2000 Election Unleashed Disaster on the World. We Can’t Let that Happen Again.
The 2000 Election Unleashed Disaster on the World. We Can’t Let that Happen Again in 2016.
For eight years, George W. Bush ravaged the planet. What will be left of it if Trump wins?
By Rebecca Solnit Today 1:51 pm
The horror of those days haunts me still. Some of us thought that a terrible danger loomed if the Republican Party took charge. Others hated the Democratic administration so much that they insisted there was no difference between George Bush and Al Gore. That was true when it came to free trade. Six years earlier, the Clinton administration had brought us NAFTA, which Al Gore continued to defend vocally, even as the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle were on everyone’s mind (well, at least, on every radical’s mind).
But it was the other fronts that terrified me. There, the differences were profound. If Bush was elected, I anticipated two major disasters. One was an attack on human rights—gay rights, racial justice, women’s rights. And sure enough, a whole damn tsunami of attacks on reproductive rights followed, laws and regulations and funding shifts designed to make abortion and birth control difficult or impossible to access without having to overturn Roe v. Wade. Women lost big in 2000. Gays, lesbians, and trans people were at best in a holding pattern. Affirmative action and racial justice suffered.
The other was environmental. The Bush administration proved to be far, far worse than anyone in 2000 could have possibly imagined, so bad I am not sure we yet understand what happened during his presidency. In a hundred years, when humans look back at when climate change got baked in—when we passed the point of no return, when we signed the deal for the catastrophe that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable, put many coastal areas and islands underwater, and produced mass famine, mass extinction, and mass displacement—they may well point to 2000 and the election of
George W. Bush. For eight years, his administration served the fossil fuel industry rather than the people of the United States, ...........
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