What Events Broke Us Apart?
I went back to 2000 on this because it feels like a nice snapshot of “modernity.” It’s almost 25 years ago, so people who were born in 2000 are theoretically entering some form of adulthood right now. Plus, it’s right before 9/11, which would be the first thing on our list.
Here’s my partial list.
9/11: This unified the country (good!), which COVID could not (bad!). The big narrative is about unity, but in reality the unity was maybe 96 hours at most, and even in those 96 hours we were getting into conspiracy theories, anti-Middle East rhetoric, left vs. right, etc. Even though I randomly put the cut-off on this post at 2000, I think 9/11 also showcases that we had lots of these divisions beforehand. We unified for a split second (remember when Bush was at, like, 88% approval ratings?!?!) and then came apart again.
Obama being elected: This is a huge one that you can’t ignore. For some people, this indicated that progress had finally arrived. It had taken him four years from his convention speech to get to this mark. He did his Convention acceptance speech in a damn football stadium. This was electric progressive stuff. But, a lot of people simply could not, and would never, deal with the idea of an African-American being President. Megan Kelly kinda walks the line of saying that, while remaining a bit respectful, in her interview for a Frontline special on division in America:
The rise of Silicon Valley and automation tools: You have to remember that Silicon Valley is and was largely the domain of engineers. Now there are more finance bros out there, and have been for 15–20 years, and now the bloom is largely off the rose. I’m not really even sure of the last amazing thing Silicon V. gave us, and please don’t say “Instagram.” You basic bitch! I kid, I kid. But Silicon Valley tools absolutely contributed to the divisiveness and disconnect between people (that’s Tier 1), and then Tier 2 would be the engineer thing. Engineers, God love ’em, look for the easiest possible path to solution. (Well, mostly.) Oftentimes, that does not involve humans. It’s taken years, but that’s why we’re seeing a new AI/ML revolution these days; for the last decade, people have been toiling on tools that will, essentially, end some employment. You can draw a straight line from that “demise of conventional employment” box to Trump 2016. We’ll get to that in a second.
School shootings and guns: This has been one of the bigger left-right divides short of abortion in the last 20 years, I think. The left thinks “These assholes will never do anything because of money and their 2A print-out tucked in their pockets.” The right thinks, “It’s protected, ya bastards. You’re such a bunch of triggered nobodies.” I’m speaking in extremes here, and honestly I think most “average” people don’t want to see schools shot up and they want kids to be safe and they don’t really want to debate any of that. Some of those “average” people might live in Oklahoma and want access to guns and always be safe using those guns. Some won’t. There’s a huge mental health component here too that we can only scrape the surface of. But the whole issue of inaction around guns and public-area shootings has divided us into poles, yes.
Trump 2016: This was a hum-dinger of a divisive thing, absolutely. There are a million takes on this. Thousands of books. In the shortest possible form, it was a “lesser of two evils” election — a lot of women hated Hillary because of when she stood by Bill after Monica, etc. — and Trump capitalized on fear and grievance about the economic conditions thrust upon us by elites. The grand irony is that he’s an elite (somewhat) and has an actual golden toilet in his home. We got duped on this one, writ large. Trump is the biggest lightning rod for far-left liberals of all-time. He spawned a million of these memes:
His son literally wrote a book called Triggered. Yea. Big divider.
Kavanaugh to SCOTUS: This is overlooked sometimes in the “culture war” canon, but this one was huge. Not only did you have left vs. right here, you had a bunch of other stuff:
Everyone had a take on this one. My cousin actually “cancelled” me during these hearings because I reached out to her checking on her mental health. That was awesome. Her sister then later disinvited my mom from a baby shower. Gotta love culture wars.
Once Kav got on SCOTUS, the narrative became:
I think the Kav stuff was the final nail, honestly.
COVID: … and then COVID came along, and it completely divided most of us on:
Seemingly everyone had a take on COVID, and a lot of the seeming joy in those takes was to demean the other side for how dumb they were about Fauci, about government’s role, about the economy, about free money, about how to raise kids, etc.
I think these are the big ones across 23 years.
Did I miss any major ones?