The 2010s, The Decade That Wasn't

In popular culture we like to use decades as shorthands, despite their limited usefulness. For example, the 60s equals countercultural times of peace, love and dope, even if it was the decade of high concept TV (Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, etc) and greater suburbanization than the 1950s. Now that the 2010s are coming to an end, there have been some half-hearted attempts to summarize the decade's culture. Those attempts will fail not only because decades are artificial boundaries, but also because 2010 is not a meaningful milestone in any way.

Periodization is one of my favorite historian parlor games. It's kind of frivolous, of course, and if done wrong can limit our understanding. (Plenty of inequality and corruption was going on before and after the Gilded Age, for example.) That said, I feel like there was a there was a pretty definitive period that lasted from 2000 to 2006. George W Bush's contested election in 2000 marked a more tumultuous political era even before 9/11. In 2006 the Republicans were trounced in midterm elections following disasters in Iraq, and in New Orleans. The politics of the Bush years were over at this point.

More importantly, a major technological change was afoot. In 2006-2007 social media first appeared on the scene, as did smartphones. This also coincided with the growth of broadband, wifi, and Netflix. From this point on, so much of America's life was going to be lived online in ways that it wasn't before.

Amid this change Barack Obama was elected president. This election did not represent a "post-racial society," but in fact led to a nationalist backlash. The Bush administration's combination of culture war and war on terror had lost its allure, conservatives now understood the power of white nationalism. This happened well before Trump. If 2010 is a milestone of anything, it's because that year saw the rise of the Tea Party, the precursor and trailblazer for Trump. His victory in 2016 was the culmination of the anti-Obama nationalist reaction.

Along with the rise of smartphones, social media, and nationalism in the late 2000s came an economic collapse that created the kind of privation and scarcity that nationalists love. Hard times make it easier to scapegoat and to draw people to the extremes.

Ten years of living dangerously led to Trump's election in 2016, which is probably the marker of a new era. 2010 and 2019 don't really represent much, but I think a lot books will be written about 2006-2008, which appears to be one of the fulcrums of history. We certainly cannot escape it.