The Second Era of Good Feelings

TW: Suicide.

I was born in 1991, just as history ended. In his 1989 essay, Francis Fukuyama makes the case that ever since the French Revolution, the world has been on a convoluted progressive path toward “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." With the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months after he published his essay, this historical trajectory ended. I was born on May 13, 1991, and the Soviet Union formally dissolved later that year, in December, 1991.

I’ve come to refer to the period I’ve lived in as the “Second Era of Good Feelings.” Like the first Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825), American politics throughout the majority of my lifetime (1991-today) have been constituted by a single party rule by two parties that share “so many of the same underlying convictions, including a belief in the desirability and inevitability of technological and economic development, that the conflict between them, shrill and acrimonious as it is, no longer speaks to the central issues of American politics.”

The emotional register of the original Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825) was one of positivity and optimism. This era coincided with the?Market Revolution ?where people stopped producing for themselves and instead traded with others. Transportation and communications technology were rapidly expanding. During this period, roads, canals, and railroads proliferated, largely funded by tolls and government subsidies.

The steamboat made the transportation of goods ten times faster than it previously had been. During this period 3,000 miles of canals were built throughout the country, including the 363 mile long Erie Canal that connected New York City to the Great Lakes.

Toward the end of this period there was a refocusing on railroads that would lead to about 30,000 miles of rail being built in just a few decades. Along the railroads also came the telegraph which allowed for the syncing of when shipments of goods would arrive where and how much they should be sold for. The first mass produced product in the US was of course the clock, which allowed for the universalization of time.

In this Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825) the way that materials flowed through nature was shifting in a way that made progress temporarily common sense, which meant that national politics was more or less unified. Time was unifying. Space was shrinking. Progress was palpable.

At the same time the nature of work was in flux. Until the early 1800s, most production happened within the domestic sphere, and mostly by women. Artisans and farmers worked for a “price” that aligned with the quality and volume of what they produced. As people moved into cities and into factories these people became employees that worked for a “wage,” that was determined by the length of time on the clock. The seasons mattered less. People became cogs in a factory machine, alienated from the fruits of their labor. As governmental and private infrastructure projects burned hot, banking and corporate structures emerged to fund everything. Wall Street became the Wall Street.

During the Era of Good Feelings there was a sense amongst intellectuals and the populace that things were sort of fucked, but folks struggled to put a finger on it. Politics went on. Black people were still enslaved in the South. Historians labeled it the Era of Good Feelings despite a sense that things were out of control. Too much, too fast.

Out of this subtle sense of fuckedness, religious revivals and backlash sprung up literally everywhere. This was the Second Great Awakening that gave us Shakers and Mormons in New York and Baptist revolutions nearly everywhere else. Melville’s?Bartlby the Scrivner?is a story of someone basically rejecting this new market capitalist system, while his?Tartarus of Maids?is a tragic look into the dark life of female mill workers in New England. The backlash to the Market Revolution also precipitated the American transcendentalist movement and Hudson River School painting movement.

During this period, many that could moved West into Western New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Illinois. There they could hang onto some sense of?what was. The West was a place where the domestic sphere still existed.

And yet, this was the Era of Good Feelings, right? It was a period where flux was seen by those at the top as success and felt by those at the bottom as violence and disorientation. Time, space, change, work, meaning—all were in metamorphosis. The Era of Good feelings for who?

The market triumphed in 1815 and again in 1991, and both were followed by periods of rapid changes in communications and labor. Today, the internet has fundamentally changed nature in a way equivalent to the roads, canals, telegraph of the past. The flow of goods globally is synced up better than ever before. Events happen still happen in one place in space and time, and yet the space in which the sight and sound of those events happens in is eliminated by livestreams and time eliminated by recordings posted to timelines and stored for eternity.

Profits are at an all time high. And yet the communities bound together around profit we called workplaces have become distributed across space. People work from home, fusing the space of workplace and domestic. Nixon took us off the gold standard a long time ago, but now money is all stored in electrons in wires. Tax collection is mediated by software. At $20/hour I can make enough money in a day to fly my body from New York to Seattle.

People who can move west to find some sense of?what was. Mythologically Western frontier places like Jackson, WY exploded after “history ended” in 1991 as everyone began to register the impending alienation that the dot com boom would bring. With the material frontier gone, the mythological frontier became as important for those living through the Second Era of Good Feelings as the material frontier was to those escaping the Market Revolution during the original Era of Good Feelings.

Anti-materialist religious revivals are everywhere today, just not bound by space as they used to be: tradwives, permaculture, vegans, yoga cults, recreation cults, affinity groups, the music festival circuit, vanlife, survivalists, MAGA rallies, CPAC, pagan communities, Mormons, retirement communities in Florida, QAnon, wildlife photographers, Alex Jones rallies, the Anastasians, Brexiteers, the Capitol Riot, the Brazilian Capitol Riot, Ayahuasca retreats—they are all organized largely online.

Today, we are living through another period of flux in how material and information flow through society. I’m coming to believe that the gridlock in Congress is not gridlock at all, but a stable equilibrium between two political poles that ultimately stabilizes the consensus goals: economic growth and technological progress. Were Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in the end much different? All three cheered the explosion of the internet into our lives, championed the economic growth of Silicon Valley and oil wells, and used force and violence to ensure the ever-expanding material and ideological influence of our country across the globe.

Clinton, Bush, and Obama all cheered a rapid metamorphosis without much care for the lived experience of everyday Americans. The overall suicide rate in the United States has grown by 30% from 2000 to 2020. Wealth inequality has skyrocketed since 1989.

And so, it may be the case that ever since the French Revolution the world has been on a convoluted progressive path toward “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” And yet, ever since I’ve been alive, it seems like there has just been more anti-liberalism and anti-democratic politics. I get the sense that today's proliferating radicalism in our politics is a subtle registration of what lies behind the two-party sleight of hand that tricks us into thinking that “we are so divided!”

Just like the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening that coincided with the rapid expansion of market capitalism, transportation, and communication technology, today anti-materialist revivalism is proliferating. The serious pushback on the far-left and far-right today is not really against equality and fascism, but instead against economic growth, technological progress, and an ever-expanding political community as the three consensus goals of modern society.

On both edges of our dumbass political spectrum, there exists a rapidly growing desire to replace the societal goals of economic growth with health and stability, to remember past means of engaging with the natural world, and to shift from a global to a local community perspective. This is Trump and Bernie. Marianne Williamson is running for president again. Alex Jones sells vitamins. My friends in organic farming become anti-vaxxers. Everyone is anti-capitalist. Conservative ranchers in Wyoming are growing hydroponically grown greens, restoring the soil, and voting for Trump.

Kendrick Lamar tells his audience to “Take off the Wi-Fi/…/There’s a real world outside,” that “live my life in nature, only thing relieves me,” that “Where's my faith? Told you I was Christian, but just not today/I transformed, praying to the trees, God is taking shape,” and to go to therapy. Jordan Davis tells his listeners to “buy dirt.” Today, optimism and pessimism intermingle at all scales. The smartest scientists in the world tell us we can’t keep doing this. Capitalists tell us that markets will solve climate change. Other capitalists tell us climate change doesn’t matter. In the existential swirl of our age, people have no clue who to trust. We grasp things closer to us. In my lifetime, history has ended and the Second Era of Good Feelings has set in. The disrupters became our idols.

We made movies about Steve Jobs and worshipped his turtlenecks and gadgets and even he, in the end, came to distrust the same technological good feelings he became synonymous with. Without medicine cancer grows and grows and grows faster. The little boys that worshipped the disruptive troll-masculinity of Elon Musk were the same ones to go down a Q rabbit hole and spend $2,000 on a Q conference and $500 on a Trump NFT and to eventually blow their brains out with a handgun alone on a Saturday night.

I can’t wait to get Starlink. I can’t wait to fast for two days. I can’t wait to find a good job in academia that pays well in a place I want to live. I can’t wait to grow a vegetable garden. I can’t wait to move West and spend time in the wilderness. I’ve had my phone on silent for three years.?Bartleby?was the OG quiet quitter.?Nomadland?is just a reboot of?The Tartarus of Maids.

I’m glad to have lived after history has ended and in an Era of Good Feelings.