A watershed, not a holiday

June 15, 2024 1:58 AM

We might now be on the cusp of a similar sea change, with American policymakers, especially Democrats and the broader center-Left, beginning to craft a new industrial policy and seeking to decouple economically from China. This decoupling is accompanied by an ersatz new Cold War with China—reminding us of how an earlier era of more activist liberal government required the Cold War to legitimate and underpin it. Whether such efforts will take hold is, for now, unclear. But understanding what these efforts are designed to overturn requires returning to the pivotal years of America in the 1990s. from What the 1990s Did to America [Public Books]
posted by chavenet (14 comments total)

understanding what these efforts are designed to overturn requires returning to the pivotal years of America in the 1990s
*steps into time machine*
posted by HearHere at 6:47 AM on June 15 [3 favorites]

I thought for sure this was going to be a review of John Ganz's new book on the 90s!
posted by mittens at 7:06 AM on June 15 [6 favorites]

*steps out of time machine, reads John Ganz article in The Nation* thanks mittens *returns to '90s*
posted by HearHere at 7:17 AM on June 15 [5 favorites]

I was listening to Prince’s “1999” this morning, and while it dates from 1982, it certainly captures how that era felt. We didn’t expect to survive. “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?” indeed. When the Cold War shockingly ended and the tech boom bloomed, there was a lot of hope, but there was a lot of leftover nihilism. I feel like the wave of neoliberalism that defined the 90s was equal parts of both. The right-wing populist reaction was 100 percent nihilism, and took hold deeply in the culture after 9/11 basically killed off the hope side of the equation. Of course Obama’s whole brand was Hope, but he ended up selling the same neoliberal policies instead of attempting to harness a left-wing populist wave. The Democratic Party machinery is addicted to neoliberalism in a populist age, and only benefit when the other party mismanages government so scandalously that people grudgingly vote for them.

Some days it feels like the last 35 years have just been postponing the inevitable doom, but I don’t know how much of that is just being raised in the trauma of near-certain nuclear apocalypse.
posted by rikschell at 8:15 AM on June 15 [15 favorites]

Xers and Millennials ask "Why didn't our parents teach us how to adult?"

It's because they didn't expect us to live to adulthood.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:54 AM on June 15 [3 favorites]

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1p3Qu

is a crazy graph to study. I don't even understand how it was possible that factory jobs allegedly numbered 1 out of 4 prime-age adults in 1970.

At any rate, the offshoring trend is certainly apparent in that graph.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1nUMU is an interest graph I found of a home unaffordability index factoring in mortgage rates and median incomes.

The early 1990s were still feeling the aftereffects of the oilpatch bust, S&L crisis, and economic shocks from the post-Berlin Wall freeze on defense spending:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX

shows defense doubled in the 1980s and again in the 2000s but was held flat in the 1990s.

I remember seeing the 1990 "twenty something" Time magazine cover story when I was working my first real post-college job in Maryland, thinking 'hey that's me!'.

Seems we had big ~10-year waves of dial-up WWW in the 1990s, the broadband wave of the late 2000s, and then full mobile phone computing all last decade, all that fully courtesy of massive manufacturing enterprises in China.

My general take of our industrial relationship with China was that they benefitted from partnering with us, essentially photocopying everything they were given, learning from it, and being able to push this wealth gain into their own society which was so terribly behind, wealth-wise, in 1990.

Too bad we, unlike say the Norwegians, didn't have any sane economics to share with them. Then again the Norwegian real estate market is probably as f'd as China's now.
posted by torokunai at 11:46 AM on June 15 [2 favorites]

Idologies seem firstly consequence only secondarily causal here.

Neoliberalism addressed "the perceived failure of the post-war consensus and neo-Keynesian economics to address the stagflation of the 1970s." As oil discoveries peaked during the 60s, this stagflation should represent the linkage between energy and the economy, but maybe also some saturation point of hom much energy could be consumed. Flying cars are stupid.

Neoliberalism switched gears from directly emploiting more fossil fuels towards exploitation of people, but using more fossil fuels to move things. In the US, this provided the illusion of a rising tide lifting all boats. Abroad, there was a rising tide in some places, because more people began exploiting the energy resources. Americans & Europeans benefitted from cheaper stuff, instead of flying cars. And new technolgoy improved eploiting people too.

I do think some enlightened socialism could've devlivered a better standard of living than neoliberalism, in part because Europe achieved something ike this. It's dubious if anything nicer than neoliberalism & globalization could've acheived their cheap stuff booms.

In future, we'll maybe have a period in which solar power is plentiful during the day time, but we should've way less energy reosurces useful for transportation regardless, meaning neoliberalism & globalization unravels eventually. In theory, we could choose between more exploitive economics or more egalitarianism, ala degrowth, but..

Anything we do involves having less across most economic factors, so no more rising tied lifts all boats fantasies.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:27 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]

heh: "President Reagan’s narcotizing agreeableness"

“The Cold War is over,” Clinton’s New Democrat rival Paul Tsongas commented in December 1991, “Japan won.”

That's the way it looked then! But Japan's external success was mounted on a rotten internal financial system, one that collapsed into trillions of bad debts, government bailouts, tax cuts to patch things through the next election, etc etc.

We copied Japan's foolishness with our own self-engineered housing boom-bubble-bust of 2002-2008, but that gets away from the topic of the 1990s I guess.

The 1990s did feature the Democrats' loss of being a permanent power center in DC.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S shows how Reaganomics just blew up the federal debt, saddling the country with a dangerous debt/GDP ratio after the 80s party ran its course. Democrats passed tax rises in 1990 and 1993 and Gingrich successfully swept to power running against them so after that first Congress of 1993-94 the Clinton administration was stuck with the GOP running Congress, and history repeated for us with Obama only having 2 years of a friendly House, and of course Biden again losing the House in 2022.

The internet and broadband has enabled an utter sea of misinformation to assemble itself into the alternate media environment that so totally overwhelms the mainstream corporate media presence.

I spend most of my time on YouTube these days and I don't know if it's the algorithm but 99% if what is pushed in my face is bullshit; conservatives getting on the outrage-of-the-day gravy train.
posted by torokunai at 2:19 PM on June 15 [4 favorites]

FYI, to torokunai or others who may or may not know, re:

crazy graph to study. I don't even understand how it was possible that factory jobs allegedly numbered 1 out of 4 prime-age adults in 1970

To some extent this is a category error. Outsourcing preceded offshoring. Ie, there were a lot of middle managers, building maintenance, administrative assistance, etc that would get lumped into 'factory' jobs because corporate hadn't turned jobs into services yet.

The US has de-industrialized, just not to the scale it looks in that graph.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:40 PM on June 15 [4 favorites]

12 years ago, a particular high school yearbook picture became a meme: "old economy Steven." I am that guy. Well, sort of. "Steven"'s haircut is dated to the 1970s, but it was a blue collar coded look well into my time, and I finished high school in 1993. I was there to see "old economy Steven"'s era come to an end.

My high school had shop classes. By which I don't just mean wood shop for the freshmen. We. Had. A. Foundry. You could sign up for a class on how to melt an ingot of pig iron and pour it into a mold you yourself shaped. America had an industrial policy, and our high school was a feeder for it. We had shop classes designed for the nation's industrial mobilization in World War Two, and it was part of a social contract that held past the war because the country was preparing for World War Three. Thankfully, there was a "si vis pacem, para bellum" moment that prevented that war, and kept the Cold War cold. It's not what you think it is.

Remember the Kitchen Debate, between Khrushchev and Nixon? It left Kruschev impressed, but not for the reason you think it did. Kruschev was not shocked at knowing that the American middle class was slated to enjoy a more comfortable life than in Russia. He took a very, very different conclusion from the debate. The kitchen appliances showed to Khrushchev in the debate were mid-century American made appliances. Not the flimsy things we buy today, but steel-made machines. And Khrushchev was no dummy. He knew full well that the factories making steel fittings for those appliances could retool to produce conventional armaments within hours of a phone call. And those armaments would be waiting for his army at the Fulda Gap.

THAT was what impressed Khrushchev. Kitchen appliances in factories that could make gun parts. Cars from plants that. could make APCs and tanks. Airlines made from plants that could and did build bombers, flown by conscriptable pilots. The consumer conveniences that defined American life were produced by a thinly veiled Arsenal of Democracy.

All this was by design. We had Madison Avenue shaping consumer demand to keep the Arsenal's assembly lines running in peacetime. We had an industrial education program in high schools all around the country feeding the factories with trained apprentices. We had detente between corporations and unions. All this kept the Cold War cold, and brought about a victory. I'll openly state that I feel both those were a good thing.

But here's he irony. If you were around, you might recall endless debate around 1991 on how to spend the "peace dividend." Well, that decision was made. The peace dividend was paid by the union workers who got shafted by deindustrialization, and given to Wall Street. That's what happened in the 1990s. The Arsenal of Democracy was deemed unnecessary, and all the norms and accords that brought int into being were dismantled.

In high school I was required to take classes in industrial drafting. The idea was that no matter what I wanted to do, I could walk around Chicago's factory districts and find a drawing board waiting for me, or something more hard core if I took the right shop classes. The computerization of industrial drafting, with deindustrialization and offshoring, made that evaporate in time for my graduation. And the commercial real estate recession of the 1990s meant architectural drafting was done by architects, not pimply faced draftsmen.

Was that entirely a bad thing? No. That industrial policy meant imposing a huge environmental impact from all the coal mining and metal mining required to keep to assembly lines fed with pig iron. The social arrangements behind it were also, less than enlightened. To get a job at these factories, you had have enough social capital to get that first shift. Once you did that and proved yourself competent enough not to endanger your co workers, you were golden. But getting that first shift if you are not the prevailing ethnicity in your area: not easy. Social capital is important when you're 18 and looking to land that first job, And it is not evenly distributed.

What's more, to be blunt, nobody ever lost an arm making a latte. That makes a barista's job objectively better than a factory job, both for yourself (duh), and for society, since nobody will have to help you restart your life with a prosthetic arm. If you get past the stupid identity politics that this discourse is inflamed by, you can understand that if your country doesn't need a retool able assembly line ready to support a war, then yes, you should be making lattes and avocado toast.
posted by ocschwar at 8:10 PM on June 15 [21 favorites]

The real life Steven is a graphic designer. That's such a beautiful thing to learn...
posted by ocschwar at 8:12 PM on June 15 [6 favorites]

The nineties were definitely when the pirates came back for more, seeing how easy it was in the eighties using only federally insured junk bonds. Something that often gets lost in reflection is that the end of the cold war, as a global cultural conflict, also became the end to American bipartisan influence on every policy ever made, from highways to welfare. And not just policy, because when articles declared the cold war dead they all predicted the peace dividend, which the pirates already saw as theirs. They offered instead a strawman anti-tax political platform based on borrowing to pay for the addiction to cold war level subsidies on everything.
posted by Brian B. at 8:40 PM on June 15 [3 favorites]

This is a good thread, and that was a great comment, ocschwar. That helped make a lot of sense of what I saw/heard growing up in the 90s.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 5:33 AM on June 18

>I thought for sure this was going to be a review of John Ganz's new book on the 90s!

thanks for that, put it in my Audible queue and had that playing on my trip to Idaho this week . . . fitting if you know the story...

plus my BIL there is totally a Christian Identity nazi kook who moved there for the same reasons that Ruby Ridge family did 40 years earlier.

I'd already known the general lay of the land but having it all exposed, teased out, and detailed as if an autopsy was educational.

I doubt I'll be visiting Idaho again, unless if by some miracle the US populace doesn't fuck up the decision later this year.

SWAT = "Special Weapons Attack Team" according to Ganz. Having lived in LA when the riots blew up, moved to Japan after that, and now with my idiot BIL, I've lived waay too much of this story already.
posted by torokunai at 2:39 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]