I cringe at what Trump will say in his inaugural speech this time around. The last time, his talk of American carnage had me wondering what country he was talking about. He won by calling this country trash, ruined. Maybe I am wrong to think the American experiment has come to an end.
Reading Paul M. Renfro's The 2000s and the End of American Optimism leaves me wondering if I was paying attention to the world around me, or if I was even more delusional than I think I was. This article is a review of Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) by Colette Shade.
In her compact, yet powerful new book, Colette Shade examines a later period within the broader “end of history” moment, which she terms the “Y2K era.” Beginning in 1997 with the introduction of Netscape Navigator—a pivotal moment in the career of the internet—and ending with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the Y2K era seemed to bear out Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, Shade notes. Its rampant techno-optimism, evidenced by the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s and early 2000s, joined with hyper-consumerism and a steadfast belief that “the West” had transcended politics to forge an “ecstatic, frenetic, and wildly hopeful” decade.
But I was living and working in Anderson, Indiana, where we thought ourselves so beaten up by the collapse of the auto industry that we were recession-proof. That proved wrong for me in May 2009.
“To tell the story of the Y2K era is … to tell the story of the millennial left during the decade that followed,” Shade provocatively writes near the end of her book. Out of the dejection and disillusionment of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years erupted “Occupy Wall Street, Jacobin, the Bernie campaign, Chapo Trap House, the Democratic Socialists of America,” Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, “the increasingly visible trans rights and disability rights and immigrant rights movements,” Standing Rock, “Starbucks unions and the movement for climate justice.”
In other words, the Y2K era and its Obama coda radicalized Shade and millions of others. As historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained in 2016, it was no accident that Black Lives Matter, for one, emerged during the second term of the nation’s first and only African American president. “How did we get from the optimism of the Obama presidential run to the eruption of a protest movement calling itself ‘Black Lives Matter’?” asked Taylor. “Perhaps the optimism itself is to blame, or rather the contrast between Obama’s promise and the reality of his tenure.” As Shade puts it, “A generation raised to believe that history’s biggest questions were settled felt that they had been lied to.”
I spent 2010 to 2021 in the care of the federal Bureau of Prisons, so I cannot say much about the Obama Era. I thought George W. Bush screwed up the country - the belief that they could create their own reality ran against everything I thought and believed. George W. Bush's request after 9/11 that we all go shopping, I still think ludicrous.
“From 1997 through 2008, we lived dishonestly,” Shade explains in her conclusion. “We dreamt we were ascending into the future, leaving history and all its complications behind on the ground. Up and up we went into the sky. Now everyone could get rich in the stock market, drive a Hummer, own a McMansion.” But, “in 2008, we awoke in our beds, drenched in sweat.”
In the years since, we’ve tried desperately to keep the dream alive. Obama bailed out and sought to rehabilitate the very financial institutions that had immiserated millions of Americans (much to the chagrin of those who occupied Zuccotti Park during his first term). Donald Trump, whose electoral base is the “American gentry,” has often promised to deliver prosperity to those left behind by globalization and neoliberalization.
But it’s unclear who truly believes in the viability of the American dream or the American project, more broadly. In a Gallup survey taken last month, only 19 percent of Americans indicated that they were satisfied “with the way things are going in the U.S.” The last time a majority of Americans expressed satisfaction with the direction of the country was December 2003—right in the middle of the Y2K Era.
Optimism ends if we do not think we can learn from our mistakes and improve upon the past. If we think there is only one way for America to be, then there are good grounds for pessimism. Thinking we can only approach the world through the gates of neoliberalism, then we are lost through the poverty of our collective imagination. One hope I had with Biden was a break from the neoliberalism of Larry Summers, and that this break would continue with Kamala Harris. It seems that breaking loose of neoliberalism remains a project for the future.
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