The 2000s and the End of American Optimism

It’s impossible to contemplate the Y2K era and all its boosterism without also weighing the effects of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the “war on terror” that followed. In what might be her most controversial argument, Shade dismisses “the cliché that 9/11 marked a new phase in American history, policy, and culture.” The U.S. “did enter a new chapter,” she contends, “though it was part of the same book,” as President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to double down on the same habits that had defined the late ’90s. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” Bush implored the public. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” A good American was a good consumer—or, in Shade’s words, “Shopping was … the most important part of citizenship.” In that vein, the post-9/11 compulsion to purchase and display American flags—“many made in the same Chinese, Bangladeshi, and Indonesian sweatshops as other American goods,” Shade recalls—seamlessly blended the well-worn American pastimes of materialism and jingoism.

The decision to shift the focus away from September 11 as a rupture point puts Y2K at odds with recent (and excellent) books by Richard Beck and Spencer Ackerman. Beck and Ackerman both argue that the 9/11 attacks set the country on a fundamentally new course, which would ultimately foster the political malaise and uncertainty on which Trumpism depended and continues to depend. The subtitle of Ackerman’s book is How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, while in his account, Beck hypothesizes that “if September 11 had not occurred, Donald Trump could never have become president.”

While the destabilizing effects of 9/11 cannot be overstated, there’s also something to be said for Shade’s examination of the preceding years, which encourages readers to look at the forms of capitalism, consumerism, and chauvinism that were already in play. “9/11 never challenged” the assumptions on which the Y2K era rested, Shade insists. “What defined the Y2K Era,” she writes, “was the unquestioned rule of American-led global capitalism, which began after the Cold War ended in the early ’90s and the dot-com bubble inflated in the late ’90s.” Only with the arrival of the Great Recession in 2008 would these assumptions break apart, Shade argues.