The dream of the 90s is dead

June 30, 2017 12:02 PM

The end of the Long 90s For the last 30 years, what David Goodhart called “the two liberalisms” have prevailed, the economic liberalism of the right and the social liberalism of the left, “Margaret Thatcher tempered by Roy Jenkins.” The Conservatives concentrated on deregulation, union busting and privatisation, while talking tough, but avoiding any action on, on immigration, political correctness and traditional values. Meanwhile, Labour focused on a socially liberal agenda without attempting to roll back the economic gains of the right. It was almost as though a tacit deal had been struck; you can have diversity, minority rights and discrimination laws if we can have privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts. The effect was to take policies that were popular with the public off the agenda on the grounds that they were publicly unacceptable.
posted by the man of twists and turns (17 comments total)

That's not what I heard.
posted by Fuzzypumper at 1:13 PM on June 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting. I had never come across that blog before but its excellent.
posted by roolya_boolya at 1:17 PM on June 30, 2017

I doubt it will die without kicking and dragging everything around it to their grave. Same as when it is alive.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:37 PM on June 30, 2017

The 90s began with the crackup of communism and apartheid. It ended with 9/11.
The long Millenial years began with 9/11 and ended with Trump and Brexit.
posted by Yakuman at 1:55 PM on June 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

I love that blog, I also liked Has peak insecurity peaked recently. Previously: The Legend of the Free Labour Market.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:58 PM on June 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

The 90s began with the crackup of communism and apartheid. It ended with 9/11.

9/11 was when The Long Boom became The Long Siege. We may not have actually been under siege by al-Qaeda and then ISIS/Daesh, but the stories we told ourselves as a society were predicated on us being, and the bonfire of civil liberties that ensued was as well.
posted by acb at 2:42 PM on June 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

The long Millenial years began with 9/11 and ended with Trump and Brexit.

No, I think there was a short "Millenial" period, not a long one, from 9/11 to the 2008 crash. This coincides with the Bush years but it's not specifically about Bush, though the policies and tone of his administration certainly defined the era. 2008 also ended the economic structure and feeling of the era. The world after 2008 was a different place.
posted by Sangermaine at 2:43 PM on June 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

The closer your are to an era, the harder it's bound to be to define it; I think you have to see what sticks, and which parts turn out to be blips in history. A decade or two from now, the time between the start of the 90s and now will have moulded itself into a semi-coherent broad-brush narrative with a name that people can use as a shorthand for what, from today's vantage point, is a confusing mess. The irony is of course that by naming a period of history, you necessarily strip it of most of its complexity, reducing it to a pithy summary.
posted by pipeski at 2:59 PM on June 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

I wondered during the 90s whether there would some day be 90s retro bars/cafés/similar establishments, and what they'd be like. I imagined the music piped in would be a melange of grunge/alternative-rock and cheesy Eurodance/commercial-dance; perhaps distance and nostalgia would bake it into a coherent milieu.
posted by acb at 3:08 PM on June 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

As far as I'm concerned, we're still dealing with the fallout from the simultaneous collapse of the Ottomans and the Qing.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:12 PM on June 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

The end of the Long 90s

They're finally cancelling The Simpsons?
posted by Sys Rq at 3:48 PM on June 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

i'm inclined to think that, in the US at least, whatever follows the trump presidency will mark the beginning of a new era. almost certainly for the worst, the political landscape has fundamentally shifted. ironically, i think trump has fulfilled obama's promise to end 'politics as usual'...
posted by thedamnbees at 4:35 PM on June 30, 2017

It was almost as though a tacit deal had been struck

Almost!
posted by Miko at 7:29 PM on June 30, 2017

Why, it's almost as if this is describing a new take on classical liberalism that took hold. I wonder who identified the problems with this, shall we say, "neo-liberalism" ahead of time?
posted by mobunited at 10:19 PM on June 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

The mainstream party of the left in both the US and UK is dominated by a wealthy metropolitan elite. Some of that elite is noblesse oblige enough to support policies that are materially contrary to their personal economic interests ... but most are, pretty naturally, not. A party of the left that didn't depend utterly on the families and institutional investors who control the major media and comprise the key donors to Democrats and Labour would look very different.
posted by MattD at 4:36 AM on July 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

As far as I'm concerned, we're still dealing with the fallout from the simultaneous collapse of the Ottomans and the Qing.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:12 PM on June 30

I favourited because this made me smile - but also because it's so very true.

When we talk about the more distant past, we talk about things like the Black Death, the Columbian Exchange as watersheds. These are events whose effects echoed across centuries, not years.

In the future, I think we'll be talking about the 20th century as part of the long 19th - with the dominance of European (and European-derived) states across the world, coinciding with the expansion of mass manufacturing. If there is another watershed in the recent years, it will be in the rapid globalisation of trade through containerisation - and the spread of computers and Internet communication. Certainly, when I was working in the archive of an organisation that was 100s of years old, the watershed year was about 1995: that was when the records moved from paper (as they had been from about 1500) to electronic (with all of the different preservation issues therein).
posted by jb at 9:29 AM on July 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wondered during the 90s whether there would some day be 90s retro bars/cafés/similar establishments

A friend-of-a-friend opened up a bar in Brooklyn (natch) which is sort of a classy attempt at this. Not too loud, lots of familiar-from-highschool music, etc. I'm sure it's not the first nor will it be the last.
posted by Skorgu at 10:09 AM on July 1, 2017