The Decade in Politics
1993

1993 was the year of the new bad guy. Gone, by then, were the stable baddies of the Cold War, replaced by drunken teddy bears like Boris Yeltsin and Yevgeny Primakov. Drug dealers, who had promised to step into the spotlight, never really managed to get it together; the collapse of the Medillin Cartel and Colombia's collapse into civil war made it all too complicated for our nemesis complex to make sense of.

Fortunately, that year three new bad guys appeared on the scene. In February, the World Trade Center bombing heralded the return of the Arab terrorist to the list of evil-doers. In April U.S. law enforcement folks lay siege to the Branch-Dividian compound, bringing religious fundamentalism to the fore, as well adding fuel to the growing fire of the anti-government militia movement (itself sparked by the 1992 Ruby Ridge affair).

But, oddly enough, the biggest bad guy to emerge during that year was the U.S. government itself. Even though most Americans didn't sympathize with the folks in Waco or Ruby Ridge, deep down lots of people felt their pain, and cursed the FBI, the ATF and most every other government agency for sending its black helicopters and shock troops into our homes. It was in 1993, of course, that the conspiratorial "X-Files" stormed the television set, preaching the nefarious ways of the law-enforcement complex.

It's a good thing to be wary of state power; that's part of any healthy democracy. But the anti-government sentiment stirred up by the events of 1993 went too far, fueling the right's quixotic anti-Clinton escapades and more or less making possible the Republican Revolution of 1994. Without a strong anti-big government wave, Clinton might never have signed the republicans' welfare reform into law, reform that changed government support of the poor and incapacitated into funding for a new system of dead-end workhouses.

It's hard to pin down just what sparked all this anti-government feeling; it wasn't one event, but several, each feeding off the other. Without Waco, Ruby Ridge would be remembered as an isolated incident, and vice-versa. Without Clinton's bad-boy act, the Republicans might not have gotten as far as they did with their call to end big government. At the time it was hard to see how all these pieces fit together; let's hope that it's a little easier when we write them down in the history books.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)