10 years in America

Pedants — of whom there are many at Princeton — like to point out that the third millennium in the Christian era began in 2001, not 2000. But that isn’t my point: History regularly fails to line up with the arbitrary lines we draw, marking off measures in time from the birth of Christ. (The best data suggest that Christ was born around 4 B.C., but that’s another matter entirely.)

Like the Long 19th Century, which ran as late as 1914, the Short 20th Century will, I believe, be defined not by neat decades but events. The 1990s are already being remembered as our own Belle Epoque, a glimmering Gilded Age of rising stocks, benevolent government and world peace. The seven years following Sept. 11, 2001, were marked by wars, deficits, trans-Atlantic bitterness and an astonishing degree of economic mismanagement at the household level. The George W. Bush administration began the 21st century — the historical 21st century — with some of the highest approval ratings on record and a massive groundswell of popular patriotism backing its invasion of Afghanistan. Two midterms, the invasion of Iraq, endless deficits and a presidential election later, the Republican brand was as popular as nuclear waste. Their party lost both houses of Congress, and Bush himself was under serious consideration as the worst president since Herbert Hoover. From 2001 to 2008, his approval ratings slid by more than 50 percentage points, one of the steepest falls from political grace in modern times. The surprising thing about the election of Barack Obama wasn’t that he won — it was that John McCain put up such a fight.

Politics has a tendency to overwhelm culture in historical recollection, and Time magazine just presented the capstone crown of the first decade of the calendrical 21st century to Mark Zuckerberg, the person who turned “friend” into a verb. Outraged partisans of Julian Assange charged Time with cowardice, but I think the magazine got it right: Zuckerberg is the youngest of the Web Barons and stands for a cultural shift onto the Internet. Television watched at the time of broadcast, on a television, is dying; newspapers are throwing up pay walls or desperately giving themselves away; the CD has effectively perished as a unit of music, and the ratings on iTunes have become the Debrett’s of the music industry. Books — cover-bound, old-fashioned books, little changed since the printing press — held out longest. I still think the tactile pleasure of turning pages will last, and the cumbersome highlighting functions on the Nook or the Kindle make them awkward to use to read anything of lasting value. But I have little doubt that the e-ink technology will improve, and, like all other media, books too will be reincarnated in bytes and binary digits.

As a matter of economics, however, we are still in the era of “The Great Divergence,” as Timothy Noah named it in his Slate series on the subject. Beginning in the late 1970s and expanding rapidly through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, the richest Americans got richer, while everyone else more or less languished. The Great Recession was supposed to restore some balance to this chasm of inequality (the richest 1 percent take home about 24 percent of the nation’s annual income), but if anything the gap seems still to be widening. The sort of companies into which Princetonians typically enter — consulting and financial services — have bounced back like rubber balls from imminent threats of collapse during 2007 and 2008. Jobless recoveries, like that of 2003, seem to be the new normal. For most of the past decade, a sustained unemployment rate above 9 percent was unthinkable in America — that sort of joblessness in the First World was found in Europe. Now 9 percent is the new standard, and the Democrats (rightly or wrongly) have paid for it at the polls. Since the unemployment figures probably won’t improve by 2012, I expect the Republicans and Democrats to pass the buck around like a hot potato between now and the next presidential cycle.

The era of evangelicals also seems to be closing: A substantial minority of the country still subscribes to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, but the old guard — like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — has either died or lost its influence in Washington. Republican bedside reading has gone from “The Rapture” to “The Road to Serfdom,” and Ron Paul has secured the ultimate triumph of seeing his son elected to a seat in the Senate just as the last Kennedy leaves Congress. The old “God gap” between Republicans and Democrats will likely persist (even as young evangelicals show themselves surprisingly amenable to same-sex marriage), but Rick Warren will never, I think, enjoy the sort of privileged access to authority bestowed on Billy Graham.

As far as eras go, the end of the historical 20th century lines up pretty neatly with Jan. 1, 2000. It is not nearly as far off as 1914 or 1789. Yet for all that has changed over the past 10 years in America — a perpetual state of two ongoing wars, endless fiscal deficits, the Great Recession, the rise of Facebook and the end of the evening news — Princeton goes on much like before. Lehman Brothers is no longer hiring, but it’s a banner year at Goldman, and the consulting firms are thriving. In the Orange Bubble, this decade is ending much the same way as the last one began.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.