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It happened very fast too. There have always been minorities who are loudly disgruntled with good reasons (particularly older people in declining regions), but in the noughties and even the early teens the dominant outlook was Thatcher/Blair/Reagan/Clinton style optimism. By 2019 (even pre-pandemic) if you weren't some kind of doomer you stuck out like a sore thumb as either an out-of-touch establishment tool or a Silicon Valley investor talking their book.
In the UK, you can date the change to somewhere between the 2012 Olympics and the 2016 Brexit referendum. The US isn't very different.
Given the timing and speed of the shift, I am inclined to blame algorithmically-curated social media.
The media started pushing it in the early oughts, though. Star Trek had a drastic tone shift from optimistic to dark and serious- and this is probably what killed the franchise, that’s not really what Star Trek is all about- just for one example.
Also Battlestar Galactica. I think a number of events in the 00s combined to make it clear that we hadn't got answers to all of our problems - the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and the inability to turn a theocratic Islamic state into a liberal Western one. Environmentalism. These problems were huge but obviously totally unsolvable by ordinary people.
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
Your system was the same dysfunctional managerial as today, except it was not under strain and the race communists have yet not obtained enough power.
All the shit you're dealing with now was in the same rusty pipeline, coming.
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Yeah, I think this is a big part of the Fourth Turning stuff.
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I see it as the final death of the naive optimism that was abroad in the 1989s and 1990s. That was unsustainable becait frankly wasn’t true and couldn’t ever possibly be true. We were kind of faking it by kicking various cans down the road repeatedly. Once we ran out of road, pretending that we were simply going to win Civilization VI style was completely implausible, but this is what people literally believed. We ran out of road because is Islamic theocracy, because we developed a serious addiction to buying now and paying later, and various forms of laziness and gluttony and so on. That was sustainable for two reasons: we were the default currency and the world’s largest market, and we had hands down the best military that could not be seriously challenged. Those conditions could not last because those conditions never do. No nation or empire will ever stay on top forever. But we’d so structured our economy, or lifestyle, our government spending as if we were going to be The Rome that Never Falls.
Once 9/11 happened we slowly came to realize just how much we had let slip away. Arabs with box cutters could strike at will, and not only could we not stop them, we couldn’t even find those responsible. We can’t remain at the top of education when China and India were eating our lunch in STEM. Why buy from Americans when China can make it better and cheaper.
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Yeah, the revived battle star was a big deal for portraying suicide bombers in a sympathetic light on big-budget prime time TV. I picked Star Trek as an example because its whole brand is cheery, optimistic future where we can all settle our differences.
I’ll also point to the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis, hurricane katrina, Russo-Georgian war, and no child left behind just blatantly and obviously failing.
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