Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse
U.S. history, and today we have finally reached
the Clinton years.
Bill Clinton and I are really quite similar,
actually.
We were both brought up in the South.
We both come from broken families … well,
no, not actually.
Also, I did not attended any Ivy League University.
Yeah, I’m actually nothing like Bill Clinton.
Well, except for the southern thing, and also
both of us are married to women who are smarter
than we are.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green?
But he was president.
Whatever, I’m still young Me From the Past!
Clinton wasn’t even governor of Arkansas
until he was like (looks at computer)....oh,
crap, he was 32, I’m finished!
INTRO
So Clinton’s presidency was focused on Domestic
Policy and a sex scandal – in fact his campaign
war room famously featured a sign that read
“It’s the Economy, stupid.”
His domestic legacy is pretty complex, though,
so we’re going to start with his foreign
policy.
The Clinton years didn’t feature as many
major foreign policy successes as Bush 41,
but Clinton did have his moments.
Like his administration achieved a partial
success with the 1993 Oslo Accords when Israel
recognized the legitimacy of the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation.
However, that eventually resulted in the PLO
becoming progressively less powerful and as
you may have noticed, it didn’t ultimately
achieve peace in the Middle East.
Clinton was more successful in Yugoslavia
where he pushed NATO to actually do something
for once in this case bombing, sending troops,
kinda something.
Now there had been widespread ethnic cleansing
of Bosnian Muslims before the NATO intervention
but the fighting ended with the Dayton Accords.
And then there’s the Rwandan genocide, which
the Clinton administration did absolutely
nothing to prevent and where 800,000 people
died in less than a month.
The Rwandan genocide is probably the international
community's greatest failure in the 2nd half
of the 20th century and while certainly Clinton
was among many people who were complicit to
that including like, me, yeah… you know...
so far it’s not such a great foreign policy
record.
Terrorism also became a bigger issue during
Clinton’s presidency.
The World Trade Center was bombed for the
1st time, the U.S.S. Cole was attacked.
But the most destructive terrorist act during
Clinton’s presidency was of course committed
by Americans - Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
who blew up the Murrah Federal building in
Oklahoma City.
Which brings us to an awkward transition from
domestic terrorism to domestic policy.
So Bill Clinton was from Hope Arkansas and
he ran as a centrist democrat who wanted to
do things differently.
He wasn’t going to be inside the Washington
beltway.
And he wasn’t going to be some old-fashioned
liberal who was all about raising taxes funneling
billions of dollars to Snuffleupagus.
That centrism made him very electable but
his first few domestic agenda items faltered,
like he tried to end the ban on gay people
entering in the military but opposition led
him to compromise with the famous Don’t
Ask Don’t Tell policy.
Essentially you were allowed to be homosexual,
if you were in the military, you just weren’t
allowed to acknowledge it.
And then there was the 1993 Health Care initiative
led by Clinton’s wife, Hillary, which was
also a failure.
By the 90’s the United States was the last
industrialized nation not to have universal
health care and while Hillary Clinton’s
plan would have resulted in Americans having
universal health care it was too complicated
to sell to us.
Also, it faced very powerful opposition from
like drug companies, and insurers, and medical
device makers… lots of people.
But at least it had a working website.
What’s that, Stan?
There was no web?
What did they use, like a mobile app or something?
There was no apps?
I thought we were in modern history!
So on the heels of these failed policy initiatives
in 1994 Democrats were swept out of Congress
and Republicans took control of both the Senate
and the House.
The new speaker of the House, whose real name
was Newt Gingrich, and who would later run
for president despite being named Newt Gingrich
issued something called the Contract with
America.
It promised to cut government, cut taxes,
cut regulation, overhaul welfare and end affirmative
action -- and this led to a Government shutdown
in 1995 over an inability to reach a budget
agreement between the Congress and the president.
Which in turn made all these new Congressional
Republicans very unpopular with the American
people as a whole and played into Clinton’s
political strategy of “triangulation.”
His strategy was to campaign against radical
republicans while co-opting some of their
ideas.
The most obvious example was his declaration
in January 1996 that “The era of big government
is over”.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.
There has been no president since WWII who
decreased the size of the government.
And that will change when never because all
of the things that actually cost the government
a lot of money like Social Security and Medicare
are very popular and both of those programs
benefit old people who vote disproportionately
because they have nothing to do since Murder
She Wrote was cancelled.
However, Clinton did actually shrink parts
of the government with policies like the Telecommunications
Act of 1996, which deregulated broadcasting.
But Clinton’s signature economic policy
was Welfare Reform – aka the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Act – of 1996.
This law replaced the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children program, which had given
money directly to poor mothers.
But with Clinton’s welfare reform states
received block grants that came with strings
attached including work requirements and time
limits for total benefits.
Welfare rolls plummeted and many economists
see this as the rare bipartisan victory in
the 1990’s but it’s still controversial
and many liberal people felt like Bill Clinton
had betrayed them.
But Clinton still remained popular through
much of his presidency largely because it
really is the economy stupid - and the economy
got better.
In fact by the time Clinton left office unemployment
was below 4% which hadn’t happened since
the 1960s.
That meant there should have been inflation
but somehow there wasn’t, possibly because
of increased global competition that kept
wages down and also energy prices that were
remarkably low as worldwide oil production
increased.
Microchips made it possible to develop loads
of new products, like personal computers and
DVD players, and video games, and cell phones,
and Crash Course.
And computers completely transformed the American
workplace.
I mean until the 90’s people would go to
work, and they would sit in their offices
at their desks, and they would…
I don’t know what did because they didn’t
have computers!
How did anything get done before computers,
I mean how were books written, how was the
Godfather edited, how was this globe made,
I mean did some individual’s human hand
sculpt it from clay?
So no wonder the economy got better we had
stumbled on the biggest innovation since like
wheels.
And during the Clinton administration we didn’t
just have computers we had computers that
began to connect to each other.
I’m referring of course to the Internet
which might have remained like a military
communications network if computer scientists
and entrepreneurs hadn’t worked out how
to use it to sell things.
This was the beginning of the e-commerce boom,
which would be followed by an e-commerce bust,
but then another e-commerce boom, which would
eventually give us websites where you can
buy Crash Course DVD’s, like DFTBA.com,
and also lesser known e-commerce sites like
Ebay and Amazon.
Oh, it’s time for the mystery document?
The rules here are simple.
I read the mystery document, I either get
the author correct, or I get shocked.
Okay here we go.
“The information highway will extend the
electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate
go-between, the universal middleman.
Often the only humans involved in a transaction
will be the actual buyer and the seller.
All the goods for sale in the world will be
available for you to examine, compare, and
often customize.
When you want to buy something you’ll be
able to tell your computer to find if for
you at the best price offered by any acceptable
source or ask your computer to “haggle”
with the computers of various sellers.
Information about vendors and their products
and services will be available to any computer
connected to the highway.
Servers distributed worldwide will accept
bids, resolve offers into completed transactions,
control authentication and security, and handle
all other aspects of the marketplace, including
the transfer of funds.
This will carry us into a new world of low-friction,
low-overhead capitalism, in which market information
will be plentiful and transaction costs low.
It will be a shopper’s heaven.”
Stan, that sounds like something that Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos would say.
No?
Dangit, Bill Gates.
Let me tell you how much I enjoy this, none.
Oh, the information super highway it made
all of this possible including my shock pen.
Ahhh!
Now one of the lessons of history is that
good news for someone is almost always bad
news for someone else and that was certainly
the case with the longest period of economic
expansion in American history.
Increased use of Information Technology facilitated
the globalization of manufacturing and the
pressure to manufacture cheaply pushed wages
down and encouraged companies to locate factories
in countries with lower environmental regulations
and also lower wages.
That’s great for companies, it’s good
for prices, arguably good for workers in the
developing world, not so great for the environment
or for American workers.
The deregulation of finance also contributed
to global growth.
Capital could flow more easily anywhere in
the world but this also meant that it could
flow out easily, making financial crises more
likely and more widespread.
The growth of free flowing capital in the
1990’s created a world in which the crash
of 2008 was more or less inevitable.
But before that we had the crash of 2000.
As money flowed into the stock market, bubbles
developed.
And in some ways this was more problematic
than it used to be because a much greater
percentage of Americans had become investors
in stocks - an actual majority of them by
the year 2000.
And many of these investors were buying into
these hot new dot-com stocks, in fact the
tech-heavy NASDAQ exchange soared in 1998
and 1999.
And then it lost 80% of its value in 2000
when the bubble burst.
It turns out that the Pets.com business model
of selling you dog food at a loss is not a
sustainable business model.
Although to be fair Amazon has been selling
stuff at a loss now for 20 years and they’re
still at it.
So… you know… maybe I’m wrong.
So during this period real wages grew but
the gains were very unequal like when you
adjust for inflation, wages of nonsupervisory
workers remained below what they were in the
1970s.
And for the poor it was even worse.
Our old friend Eric Foner reports that “Average
after-tax income of the poorest 1/5 of Americans
fell 12 percent, and that of the middle 1/5
decreased by 3 percent.”[1] Meanwhile, the
income of the top fifth increased 38%.
Now of course this trend towards inequality
and the majority of jobs being created in
low wage, insecure, service industries would
continue into the 21st century.
But the economic and political pictures that
we’ve sought to paint only tell half of
the story of the 1990s, because it was also
a decade characterized by what has been called
the Culture Wars.
A big part of this was immigration, which
rose enormously after immigration reform in
1965.
Between 1965 and 2000 the US saw almost 24
million immigrants arrive, compared with 27
million during the peak immigration period
between 1880 and 1924.
Fully half of new immigrants came from Latin
America and the Caribbean, 35% came from Asia,
only 10% came from Europe and most of them
were from the former USSR and the Balkans.
As had always been the case, most immigrants
were attracted by labor opportunities, but
now more were highly educated.
In fact, 40% had college educations.
Let’s go to the thoughtbubble.
Latinos were the largest immigrant group by
far, with Mexicans making up the largest contingent
and by 2007 Latinos would replace African
Americans as the second largest ethnic group.
Latinos suffered disproportionate poverty,
and, despite significant economic gains during
the 1990s, African Americans still found their
economic opportunities limited.
According to Eric Foner, “In 2007, the total
assets of the median white family […] stood
at $87,000.
For black families, the figure was $5,400.”[2]
Diversity also increased in other ways like
single parent families became more accepted
which was essential as 50% of marriages ended
in divorce.
Out-of-wedlock births declined, primarily
because teenagers were practicing safer sex.
And teens and adults were cohabiting before
or instead of marriage.
Eventually the Mom, Dad, and 2.4 kids standard
American household became only one of a number
of accepted options for families.
Gay and trans people became increasingly visible
in the national consciousness as a result
of the GLBT rights movement and it becoming
safer for people to come out of the closet.
On the other hand, the AIDS epidemic, which
disproportionately affected the GLBT community
was disastrous.
By 2000 400,000 Americans had died of AIDS.
Then there’s the depressing rise in imprisonment.
Politicians competed with each other to see
who could be tougher on crime and as the War
on Drugs continued, many state legislatures
passed “three strikes” laws meaning that
people who were convicted of three felonies
would go to prison for life.
The number of Americans in prison skyrocketed.
By 2008 it was 2.3 million, ONE QUARTER of
the total number of inmates on planet Earth.
Thanks, thoughtbubble.
Although I have to say I thought this was
going to be a happy one, I mean the economy
is growing, things are getting better for
people in the GLBTQ community, and then boom,
boom, boom, it’s all terrible!
I don’t want to underplay the many benefits
of our increased prosperity and diversity
but all of this multiculturalism and change
made for a very tense political atmosphere.
To some people it seemed like the open free-wheeling
liberalism of the 60’s had run amuck, and
those people really started to hate the Clintons.
But among Bill Clinton’s many flaws: facelessness,
cigar smoking, his biggest was his inability
to stop cheating on his wife.
Clinton had dodged accusations of extramarital
skoodilypooping while running for the presidential
nomination which contributed to his unfortunate
“Slick Willie” moniker.
But while he was president, Clinton’s former
employee Paula Jones sued him for sexual harassment
that had occurred, allegedly occurred, I guess
it probably occurred, allegedly occurred while
he was governor of Arkansas.
While gathering evidence for that lawsuit,
investigators discovered that the president
had carried on a sexual relationship with
a young intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The President denied having “sexual relations”
with Monica Lewinsky which was a lie unless
you are President Bill Clinton and have a
very narrow definition of “sexual relations.”
That lie to a justice department official
was the basis for articles of impeachment
for perjury and obstruction of justice.
And so it was that the president of the United
States was impeached for saying that he didn’t
have sex with a woman that he did have sex
with, unless of course you define sex very
narrowly, and it all depends on what your
definition of is is, and etc.
In early 1999, Clinton was acquitted of these
charges in a congressional vote that went
right down party lines and he served out the
remainder of his term but he was significantly
weakened.
Also, he served out the remainder of his presidency
sleeping on the couch.
So the 90s were a really pivotal decade to
the world we live in right now, a globalized,
multicultural, instagram-filtered world
But as we became more globally connected political
divisions grew within the United States.
And this became especially problematic because
with the growth of the Internet it was easier
than ever to only hear voices that you already
know you agree with.
To live inside of an echo chamber where your
news doesn’t necessarily resemble your neighbor’s
news.
In some ways Bill Clinton directed these changes
but in most ways they directed him.
But that’s what I find so fascinating about
history, even the fancy people who get their
heads on the chalkboard, even they are subject
to historical forces.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next week.
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Thank you so much for watching Crash Course,
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in my hometown, “Don’t forget to be awesome.”
________________
[1] Foner.
Give me Liberty ebook version p. 1141
[2] Foner, Give me Liberty.
Ebook version p. 1150.
