The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?

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Begin Again
The reset button has been pushed. So what will be the protocols and look and feel of the America about to emerge?

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Only six months ago, we thought we might be on the verge of a remarkable new era — thanks to the possible election of Obama. It is bizarre how secondary that epochal change now seems. It's as if Jesus had returned — but just afterward extraterrestrials landed, and as a result everybody stopped paying much attention to the holy dude. But it's also a perfectly apt and gratifying turn of events: candidate Obama positioned himself as a smart, steady character who happened to be black, and the economic emergency that helped ensure his election has pushed the fact of his race and its heavy symbolic freight into the shadows of public consciousness. Once the crises have passed, however, I think we'll rediscover the ramifications, small and large, of the enlightened national turn we made last Nov. 4 and start enjoying the dawn of a new era of racial reconciliation.

A big reason for Obama's election and high approval ratings is his privileging of the empirical and pragmatic ahead of ideological reflex. We have not, of course, arrived in a golden age of fair-minded, intellectually honest postpartisanship, as proved by the congressional votes on the stimulus package and the redoubled ferocity of brain-dead partisans. But a majority of Americans out in America are dialing back or turning off their ideological autopilots, thanks to the economic crises, Obama's approach and the post–Cold War realities. With the Soviet Union gone and China socialist in name only, the specter of communism is no longer haunting us, and charges of socialism have lost the political power they had for most of the past century. Rather, it's suddenly capitalist piggishness that provokes genuine rage. When nearly half the House Republicans vote for a confiscatory 90% tax on Wall Street executives' bonuses, the old "class warfare" lines seem moot.

We haven't come to the end of ideology, as Daniel Bell asserted in 1960 and Francis Fukuyama restated in 1992, but the familiar polarities of right and left are losing their salience. For a while, America will be in a state of ideological flux — which means we'll be unusually free to improvise a fresh course forward. We can have universal health coverage and public schools unbound from the stultifying grip of teachers' unions. We can tax fossil fuels so that solar and wind become more economical and commit seriously to nuclear power. We can impose sensible regulatory mechanisms and enthusiastically promote free markets and free trade. We can grow the armed forces to fight all necessary wars but also forgo pork-barrel weapons systems.

It's not that disagreements about government intervention won't disappear — and we'll continue to have true believers on the left and the right. But with the economy in uncharted territory, we'll come to recognize that party-line adherence to old political convictions won't provide any easy way out. Given that it was our unthinking trust in the unthinking certainty of "experts" that got us here — securitized debt? credit-default swaps? uh, sure, whatever — Americans can now revert to their ruthlessly pragmatic, commonsensical selves. Admitting that we aren't certain exactly how to proceed is liberating, and key. Hyperbolic rants and rigid talking points, in either Limbaughian or Olbermannian flavors, now seem worse than useless, artifacts of a bumptious barroom age.

The utterly international nature of our present economic hell makes it all the scarier. But in the long run, I think we will also see an upside: the meltdown amounts to a spectacular moment of global consciousness, this generation's version of the Apollo astronauts' iconic 1968 photograph of the earth from the moon — an unforgettable reminder that all 6.7 billion of us are in this together, profoundly and inextricably interdependent. (The sublime always has a bit of terror mixed in.)

If you want to feel encouraged about our economic near future — not this damned decade but the one to come — ignore the stock traders and go talk to some venture capitalists. They aren't quite giddy (after the '80s and '90s and '00s, beware all giddiness), but they are optimistic about an imminent tide of innovations in technology, energy and transportation. Recall, please, the national mood in the mid-'70s: after the 1960s party, we found ourselves in a slough of despondency, with an oil crisis, a terrible recession, a kind of Weimarish embrace of decadence, national malaise — and at that very dispirited moment, Microsoft and Apple were founded. The next transformative, moneymaking technologies and businesses are no doubt coming soon to a garage near you.

The present chastening can't mean turning into a nation of overcautious, unambitious scaredy-cats. This is the moment for business to think different and think big. The great dying off of quintessentially 20th century businesses presents vast opportunity for entrepreneurs. People will still need (greener) cars, still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings — that is, the people burning to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and media in new, economic ways — will have a clearer field in which to grow.

The ecology of business and employment at the high end has already been transformed by the Wall Street crash. The end of the boom in the financial industry means that careers manipulating money will no longer be so seductive to such a disproportionate share of our best and brightest. Among the 2007 graduates of Harvard College who went straight to work, half the kids heading to banks and consultancies said that if money weren't an issue, they'd be embarking on different career paths, and the 20% of the class that went to work in public service, politics, the arts and publishing would instead be 39%. In the postbubble economy, plenty of smart and ambitious young people will still pursue financial careers, God bless them, but other fields will get a bigger share of the cream.

The baby boomers were historically fortunate: they missed the Great Depression and World War II, and though they grew up with the hideous ambient hum of potential nuclear Armageddon, until they reached middle age, the only great national trauma was the one — the '60s and Vietnam — in which they were the self-regarding stars. The so-called millennials, on the other hand, have come of age during a period defined by the digital revolution, 9/11, financial bubbles bursting, a possible depression and the election — possibly their election — of an African-American President: the makings, frankly, of a healthier, more useful generational creation myth than assassinations, antiwar protests and countercultural bacchanalia (which, by the way, enabled the risk-taking, party-hearty, quasi-utopian paradigm of the past quarter-century). In other words, the kids are all right. (Read stories from people who lived through the Great Depression.)

Whether or not Congress passes some kind of carbon-taxing scheme that ushers in a true alternative-energy era, "sustainability" is going to be shaping individual and public-policy decisions. And I don't just mean eating locally grown foods, driving more fuel-efficient cars and using weird lightbulbs. Annual increases of 10% and 15% in real estate prices were not sustainable; endlessly lowering taxes and expanding government isn't sustainable; Medicare and the war on drugs as currently constituted are not sustainable. Sustainability in this sense is as much old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicanism as it is newfangled kumbaya-ish green talk, and achieving it will require partisans on both sides to face facts and make unpleasant choices.

Yes, we must start spending again, and we will. But we've all known people who, having survived the 1930s, never lost their Depression habits of frugality. And so it will be again. We don't need to turn ourselves into tedious, zero-body-fat, zero-carbon-footprint ascetics, but even after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bathroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally.

The housing industry is comatose, yet even that has a silver lining. We have a moment to pause and reflect before we begin building again. When big-time real estate development resumes, we can move beyond the incoherent, anything-goes paradigm of the postwar era and produce more places to live along the lines of the towns and cities everyone instinctively loves, communities designed to become true communities. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever," Obama said in February in South Florida, "those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats — everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to design communities."

Although certain self-parodying epiphenomena of the Age of Profligacy — so long, Paris Hilton! — are about to disappear, fun will endure. Hollywood is doing fantastic box-office business, thanks to insanely unserious movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Madea Goes to Jail. The Colbert Report has been a special haven of sanity amid the sky-is-falling hysteria. And again, history is encouraging in this regard: Saturday Night Live and modern comedy were born during the malaise-y '70s, just as wit and humor — the New Yorker, the Marx Brothers, screwball comedy — flourished in the '30s. I'm even hopeful that the meltdown and resulting reset might jar the culture in deeper ways. For three decades, too much of art and design and entertainment has seemed caught in a cul-de-sac, almost compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past. (Think: post-Modern architecture, pop music based on sampling, '60s-style shift dresses, pseudo-midcentury home décor.) Since we're now finished with a 25- or 30-year-long era in both politics and economics, maybe a new cultural epoch will emerge as well. Maybe more of the next big things will be actually, thrillingly new.