D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
To Seek a Newer World
With a financial storm and a pivotal presidential election, we're truly setting sail into the 21st century.
You could argue that America's 20th century — not the calendar artifact, but the cultural and historical "20th century" — really began with New Mexico's statehood in 1912. That symbolic taming of the Wild West put a period to the nation's frontier era and a century in which the fledgling United States grew, splintered and reunited to stretch from sea to shining sea. Significantly, 1912 also saw the election of Woodrow Wilson, the president who thrust America to the front of the world stage. A "Wilsonian" approach to foreign policy — idealistic yet willing to intervene with force, if necessary — has dominated ever since, up to and including the current administration (despite Wilson being a Democrat and Bush a Republican).
In this sense of defining a "century," America's 18th century might be seen as stretching through the struggle for independence and its refighting in the War of 1812. The 19th century, then, saw the nation that won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 fulfill its Jacksonian manifest destiny in 1912.
As New Mexico prepares to celebrate its centennial, we again stand at the cusp of an historic shift. For Americans, the metaphorical 21st century had seemed to start almost right on schedule with the calendar, the tragic break with the past being the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But the ensuing years have unfolded not as a new era but rather as a painful coda to the 20th century. Frittering away the opportunity to call Americans to meet the challenges of a new century, President Bush instead told the nation to go shopping.
And shop we did, in an orgy of consumption fueled by soaring house prices, sub-prime mortgages, credit-card debt and hedge-fund leverage.
Now the bill has come due, and suddenly the 20th century is past its "sell by" date.
Much as New Mexico's statehood coincided with an epochal election, the collapse of the 20th century's global financial system in 2008 comes in an almost shocking simultaneity with the final act of the longest presidential campaign in our history. All the feints and fireworks of the past months — can anyone even still name all the candidates who began on this numbing slog back in 2007? — turn out to have been mere background noise to the roar of history changing gears. The two surviving candidates, each of whom had hoped to ride into the White House as an agent of change, now find themselves grasping a tiger by the tail.
The conceit of denizens of every era is that they live at some remarkable moment in history. But perhaps, in 2008, we do stand at a transition point that later self-appointed sages will look back on as the cultural and geopolitical end of the 20th century and the painful birth of the 21st.
The United States will need to find fresh footing and a new role in that 21st century. It's not unpatriotic but pragmatic to suggest our place will not automatically be at the head of the table. India and China are on the rise. Asian nations that emerged from their own financial near-death experiences in recent years vowed "never again" and stockpiled monetary reserves — much of those billions invested in the US. We have a $2 billion a day addiction to foreign capital.
"The big lesson is that the West can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image," Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens wrote recently as stock markets disintegrated. "For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending."
Globalization — like the energy crisis, global warming and other "inconvenient truths" — can no longer be ignored. This tiger is out of its cage, and we — and our next president — can either deal with it or get eaten.
Given the landscape at this metaphorical dawn of the 21st century, it's hard to imagine that anyone would even want to be president of the United States. But someone will wake up on the morning of Nov. 5 as the next president, and at this writing it seems likely to be Sen. Barack Obama. Indeed, if you're reading this after Election Day and Obama has not won by a near-landslide, sweeping in along with greatly expanded majorities of his own party, I'll be astonished and many pollsters will be red-faced. There's no hubris quite like locking in a political prediction — in immutable ink on paper (I suppose I could cheat and change this column on the Web) — nearly a week before Election Day. But that's mine, for what it's worth.
All of which means there will be no political excuses for President Obama and his party. Even as the wave of the 21st century breaks over us, Obama will have all the tools at democracy's disposal to try to keep our heads above water and to lead us to a place on the shore that won't be washed away.
Optimistic Americans might consider that maybe, just maybe, Obama is uniquely suited to the task. It's hard to see his opponent as other than a man of the 20th century — forged by the US Navy, a harrowing experience in the US' most frustrating war, and the can-do spirit of the burgeoning Southwest. In another election year, those virtues might have made Sen. John McCain the man of the hour. But in 2008, Barack Obama — globalized right down to his name and multicultural ethnicity — presents a strikingly apt face and life story for the 21st century.
Even some conservatives have come around to this view. Christopher Buckley — son of that archdeacon of the right, William F. Buckley, a columnist for his dad's National Review and a past defender and speechwriter for McCain — recently announced he was voting for Obama. He wrote, "Obama has in him — I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric — the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for."
Looking beyond this uncertain historical moment, one certainty is that the nation itself will come to look a lot more like Barack Obama. Much as Anglos are already a minority here in New Mexico, in the 21st century they will cease to be a majority in the nation as a whole. We can learn to transcend race and ethnicity, or be riven like so many third-world countries we tut-tut about on the nightly news. Electing the first mixed-race president doesn't exactly erase the legacy of centuries of slavery and segregation, but it's a symbolic start.
Obama's youth, too, which once seemed risky to some, increasingly appears right for the historical moment. If ever there was a time for youthful vigor, this is it.
Especially in his rhetorical soaring during the primaries, Obama reminded many of another youthful presidential aspirant, Robert F. Kennedy. In his campaign speeches, RFK was fond of quoting Tennyson's Ulysses: "Come, my friends,/ 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
For better or worse, the new world of the 21st century is upon us. And as we navigate the choppy seas ahead, Americans can perhaps take comfort from the closing lines of that poem:
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.