CHAPTER 11- THE NEW MILLENNIUM (UNIT 13)
11A. THE NEW CENTURY
For the United States, the 20th century ended on a note of triumph. As the 21st century began, the United States was without a doubt the strongest, wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. It possessed the world's most productive economy and the mightiest armed forces; it dominated global manufacturing and trade; it held an unchallenged lead in invention, science, and technology. Its popular culture was dominant across much of the globe.
Its greatest rival, the Soviet Union, had disintegrated. Another, Japan, had been mired for a decade by economic stagnation. A third, Germany, was preoccupied with the stresses of reunification. The United States seemed to be leading the way to a new economy built around the Internet and the global distribution of finance, manufacturing, and entertainment.
Few would have imagined the United States’ success 40, 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. In the late 1960s, a third of the world had embraced communism and another third was non-aligned. The United States faced ideological challenges from the Cuban Revolution, Maoist China, and North Vietnam. The United States also confronted a new and unsettling set of cultural challenges: the youth revolt; the sexual revolution; women's liberation; the civil rights struggles of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and gays; and the environmental and consumer movements.
During the 1970s, the country faced a severe crisis of confidence deepened by a sense of economic and military decline and political scandal. Watergate, economic stagnation, mounting inflation, energy crisis, foreign competition and the loss of industrial jobs, the defeat in Vietnam, the impact of Iranian hostage crisis--all contributed to a sense of national decline.
By 1980, the sense of American pre-eminence had faded. Other countries saved more, invested more, worked harder, and increased the productivity of their industries faster than did America--a shocking recognition that American economic competitiveness had declined. In the U.S., real wages had fallen since 1973; families required two incomes, instead of one, to maintain a middle class standard of living.
Foreign trade overshadowed goods exported by the U.S. Foreign countries, especially Germany and Japan, dominated the most profitable, technologically-advanced fields, namely, consumer electronics, luxury automobiles, and machine tools. The United States remained preeminent in exporting farm products and timber, areas of trade that Americans used to associate with poor Third World countries.
Economic decline was accompanied by a deep sense of social decay. There was a mounting recognition that the United States’ level of crime and violence was the highest in the industrialized world. Not even the presidency was untouched by this epidemic of violence. Between 1963 and 1981, four presidents were the targets of assassins' bullets.
Other signs of social breakdown also evoked alarm. By the 1980s, half of all marriages ended in divorce--the highest rate in the Western world. The United States’ rates of drug use, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, and teen suicide were also the industrial world’s highest.
As recently as the late 1980s, the country was once again mired in recession and awash in a vast sea of private and public indebtedness. The national debt and federal deficit stood at record levels. Corporate takeovers and bankruptcies were also at a high level. The country owed more than $2 trillion in debt; and foreigners had acquired many of America's most famous corporations and pieces of real estate. Indeed, foreign ownership of American factories, real estate, and stocks and bonds was actually greater than American ownership of foreign assets.
But as a result of the longest post-war economic boom, the upsurge in stock prices, falling energy prices, a dramatic decline in unemployment, and the proliferation of new communication and computer technologies, Americans came to see themselves once again standing astride the world like a colossus.
How long that euphoria will last remains an open question.
It is possible to look at the events since the late 1980s from contrasting perspectives. Optimists can point to a process of democratization, of “people’s power,” that occurred on a global scale. From China’s Tiananmen Square (where student protesters erected a model of the Statute of Liberty), to the Philippines, Indonesia, and Eastern Europe, American ideals of freedom and human rights seemed to be spreading across the world. The 1990s witnessed the abolition of apartheid in South Africa; the weakening of clerical tyranny in Iran; the overthrow of dictatorship in Indonesia; the liberation of East Timor; and the peaceful resolution to conflict in Northern Ireland. The prospects for peace in the Middle East never appeared greater until renewed tensions erupted in 2000.
Over the same period, ecological conscious grew and new standards of women’s rights and human rights spread. War crimes tribunals and truth-and-reconciliation commissions were established to address past abuses of power.
But pessimists could also point to certain troubling indicators of future trouble. On the world scene, there is concern over the spread of diseases like AIDS, the threat of global warming, and the world’s heavy reliance on non-renewable sources of energy. Especially worrisome are the violence and disorder that is rooted in intense ethnic conflicts and the breakdown of nation states, especially in Africa.
At home, too, there are many sources of concern. In the U.S., areas of unease include the declining rates of participation in elections; the growing gap in the distribution of wealth; the increasing stresses that beset many families; and the pervading deep racial tensions that still plague the nation’s cities. The level of health and education in our country is another source of anxiety. The nation’s infant death rate lags behind that of 19 other nations and is twice as high as Japan’s. Meanwhile, test scores reveal that America's school children lag behind those in other advanced societies in almost every branch of learning mathematics, natural sciences, foreign languages, geography, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Pessimists also point to our society’s heavy reliance on prisons to address many social problems and a coarsening of popular culture.
11B. THE DISPUTED ELECTION OF 2000
The presidential election of 2000 hinged on the outcome in Florida. First, the television networks said that Vice President Al Gore had carried the state. Then, the state’s election was considered “too close to call.” Then, the networks declared Texas Governor George W. Bush the winner. The presidential election was so close that it took five weeks to determine the winner. Vice President Al Gore carried the East and West Coasts and inland industrial cities, while Texas Governor George W. Bush won much of the Midwest and Plains, as well as the South. Gore gained a half-million more votes than Bush, but Gore lost the Electoral College when he lost Florida. Bush's official margin in Florida was by 537 votes.
With the presidency hanging on a few hundred votes in a single state, there were lawsuits and requests for recounts. Bitter disputes centered on confusing ballots, missing names from voting rolls, and subjecting minority voters to multiple requests for identification. The punch card ballots posed a major problem--they were vulnerable to voter error. Many ballots were called into question because voters failed to punch a hole all the way through the ballot. In an extraordinary late-night decision, the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. A narrow majority of the Justices said that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated the principle that “all votes must be treated equally.” It also ruled that there was not enough time to conduct a new count that would meet constitutional muster.
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The 2000 presidential election was the first in 112 years in which a president lost the popular vote but captured enough states to win the electoral vote.
The Presidency of George W. Bush
The son of President George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush received his college degree from Yale University and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He served as an F-102 pilot for the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, before beginning his career in the oil and gas business in Midland, in the Texas panhandle. He later served as managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team until he was elected governor of Texas in 1994.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush described himself as a “compassionate conservative” committed to the principles of limited government, personal responsibility, strong families, and local control. He proposed to improve public schools by insisting on competency testing. Under his proposed “faith-based initiative,” religious institutions would be able to compete for government funds to provide social services. A major legislative success involved cutting taxes. But it would be the events that took place on September 11, 2001 that would reshape the whole direction of his presidency.
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11C. SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 to a Yemeni bricklayer. He was one of the youngest of nearly fifty children. Bin Laden grew up in Saudi Arabia, where his father founded a construction firm that would become the largest in the desert kingdom. He inherited millions of dollars after his father’s death and graduated from one of the kingdom’s leading universities with a degree in civil engineering.
In 1979, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to assist Muslims in Afghanistan in expelling the Soviet army, which was trying to support a communist government in the country by raising money and recruits. During the mid-1980s, bin Laden built roads, tunnels, and bunkers in Afghanistan.
Although the U.S. had helped him and his fellow warriors expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, bin Laden would turn against the United States. He was furious about the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia--the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and home of the two holiest Muslim shrines--that had been sent to protect the oil-rich kingdom from an Iraqi invasion. He was also angry about U.S. support for Israel and the American role in enforcing an economic embargo against Iraq. His goal was to remove American forces from his Saudi homeland, destroy the Jewish state in Israel, and defeat pro-Western dictatorships around the Middle East.
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By 1998, bin Laden had formed a terrorist network called Al-Qaeda, which in Arabic means “the base.” He also provided training camps, financing, planning, recruitment, and other support services for fighters seeking to strike at the United States.
American officials believe bin Laden's associates operate in over 40 countries--in Europe and North America, as well as in the Middle East and Asia. U.S. government officials believe bin Laden was involved in at least four major terrorist attacks against the United States’ interests prior to the September 11, 2001 attack: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1996 killing of 19 U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia; the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole at a port in Yemen, in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed.
Al-Qaeda viewed the U.S. responses to these attacks as half-hearted. In 1998, in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, American cruise missiles struck a network of terrorist compounds in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The pharmaceutical plant target was mistakenly believed to have been producing chemicals for use in nerve gas.
The September 11th Attacks
On September 11th, hijackers turned commercial airlines into missiles and attacked key symbols of American economic and military might. These hideous attacks leveled the World Trade Center towers in New York, destroyed part of the Pentagon, and left Americans in a mood similar to that which the country experienced after the devastating Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The succession of horrors began at 8:45 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 people from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into the World Trade Center's north tower. Eighteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 65 people, also bound for Los Angeles from Boston, struck the World Trade Center's south tower. At 9:40 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77, flying from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and carrying 64 people aboard, crashed into the Pentagon. At 10 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93, flying from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Passengers onboard the airliner, having heard about the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., apparently stormed the airplane’s cockpit and prevented the hijackers from attacking the nation’s capital.
Millions of television viewers watched in utter horror. At 9:50 a.m., the World Trade Center's south tower collapsed. At 10:29 a.m., the World Trade Center's north tower also collapsed.
More than 3,000 innocent civilians and rescue workers perished as a result of these acts of terror. This was about the same number of Americans who died on June 6, 1944, during the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. This was nearly as many as the 3,620 American--the largest number of Americans to die in combat on a single day--who died at the Civil War battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. More Americans died in two hours on September 11th than died in the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, or the Gulf War.
The U.S. Response
The U.S. response to the September 11th attacks was immediate and forceful. Over a period of just three days, Congress voted to spend $40 billion for recovery. Then, like his father in the period before the Persian Gulf War, George W. Bush organized an international coalition against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan that supported it. He persuaded Pakistan, which had been the main sponsor of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, to support the United States diplomatically and logistically.
On October 7, 2001, in retaliation for the September 11th attacks, a U.S.-led coalition launched an attack against targets in Afghanistan--the beginning of what President Bush has promised would be a long campaign against terrorist groups and the states that support them. The American strategy in Afghanistan involved using American air power and ground targeting to support the Northern Alliance, the major indigenous force opposing the Taliban. Later, U.S. and British forces coordinated ground operations against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's rugged terrain, extremes of weather extremes, and veteran guerilla-style fighters presented a serious challenge to the American military. But the effective use of laser-guided missiles, cluster bombs, 2,000-pound Daisy Cutter bombs, unmanned drones, and U.S. and British Special Forces, in conjunction with indigenous Afghani forces, succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban government. However, some members of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban apparently escaped into isolated regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Between 1,000 and 1,300 Afghani civilians were killed.
11D. BALANCING CIVIL LIBERTIES WITH NATIONAL SECURITY
The war on terror has forced the nation to toughen its national security. Following the horrifying events of September 11, 2001, more than 1,000 people, mainly Arab and Muslim men suspected of having information about terrorism, were detained by the federal government. These detainees were held without charges, and their names and whereabouts were largely kept secret.
In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Congress enacted legislation that gave law enforcement agencies broader authority to wiretap suspects and to monitor online communication. Congress also expanded the government’s authority to detain or deport aliens who associate with members of terrorist organizations. It also authorized greater intelligence sharing among the FBI, the CIA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and local law enforcement agencies.
President Bush responded to the attacks by proposing a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security would help to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce the country's vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recovery from attacks that do occur. The new department would be responsible for promoting border security, responding to chemical, biological, and radiological attacks, and utilizing information analysis.
Arab Americans and Muslim Americans
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, some Americans directed their anger at Arab Americans, Muslims, and South Asians. In a suburb in Phoenix, Arizona, an Indian immigrant who practiced the Sikh faith was murdered in a hate crime. So, too, was a Pakistani grocer in Dallas, Texas. In Irving, Texas, bullets were fired into an Islamic community center. Some 300 protestors tried to storm a Chicago-area mosque. Near Detroit, Michigan, an Islamic school had to close down because of daily bomb threats.
”Those who directed their anger against Arab Americans and Muslims should be ashamed,” President Bush declared. "Muslim Americans make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country," he said. "They need to be treated with respect." Today, there are approximately 3 million Arab Americans in the United States. About a third live in California, Michigan, and New York.
Arab Americans belong to many different religions. While most are Muslims, many are Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, or Druze. Prominent political figures of Arab descent include Ralph Nader, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala.
According to a poll conducted by the Pew Memorial Trusts, approximately two-fifths of the nation’s approximately 7 million Muslim Americans were born in the United States, with the rest coming from 80 other countries. About 32 percent are South Asian, 26 percent are Arab, 20 percent African American, 7 percent African, and 14 percent report some other background. About a fifth are converts to Islam.
11E. END OF THE BUSH YEARS
The War on Terror was a centerpiece in the race for the White House in 2004. The Democratic ticket, headed by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, a Vietnam War hero who entered the public consciousness for his subsequent testimony against it, attacked Bush for the ongoing inability to contain the Iraqi insurgency or to find weapons of mass destruction, the revelation, and photographic evidence, that American soldiers had abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, and the inability to find Osama Bin Laden. Moreover, many who had been captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were “detained” indefinitely at a military prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “Gitmo” became infamous for its harsh treatment, indefinite detentions, and the torture of prisoners. Bush defended the War on Terror and his allies attacked critics for failing to support the troops. Moreover, Kerry had voted for the war. He had to attack what had authorized. Bush won a close but clear victory.
New Orleans suffered a direct hit, the levees broke, and the bulk of the city flooded. Thousands of refugees flocked to the Superdome, where supplies and medical treatment and evacuation were slow to come. Individuals were dying in the heat. Bodies wasted away. Americans saw poor black Americans abandoned. Katrina became a symbol of a broken administrative system, a devastated coastline, and irreparable social structures that allowed escape and recovery for some, and not for others. Critics charged that Bush had staffed his administration with incompetent supporters and had further ignored the displaced poor and black residents of New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest and more destructive hurricanes to hit American soil in U.S. history. It nearly destroyed New Orleans, Louisiana, as well as cities, towns, and rural areas across the Gulf Coast. It sent hundreds of thousands of refugees to near-by cities like Houston, Texas, where they temporarily resided in massive structures like the Astrodome. Photograph, September 1, 2005
Immigration had become an increasingly potent political issue. The Clinton Administration had overseen the implementation of several anti-immigration policies on the border, but hunger and poverty were stronger incentives than border enforcement policies. Illegal immigration continued, often at great human cost, but nevertheless fanned widespread anti-immigration sentiment among many American conservatives. Many immigrants and their supporters, however, fought back. 2006 saw waves of massive protests across the country. Hundreds of thousands marched in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and tens of thousands marched in smaller cities around the country. Legal change, however, went nowhere. Moderate conservatives feared upsetting business interests’ demand for cheap, exploitable labor and alienating large voting blocs by stifling immigration and moderate liberals feared upsetting anti-immigrant groups by pushing too hard for liberalization of immigration laws.
Afghanistan and Iraq, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate. In 2006, the Taliban reemerged, as the Afghan Government proved both highly corrupt and highly incapable of providing social services or security for its citizens. Iraq only descended further into chaos.
In 2007, 27,000 additional United States forces deployed to Iraq under the command of General David Petraeus. The effort, “the surge,” employed more sophisticated anti-insurgency strategies and, combined with Sunni moves against the disorder, pacified many of Iraq’s cities and provided cover for the withdrawal of American forces. On December 4, 2008, the Iraqi government approved the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement and United States combat forces withdrew from Iraqi cities before June 30, 2009. The last US combat forces left Iraq on December 18, 2011. Violence and instability continued to rock the country.
Opened in 2005, this beautiful new mosque at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan, is the largest such religious structure in the United States. Muslims in Dearborn have faced religious and racial prejudice, but the suburb of Detroit continues to be a central meeting-place for American Muslims. Photograph July 8, 2008
11F. OBAMA AS PRESIDENT
By the 2008 election, with Iraq still in chaos, Democrats were ready to embrace the anti-war position and sought a candidate who had consistently opposed military action in Iraq. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois had been a member of the state senate when Congress debated the war actions but he had publicly denounced the war, predicting the sectarian violence that would ensue, and remained critical of the invasion through his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. He began running for president almost immediately after arriving in Washington.
A former law professor and community activist, Obama became the first black candidate to ever capture the nomination of a major political party. During the election, Obama won the support of an increasingly anti-war electorate. Already riding a wave of support, however, Bush’s fragile economy finally collapsed in 2007 and 2008. Bush’s policies were widely blamed, and Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was tied to Bush’s policies. Obama won a convincing victory in the fall and became the nation’s first African American president.
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President Obama’s first term was marked by domestic affairs, especially his efforts to combat the Great Recession and to pass a national healthcare law. Obama came into office as the economy continued to deteriorate. He managed the bank bailout begun under his predecessor and launched a limited economic stimulus plan to provide countercyclical government spending to spare the country from the worst of the downturn.
Obama’s most substantive legislative achievement proved to be a national healthcare law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but typically “Obamacare” by opponents and supporters like. The plan, narrowly passed by Congress, would require all Americans to provide proof of a health insurance plan that measured up to government-established standards. Those who did not purchase a plan would pay a penalty tax, and those who could not afford insurance would be eligible for federal subsidies.
Nationally, as prejudices against homosexuality fell and support for gay marriage reached a majority of the population, the Obama administration moved tentatively. Refusing to push for national interventions on the gay marriage front, Obama did, however, direct a review of Defense Department policies that repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011.
In 2009, President Barack Obama deployed 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as part of a counterinsurgency campaign that aimed to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Forces and CIA drones targeted al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. In May 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs conducted a raid deep into Pakistan that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. The United States and NATO began a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011, with an aim of removing all combat troops by 2014. Although weak militarily, the Taliban remained politically influential in south and eastern Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda remained active in Pakistan, but shifted its bases to Yemen and the Horn of Africa. As of December 2013, the war in Afghanistan had claimed the lives of 3,397 U.S. service members.
These former Taliban fighters surrendered their arms to the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan during a reintegration ceremony at the provincial governor’s compound in May 2012
Climate change, the role of government, gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana, the rise of China, inequality, surveillance, a stagnant economy, and a host of other issues have confronted recent Americans with sustained urgency.
In 2012, Barack Obama won a second term by defeating Republican Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. However, Obama’s inability to pass legislation and the ascendancy of Tea Party Republicans effectively shut down partisan cooperation and stunted the passage of meaningful legislation. Obama was a lame duck before he ever won reelection. Half-hearted efforts to address climate change, for instance, went nowhere. The economy continued its half-hearted recovery. While corporate profits climbed unemployment continued to sag. The Obama administration campaigned on little to address the crisis and accomplished far less.
11G. THE GREAT RECESSION
The Great Recession began, as most American economic catastrophes began, with the bursting of a speculative bubble. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, home prices continued to climb, and financial services firms looked to cash in on what seemed to be a safe but lucrative investment. Especially after the dot-com bubble burst, investors searched for a secure investment that was rooted in clear value and not trendy technological speculation. And what could be more secure than real estate? But mortgage companies began writing increasingly risky loans and then bundling them together and selling them over and over again, sometimes so quickly that it became difficult to determine exactly who owned what. Decades of lax regulation had again enabled risky business practices to dominate the world of American finance. When American homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole system tumbled quickly. Seemingly solid financial services firms disappeared almost overnight. In order to prevent the crisis from spreading, the federal government poured billions of dollars into the industry, propping up hobbled banks. Massive giveaways to bankers created shock waves of resentment throughout the rest of the country. On the Right, conservative members of the Tea Party decried the cronyism of an Obama administration filled with former Wall Street executives. The same energies also motivated the Occupy Wall Street movement, as mostly young left-leaning New Yorkers protesting an American economy that seemed overwhelmingly tilted toward “the one percent.”
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The Great Recession only magnified already rising income and wealth inequalities. According to the Chief Investment Officer at JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” A study from the Congressional Budget authority found that since the late 1970s, after-tax benefits of the wealthiest 1% grew by over 300%. The “average” American’s benefits had grown 35%. Economic trends have disproportionately and objectively benefited the wealthiest Americans. Still, despite some political rhetoric, American frustration has not generated anything like the social unrest of the early twentieth century. A weakened labor movement and a strong conservative base continue to stymie serious attempts at redistributing wealth. Occupy Wall Street managed to generate a fair number of headlines and shift public discussion away from budget cuts and toward inequality, but its membership amounted to only a fraction of the far more influential and money-driven Tea Party. Its presence on the public stage was fleeting.
The Great Recession, however, was not. While American banks quickly recovered and recaptured their steady profits, and the American stock market climbed again to new heights, American workers continued to lag. Job growth would remain miniscule and unemployment rates would remain stubbornly high. Wages froze, meanwhile, and well-paying full-time jobs that were lost were too often replaced by low-paying, part-time work. A generation of workers coming of age within the crisis, moreover, had been savaged by the economic collapse. Unemployment among young Americans hovered for years at rates nearly double the national average.
The Great Recession, however, was not. While American banks quickly recovered and recaptured their steady profits, and the American stock market climbed again to new heights, American workers continued to lag. Job growth would remain miniscule and unemployment rates would remain stubbornly high. Wages froze, meanwhile, and well-paying full-time jobs that were lost were too often replaced by low-paying, part-time work. A generation of workers coming of age within the crisis, moreover, had been savaged by the economic collapse. Unemployment among young Americans hovered for years at rates nearly double the national average.
11H. NEW HORIZONS
Much public commentary in the early twenty-first century concerned the “millennials,” the new generation that had come of age in the new millennium. Commentators, demographers, and political prognosticators continue to ask what the new generation will bring. Pollsters have found certain features that distinguish the millennials from older Americans. They are, the pollsters say, more diverse, more liberal, less religious, and wracked by economic insecurity.
Millennial attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage reflect one of the most dramatic changes in popular attitudes toward recent years. After decades of advocacy, attitudes over the past two decades have shifted rapidly. Gay characters–and characters with depth and complexity–can be found across the cultural landscape and, while national politicians have refused to advocate for it, a majority of Americans now favor the legalization of gay marriage.
Even as anti-immigrant initiatives like California’s Proposition 187 (1994) and Arizona’s SB1070 (2010) reflected the anxieties of many, younger Americans proved far more comfortable with immigration and diversity–which makes sense, given that they are the most diverse American generation in living memory. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society liberalized immigration laws, the demographics of the United States have been transformed. In 2012, nearly one-quarter of all Americans were immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. Half came from Latin America. The ongoing “Hispanicization” of the United States and the ever shrinking proportion of non-Hispanic whites have been the most talked about trends among demographic observers. By 2013, 17% of the nation was Hispanic. In 2014, Latinos surpassed non-Latino whites to became the largest ethnic group in California. In Texas, the image of a white cowboy hardly captures the demographics of a “minority-majority” state in which Hispanic Texans will soon become the largest ethnic group. For the nearly 1.5 million people of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, for instance, where a majority of residents speak Spanish at home, a full three-fourths of the population is bilingual. Political commentators often wonder what political transformations these populations will bring about when they come of age and begin voting in larger numbers.
Younger Americans are also more concerned about the environment and climate change, and yet, on that front, little has changed. In the 1970s and 1980s, experts substantiated the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. Eventually, the most influential of these panels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in 1995 that there was a “discernable human influence on global climate.” This conclusion, though stated conservatively, was by that point essentially a scientific consensus. By 2007, the IPCC considered the evidence “unequivocal” and warned that “unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt.”
Climate change became a permanent and major topic of public discussion and policy in the twenty-first century. Fueled by popular coverage, most notably, perhaps, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, based on Al Gore’s book and presentations of the same name, climate change entered much of the American left. And yet American public opinion and political action still lagged far behind the scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming. Conservative politicians, conservative, think tanks, and energy companies waged war against to sow questions in the minds of Americans, who remain divided on the question, and so many others.
Much of the resistance to addressing climate change is economic. As Americans look over their shoulder at China, many refuse to sacrifice immediate economic growth for long-term environmental security. Twenty-first century relations with China are characterized by contradictions and interdependence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China reinvigorated its efforts to modernize its country. By liberating and subsidizing much of its economy and drawing enormous foreign investments, China has posted enormous growth rates during the last several decades. Enormous cities rise by the day. In 2000 China had a gross domestic product around an eighth the size of the United States. Based on growth rates and trends, analysts suggest that China’s economy will bypass the United States’ soon. American concerns about China’s political system have persisted, but money sometimes speaks matters more to Americans. China has become one of the country’s leading trade partners. Cultural exchange has increased, and more and more Americans visit China each year, with many settling down to work and study. Conflict between the two societies is not inevitable, but managing bilateral relations will be one of the great challenges of the next decade. It is but one of several aspects of the world confronting Americans of the twenty-first century.