1. Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act requiring banks to report suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department to fight organized crime. This was held to be Constitutional in California Bankers Association vs. Shultz.
2. Carter signed FISA, in a bid to contain Nixon-era domestic wiretapping. Under Carter you also see the rise of FBI Swat teams and expansion from there to local police forces.
3. Reagan asks for and gets a drug exception to Posse Comitatus, allowing the military to be directly involved in enforcing domestic narcotics law. Reagan also expands on Carter's SWAT programs by forming the outright military arm of the FBI known as the Hostage Rescue Team (involved in both Waco and Ruby Ridge, working aside the military in both cases under the drug exception to Posse Comitatus).
4. Clinton asks for and gets the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which provides for most of what was in the USAPATRIOT Act. Clinton Asks for the rest and a bill written by Biden fails to pass. Clinton also asked for a terrorism exception to Posse Comitatus and this also failed to pass Congress.
5. Bush, in the wake of 9/11, signs the USAPATRIOT Act into law, and embarks on Nixonesque wiretapping of Americans. Seeks to hold Americans without trial.
6. Obama sucedes in getting the Bush-era wiretaps legalized, and argues that Americans suspected of being in terrorist organizations can be killed anywhere in the world without trial.
The point is that 9/11 was not a tipping point. It was not what destroyed this nation. This has been going on for a long time. It just started to be thrust into public discussion after 9/11.
I am both optimistic and pessimistic on this. On one hand, we are losing what we need in order to recover this country, as the economics and politics are deeply interconnected. On the other hand, at least we are having the discussion which we were not having to the same extent under Clinton or Reagan.
The Iraq War was a terrible blunder, but it pales in comparison to Vietnam, which inflicted horrible costs on the US but even worse costs on the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, whose civilian populations were carpet bombed with napalm.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Speaking of which, if you're really ready to engage with the 20th Century, imagine what would have happened had the Soviets "won". Read about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
It will be another 100 years, at least, until we're no longer feeling the immediate aftershocks of colonialism.
I don't have a specific position that I'm defending. I'm trying to learn some more historical perspective, and to understand your political philosophy in general.
In that contest, 20 years is the single beat of a heart. 20 years ago, the media was entirely controlled by a handful of corporations, and you had no means whatsoever of telling an audience as large as the one you have now that you think America died on 9/11.
Say you want to make the NSA drama especially bad for Obama, and assert that the worst of their snooping is just a couple years old. A couple years. Just a few neurons have fired in that interval. Maybe wait for a few more before we rush to judgement at a world historical scale.
In world historical terms, yes. But not in US historical terms, which is what matters here.
You may actually be right, depending on when you were born. If you were born in the 80s, then things weren't too bad (unless you were a homosexual or other estranged group, of course). I think tptacek is reasonable to counter that, a decade or two earlier, things were noticeably worse than they were now. That's not to say that he's justifying what's going on now with "well, this is fine, because Vietnam was way worse".
You know who else thinks that the current period of time is absolutely the scariest, most dangerous time in American history? The kind of politicians who enact the laws that you are opposing.
This being said one thing that really differentiated Iraq from Vietnam was that when backed into a corner, Bush had one of his few shining moments as President when he tied the troop surge to political reforms aimed at a more inclusive Iraqi government. One of the problems in Vietnam was that we were so used to propping up despots we were unwilling to confront Diem on issues of governance. At least Bush learned from that lesson albeit late and with his back to the wall (and I think further it is pretty damning that Bush's finest moment was one that merely managed to contain a mess he created).