In light of, well \gestures broadly at everything*, I recently saw a comment thread somewhere online asking about whether the early 2000s felt like it does now to people who were around and aware for both, if it seemed better or worse at the time than what's going on now, and does looking back now change that opinion of better or worse? It got me to thinking..."wait, it was better, right? Worse? Tied?" The more I thought about the question the more I realized it was kind of a sticky question that I couldn't answer easily.
As someone in my early 20s (turned 23 in 2000) when Bush surprisingly won the election, 9/11 happened, followed by the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, then Afghanistan, etc., and remembering how bad everything felt then, the question got me wondering about the similarities and differences between, say, 2004 and 2024.
Then: 2000-2005. Ish.
After 9/11 and the start of the Iraq invasion of the early aughts, It felt then like the culture was suddenly fragmenting, and there was something of an existential dread hanging around after 9/11 that has changed shape half a dozen times since then but never really went away. That dread was hard to define, many have tried so I've no need to, but looked a lot like what people felt in and after November of 2024.
There was a sense that you were a bit adrift in a culture that was rapidly atomizing...the monocultures that helped give shape to previous decades pretty much dried up in the early Internet era and it's never come back. The closest thing to a monoculture we had in the Bush years was racist bumperstickers and Toby-Keith-esque 'murica-fuck-yeah bullshit. The stupidest, most venal people in the world were in power and actively wanted to make the world and also your specific life worse, for money, and there wasn't much you could do about it except vote, which turned out didn't amount to shit.
The Patriot Act was a pretty blatant infringement on individual rights, or even individual comforts like making air travel the pain in the ass that it is today. It was the birth of the modern surveillance state, that modernity being defined by two things: first, that it nakedly told you that the state could effectively do anything it wanted to you at any time under the thinnest of pretexts, and second, that a very large percentage of the populace thought this is a good thing, actually. Many people including minorities and anyone left-of-center politically, it was a scary time--knowing that not only could you theoretically get "extraordinarily renditioned" off your own street at any time, but that many of your neighbors would actively cheer it happening to you.
People don't think of the economy as being as bad then as it is now, but I think people arguing that are missing two important things:
- "It was so much cheaper to buy a home"--which was largely true, but partially because many were getting screwed by the subprime mortgage ghouls and wouldn't find out until later in the decade. If you didn't get stuck with a usurious subprime or ARM loan, you'd be right that those days were better. If you did (any many did), then 2008 rolled around and, well.
- "The Internet was so much more hand-crafted then"--because everyone forgets how everyone went broke after the dot-com bust and VC wasn't available anymore for a while. I mean, I'm nostalgic for the early Internet too but hardly anybody was making the kind of living you see now, especially if you were an individual creator (ask me how I know!). It was, very broadly speaking, just as tough being a tech worker then as it is now (ask me how I know that too!).
You perhaps wouldn't necessarily be wrong to argue that the economy was better in, say, 2004, but you need to realize just how much heavy lifting the word "better" is doing here...especially if you were working class. It's definitely not clear-cut.
This is, I entirely admit, a vast oversimplification of the circumstances of the time, but worth keeping in mind in light of the current arguments about why the economy is supposedly doing great even though everyone agrees that it feels worse. The 2000s basically had us having the same argument, but in reverse.
"But What About Meeeeeeee"
Because this is a blog and not a news article, I feel like I should briefly mention as a sidebar how I personally experienced that period of time. Being entirely fair, my personal life in the early 2000s was pretty tough on me financially and emotionally for reasons warranting tales for another time, but on balance, mostly not that bad. The second half of the decade was amazing, the best period of my life, I don't mind saying (even though I probably should) but that's not the period we're looking at for this discussion.
I will say that I definitely felt a lot of economic and political anxiety during the Bush years, or I wouldn't be talking about it here. Especially financially, it was an extremely difficult time for me trying to pay for college on my own and keep a roof over my head, the latter of which I frankly didn't always succeed at doing. But in those days while I was working my way through college, I had a lot of really good friends that kept me grounded, was in a good relationship (still in it), worked a job that I sincerely enjoyed doing even though it paid for absolute shit, and had enjoyable hobbies that kept me busy. I was poor as a churchmouse and living somewhere I didn't want to be until early 2006, but would I say it was worse than now?
Well, sort of yes, sort of no, and I suppose that's actually the crux of why I got to pondering the original question.
Now: November 5th, 2024 to This Afternoon
Well, since the election all I can say is it feels more similar than I think I'd like. Everything feels like a more amplified version of the early 2000s right now. It only feels different by degree, not cause.
I mean, if you scroll back up, how familiar does the anxiety of the Patriot Act feel to knowing the current administration completely sanctions and abets far-right violence and in the last 24 hours outlawed protesting?
The median income of the US has gone up significantly since the early aughts even adjusting for inflation, but housing has gotten further out of reach. We are still embroiled in international conflicts that we have no clear win state for and no clear path out of. We certainly still don't have any kind of monoculture, but an equally virulent form of "patriotism" has reared is ugly-ass head again and this time is literally trying to end and erase the entire American experiment. (And not for nothing, but the soundtrack of that "patriotism", like in the Bush years, is just as godawfully bad.)
The degree vs. the cause is why I would have to come down on concluding that now is ultimately worse than 20 years ago. In my own life, I am doing materially better, which is part of why I wanted to examine my feelings about it--specifically for me personally* things are significantly better than the early 2000s in every way barring the aches and pains of middle age. I have a very comfortable living, I do own my home, I have resources that will likely allow me to be farily resilient against a lot of what's coming. And support others in resilience. I hope, anyway.
But there's definitely something coming. It's hard not to see it as at least a little funny (not in a ha-ha way) that a lot of us called Bush a fascist, which felt right at the time--and I'm not saying was wrong now--not knowing that we hadn't yet but would see actual goddamned literal Nazis in power. Though in truth you wouldn't really have one without the other anyway. In the past, we saw Bush's infamous "free speech zones" and the grisly stories coming out of Guantanamo Bay as an egregious attack on civil liberties and a dramatic overstep of the Constitutional limitation of executive power. Which was true! They absolutely were! Things were fucking bad dude! Now however, we have an administration that isn't trying to skirt the Constitution but very literally destroy it to build a White Nationalist version of the US, which can only happen if a lot of things happen to a lot of people that aren't straight, cis, white Christians.
I won't beat this to death and stretch this out with narrating all of the execrable things that have happened just in the last 6 weeks. You already know. I'm not leading up here to a call of action or message of optimism or a list of next steps and suggestions for resistance liberals. Just answering the original quesiton for myself, as going into writing this post I was honestly tempted to say it was going to be a tie--there are so many parallels from then and now that I think are worth looking at, and I wanted to look at them without either the millenial childhood nostalgia nor the doomer nihilism that are both in vogue right now and taint our perceptions of each period. But, well, yeah: the Bush years were a clear pre-cursor or dry run to what's happening now, what's happening now is the logical end of a 30-year conservative project, and bro, we are straight up not having a good time.