1990s Scorecard: Cynical and Discouraging

The many eulogies for the millennium and the century have upstaged the usual talk about the coming end of the decade. The 1990s, so far, have not been as dramatic as the 1960s, or as traumatic as the 1930s and 1940s. What can we say about the Age of the Internet and of Walmart, when television couch potatoes not California Adonises surfed, when Amazon became an ethereal web site as well as a river, when lawyers not linebackers defended O.J. Simpson, when special prosecutors became the hunted as well as the hunters, when rapping meant chanting rhythmically not communicating intensely, when windows crashed but did not break, a mouse clicked but did not squeak, when people enjoyed spending lots of time "on line" and Hollywood fell in love yet again -- with the Titanic and William Shakespeare?

The Dow Jones industrial average's exceeding 11,000 may have granted this decade its defining symbol. Wherever the Dow ends up, this five-figure milestone reflects the remarkable prosperity millions of Americans are enjoying in peace, nestled in their gated communities. The titanic plateau befits our age of hype, allowing us to fulfill our fantasies and overlook any misery or "collateral damage" even as we fear that, like Viagra and Internet stocks, the surge is artificial. This magic number explains the still-astonishingly high approval ratings we Americans give our scoundrel-in-chief, as the boom earned him a virtual free pass to paw the help.

Ours has been an era of great wealth, and even greater consumption, as the gap between rich and poor has bulged. Each individual's private dreamworks eclipse community concerns. Titans of industry boast about their Gulfstream jets while working stiffs cash in stock options to buy gas-guzzling SUVs. Billionaires have become celebrities, rubbing elbows with Hollywood royalty, while Everyman feels like a king by grandly sipping a Starbucks' three dollar latte. Bigger and fancier malls sprout up across the suburban and exurban landscape, overstuffed mushrooms with thousands of extravagances no one needs but few feel secure enough to forego.

Surveying all our Mergers and Acquisitions, our Tiffany icons and our Kmart values, the nineties have become what many feared the eighties would be. That decade triggered a wave of jeremiads denouncing America's orgy of selfishness, with Michael Milken, Donald Trump, and Leona Helmsley symbolizing the me-me-me mine-mine-mine ethos.

Even though the 1990s were supposed to spawn a "kinder, gentler" nation, the magnanimous millennium never materialized. Ours became the decade of affluence, selfishness, and hedonism. This is the era when Yuppies reigned and greed was good. In fact, from the perspective of these Gay Nineties, the eighties appear more tempered, more guilt-ridden, and more politically engaging. The 1990s have lacked even superficial signs of a vibrant political culture. There have been no mass rallies similar to the 1982 anti-nuke protest that drew 700,000 to Central Park. There has been no mass outcry about the homeless who have faded into the urban landscape.

There have been no inspiring polemics or stimulating treatises such as George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty or Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. The defining presidential scandal pivoted around Bill Clinton's domestic vices rather than Iran-Contra's cowboy diplomacy. In the 1980s, Americans from the left and the right still tried to resurrect the 1960s' communal ambition; in the 1990s we laughed at it. Even in the capital of self-righteous political posturing, Hollywood, pink ribbons have become passe and the flaccid mass-protest song "Lean on Me" pales besides the rousing, star-studded best-seller "We are theWorld." The Reagan years' top sit-com, The Bill Cosby Show was earnest and politically correct. It offered a vision of wealth tempered by a multi-racial social conscience. The show of the 1990s, Seinfeld was cynical and amoral; its monochromatic self-indulgent Yuppies mocked anyone with a social conscience or a political vision, left or right.

Similarly, in this decade, economic power has become more concentrated as our culture has splintered. In 1980, cable was embryonic. The Big Three networks dominated, and the avuncular Walter Cronkite symbolized the easy power of CBS, ABC, NBC, to set the national agenda to monopolize the attention of our teeming polyglot of a nation. Today, the Big Three are in retreat, competing with dozens of cable stations that offer each sub-group its own niche and an escape from national conversations or responsibility.

Ultimately, much of the difference between the stimulating 1980s and the cynical 1990s rests on the two presidents who defined their respective eras. Ronald Reagan dominated the 1980s. His presidency galvanized the right and the left. Republicans mobilized to advance Reagan's revolution as Democrats resisted. Many laments about the greedy eighties were camouflaged attacks against the popular president. Budget cuts, tax cuts, supply-side economics, affirmative action, abortion, crime, the Bork nomination, national defense, Star Wars, Nicaragua, the "Evil Empire," were all ideological flashpoints triggering passionate arguments and, sometimes, creative policies to fix enduring problems.

Amid the rousing debate, some conservatives became more doctrinaire than ever, while others learned to modulate their ideology with pragmatism. Meantime, some liberals became more radical than ever, while others redefined their ideology to accept fiscal restraint and government rollbacks as they championed "fairness." A decade later, President I-share-your-pain, with his lip-biting and his furrowed brow, coopted the Republican and Democratic agendas. Bill Clinton's warmed-over Reaganism promising "the era of big government is over" has flummoxed, whose grip on national power weakened because their ideas triumphed. Democrats, on the other hand, have deluded themselves into thinking that because Clinton is a Democrat and Democrats are good, their agenda has by definition been advanced. Thus, they could defend Clinton blindly, confident that the age of Clinton was necessarily more altruistic than the age of Reagan.

Rather than galvanizing the nation's politics, stimulating discourse and spawning new solutions, the Clinton controversies simply polarized the nation's political players. This politics of personality alienated millions and produced no creative ferment. Politics has become a spectator sport, more interesting than golf but not a "must-see" like the Super Bowl.

In the 1980s, left-leaning academics wondered "Has America Lost Its Social Conscience And How Will it Get it Back?" Yet even then, the bracing liberal versus conservative combat kept alive social concerns. A decade later, narcotized by Clinton, corrupted by power, dazzled by the Dow, few Democrats even pose the question. With Democrats silenced and the economy booming, Republicans do not bother explaining or expanding their "trickle down" economics. The nineties, then, is the decade of the five figure Dow Jones, the decade of 11,000 creature comforts and self-delusions, of social disengagement and political narcolepsy.