Home #edutech David Auerbach An Outline of 21st Century American History

An Outline of 21st Century American History

Waggish 2019-08-20

Tanner Greer put together a very intriguing prospectus for a book of 21st century American history. I am inclined to think that we know very little about much of anything and our perspectives about the present are hopelessly blinkered, so I tend to avoid broad summaries except from oblique angles.

And yet I am fond of books like Karl Dietrich Bracher’s The Age of Ideologies that attempt exactly such a summary. It’s just that I think one must have a combination of age, wisdom, genius, and perspective in order to pull off such a book . I don’t have that combination, so an outline is the most I will offer.

What I have done is to take Greer’s prospectus as a starting point, then radically strip it down to those factors that I believe to have been decisive. The 2000, 2010, and 2016 elections, for example, have made a far greater impact than the others of this century.

As a consequence, most social issues and cultural moments have disappeared. Most media, punditry, and academia have disappeared, save for the remarkable rise of the right-wing “mighty Wurlitzer.” (The media’s creation of Trump qualifies too, but is not a top-level subject.) These areas are notable mostly for how little impact they have had relative to the amount of noise and heat they have generated. They function as attention, intelligence, and anger sinks.

Most top-level discussion of technology has disappeared as well, except in one regard: how it has exacerbated political polarization. Technology and the internet in particular has played a huge part in shaping all the events below, but as with television, it does not merit being treated on its own. Technology has primarily served to cause people to be more chronically aware of all of the issues below—usually for the worse.

I have moved the starting point back from 2004 to 1994, as I believe many of the events of this century trace back to the fateful midterms of 1994, and I believe the crux of recent American history to have been the 2000 election. It is rare that such a single moment can make such a difference, but that one truly did. So the history proper starts precisely at the year 2000.

And I have stopped at 2016, treating the years 2017-18 as an epilogue. What to make of these years will not even be slightly available to us until after the next presidential election.

One notable exclusion is demographic trends, which deserve their own chapter, but which don’t quite fit into a history because they haven’t made themselves sufficiently felt yet. They’re more a prophecy. The epilogue implies that the United States is in an anxious holding pattern waiting for another real crisis to hit, and for that reason any “conclusion” is inevitably tentative.

Prologue: The Republican Revolution of 1994

  1. The Contract with America
  2. Welfare reform and the crime bill
  3. The Clinton impeachment
  4. Fox & Friends: the mighty Wurlitzer

Chapter 1: The 2000 Election

  1. The Bush family
  2. Media framing: Fuzzy math and inventing the internet
  3. Joe Lieberman and James Baker
  4. The Florida recount

Chapter 2: Terror

  1. September 11, 2001 and its impact
  2. The Afghanistan war
  3. The Axis of Evil and the bipartisan build-up to war
  4. The Iraq war
  5. Neoconservatism and the end of the bipartisan Cold War consensus

Chapter 3: Incompetence

  1. The unreality-based community
  2. Iraq reconstruction
  3. Hurricane Katrina
  4. McCain/Palin

Chapter 4: Economics

  1. The 2008 crash and the bailouts
  2. Income inequality: 1980 to present
  3. Real-estate crises and subprime bonanzas
  4. Debt, credit, insecurity, and the indignity of labor
  5. The paradoxes of neoliberalism and free trade
  6. Club for Growth, DLC, Americans for Tax Reform, and the rest

Chapter 5: The Obama Era

  1. “Obamacare”: promises and paranoia
  2. The 2010 midterms
  3. The Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and their scions
  4. Obama as the last gasp of the competent establishment

Chapter 6: Fracture

  1. The urban-rural split
  2. The end of the unified national dialogue
  3. Unfinished business in the South
  4. The rise of undercultures
  5. Reinforcement bubbles, online and offline
  6. The triumph of the latent group
  7. Republican inability to rule, Democratic inability to win

Chapter 7: The 2016 Revolt

  1. Trump, Sanders, and the struggle of the establishment
  2. Trump as catalyst, not as revolutionary
  3. The strategic and messaging errors of the Democrats
  4. Trump’s fundamental incompetence and lack of ambition

Epilogue: Waiting for the Deluge

  1. The 2018 midterms
  2. “Everything is normal and everything is an emergency.”
  3. Uneasy questioning of economic dogma
  4. The new global nationalism and protectionism
  5. Identities as politics
  6. The loss of myth, the loss of authority, the loss of narrative