If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?

One of the best histories I have had the pleasure to read is Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. There are many things to love about this book. Allen wrote his history of the 1920’s in a jaunty, breezy style. When you pick his book up it is hard to put it down. Allen’s tone is fair, his judgements sharp, and prose delectably entertaining. The most notable thing about this history of the 1920s, however, is its publication date: Allen wrote the book in 1930. He saw it published in 1931.

I often wish Allen had more imitators. Allen’s book shines as a social history. The genius of writing such a history directly after the events took place is that the historian can narrate not just what happened in a period, but what it felt like to live through it. Names have not receded into history; the little things of daily existence are still remembered, and often still in use. Judgements of past events have not been too clouded by the downstream effects they had three or four decades down the line. There is an immediacy to Only Yesterday that I have never found in any other work of history (though I have found it in several works of fiction).

What would such a history of our own era look like? What would it include? Where would it begin? That last question is harder than it sounds. Allen lived in a rare time, one that was recognized as a distinct period in American history the moment it concluded. That period was bookended by WWI on the one side and the Great Depression on the other. Moreover, the decade that passed between 1919 and 1929 was recognized at the time as one that ushered in a series of then-unprecedented social, economic, and technological transformations. Allen did not need to convince anyone that this decade deserved its own history.

Finding the bookends of our era is more difficult. Were I to follow in Allen’s footsteps and write a history of what it felt like to live through modern times, I would start the story in 2004. This is partly for personal reasons: it was about that time that I became politically conscious enough to offer real judgements on what those days were like. But there is a broader purpose to choosing that date. 2004 was the high tide of America’s unipolar moment. It was a time of economic growth and extreme confidence in the American project. The story of my generation begins at that point–and it is in many ways the story of a country (and a generation) coming to terms with lost power, shattered confidence, and the creeping sense that we can no longer tell a coherent story about our people at all.

The other bookend is even more difficult to find. That moment has not arrived. I suspect, however, that it will arrive soon. Regardless of who wins the 2020 election, my guess is that it will be seen as a transition point, the end of a era. Generational concerns influence this perception as well. This history is a generation’s coming of age tale. By the time the 2010s close out, the very last cohort of that generation will have just graduated from college (this is a good point to remind readers that most Americans do not graduate within four years of their first freshman semester at college).

I have typed up a potential outline for what this history might look like below. Savvy readers will pick up a few of the major themes I see as the dominating threads of American social history between the years 2004-2020: social media’s first invigorating, then decaying impact on the daily round, traditional media, and our body politic; the splintering of American life into ever-shrinking, often mutually hostile social tribes (and the dynamics that led to this); the creeping isolation of the better-off from the rest of the nation; how cloistered group-think in Washington DC led to one terrible disaster after another; how the forces of globalization, automation, and finance hollowed out the American economy; the lack of public accountability and the loss of trust in American institutions this has caused; the intense emotional investment the American people have placed in their political leaders over the last decade; the growing prestige of data-centric and identity-centered ways of thinking; and the dynamism of an age where every American had the power to share their convictions and creations with the entire world. While I cannot pretend to be positive about most of these trends, life in the early 21st century has had great highs mixed in its its lows, and any history that did not capture these moments would be incomplete.

One of the difficulties with an experiential history of 21st century America (“what it felt like”), is the growing awareness of how different things feel to people who do not share your class, race, religion, region, education, or twitter feed. That may doom this project from the start. It would require an extraordinary writer–the only person who comes to my mind as being able to take this project on is Wesley Yang (though he might be a half-generation too old to sympathize with perspective I lay out below)–but it could be done. Perhaps a partnership of two writers, each from very different backgrounds, would be the ideal for this project.

It would not work if their prose did not shine. Unlike in Allen’s day, we have access to reams and reams of data produced by sociologists, economists, political scientists, and business research teams. It would be a shame if these were not included in the book. Yet I suspect the long term success of the history would depend most on its charity. Partisan screeds will be forgotten. Appraisals may sting; judgements may bruise. But if the book is not seen as even-handed, and if it does not make a sincere effort to get inside the souls of its subjects, it amount to nothing more than so much wasted space.

Below is my outline of what a book like this might look like. I have been generous on the page numbers needed for each topic; a good author might be able to write each section in half the space.

Readers are encouraged to leave a comment explaining on how they would do things differently if the book was theirs.

AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK WHOSE TITLE IS NOT YET DECIDED, 2004-2020

Chapter One: The “Average” American Family in 2004 (6 pages)

Chapter Two: Bush Triumphant (33 pages)

—Iraq Erupts Into Civil War (15 pages)

•   Snapshot of the costs of war, 2003-2013

•   Mission Accomplished

•   The Green Zone World View 

•   Battle of Fallujah

•   Abu Ghraib

–America at the Mall (8 pages)

•   Domestic Response to Chaos in Iraq

•   Dixie Chicks Disowned (compare the comparative furor over this to that faced by the generals, officials, etc. whose misteps led to civil war in Iraq)

•   Politics as Gossip: Talk Radio Rules the Airwaves

•   Politics as Comedy: Southpark, the Daily Show, The Colbert Report

–-The Election of 2004 (10 pages)

•   Mr. Kerry Takes the Stage

•   Refighting the ’60s (Swift Boats, Killian Documents, and Boomer Angst)

•   What’s The Matter With Kansas?  

•   Retrospective: The Cultural Confidence of the Early Aughts

Chapter Three: The World Blogs Made (32 pages)

 –Brave New World of the Citizen Blogger (4 pages)

•    Blogging basics: RSS Feeds, Blog Rolls, Cross Linking

•    Big Names Change the Headlines–Two paragraph rundown of Sullivan, Yglesias, Klein etc

•    The Old Guard gets Anxious

 —Junior Officers Blog to War (14 pages)

•    Fiasco: Iraq, 2005-2006

•    Abu Muqawama, Small Wars Journal, and the Search for a Solution

•    The Nagl vs. Gentile Debates 

 –Peak Oil Meets the Internet Age (7 pages)

•    Climate Change Policy in the Bush Years (IPCC reports, Inconvenient Truth, etc)

•    The Climate Science Blogs

•    Climate Skeptics Find their Platform

•    Retrospective on the Oil Drum

–New Atheists and the ScienceBlogs Debates (7 pages)

•    The “New Atheists”

•    ScienceBlogs divided: PZ Meyers vs. Chris Mooney

•    Retrospective on the Nagl vs. Gentile Debates (Compare their tone and stakes to the Meyers vs. Mooney affair)

 Chapter Four: A World Gone Viral (15 pages)

  —The Smart Phone Makes Its Debut (4 pages) 

  —How Youtube Was Used (3 pages) 

  —Memes Sweep the World (5 pages) 

  —The Novelty of Virality (3 pages)

Chapter Five: Crash (42 pages)

–Bush Administration Failures, 2005-2008 (4 pages)

•   Spotlight Hurricane Katrina

•   Iraq and the 2006 Elections

–Bubble (8 pages)

•   Subprime Prices

•   A House Built out of CODs

—Bust (10 pages)

•   Stock market tumbles

•   Global Reverberations

•   Who Hurt the Most?

—Social Impact of the Great Recession (15 pages)

•   Recession Songs (“Just Dance,” “Dynamite,” etc.)

•   So Starts the Gig Economy

•   Long Term Impacts on the Millennials’ Worldview

—Bail Outs (5 pages)

•   First Round of the Great Bailouts

•   GM Gets Its Own Bail Out

•   Obama Admin Refuses to Prosecute

Chapter Six: Hope and Change (13 pages)

—Who was Barrack Obama (7 pages)

•   The Keynote Speech

•   The Personal Costs of Political Success: Obama’s Early Years

•   Shadows on the Wall

—The 2008 Campaign (6 pages)

•   Iraq at the Center, Hillary at the Margins

•   Technology Does Its Thing

•   Hope and Change

Chapter Seven: Hope’s Growing Pains (23 pages)

–Broken Campaign Promises (2 pages)

—The Obama Economic Program (7 pages)

•   Stimulus

•   Health Care

–Insurgency Redux (7 pages)

•   Iraq Withdrawal

•   Surge in Afghanistan 

–Mood of the Politicos in the Early Obama Years (7 pages)

•   Tea Party Rising

•  The Social World of Washington DC (the lobbyist/regulator/think tank/ complex)

•   Days of Faith (for the left)

Chapter Six: Growing Up in the New Millennium (31 pages)

–Where Millennials Were Different (8 pages)

•   Racial and demographic composition

•   The Moral World of the Millennial Teen (section on Moral Therapeutic Deism)

•   A Side Note on Gay Marriage

•   Leaving the subculture cliques (except for emos) behind 

–Time Series Data on American High Schoolers, 2004-2012 (2 pages) 

—Social Media (5 pages)

•   What Myspace Was

•   Why Facebook Won

•   Social Media, Then vs. Now

–A New Sort of Family Life (6 pages)

•   The AP Kid

•   Helicopter Moms and the Harvard Run 

–The Other Sort of Family Life (10 pages)

•   Growing up in single mother homes

•   Boys Fall Behind

•   Video Games: Halo through World of Warcraft

•   Video Games: The Day Gaming Replaced Working

Chapter Seven: Coming Apart (25 pages)

–Snapshot of the American Family, 2012-2020 (6 pages)

•    The 1%

•    The Vanity of Occupy Wall Street

•    Where the Recession Never Ended, Where it Ended First

•    Class Mobility and Income Stagnation

•    College and Marriage — the Great American Sorting Machines

•    Six Jobs in Five Cities

–The upper 19% (8 pages)

•   Entertainment for the “Mass Intelligent”

•   Other sorts of sorting

•   Reds, blues, and greys among the creative classes

–The lower 80% (6 pages)

•   Pop culture contrasts with the top (GoT vs. Naked and Afraid)

•   The sort of jobs you get in the service working class

•   Church and community life at the top and with the nots

•   Health and Wealth

–The Slow Collapse of the White Working Class (8 pages)

•   Perceptions and Mis-perceptions

•   Anatomy of a Drug epidemic

•   The Millions on Disability

•   Backlash

Chapter Eight: Fracturing Narratives (20 pages)

—Twittering Nation (5 pages)

• Arab Spring Intro / Allure of New Tech

• Collapse of the Blogosphere; How (and Why) Twitter-driven Conversation is Different

• Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and the New Science of Going Viral

–Legacy Media Falls Apart (6 pages)

•   Stats on newspaper readership, advertising revenue, and resources cut

•   What it takes to survive — story of Vox

•   The improbable rise of Mr. Fisher (and the embarrassment of Mr. Thayer)

•   “20-somethings who know nothing”

—Election Narratives (11 pages)

•   Romney’s “49 %,” “Binders Full of Women”

•   Spin Games

•   Obama Wins 

•   Liberal Victory Narratives Vindicated? 

Chapter Nine: Lords of Tech (18 pages)

–San Fransisco in 2004 vs. 2014 (2 pages)

• Housing prices, other remarkable stats on silicon valley

–The Ambitious Mr. Altman (6 pages)

•  Sam Altman and the new American wonderworld

•  Marc Andreeson

•  How VC financing in Silicon Valley actually works

—Software Eats the World (6 pages)

•  Jobs/Thiel/Bezos/Musk/

•  Reality of most Silicon Valley business plans (B2B vs. B2C eating)

•  Automation and its impact

–Broader Cultural Impact (4 pages)

•   Do you have data for that?

•   Nerdy as the New Sexy

Chapter Ten: The Great Awokening (16 Pages)

 –Black Lives Matter (6 pages)

• The Murder of Trayvon Martin

• An economic and demographic picture of Black America, 2004-2014

•  Ferguson

•  Black Lives Matter

 –The Left Swings Intersectional (6 pages)

• Data

• Intellectual Foundations

• Academia-Tumblr-Activists-Journalists Networks All Mashed Together

 –Coates’ Critique of the American Project (4 pages)

• Ta Nehisi Coates: Zeitgeist of the Age

• Coates Turns His Back on the American Dream

Chapter Eleven: A New Sort of Culture War (22 pages)

–The Internet’s Underbelly (4 pages)

• What was an Internet Troll?

• Trolling as a Vocation (4Chan, etc.)

 —Gamergate (10 pages)

• Narrative I

• Narrative II

• Dynamics of a Twitter Age Culture War Dispute

 –The University Campus (4 pages)

• Intersectional Activism on Campus

• Other University Problems here

• Not as Bad as Folks Want it to Be, but Bad Enough

–Various other examples (4 pages)

Chapter Eleven: Team Obama Falters Forward (18 pages)

  —Gridlock (5 pages)

• Intro: Sandy Hook

• Mid-terms deliver victory to the GOP

• The new costs of getting things done

  —Obama Meets the Culture Wars (2 pages)

• Preacher of a faith his coalition no longer believes in

• Obama assesses the intersectionalists

•  Man out of his element

 –Legacy (11 pages)

• Legacy: Obama as Commander in Chief and Head of State, 2008-2016 (ISIS, Iran, Climate Accord) 

• Legacy: Obama as Policymaker (Executive Orders)

• Legacy: Obama as Party Leader (Collapse of the Democrats in 2016)

• Legacy: Obama as Symbol 

Chapter Twelve: Election of 2016 (16 pages)

–Sanders vs. Clinton (4 pages)

• Sanders, an Old Choice for the Young

•  Coronation of Hillary Clinton

–Trump’s Rise (7 pages)

• The Running Joke

• Trumpism 

• How to Dominate a Crowded Primary

• Never-Trump

Trump vs. Hillary (5 pages)

• One Outrage After Another

• “Flight 93 Election”

• What People Expected

•  What They Got

Chapter Thirteen: Days of Rage (12 pages)

 –Liberal Incomprehension (2 pages)

• Waves of rage
• Protests, pussyhats
• Vox still playing the same old game

 –Excuses Pile Up (8 pages)

• Was it all Because of the Russians?
• Was it all Because of the Racists?
• Was it all Because We Were Too Woke?

 –Failure to Take Responsibility (2 pages)

• The terrible candidate
• Her terrible team
• Terrible party organization across the entire country
• The terrible media complex that held it all up
•  Once again, no one held responsible

Chapter Fourteen: Chaos Machine (14 pages)

  –Trump’s Early Days (5 pages)

• Surprised as Anyone Else

• Trump’s Inaugural Sets the Scene

• Story of the Muslim Ban

  —The Trump Official Merry Go Round (5 pages)

• Stats on # of cabinet officials

• Stories of some individuals who took and left the stage

• Partly Intentional on Part of the President

• Partly Result of Poor Preparation on the Transition Team

• Difficulty of Coherent Policy Making

  –Things Stabilize by mid-2018 (4 pages)

• Accomplishments up to that point

• Failures

Chapter Fifteen: Romance and Sex in the 2010s (31 pages)

–Intro: #MeToo and the Cavanaugh Hearing (6 pages)

–Dating Apps Change Everything (4 pages)

• Statistics
• How Tinder, Bumble, etc. works
• What it is like to use Tinder as a woman/man

–Hook Up Angst (8 pages)

• Myths of hook up culture
• New norms, new expectations
• “Cat woman” and consent

–Generation Porn (8 pages)

•    Statistics
•    Effect on behaviors and views
•    Harsh reality of a world flooded with sexual media but less and less people actually are having it

–Sex Recession, Marriage Depression (5 pages)

• Sex recession – perceptions and mis-perceptions
• Marriage rates, divorce rates
• Retrospective: Happiness and Meaning in the Age of Angst

Chapter Sixteen: Intellectual and Cultural Life in the Age of Angst (? pages)

—Streaming Straight to You  (8 pages)

• Why Netflix Mattered

• A Blockbuster Age (super hero movies, decline of films into nothing but franchises)

• Prestige TV 

• Why Was the “Golden Age” of TV So Dark?

–New Mediums, New Messages (? pages)

• Youtube Channels, Patreon Accounts

• Podcasting, Focus in on Podcasting Bros

• The Changing Meaning of Being a Man

• ?

–Conservatives Adrift (? pages)

• Difficulty Defining Trumpism

• New Atheists Move to the Right

• IDW

• ?

–Reigning Intellectual Styles (? pages)

•   Basically just see my twitter thread

 Chapter Seventeen: America and China, 2004-202? (30~ pages)

  –Trump’s Most Lasting Legacy? (1 page)

• Intro: Pence Speech

  —America and China, 2000-2016 (6 pages)

• The World Is Flat, The Pentagon’s New Road Map, and Other Grand Delusions
• US politicians get rich
• 2008 Olympics

  –China breaks American hopes (12 pages)

• Hints of the coming crisis: renditions, murders, thefts, and deaths
• The hard regime of Xi Jinping
• Obama has his chance–2012 Scarborough Shoal
• Obama makes a deal–2016 (+assumptions of his team)

  —America Responds at Last (6 pages)

• Trump Starts a Trade War
• Hard bargaining (Huawei, ZTE)
• Trade War Becomes a Cold War

  —Public Apathy, Elite Engagement (? pages)

• Bipartisan support
• Foreign Perceptions
• ?
• ?

 Chapter Eighteen: Tech’s Reckoning  (? pages)

–Automation Eats Everything (6 pages)

•  American Economy, 2014-202[?]: The Numbers Look Good…

•  …But They Came With a Cost (Hollowing Out of US Economy)

•  Automation of the American Labor Force 

—Social Media Turns on Itself (? pages)

• Bots, Trolls, and Foreign Operatives

• Just Ban Everybody

• ?

—Washington Turns Against Tech (? pages)

 Chapter Nineteen: The Trials of Donald Trump, 2018-202?  (? pages)

Chapter Twenty: Coda