The Rubble of the '90s

Over the years I have written a lot about the '90s--in part because the period encouraged certain illusions which have proven destructive, and increasingly appeared destroyed themselves by contact with reality. There was the way that those singers of the information age, so long trying to persuade Americans that what was obviously deindustrialization was actually progress, almost looked credible amid the tech boom of the latter part of the decade--enough so as to profoundly distort the national dialogue about the economy for an extended and critical period. There was the way that Americans were persuaded to believe the "unipolar moment" of uncontestable full-spectrum American hyperpower might go on forever. There was the way the public was persuaded that the Internet would be an ultra-democratic cyber-utopia, as political correctness triumphed over all--so much so that, as Thomas Frank recounts, right-wing populism seemed to be assuming a new face, not only trying to persuade the people that "the market" was the common man's best friend, but appearing to embrace wokeness, while declaring the market its greatest champion.

What people think of as the elite are, as I have said again and again and will go on saying again and again, careerist mediocrities who are profoundly out of touch with reality, as they show us again and again when relied upon to lead the way. Accordingly many of them may still believe in such drivel--still, to use Paul Krugman's words, seem "stuck in some sort of time warp, in which it's always 1997"--but not all of them do so, while credulity in such silliness is the weaker the further out one gets from that overprivileged little world they inhabit.