In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.Barack Obama's America did not transform into Donald Trump's America all at once. It took millions of individual choices, thousands of decision points, for American politics to fracture as it has. Ideological differences, once a defining line between parties, have widened into a gaping abyss. The fundamental assumptions of politics, unchanged since at least World War II, are being questioned. It feels as if the U.S. has been broken and we're living amid the wreckage.
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Much of the erosion may have occurred before the beginning of the decade, with the Iraq War and the financial crisis doing real damage to the country, and proving to many people that the government couldn't be trusted. But as the 2010s unspooled, new horrors kept emerging, or else sometimes old horrors with new faces: mass surveillance, police brutality, white supremacy, actual for-real fascism.Obama became president thanks in part to his insistence that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America," as he said in 2004. When he entered office, he promised to find common ground with Republicans and seek compromise, only to be demonized by right-wing media and foiled by conservatives in Congress. At the time, Obama's vision of the country might have seemed refreshing or even noble, but now it seems naive at best, a lie at worst.There are two Americas, and they're at war. This is how the 2010’s fueled that war.
February 2010: The Tea Party Convention Catalyzes a Republican Takeover
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October 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
September 17, 2011: Occupy Wall Street Kicks Off a Left-Wing Renaissance
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June 5, 2013: The NSA Spying Scandal Reveals the Government Really Is Watching You
November 24, 2014: Michael Brown's Killer Is Acquitted, and the age of Black Lives Matter Begins
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2015: The Rise of Bernie Sanders Reveals a Hunger for Socialism
November 9, 2016: Donald Trump Wins the Presidency, and the Right Is Triumphant
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August 12, 2017: The Unite the Right Rally Comes to Charlottesville and Shocks America
November 6, 2018: The Rise of “the Squad”
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