By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 11, 2017
The golden age lasted about ten years.
In November of 1989, the gates of the Berlin Wall were
opened. Soon after, the people themselves took to it with sledgehammers, and
people who did not know that they could cry from joy learned to. The Wall was a
product of that original Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascists of the East
German police state, who called it the Antifaschistischer
Schutzwall, the “antifascist rampart.” They told the subjects of their
totalitarian rule that the Wall was built to protect socialism from the evils
without, but of course it was designed to stem migration out of East Germany,
where people with direct experience of life under socialism went to great
lengths to remove themselves and their families from that workers’ paradise.
By 1991, the demolition of the Wall was complete — and so
was the demolition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was
dissolved in November of that year. On the radio, pop stars sang about
strolling through Gorky Park and “watching the world wake up from History.” The
capital H was implicit, denoting History in the Hegelian sense, the force
against which National Review
proposed to stand athwart yelling “Stop,” the History of “dialectical and
historical materialism,” the process which Francis Fukuyama would declare
concluded, with liberal democracy having emerged as the unchallenged victor in
History’s great contest.
The United States declared victory and then turned its
attention to domestic matters. That happens in the wake of every great conflict
in which the United States is involved: The people grow weary of it, even in
victory, and someone, usually a presidential candidate, comes along and
demands: “Why are we spending all that money in Berlin (Baghdad, Kabul,
Damascus) when we could be using it to fix potholes in Sheboygan?” Barack Obama
would later talk about “nation-building at home,” but he hardly invented that
sort of thing, and in 1992 it was Bill Clinton making the case for investing
the so-called peace dividend in a larger welfare state at home. President
Clinton put his wife, a middling lawyer, in charge of reforming the nation’s
health-care system, and the project failed, but not before establishing the
Clintons as a kind of ersatz royal house cum crime syndicate.
(The “penicillin-resistant syphilis of American
politics,” as I called them, a line I would thank Roger Stone to stop
plagiarizing.)
It was a heck of a party. The economy had gone from
stagflation and gas lines in the Carter years to booming in the Reagan era, and
that continued through the Clinton presidency, turbocharged by the emergence of
the Internet and the high-tech economy associated with it. My last year in
college, 1996, may have been the best year in American history to have been
entering the work force with a halfway respectable bachelor’s degree and a
little bit of technological knowhow. But things were pretty good all over: My
own personal Austin Economic Indicator — the help-wanted sign at the Taco Bell
across from the University of Texas campus — was advertising $10 an hour plus a
$1,000 longevity bonus after 90 days,
and they couldn’t hire people. My experience at my college newspaper and
knowledge of desktop-publishing software was enough to take me around the world
as a newspaper editor, but I was something of a slacker: The real go-getters
weren’t going to work for anybody but starting their own companies and doing
their own thing. The startup ethic wasn’t limited to software bosses like Bill
Gates and Marc Andreessen: Robert Rodriguez didn’t sit around waiting for
Miramax to make his movie — he took $7,000 to Mexico and made El Mariachi himself. There was a sense
not that anybody could do anything, but that the possibilities had become much
larger than they once were. The combination of technology, freedom,
entrepreneurship, and ready investment capital amplified the individual, and
made him if not quite the equal of a Fortune 500 corporation then at least a
potential rival to it.
All of this occurred to Osama bin Laden as well, and the
golden age came to an end a little more than a decade after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, on September 11, 2001. Those of us who knew the world before are
refugees from the past, residents of a different world from the one inhabited
by those who have never known anything different. That may be a return to
normal: The paranoid atmosphere of 2017 is really not so different from the one
at the end of the Cold War, when we elementary-school students were being
taught to duck under our desks in the event of thermonuclear warfare. Those
desks must have been sturdier than they looked.
With the rock festivals and tie-dye and the bad haircuts,
people in the 1990s sometimes thought they were living in something like the
1960s, but the Clinton years were a lot more like the Eisenhower years than the
LBJ-Nixon-Vietnam era: a time of peace that wasn’t quite secured and affluence
that, in retrospect, smelled slightly of tulips. It was a great time — and a
missed opportunity. We might have done anything during the postwar boom, with
the United States standing practically alone on the global stage as the
unchallengeable economic power and leader of the free world, whose only global
rival was a grimy, backward, hungry gulag state whose only real influence in
the world came from its apparent willingness to destroy that world out of
ideological pique. What we did was build a bigger welfare state and hope that
the good times would last forever, while doing very little to ensure that they
did. We repeated that mistake in the 1990s, so impressed by our victory over
the vast red armies of the Communist world that we failed to appreciate that 19
Islamic fanatics with box-cutters had a sense of History, too, and a program
for a future very different from the one we’d imagined for ourselves.
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