Marking the decades beyond the calendar

[misanthrope]

So in reading Chuck Klosterman's new book "The Nineties; A Book" I noted he employed a thesis I've long held, that the decades our culture perceives aren't marked by the Gregorian calendar so much as events which signaled a shift in zeitgeist. The 1920s didn't begin on Dec. 31, 1919 so much as they began when World War I concluded. Likewise, the 1930s began with the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

The 1940s began with Pearl Harbor and ended with the Soviets' acquisition of atomic weaponry in 1949. The 1950s ended with JFK's 1963 assassination.

The 1960s short and furious period ended in the summer of 1969, somewhere between Neil Armstrong's words from the lunar surface and the Manson Family's blood-soaked spree. The 1980s zeitgeist was birthed with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, late 1979.

Klosterman proffered the 1990s began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ran through 9/11, something I've leaned on for a while now. My real question, though, has been identifying when the 2000s ended and the '10s began.

Our current era's inception is easy to encircle: it is the emergence of the pandemic in early 2020 and the seemingly continual feeling of heightened alarm since. But what about the decade before it? 2014 didn't feel so much like 2004, but what signaled the change?

Though it sounds trite, I've got to go with the Obama election in '08. The acceleration of hyper-partisanship, the ascending cognizance of our racial fractures, the historic presence of a Black man as the nation's chief executive was what seemed to be the catalyst for so much of what followed. The way it was utilized by craven political entities, the unease it stirred in those who otherwise downplayed their own racial issues, sparking street protests under the guise of anti-tax movements, it was a sea change.

I would be interested in hearing anyone else's reflections on this.

[Walleye]

1. I've always thought the 60s ended with Kent State

I was born in 1949, so for some reason my life seems to change with the decades

[Freddie]

2. I like your theory about 2008

The election of Obama brought out the racists and haters and they’ve felt entitled to rule over everyone since then.

[fishwax]

3. my first instinct was Obama's election, but two other possibilties

McCain selecting Palin as his running mate--the stamp of legitimacy that this move gave to general lunacy certainly seems in retrospect like a game changer. I think we might have lived a different timeline if McCain had gone with someone else. I guess this isn't so much an alternative to Obama's election so much as a shifting of it from his election to the 2016 campaign as a whole. The democratic primary, too, with its tension between establishment and energetic newcomer, seems like an important part of the shift.

The other candidate: The Bin Laden raid. Trump in the audience at the correspondents dinner being roasted by Obama on the night that Obama made a move more impactful and significant than anything donny had tried before or has tried since. A bookend to the decade that began with 9/11. A generation that had grown up knowing/remembering almost nothing before the war on terror now seeing it come to an end. (I was living near a major university campus at the time, and still remember the students celebrating and letting off fireworks, and getting the feeling that it represented something more significant to them than it did to me somehow.) And, of course, the elimination of Bin Laden freed up some of the republicans to be even worse versions of themselves, intensifying the partisanship, changing the dynamic of the 2012 campaign. There was a brief period where republicans backed off the crazy in response to the event, and then of course Romney's loss was a blow to the establishment wing of the party. Looking back, perhaps the ideal timeline would put the raid about a year later, while the republicans were on the path to nominating a nutjob like Palin, and then having Obama embarass the nutjob wing of the party at the polls rather than the bland establishment represented by Romney.

[misanthrope]

4. The Bin Laden raid is a really good one

It certainly visited my mind when I thought about the outpouring on the streets. It's pretty much a classic definition of zeitgeist.

What kept me from doing so was the tension that bracketed it. The uncertainty rippling through the American mainstream was the same after the Bin Laden raid as it had been before it. I think the feelings that led to the outrageous move of a Congressional member standing and yelling "You lie" to the POTUS amidst his September 2009 joint Congressional address were the force animating the times.

I like the nod to the Palin selection as a key moment. That said, I wonder if it is too specific, too "Inside Baseball" for broad purposes. I think it is an integral ingredient in the change, so maybe it would be more accurate to say the 2008 election was the watershed.