms of communication. They operated their own schools and universities. For some evangelicals, Christianity formed the basis for a commitment to racial and economic justice and to world peace. For many other evangelicals, the message of the new religion was very different-but no less political. They were alarmed by what they considered the spread of immorality and disorder in American life. They feared the growth of feminism and the threat they believed it posed to the traditional family. Particularly alarming to them were Supreme Court decisions eliminating religious observance from schools and, later, the decision guaranteeing women the right to an abortion. Despite the historic antagonism between many evangelical Protestants and the Catholic Church, the growing politicization of religion in the 1970s and beyond brought some former rivals together. Catholics were the first major opponents of the Supreme Court's decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, but evangelical Protestants soon joined them in the battle. The rapidly growing Mormon Church, long isolated from both Catholics and traditional Protestants, also became increasingly engaged with the political struggles of other faiths. Mormons were instrumental in the 1982 defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would have guaranteed women the same rights as men. And they too supported the evangelical agenda of opposition to abortion and homosexuality.

1990 Recession

But the most serious domestic problem facing the Bush administration was one for which neither the president nor Congress had any answer: a recession that began late in 1990 and slowly increased its grip on the national economy in 1991 and 1992. Because of the enormous level of debt that corporations (and individuals) had accumulated in the 1980s, the recession caused an unusual number of bankruptcies. It also increased fear and frustration among middle- and working-class Americans and put pressure on the government to address such problems as the rising cost of health care.

Technology Industries

Digital technology made possible an enormous range of new products: computers, the Internet, cellular phones, digital music, video, and cameras, personal digital assistants, and many other products. The technology industries created many new jobs and produced new consumer needs and appetites. But they did not create as many jobs as older industrial sectors had. The American economy experienced rapid growth in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The gross national product (the total of goods and services produced by the United States) almost quadrupled in twenty years-from $2.7 trillion in 1980, to over $9.8 trillion in 2000, to $15.7 trillion by 2013. Inflation was low throughout these decades, never rising above 3 percent in any year. Stock prices soared to unprecedented levels, and with few interruptions, from the mid-1980s to the end of the century. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the most common index of stock performance, stood at 1,000 in late 1980. Late in 1999, it passed 11,000, and in November 2013 it peaked at 16,000 for the first time ever. Economic growth was particularly robust in the last years of the 1990s. In 1997 and 1998, annual growth rates reached 5 percent for the first time since the 1960s. Most impressive of all was the longevity of the boom. From 1994 to 2000, the economy recorded growth-at times very substantial growth-in every year, indeed in every quarter, something that had never before happened so continuously in peacetime.

Proposition 13

Equally important to the success of the New Right was a new and potent conservative issue: the tax revolt. It had its public beginnings in 1978, when Howard Jarvis, a conservative activist in California, launched the first successful major citizens' tax revolt in California with Proposition 13, a referendum question on the state ballot rolling back property tax rates. Similar antitax movements soon began in other states and eventually spread to national politics. The tax revolt helped the right solve one of its biggest problems. For more than thirty years after the New Deal, Republican conservatives had struggled to halt and even reverse the growth of the federal government. But attacking government programs directly, as right-wing politicians from Robert Taft to Barry Goldwater discovered, was not often the way to attract majority support. Every federal program had a political constituency. The biggest and most expensive programs-Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and others-had the broadest support.

Economic Progress for African Americans

For the black middle class, which in the first decade of the twenty-first century constituted over half of the African American population of America, progress was remarkable in the decades after the high point of the civil rights movement. African American families moved into more-affluent urban and suburban communities. The percentage of black high-school graduates going on to college was virtually the same as that of white high-school graduates by the early twenty-first century (although a smaller proportion of blacks than whites completed high school). Just over 20 percent of African Americans over the age of twenty-four held bachelor's degrees or higher in 2010, compared to 30 percent of whites, a significant advance from twenty years earlier. And African Americans were making rapid strides in many professions in which only a generation earlier they had been barred or segregated. Over half of all employed blacks in the United States had skilled white-collar jobs in 2010. There were few areas of American life from which blacks were any longer entirely excluded.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev transformed Soviet politics with two dramatic new initiatives. The first he called glasnost (openness): the dismantling of many of the repressive mechanisms that had been conspicuous features of Soviet life for over half a century. The other policy Gorbachev called perestroika (reform): an effort to restructure the rigid and unproductive Soviet economy by introducing such elements of capitalism as private ownership and the profit motive. The severe economic problems at home evidently convinced Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could no longer sustain its extended commitments around the world. As early as 1987, he began reducing Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. And in 1989, in the space of a few months, every communist state in Europe-Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Albania-either overthrew its government or forced it to transform itself into a noncommunist (and, in some cases, actively anticommunist) regime.

Dissolution of the USSR

In 1991, communism began to collapse at the site of its birth: the Soviet Union. An unsuccessful coup by hard-line Soviet leaders on August 19 precipitated a dramatic unraveling of communist power. Within days, the coup itself collapsed in the face of resistance from the public and, more important, crucial elements within the military. Mikhail Gorbachev returned to power, but it soon became evident that the legitimacy of both the Communist Party and the central Soviet government had been fatally injured. By the end of August, many of the republics of the Soviet Union had declared independence; the Soviet government was clearly powerless to stop the fragmentation. Gorbachev resigned as leader of the now virtually powerless Communist Party and Soviet government, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Kosovo

In 1999, the president faced the most serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency, once again in the Balkans. A long-simmering conflict between the Serbian government of Yugoslavia and Kosovo separatists erupted into a savage civil war in 1998. In May 1999, NATO forces-dominated and led by the United States-began a bombing campaign against the Serbians, which after little more than a week led the leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to agree to a cease-fire. Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo. They were replaced by NATO peacekeeping forces. A precarious peace returned to the region. Clinton finished his eight years in office with his popularity higher than it had been when he had taken office. Indeed, public approval of Clinton's presidency-a presidency marked by astonishing prosperity and general world stability-was consistently among the highest of any postwar president, despite the many scandals and setbacks he suffered in the White House.

Attacking Taxes

In Proposition 13 and similar initiatives, members of the right separated the issue of taxes from the issue of what taxes supported. That helped them achieve some of the most controversial elements of the conservative agenda (eroding the government's ability to expand and launch new programs) without openly antagonizing the millions of voters who supported specific programs. Virtually no one liked to pay taxes, and as the economy weakened, that resentment naturally rose. The right exploited that resentment and, in the process, greatly expanded its constituency.

The Iraq War

In his State of the Union address to Congress in January 2002, President Bush spoke of an "axis of evil," which included the nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea-all nations with anti-American regimes, all nations that either possessed or were thought to be trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Although President Bush did not say so at the time, many people around the world interpreted these words to mean that the United States would soon try to topple the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. For over a year after that, the Bush administration slowly built a public case for invading Iraq. Much of that case rested on two claims. One was that Iraq was supporting terrorist groups that were hostile to the United States. The other, and eventually the more important, was that Iraq either had or was developing what came to be known as "weapons of mass destruction," which included nuclear weapons and agents of chemical and biological warfare. Less central to these arguments, at least in the United States, was the charge that the Hussein government was responsible for major violations of human rights. Except for the last, none of these claims turned out to be accurate. In March 2003, American and British troops, with scant support from other countries and partial authorization from the United Nations, invaded Iraq and quickly toppled the Hussein regime. Hussein went into hiding but was eventually captured in December 2003 and executed in 2006. In May 2003, shortly after the American capture of Baghdad, President Bush made a dramatic appearance on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California, where, standing in front of a large sign reading "Mission Accomplished," he declared victory in the Iraq War. In fact, the war in Iraq continued for six more years, during which 3,600 soldiers were killed (out of just over 4,200 in total). Support for the war in the United States steadily declined in the first months of the war, especially when it became clear that the "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out not to exist. Reports of torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers increased the unpopularity of the war. The invasion of Iraq was the most visible evidence of a basic change in the structure of American foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush. Ever since the late 1940s, when the containment policy became the cornerstone of America's role in the world, the United States had worked to maintain stability in the world by containing, but not often directly threatening or attacking, its adversaries. Even after the Cold War ended, the United States continued to demonstrate a reasonable level of constraint, despite its unchallenged military preeminence. In the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for example, American leaders worked closely with the United Nations and NATO to achieve U.S. international goals and usually resisted taking unilateral military action. There had always been those who criticized these constraints. They believed that America should do more than maintain stability, and should move actively to topple undemocratic regimes and destroy potential enemies of the United States. In the administration of George W. Bush, these critics took control of American foreign policy and began to reshape it. The legacy of containment was repudiated. Instead, the public stance of the American government was Bush Foreign Policy that the United States had the right and the responsibility to spread freedom throughout the world-not just by exhortation and example, but also, when necessary, by military force. In Latvia in May 2005, President Bush spoke of the decision at the end of World War II not to challenge Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, a decision that had rested on the belief that such a challenge would lead the United States into another war. The controversial agreement negotiated at Yalta in 1945 by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, which failed to end the Soviet occupation of Poland and other Eastern European nations, was, the president said, part of an "unjust tradition" by which powerful governments sacrificed the interests of small nations. "This attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability," the president continued, "left a continent divided and unstable." The lesson, Bush suggested, was that the United States and other great powers should value stability less and freedom more, and should be willing to take greater risks in the world to end tyranny and oppression.

Al-Qaeda

In the aftermath of September 2001, the United States government launched what President Bush called a "war against terrorism." The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, government intelligence indicated, had been planned and orchestrated by Middle Eastern agents of a powerful terrorist network known as al-Qaeda. Its leader, Osama bin Laden-until 2001 little known outside the Arab world-quickly became one of the most notorious figures in the world. Convinced that the militant "Taliban" government of Afghanistan had sheltered and supported bin Laden and his organization, the United States began a sustained campaign of bombing against the regime and sent in ground troops to help a resistance organization overthrow the Afghan government. Afghanistan's Taliban regime quickly collapsed, and its leaders-along with the al-Qaeda fighters allied with them-fled the capital, Kabul. American and anti-Taliban Afghan troops pursued them into the mountains, but failed to capture bin Laden and the other leaders of his organization. American forces in Afghanistan rounded up several hundred people suspected of connections to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the fighting and eventually moved these prisoners to a facility at the American base in Guantánamo, Cuba. They were among the first suspected terrorists to be handled under the new laws created by the federal government to deal with terrorism after September 11, 2001. The Patriot Act of 2001 was the most important of these new laws. The post-September 11 laws and policies made it possible for suspected terrorists to be held for months, and in many cases years, without access to lawyers, without facing formal charges, subjected to intensive interrogation and torture. They became examples to many critics of the dangers to basic civil liberties they believed the war on terrorism had created. Several Supreme Court rulings, including one in 2008, dismissed the Bush administration's argument that detainees in Guantánamo were outside the reach of American law. But the administration was slow to comply. Before his election in 2008, Barack Obama promised to close the Guantánamo prison, which had become a symbol to many people of unfair treatment. But once in office, Obama found it difficult to keep this promise because of popular opposition to moving prisoners into facilities in the United States.

Deregulation

Men and women whom Reagan appointed fanned out through the executive branch of government, reducing the role of government. Secretary of the Interior James Watt, previously a major figure in the Sagebrush Rebellion, opened up public lands and water to development. The Environmental Protection Agency (before its directors were indicted for corruption) relaxed or entirely eliminated enforcement of many environmental laws and regulations. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department eased enforcement of civil rights laws. The Department of Transportation slowed implementation of new rules limiting automobile emissions and imposing new safety standards on cars and trucks. By getting government "out of the way," Reagan officials promised, they were ensuring economic revival. By early 1982, the nation had sunk into a severe recession. Unemployment reached 11 percent, its highest level in over forty years. But the economy recovered relatively rapidly. By late 1983, unemployment had fallen to 8.2 percent, and it declined steadily for several years after that. The gross national product had grown 3.6 percent in a year, the largest one-year increase since the mid-1970s. Inflation had fallen below 5 percent. The economy continued to grow, and both inflation and unemployment remained low through most of the decade.

Invasion of Kuwait

On August 2, 1990, the armed forces of Iraq invaded and quickly overwhelmed their small, oil-rich neighbor, the emirate of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein, the militaristic leader of Iraq, soon announced that he was annexing Kuwait and set out to entrench his forces there. After some initial indecision, the Bush administration agreed to lead other nations in a campaign to force Iraq out of Kuwait-through the pressure of economic sanctions if possible, through military force if necessary. Within a few weeks, Bush had persuaded virtually every important government in the world, including the Soviet Union and almost all the Arab and Islamic states, to join in a United Nations-sanctioned trade embargo of Iraq. At the same time, the United States and its allies (including the British, French, Egyptians, and Saudis) began deploying a large military force along the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a force that ultimately reached 690,000 troops (425,000 of them American). On November 29, the United Nations, at the request of the United States, voted to authorize military action to expel Iraq from Kuwait if Iraq did not leave by January 15, 1991. On January 12, both houses of Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq. And on January 16, American and allied air forces began a massive bombardment of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and of military and industrial installations in Iraq itself. The allied bombing continued for six weeks. On February 23, allied (primarily American) forces under the command of General Norman Schwarzkopf began a major ground offensive-not primarily against the heavily entrenched Iraqi forces along the Kuwait border, as expected, but to the north of them into Iraq itself. The allied armies encountered almost no resistance and suffered relatively few casualties (141 fatalities). Estimates of Iraqi deaths in the war were 100,000 or more. On February 28, Iraq announced its acceptance of allied terms for a cease-fire, and the brief Persian Gulf War came to an end. The quick and (for America) relatively painless victory over Iraq was highly popular in the United States. But the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein survived, weakened but still ruthless. The Gulf War preserved an independent nation and kept an important source of oil from falling into the hands of Iraq. But many Muslims, watching Americans attacking their fellow religionists, became incensed by the U.S. presence in the region. The most conservative and militant Muslims were insulted by the presence of women in the United Nations forces. But even more-moderate Middle East Muslims began to believe that America was a threat to their world. Even before the Gulf War, Middle Eastern terrorists had been targeting Americans in the region. Their determination to threaten America grew significantly in its aftermath.

Political Gridlock

On domestic issues, the Bush administration was less successful. His administration inherited a heavy burden of debt and a federal deficit that had been growing for nearly a decade. The president's pledges to reduce the deficit and simultaneously to promise "no new taxes" were in conflict with one another. Bush faced a Democratic Congress with an agenda very different from his own. The Congress and the White House managed on occasion to agree on significant measures. They cooperated in producing the plan to salvage the floundering savings and loan industry. In 1990, the president bowed to congressional pressure and agreed to a significant tax increase as part of a multiyear "budget package" designed to reduce the deficit-thus violating his own 1988 campaign pledge.

Hurricane Katrina

Perhaps even more damaging to President Bush was the government's response to a disastrous hurricane, Katrina, that devastated a massive swath of the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005 and gravely damaged the city of New Orleans. The federal government's slow response aroused anger throughout the nation, contributing to the loss of the Republican majorities in both houses and leaving Bush with little support. At the same time, there were scandals in the Justice Department, revelations of illegal violations of civil liberties, and declining economic prospects that would culminate in the financial crisis of 2008.

Globalization

Perhaps the most important economic change was what became known as the "globalization" of the economy. The great prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s had rested on the relative insulation of the United States from the pressures of international competition. As late as 1970, international trade still played a relatively small role in the American economy, which thrived on the basis of the huge domestic market in North America. By the end of the 1970s, however, the world had intruded on the American economy in profound ways, and that intrusion increased unabated into the twenty-first century. Exports rose from just under $43 billion in 1970 to over $1 trillion in 2006. But imports rose even more dramatically: from just over $40 billion in 1970 to over $1.8 trillion in 2006. Most American products, in other words, now faced foreign competition inside the United States. The first American trade imbalance in the postwar era occurred in 1971; only twice since then, in 1973 and 1975, has the balance been favorable.

Reaganomics

Reagan's 1980 campaign for the presidency had promised to restore the economy to health by a bold experiment that became known as "supply-side" economics or, to some, "Reaganomics." Supply-side economics operated from the assumption that the woes of the American economy were in large part a result of excessive taxation, which left inadequate capital available to investors to stimulate growth. The solution, therefore, was to reduce taxes, with particularly generous benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals, in order to encourage new investments. Because a tax cut would reduce government revenues (at least at first), it would also be necessary to reduce government expenses. A goal of the Reagan economic program was a significant reduction of the federal budget.

Reagan Doctrine

The Reagan administration supported opponents of communism anywhere in the world, whether or not they had any direct connection to the Soviet Union. This new policy became known as the Reagan Doctrine, and it meant a new American activism in the Third World. In October 1982, the administration sent American soldiers and marines into the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to oust an anti-American Marxist regime that showed signs of a relationship with Moscow. In Nicaragua, a pro-American dictatorship had fallen to the revolutionary "Sandinistas" in 1979; the new government had grown increasingly anti-American (and increasingly Marxist) throughout the early 1980s. The Reagan administration supported the so-called contras, a guerrilla movement drawn from several antigovernment groups and trying to topple the Sandinista regime. In June 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon in an effort to drive guerrillas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the country. An American peacekeeping force entered Beirut to supervise the evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon. American marines then remained in the city to protect the fragile Lebanese government. As a result, Americans became the targets in 1983 of a terrorist bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Beirut that left 241 marines dead. Rather than become more deeply involved in the Lebanese struggle, Reagan withdrew American forces.

Welfare Benefits Cut

The enormous deficits had many causes, some of them stretching back over decades of American public policy decisions. In particular, the budget suffered from enormous increases in the costs of "entitlement" programs (especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid), a result of the aging of the population and dramatic increases in the cost of health care. But some of the causes of the deficit lay in the policies of the Reagan administration. The 1981 tax cuts, the largest in American history to that point, contributed to the deficit. The massive increase in military spending by the Reagan administration added much more to the federal budget than its cuts in domestic spending removed.

Growth of Environmentalism

The environmental movement grew dramatically in the early 1970s and continues to develop in the present. An early milestone was Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970, a day that generated wide-scale interest in the environment. The federal government displayed only light interest in the subject, but many people became invested in studying the effects of "global warming"-a steady rise in the earth's temperature resulting from emissions from burned fossil fuels, most notably coal and oil. Many other people either ignored or disavowed the impact of such industrial waste on the environment. In 1997, representatives of the major industrial nations met in Kyoto, Japan, and agreed to a broad treaty to reduce carbon emissions to slow or reverse global warming. Republicans in Congress prevented the ratification of this treaty in the United States. The United States again refused to participate in this global initiative during the presidency of George W. Bush, who argued that doing so would place too great of an economic burden on the country. Barack Obama, too, has done little about global warming. Without the participation of the United States and China, another country that has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, most environmentalists consider the treaty to be dead.

2008 Financial Crisis

The so-called Great Recession of 2008, influenced by the loan crisis, also pushed down wages and triggered widespread job layoffs making it impossible for the additional owners of ARMS and jumbo loans to make payments thus increasing the number of home foreclosures. Many Americans could not meet their other financial obligations such as the repayment of school loans or credit card debt. There was also less money available for investing, or economic growth. The increased unemployment rate further accelerated the downward economic spiral. By mid-September 2008, the financial crisis suggested an economy falling out of control. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, supported by other economic leaders, proposed the massive use of federal funds to help the government bail out banks that were failing. Both the Bush administration and eventually the Obama administration won congressional support for $750 billion in the form of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to shore up the tottering financial institutions. The bailout kept the economy from collapsing, but it remained very weak for several years, with exceptionally high unemployment rates. During this crisis, McCain and Obama fought out the last two months of their campaign. Obama benefited from George W. Bush's unpopularity. With the incoming president facing another powerful downturn in the economy, McCain's response seemed to associate him with Bush's policies, increasingly viewed by many Americans as causing the financial meltdown, whereas Obama conveyed a message that seemed to signal new and more hopeful possibilities. What had been at times a close race ended in a strong showing for Obama, and on November 4, 2008, he won the popular vote 53 percent to 46 percent and the electoral vote by an even larger margin.

Origins of Terrorism

The term "terrorism" was used first during the French Revolution in the 1790s to describe the actions of the radical Jacobins against the French government. The word continued to be used intermittently throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe the use of violence as a form of intimidation against peoples and governments. But the widespread understanding of terrorism as an important fact of modern life is largely a product of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Acts of what we have come to call terrorism have occurred in many parts of the world. Irish revolutionaries engaged in terrorism regularly against the English through much of the twentieth century. Jews used it in Palestine against the British before the creation of Israel, and Palestinians used it frequently against Jews in Israel-over several decades. Revolutionary groups in Italy, Germany, Japan, and France have engaged in terrorist acts intermittently over the past several decades. The United States, too, has experienced terrorism for many years, much of it against American targets abroad. These included the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the explosion that brought down an American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the bombing of American embassies in 1998, the assault on the U.S. naval vessel Cole in 2000, and other events around the world. Terrorist incidents were relatively rare, but not unknown, within the United States itself prior to September 11, 2001. Militants on the American left performed various acts of terror in the 1960s and early 1970s. In February 1993, a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City killing six people and causing serious, but not irreparable, structural damage to the towers. Several men connected with militant Islamic organizations were convicted of the crime. In April 1995, a van containing explosives blew up in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Timothy McVeigh, a former Marine who had become part of a militant antigovernment movement of the American right, was convicted of the crime in 1997 and executed in 2001. Most Americans, however, considered terrorism a problem that mainly plagued other nations. One of the many results of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, was to jolt the American people out of complacency and alert them to the presence of continuing danger. That awareness increased in the years following September 11. New security measures changed the way in which Americans traveled. New government regulations altered immigration policies and affected the character of international banking. Warnings of possible new terrorist attacks created widespread tension and uneasiness.