I see this class of critique a lot and I think it tends to be somewhat overblown in that conflates contingently bad aspects of the past with necessary ones—and in particular suggests that these contingently bad aspects are what must be driving nostalgia as a cover for some form of X-ism. But the 1990s is also (especially as generations age and die out) a popular decade for people to feel nostalgic for with respect to general American optimism, perceived high and increasing quality of life and most with respect to the quality of a lot a of cultural output. Conversely, the 70s are (other than some of the films and the music) kind of universally panned in the list of “decades it was good to be a middle-class American.” This suggests to me that at leasy many people really do just want a period of relative stability and optimism / dynamism, and that it’s by extension something of a canard to chalk it all up to dog whistles rather than more like what it says on the tin.
I feel bad for today's young people because you cannot imagine the professional opportunities we had as young people in the 90s. The whole tech industry was expanding at a breakneck pace, and you could find yourself being an "expert" or running a team in just a couple years.
Not to mention that (as I've mentioned in past comments) we had been raised under the existential dread of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and they crumbled just as we were reaching adulthood.
My first memory of understanding politics was when my dad came into my room and pointed at the USSR on the globe on my bedside table and said “that doesn’t exist anymore, we beat them and your world will be freer than mine”. I had no idea what he was talking about (I was around 7 years old) but I asked him what he meant and he sat down and explained what the USSR was, how he used to hide under his desk in school and why the US is free and the communist world is not.
>>> Seriously? Do people feel nostalgic for the 90s?
Yes. I know the below is just one example (and I'm not really on FdB's wavelength and don't quite understand where all his internet-fame originates in any event) but I will say that I personally agree with much of it and my strong sense is that this a fairly widely-held PoV [See also "The Dream of the 90s is alive in Portland"]. Some other article from a ways back (may have been the AV Club back when it was reasonably good) pointed out that (to a present viewer) one of the absurdities of "American Beauty" being the kind of movie that drew audiences in is that it was exploring the ennui of being an employed, secure, well-paid member of the middle class. This was, at the time, an actually compelling premise -- this, *this* was the sort of problem Americans saw themselves facing at the time. (I think "Fight Club" is not dissimilar). Oh, the scourge of prosperity! [See also the notion of "selling out" in music].
100% agree on Fight Club and American Beauty. Things were so good we literally did not know how to handle it! Even the Matrix touched on this theme, and Office Space too in a way.
It's like the reverse of the Watchmen graphic novel though - without a shared enemy, Americans turned on each other. Terrorism was too vague and distant to really bring us together, but maybe this China obsession will?
So I’m given to believe. The point was just that the lyric itself is the sort of thing that was clearly meant to be instantly familiar to the intended audience in a sort of lightheartedly facetious way. Similar to how “stuff white people like” works because its intended audience does, in fact, like much of fhe eponymous stuff :p. “The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland” wouldn’t work if didn’t (correctly) reflect a kind of gut-level widely-shared nostalgia.
Nostalgia is basically out of control on YouTube. You can watch someone boot up a beige tower PC running Windows 95 and feel a wistful longing for a better time.
"...it absolutely isn't because, like Matt, that that's when I came of age."
No, it's an objective fact based on sound causality: that time was the best because it happened that the best music of all time was released right around when I was a teen and young adult. Objectivity squared, sucker! Try to fight that!
I have always pinpointed the emergence of Sugar Ray as when music fell off so I pinpoint the late '90s. Rock started getting more pop-influenced and I was getting too old to tolerate that. Hip hop was still pretty good into the 2000s, though.
There really was a lot of objectively good music in the '90s, though, that still appears on classic and modern stations.
Yeah, I have a lot of nostalgia for, like, 2009-2012. Which was an objectively crappy time for a lot of people. But I was in my mid-to-late twenties back then and it was a good time for me.
'90s nostalgia really is off the charts. My teenage years and young adulthood was in the '90s so I, of course, am a bit nostalgic for that. And it was globally a sweet spot for Americans, though I don't think people are as nostalgic for the AIDS crisis.
Back in the '90s the late '60s were the focus of nostalgia. We may just be now at the time where people are nostalgic for a time before they were born because the crappy stuff got left in the past while the good stuff remains culturally relevant.
Yes. People my age* (I'm a few years younger than Matt) view the 90s in the same way that Baby Boomers viewed the 50s. The parallels are pretty uncanny.
Whether that's actually how it felt for people who were adults at the time is a different story.
*I personally do not have much nostalgia for anything before 1998 or 1999, but this is due to personal circumstances (I didn't really like being a kid) more than anything happening the world at large.
What I remember from that time growing up in central Florida was when we closed off the garage to make it a TV room and put an air conditioner unit in the window so at least one room in the house wasn't hell on earth.
There was definitely a pop cultural idea of "the 50s" as a time of innocence, peace and prosperity that was floating around when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s (and still is, as Matt describes here). Considering that most of the culture at the time was produced by Baby Boomers...I have to think this idea came from Boomers?
This notion is probably not an accurate description of how the modal Boomer experienced the 50s, but it's definitely out there.
(One of the ironies of this is that - aside from the obvious issues around racism, sexism, and the Cold War - the economy in the 60s was actually better than the economy in the 50s.)
Id say you see remarkably little 90s optimism precisely bc these factors of nostalgia are so real. Look at how, for example, Matt insists we need to undo local political control and environmental review to grow. Were these things temporarily repealed in the 90s? instead we just write the 90s growth off as some kind of illusion—sure we could grow bc of the chips and the digits for a while but now we can’t anymore. 90s just not viewed as something we can ‘go back’ to by hardly anyone on any side of any issue. It’s just something that happened, almost by accident?
I tend to think of it that way, and yes that there was low hanging fruit in for example warehouse productivity that better computing picked and that remaining gains are more difficult. But I really don’t know—I’d love to have some more contemporary time with tight labor market monetary policy to compare it to. Certainly peace dividend years are comparing favorably to these few less peaceful full employment years we have had recently.
But what I’m really saying is my nostalgia should surely cloud my judgement more. Why am I (most people imo) so reasonable about the idea we can’t just do the 90s again? And instead some folks are unreasonably attached to a vision of the 50s? I would say there is something related to an ‘ism’ here for sure.
Look, I appreciate getting to go to graduate school and have a career as much as anyone and probably a great deal more than most people, but my grandmother was not "subservient" in any way. She did not experience her life as horrible. She had a terrific marriage to a man she, as opposed to her parents, picked. If my grandfather had not been terrific, she would have had far fewer options than she would today, and that's important. But the idea that this was just universally experienced as bad by the women actually living through it -- that is not accurate.
"If my grandfather had not been terrific, she would have had far fewer options than she would today...."
That her life-prospects depended so heavily on the whims of someone else, and that the life-prospects of all women depended so heavily on the whims of men, was a form of subservience.
I'm glad it worked out for her. Not everyone got a "terrific" husband to love, honor, and obey.
But his depended fairly strongly on her as well -- not quite as much, but very significantly. There wasn't no-fault divorce where they lived during his lifetime. That's interdependence, but it's not inherently subservience. And, again, she and many other women did not perceive it as such.
A lot of people didn't get great spouses. It is much more possible now to go it alone when it comes to being single, particularly if you are raising children. But you started with "it was horrible, for women and for everyone except Father", and that's just such a misreading of how many women perceived their actual lives.
I'm not sure that we're disagreeing here, because I said that their lives *were* horrible, and you have carefully said that they did not *perceive* or *experience* their lives as horrible.
And yet we know there is no conflict between someone's life being genuinely horrible, and their not perceiving it that way. Ivan Denisovich does not always perceive or experience the Gulag as horrible -- when the temperature is too low for work, he is delighted, and when he gets an extra fish-eye in his soup, he is over the moon. There's a whole literature on hedonic adaptation which explains why people can find some degree of satisfaction in objectively horrible situations.
If you want to disagree with me, you will have to go further than the hedged language of "she didn't perceive it as horrible," and declare that, in fact, her life was not horrible. That's a stronger claim, and I do not think it is a plausible one.
If you're going to accuse millions of women of being brainwashed or having some kind of false consciousness about their existence, I think the onus is actually on you for that. Also, if we're talking about "objective" horribleness, serving in a war where you are surrounded by injury and death and could at any time die yourself - which was my grandfather's reality, and that of many men of his generation. in many cases via conscription, seems a heck of a lot worse to me, and it was of course a horribleness that my grandmother was spared.
"Also, if we're talking about "objective" horribleness, serving in a war...."
Yes, that's a good example of objective horribleness. There are facts about human welfare that are not reducible to perceptions and experiences, and some of them include things like the range of options one has available.
Notice that I did not say that Ivan Denisovich is brainwashed. I simply think that human beings adapt to their surroundings, and often succeed in finding small satisfactions even when their surroundings are objectively horrible. In some cases, it is even a kind of triumph of the human spirit that we can find satisfaction in horrible circumstances. But when we do, it does not constitute proof that the circumstances are not horrible.
I think there is an assumption here that "objective" can be distinguished from "perceived". What we all want, ultimately, for ourselves and others, is happiness. One of the best predictors of happiness is prior expectations. My impression is that people's expectations were more realistic previously and part of the malaise that's common today is expectations have run far ahead of reality. I'm certainly not arguing for female subservience, but if people perceived their lives as decent, it's worth at least giving their point of view the time of day. Consider that, under your position, people of the future will consider _your_ life so "objectively hortible" that you would have been better off dead.
To your point here, I feel like it makes the sexist trappings of this meme worse, since--as you say--the alleged nostalgia isn't even accurate nostalgia.
My grandpa died and my grandma remarried in her 80s. It was a culture shock for her because my grandpa was a conscientious man who respected her and did his fair share of the housework. Her new husband, a more typical man of his generation, is more entitled. He expects her to do all the cooking and cleaning; he expects to be able to dictate where they live; he doesn't seem to respect her very much.
Basically, just agreeing with you because it seem to reflect my own grandma's experience.
The funny thing is if it weren’t for the name of the poster and the specific picture used, this could absolutely be a socialist tweet instead of a weird trad right-wing tweet
I'd like to at least mildly push back on the notion that the '50s were a utopia for fathers. Raising a kid is one of the more fulfilling aspects of my life. The notion that I could outsource this experience to my wife so that I could focus more time on climbing a career ladder is...not appealing. Men may have had, in the main, the better part of the deal in the '50s, but I'm not sure it was such an awesome deal.
It might be a terrible deal. Personally I favor in home work, and time with the kids. But these memers still strike me as mostly longing for a world where they are very valued by a woman for holding down an average job.
I could have written a much longer comment about how this actually probably is a pretty deep source of meaning for a lot of men, and a lot of them are suffering for not having a found a good replacement. It likely is a real problem, even if returning to the '50s isn't the solution.
I grew up in a conservative family with a stay-at-home mom, but the norms of the 80s and 90s worked out much better than the norms of the 50s in my opinion. My grandpa didn’t learn any domestic skills so he had to immediately remarry upon his first wife’s death, because he had no ability to live on his own and couldn’t cook or do laundry. Thankfully both my parents are alive today but my dad shared chores pretty equitably, is a great cook and capable of living on his own if needed, and I think that’s a good thing
The thing with the 50s is this is precisely when it became a lot more plausible to escape a terrible marriage by taking the kids in your car and leaving for a relative's place. While any period will differ in anecdote, the main reason people are nostalgic for the 50s is because there were enormous booms in consumer prosperity that the war had sidelined coupled with a burst of family formation and buttoning up of sexual norms after the more promiscuous 40s (look up how many posters warning against venereal disease the army put up). To many, it felt like the worst mistakes were being corrected and progress on everyday matters was possible. The stifling conformity and anonymous nature of society by organization men was a minority and intellectual critique, which largely cut on racial rather than gendered lines. JFK is beloved by older Americans in both parties because he's a figure of this period; a man from a slightly different background who will nonetheless emulate the best parts of the socially-minded WASPs before him, because progress and unity can go hand in hand.
The critique of the 50s grew in salience in large part after this idealized society ran into Vietnam, a war that couldn't be won by a country that couldn't admit defeat. Vietnam made the barrack-like classrooms, cookie-cutter homes, businesses and politics run by veterans, almost exclusively male except for sitcom television, etc look less like an orderly yet reasonable society and more like George Lucas's Empire. But this wasn't like the Old South's fall to the Northern industrial power and corruption by carpetbaggers that Southern white writers portrayed. Defeat came from within, not from without. Young people raised in this period were among the strongest supporters of the Vietnam war early on. That's what was so devastating about it.
Yeah Matt doesn’t dig into it that much here but the crux is where he says you can live in a 50s sized home with one car and a stay at home mom and not send your kids to college. It seems unlikely the guys giving these memes the little heart actually can find a young woman who would like to wait at home with no car and the kids all day in a small home. And not only would like to do that, but feels lucky (and dependent) and is relatively concerned with keeping her husband happy as well.
But just to give them a tiny bit of credit, we could look at but harder at the marriage penalties in our tax code / welfare state. If we’re richer and fewer people want this type of life that’s great but we shouldn’t put a thumb on the scale against it imo.
I think they could if housing, education, and other expenses were cheaper. Surveys show a majority of women would prefer to be a homemaker, but many feel it’s not economically feasible to do so.
Well this really gets to it, is the key that women expect bigger homes and more expensive education for their kids than they used to or have those things really gotten relatively more expensive / unattainable? That’s the point of ‘you could live in a small home and not send kids to college if you want to’. I’d say there are more unattached men ok with this idea floating around than women looking for it. But I could definitely be wrong.
It says a majority of mothers would prefer to stay home--women who are not mothers prefer to work. I imagine mothers of grown children would also prefer employment. This is what the women’s movement of the 70s was all about--back then the hope was that only one spouse would have to work, but that women would be able to choose a good career if they went to work, and that it didn’t *have* to be the woman that stayed home.
I agree. My only note is I mention ‘marriage penalty’ a tiny actual thing to look at in the context of complaints that are mostly wrong or about asking for other people to want different things than what they actually want. And talking about it does seem to provoke this ‘it’s not happening / it’s happening but it’s not a big deal / it’s happening and its good’ pattern of responses that lead me to suspect what’s going on is the political coalitions are listening to factions on policy making that are far from the median and even from the coalitions own median. Yes these cases usually turn out to be relatively small effects (it’s harder to get away from the median with a large effect). But we can still take a look at them.
The low end is what relevant here, I do think single earner families at 200k are doing ok in our society despite it being hard to afford some things other rich people with different lives have.
I’m thinking of two median wage earners marrying and having one stay home, or a single mom with a low wage job and kids looking at a median earning husband. That type of thing.
I’m not a wonk on these topics but I’ve seen some similar work from the left advocating for simpler child benefits. If it’s all a mistake I’d love to know.
SAHM debates online tend to be really toxic, but it's worth remembering that even today most women want to be SAHMs, at least while their children are young, and nearly all expect their husband to be the primary breadwinner. I don't think it's helpful to view relationships with traditional gender roles as ones of subservience.
As someone whose wife is a SAHM and who would really, really like to see her get back in the workforce, I agree that SAHM-ism should not automatically be construed as a sign of subservience . . . .
2nd wave feminists suggested that the move to the suburbs severed the female’s connection to her extended family and support systems - which was present in white working class women (and black women) for much longer. It grounded women the way the concept of “dignity in work” grounded their men.
WARNING -- I’m painting with broad brushes in what follows (not all upper middle class white women are bulimic nuts and not all black men are gangster thugs)
This is why the most dysfunctional classes of people in America have been middle and upper middle class women (mostly white) with their eating disorders, slavery to fashion and current strident “allyship” AND black men with their fashion conscious gangster thuggery.
Upper middle class white women and black men were the first to be untethered. Women from traditional female support systems and black men from the dignity of work or any work at all.
Working class white men have are now being welcomed into the dysfunctional club, not so much because there is no work, but there is no dignity afforded to work.
I would be interested in a Matt take on the sexism/'trad-con' element of this stuff, but that would have to be a different post. Kinda hard to shoehorn it into this piece, I think.
Online trad debates are just conceptually confusing because nobody is clear what "trad" refers to. Some definitions capture a majority of American women, some definitions capture a tiny slice of particular religious movements. For example, participants in these debates often use "tradcath" to describe all observant Catholic women, not just the small minority who consider themselves traditionalist Catholics.
DT, I agree: those drawings make my skin crawl. And yet they are actually a pretty good depiction of what my family looked like when I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s . . . it's just those drugged-out smiles on that happy family. They're living the American Dream, except for the wife/mother who seethes about being trapped at home, and the father/husband alienated from his family and escapes to his golf club (or other activities) whenever he can.
> This is downstream of material prosperity — mothers are less economically dependent than they used to be — but I think it’s probably not ideal for kids’ social and emotional development.
I think this an instance of a general trend that both conservatives and leftists want to deny: As we get richer, we want to purchase more independence and distance. Everyone wants to believe in some concept of community, people tied together in meaningful interdependence. Yet our revealed preference is that we mainly want to get away from each other.
Our desire for connectivity is likely largely based on the benefits, particularly being able to rely on others. No one is particularly excited about the costs; the obligations to support and accept others. Add in adverse selection, those who can contribute the most have least to gain, while those with greatest needs offer the least, and our illusion of community collapses.
I'm going to partially disagree here. Since I was a city dweller for most of my young adulthood, I didn't buy a car until my early 30s (when I got a job out in suburbia and moved out there accordingly). The mental shift from encountering actual people as I walked/bused/biked to work/school to encountering them in cars was shocking! It was amazing how quickly I became disconnected from others.
Point is, we've intentionally built a car-oriented society that sets up barriers to connectivity with others. And when that's the default choice, you're already starting from a point of greater isolation.
I partially concur with your viewpoint; the built environment indeed influences the extent to which we perceive our connections with others. However, I believe that the desire for single-family neighborhoods, especially among families with young children, has played a significant role in shaping the development of our built environment.
I suspect that a lot of the pressure for single-family home neighborhoods among parents of young kids is due to the fact that you want/need to be somewhat selective about who else is in your community.
And if you -dont- achieve that, you are/are perceived to be throwing your kids to the wolves.
The inability to have that kind of selection through any means but pricing out the 'bad' people means that - surprise! - we rely really heavily on pricing out the 'bad' people.
TLDR, you aren't going to get meaningful communities when most filters on membership are disallowed. People generally just don't engage. Unless they have no other choice.
Aren’t close-in suburbs the ideal here? I’m thinking of places like the inner Main Line bits in Philadelphia, much of Santa Monica, Chevy Chase etc. Are these places simply not considered as spots to imitate?
You know, it's possible for kids in suburban neighborhoods to play with other kids in the same neighborhood, by just walking (or riding a bike). Like I did.
1. This is a lot easier if you're in a newly built suburban neighborhoods with a lot of families in similar age ranges. My mom had that in her neighborhood growing up. When we lived in the same neighborhood for a while when I was a kid, the other-children-situation was not nearly as good.
"Community isn’t really geographic anyway. Most friends with kids we play with are from work or social stuff and live in all different parts of the city anyway."
But you just did describe a geographic community. It's just that the one you described is a little bit bigger than the smaller one you juxtaposed it against. People you're describing as friends you get together with from different parts of the city are all have in common that they live in the same city, i.e., a single geographic community.
There is something lost if kids can't walk to their friends' places. This obviously works better in apartment buildings than in single family detached house neighborhoods.
I think it is difficult to be certain the extent to which single family neighborhoods are desired. Obviously many people want them, but I question whether the desire is for this particular built environment or simply for more housing space and the only way one can do that at a relatively affordable rate is going to single family neighborhoods. Of course space is inherently going to be somewhat more expensive in cities but the American regime of excluding density through zoning means that living in city vs suburb holding price constant is going to be 50% reduction in space vs a 20% reduction in space. That makes suburbs an obvious choice for most, especially when they have kids.
Do you actually have kids? Single family neighborhoods where both spouses work are a royal pain. The suburbs work well only if one of the parents is stay at home or underemployed. Multigenerational family compounds work better with kids.
Single family neighborhoods where both parents work are a pain?
Then why is that seemingly what many/most married couples are drawn to?
I agree that the multigenerational model works better* but for various reasons it hasn't spread widely outside of a few ethnic communities that maintained it after immigrating.
Notably, some of those ethnic communities are among the wealthiest in the US...
* We tried to replicate it, but neither of our parents aren't interested, and they are still well-off enough to maintain their independence.
As a city dweller early in my career, by far the most prominent part of my financial life and material longing was the desire to ditch roommate living and get my own place. Most roommate-havers in my social circles expressed similar desires.
Apartments are small & lack acoustic privacy - if one person wants to watch TV or have a loud conversation then that’s what we’re all doing now. Unless you want to drown it out with headphones, which I am already doing (with limited success) all day at work. Managing the cleaning, etc. was fine but being at the mercy of random acquaintances for access to quiet focus time felt very violating. And it’s not like you can tell someone to not watch TV in their own house.
The original meme from "Culture Critic" is couched in terms of economics, but to me it reads more as nostalgia for female subservience.
Oh for the days of Father Knows Best, when a man was king of his castle.
Yeah, I grew up in fifties-land, and it was horrible, for women and for everyone except Father.
You may as well be nostalgic about the joys of being a white slave-owner in the antebellum south.
I see this class of critique a lot and I think it tends to be somewhat overblown in that conflates contingently bad aspects of the past with necessary ones—and in particular suggests that these contingently bad aspects are what must be driving nostalgia as a cover for some form of X-ism. But the 1990s is also (especially as generations age and die out) a popular decade for people to feel nostalgic for with respect to general American optimism, perceived high and increasing quality of life and most with respect to the quality of a lot a of cultural output. Conversely, the 70s are (other than some of the films and the music) kind of universally panned in the list of “decades it was good to be a middle-class American.” This suggests to me that at leasy many people really do just want a period of relative stability and optimism / dynamism, and that it’s by extension something of a canard to chalk it all up to dog whistles rather than more like what it says on the tin.
I feel bad for today's young people because you cannot imagine the professional opportunities we had as young people in the 90s. The whole tech industry was expanding at a breakneck pace, and you could find yourself being an "expert" or running a team in just a couple years.
Not to mention that (as I've mentioned in past comments) we had been raised under the existential dread of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and they crumbled just as we were reaching adulthood.
GenX FTW.
My first memory of understanding politics was when my dad came into my room and pointed at the USSR on the globe on my bedside table and said “that doesn’t exist anymore, we beat them and your world will be freer than mine”. I had no idea what he was talking about (I was around 7 years old) but I asked him what he meant and he sat down and explained what the USSR was, how he used to hide under his desk in school and why the US is free and the communist world is not.
It’s one of my favorite memories of my dad.
The end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of democracy, and rapid increase in prosperity in the world, plus ST:TNG make the 90s pretty great.
The other big factor in 90s optimism is that we didn't realize how bad climate change was going to be yet.
Eh, I don't feel like this one has changed that much.
oh, I think the GenZ folks feel existential dread about climate change just like we worried about the nukes.
Nuclear war existential dread was justified, though.
Climate change...not so much.
"But the 1990s is also (especially as generations age and die out) a popular decade for people to feel nostalgic for...."
Seriously? Do people feel nostalgic for the 90s?
Man. When I was a kid, nostalgia was a lot better than that.
>>> Seriously? Do people feel nostalgic for the 90s?
Yes. I know the below is just one example (and I'm not really on FdB's wavelength and don't quite understand where all his internet-fame originates in any event) but I will say that I personally agree with much of it and my strong sense is that this a fairly widely-held PoV [See also "The Dream of the 90s is alive in Portland"]. Some other article from a ways back (may have been the AV Club back when it was reasonably good) pointed out that (to a present viewer) one of the absurdities of "American Beauty" being the kind of movie that drew audiences in is that it was exploring the ennui of being an employed, secure, well-paid member of the middle class. This was, at the time, an actually compelling premise -- this, *this* was the sort of problem Americans saw themselves facing at the time. (I think "Fight Club" is not dissimilar). Oh, the scourge of prosperity! [See also the notion of "selling out" in music].
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romanticize
(Bonus Contemporary Onion: https://www.theonion.com/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of-peace-and-prosperi-1819565882 )
100% agree on Fight Club and American Beauty. Things were so good we literally did not know how to handle it! Even the Matrix touched on this theme, and Office Space too in a way.
It's like the reverse of the Watchmen graphic novel though - without a shared enemy, Americans turned on each other. Terrorism was too vague and distant to really bring us together, but maybe this China obsession will?
Also movies like The Truman Show, which asks “is this all there is??”
So I’m given to believe. The point was just that the lyric itself is the sort of thing that was clearly meant to be instantly familiar to the intended audience in a sort of lightheartedly facetious way. Similar to how “stuff white people like” works because its intended audience does, in fact, like much of fhe eponymous stuff :p. “The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland” wouldn’t work if didn’t (correctly) reflect a kind of gut-level widely-shared nostalgia.
Nostalgia is basically out of control on YouTube. You can watch someone boot up a beige tower PC running Windows 95 and feel a wistful longing for a better time.
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups or GTFO! Oh, sorry, '90s computer nerd reflex . . . .
I am fully nostalgic for the 1990s, and it absolutely isn't because, like Matt, that that's when I came of age. Totally not the case....
"...it absolutely isn't because, like Matt, that that's when I came of age."
No, it's an objective fact based on sound causality: that time was the best because it happened that the best music of all time was released right around when I was a teen and young adult. Objectivity squared, sucker! Try to fight that!
Fact: music started sucking in 2005 and has, with a few exceptions, never really recovered.
Fact check: music hit its peak with Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Archies.
You kids don't know what you're missing.
I have always pinpointed the emergence of Sugar Ray as when music fell off so I pinpoint the late '90s. Rock started getting more pop-influenced and I was getting too old to tolerate that. Hip hop was still pretty good into the 2000s, though.
There really was a lot of objectively good music in the '90s, though, that still appears on classic and modern stations.
Honestly, as a 90s kid, everything except 90s hip-hop and Radiohead is pretty trash.
The Boomer version of this argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLqfXlIq6RE
FACTS
https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/9/24/22691047/biggest-album-release-dates-in-history-nirvana-tribe-rhcp
"September 24, 1991, is often called the biggest release day in history."
EDIT:
MORE FACTS
https://louderthanwar.com/1991-a-year-that-shaped-a-generation/
I mean 1991 had the entire range of musical excellence, from Ozzy and GNR releases to Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
Am I kidding? Maybe? But maybe not...
https://imgflip.com/i/7g0wog
That was the era when a garage band from Seattle could receive a $2.5 million advance for a record with nothing on it! Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmxSMIN3-WI
I mean, maybe I'm just nostalgic for my 20s? Who isn't?
Yeah, I have a lot of nostalgia for, like, 2009-2012. Which was an objectively crappy time for a lot of people. But I was in my mid-to-late twenties back then and it was a good time for me.
'90s nostalgia really is off the charts. My teenage years and young adulthood was in the '90s so I, of course, am a bit nostalgic for that. And it was globally a sweet spot for Americans, though I don't think people are as nostalgic for the AIDS crisis.
Back in the '90s the late '60s were the focus of nostalgia. We may just be now at the time where people are nostalgic for a time before they were born because the crappy stuff got left in the past while the good stuff remains culturally relevant.
It does seem like ~30 years is the sweet spot, I see a lot of 50s nostalgia in 80s entertainment (Back To The Future being the most famous).
Although there was definitely '50s nostalgia in the '70s too -- "Happy Days" premiered in 1974.
And That 70s Show premiered in 1998. Maybe we can nudge this down to in between 20-25 years, that's generally about how long a generation lasts.
Yes. People my age* (I'm a few years younger than Matt) view the 90s in the same way that Baby Boomers viewed the 50s. The parallels are pretty uncanny.
Whether that's actually how it felt for people who were adults at the time is a different story.
*I personally do not have much nostalgia for anything before 1998 or 1999, but this is due to personal circumstances (I didn't really like being a kid) more than anything happening the world at large.
How do we Baby Boomers view the 50s?
What I remember from that time growing up in central Florida was when we closed off the garage to make it a TV room and put an air conditioner unit in the window so at least one room in the house wasn't hell on earth.
There was definitely a pop cultural idea of "the 50s" as a time of innocence, peace and prosperity that was floating around when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s (and still is, as Matt describes here). Considering that most of the culture at the time was produced by Baby Boomers...I have to think this idea came from Boomers?
This notion is probably not an accurate description of how the modal Boomer experienced the 50s, but it's definitely out there.
(One of the ironies of this is that - aside from the obvious issues around racism, sexism, and the Cold War - the economy in the 60s was actually better than the economy in the 50s.)
Oddly enough, people get nostalgic about their suffering.
I was legally an adult for most of the 1990s and I would say they were pretty awesome.
Yeah this content is out there. For any soccer fans, Quickly Kevin Will He Score is a phenomenal podcast about 1990s soccer.
Id say you see remarkably little 90s optimism precisely bc these factors of nostalgia are so real. Look at how, for example, Matt insists we need to undo local political control and environmental review to grow. Were these things temporarily repealed in the 90s? instead we just write the 90s growth off as some kind of illusion—sure we could grow bc of the chips and the digits for a while but now we can’t anymore. 90s just not viewed as something we can ‘go back’ to by hardly anyone on any side of any issue. It’s just something that happened, almost by accident?
Some of it was surely the peace dividend, which doesn’t happen again until China and Russia start behaving nicely again.
I tend to think of it that way, and yes that there was low hanging fruit in for example warehouse productivity that better computing picked and that remaining gains are more difficult. But I really don’t know—I’d love to have some more contemporary time with tight labor market monetary policy to compare it to. Certainly peace dividend years are comparing favorably to these few less peaceful full employment years we have had recently.
But what I’m really saying is my nostalgia should surely cloud my judgement more. Why am I (most people imo) so reasonable about the idea we can’t just do the 90s again? And instead some folks are unreasonably attached to a vision of the 50s? I would say there is something related to an ‘ism’ here for sure.
Look, I appreciate getting to go to graduate school and have a career as much as anyone and probably a great deal more than most people, but my grandmother was not "subservient" in any way. She did not experience her life as horrible. She had a terrific marriage to a man she, as opposed to her parents, picked. If my grandfather had not been terrific, she would have had far fewer options than she would today, and that's important. But the idea that this was just universally experienced as bad by the women actually living through it -- that is not accurate.
"If my grandfather had not been terrific, she would have had far fewer options than she would today...."
That her life-prospects depended so heavily on the whims of someone else, and that the life-prospects of all women depended so heavily on the whims of men, was a form of subservience.
I'm glad it worked out for her. Not everyone got a "terrific" husband to love, honor, and obey.
But his depended fairly strongly on her as well -- not quite as much, but very significantly. There wasn't no-fault divorce where they lived during his lifetime. That's interdependence, but it's not inherently subservience. And, again, she and many other women did not perceive it as such.
A lot of people didn't get great spouses. It is much more possible now to go it alone when it comes to being single, particularly if you are raising children. But you started with "it was horrible, for women and for everyone except Father", and that's just such a misreading of how many women perceived their actual lives.
I'm not sure that we're disagreeing here, because I said that their lives *were* horrible, and you have carefully said that they did not *perceive* or *experience* their lives as horrible.
And yet we know there is no conflict between someone's life being genuinely horrible, and their not perceiving it that way. Ivan Denisovich does not always perceive or experience the Gulag as horrible -- when the temperature is too low for work, he is delighted, and when he gets an extra fish-eye in his soup, he is over the moon. There's a whole literature on hedonic adaptation which explains why people can find some degree of satisfaction in objectively horrible situations.
If you want to disagree with me, you will have to go further than the hedged language of "she didn't perceive it as horrible," and declare that, in fact, her life was not horrible. That's a stronger claim, and I do not think it is a plausible one.
If you're going to accuse millions of women of being brainwashed or having some kind of false consciousness about their existence, I think the onus is actually on you for that. Also, if we're talking about "objective" horribleness, serving in a war where you are surrounded by injury and death and could at any time die yourself - which was my grandfather's reality, and that of many men of his generation. in many cases via conscription, seems a heck of a lot worse to me, and it was of course a horribleness that my grandmother was spared.
"Also, if we're talking about "objective" horribleness, serving in a war...."
Yes, that's a good example of objective horribleness. There are facts about human welfare that are not reducible to perceptions and experiences, and some of them include things like the range of options one has available.
Notice that I did not say that Ivan Denisovich is brainwashed. I simply think that human beings adapt to their surroundings, and often succeed in finding small satisfactions even when their surroundings are objectively horrible. In some cases, it is even a kind of triumph of the human spirit that we can find satisfaction in horrible circumstances. But when we do, it does not constitute proof that the circumstances are not horrible.
I think there is an assumption here that "objective" can be distinguished from "perceived". What we all want, ultimately, for ourselves and others, is happiness. One of the best predictors of happiness is prior expectations. My impression is that people's expectations were more realistic previously and part of the malaise that's common today is expectations have run far ahead of reality. I'm certainly not arguing for female subservience, but if people perceived their lives as decent, it's worth at least giving their point of view the time of day. Consider that, under your position, people of the future will consider _your_ life so "objectively hortible" that you would have been better off dead.
To your point here, I feel like it makes the sexist trappings of this meme worse, since--as you say--the alleged nostalgia isn't even accurate nostalgia.
My grandpa died and my grandma remarried in her 80s. It was a culture shock for her because my grandpa was a conscientious man who respected her and did his fair share of the housework. Her new husband, a more typical man of his generation, is more entitled. He expects her to do all the cooking and cleaning; he expects to be able to dictate where they live; he doesn't seem to respect her very much.
Basically, just agreeing with you because it seem to reflect my own grandma's experience.
the dating market shifts heavily against women as you get older. there are far more widows than widowers
The funny thing is if it weren’t for the name of the poster and the specific picture used, this could absolutely be a socialist tweet instead of a weird trad right-wing tweet
I'd like to at least mildly push back on the notion that the '50s were a utopia for fathers. Raising a kid is one of the more fulfilling aspects of my life. The notion that I could outsource this experience to my wife so that I could focus more time on climbing a career ladder is...not appealing. Men may have had, in the main, the better part of the deal in the '50s, but I'm not sure it was such an awesome deal.
It might be a terrible deal. Personally I favor in home work, and time with the kids. But these memers still strike me as mostly longing for a world where they are very valued by a woman for holding down an average job.
I could have written a much longer comment about how this actually probably is a pretty deep source of meaning for a lot of men, and a lot of them are suffering for not having a found a good replacement. It likely is a real problem, even if returning to the '50s isn't the solution.
I grew up in a conservative family with a stay-at-home mom, but the norms of the 80s and 90s worked out much better than the norms of the 50s in my opinion. My grandpa didn’t learn any domestic skills so he had to immediately remarry upon his first wife’s death, because he had no ability to live on his own and couldn’t cook or do laundry. Thankfully both my parents are alive today but my dad shared chores pretty equitably, is a great cook and capable of living on his own if needed, and I think that’s a good thing
The thing with the 50s is this is precisely when it became a lot more plausible to escape a terrible marriage by taking the kids in your car and leaving for a relative's place. While any period will differ in anecdote, the main reason people are nostalgic for the 50s is because there were enormous booms in consumer prosperity that the war had sidelined coupled with a burst of family formation and buttoning up of sexual norms after the more promiscuous 40s (look up how many posters warning against venereal disease the army put up). To many, it felt like the worst mistakes were being corrected and progress on everyday matters was possible. The stifling conformity and anonymous nature of society by organization men was a minority and intellectual critique, which largely cut on racial rather than gendered lines. JFK is beloved by older Americans in both parties because he's a figure of this period; a man from a slightly different background who will nonetheless emulate the best parts of the socially-minded WASPs before him, because progress and unity can go hand in hand.
The critique of the 50s grew in salience in large part after this idealized society ran into Vietnam, a war that couldn't be won by a country that couldn't admit defeat. Vietnam made the barrack-like classrooms, cookie-cutter homes, businesses and politics run by veterans, almost exclusively male except for sitcom television, etc look less like an orderly yet reasonable society and more like George Lucas's Empire. But this wasn't like the Old South's fall to the Northern industrial power and corruption by carpetbaggers that Southern white writers portrayed. Defeat came from within, not from without. Young people raised in this period were among the strongest supporters of the Vietnam war early on. That's what was so devastating about it.
Yeah Matt doesn’t dig into it that much here but the crux is where he says you can live in a 50s sized home with one car and a stay at home mom and not send your kids to college. It seems unlikely the guys giving these memes the little heart actually can find a young woman who would like to wait at home with no car and the kids all day in a small home. And not only would like to do that, but feels lucky (and dependent) and is relatively concerned with keeping her husband happy as well.
But just to give them a tiny bit of credit, we could look at but harder at the marriage penalties in our tax code / welfare state. If we’re richer and fewer people want this type of life that’s great but we shouldn’t put a thumb on the scale against it imo.
I think they could if housing, education, and other expenses were cheaper. Surveys show a majority of women would prefer to be a homemaker, but many feel it’s not economically feasible to do so.
Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx
Well this really gets to it, is the key that women expect bigger homes and more expensive education for their kids than they used to or have those things really gotten relatively more expensive / unattainable? That’s the point of ‘you could live in a small home and not send kids to college if you want to’. I’d say there are more unattached men ok with this idea floating around than women looking for it. But I could definitely be wrong.
It says a majority of mothers would prefer to stay home--women who are not mothers prefer to work. I imagine mothers of grown children would also prefer employment. This is what the women’s movement of the 70s was all about--back then the hope was that only one spouse would have to work, but that women would be able to choose a good career if they went to work, and that it didn’t *have* to be the woman that stayed home.
I agree. My only note is I mention ‘marriage penalty’ a tiny actual thing to look at in the context of complaints that are mostly wrong or about asking for other people to want different things than what they actually want. And talking about it does seem to provoke this ‘it’s not happening / it’s happening but it’s not a big deal / it’s happening and its good’ pattern of responses that lead me to suspect what’s going on is the political coalitions are listening to factions on policy making that are far from the median and even from the coalitions own median. Yes these cases usually turn out to be relatively small effects (it’s harder to get away from the median with a large effect). But we can still take a look at them.
The low end is what relevant here, I do think single earner families at 200k are doing ok in our society despite it being hard to afford some things other rich people with different lives have.
I’m thinking of two median wage earners marrying and having one stay home, or a single mom with a low wage job and kids looking at a median earning husband. That type of thing.
Here this was featured on a previous slow boring:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-state-lawmakers-can-reduce-marriage-penalties-in-the-welfare-system
I’m not a wonk on these topics but I’ve seen some similar work from the left advocating for simpler child benefits. If it’s all a mistake I’d love to know.
You also make out like bandits in the social security system in that scenario.
SAHM debates online tend to be really toxic, but it's worth remembering that even today most women want to be SAHMs, at least while their children are young, and nearly all expect their husband to be the primary breadwinner. I don't think it's helpful to view relationships with traditional gender roles as ones of subservience.
As someone whose wife is a SAHM and who would really, really like to see her get back in the workforce, I agree that SAHM-ism should not automatically be construed as a sign of subservience . . . .
2nd wave feminists suggested that the move to the suburbs severed the female’s connection to her extended family and support systems - which was present in white working class women (and black women) for much longer. It grounded women the way the concept of “dignity in work” grounded their men.
WARNING -- I’m painting with broad brushes in what follows (not all upper middle class white women are bulimic nuts and not all black men are gangster thugs)
This is why the most dysfunctional classes of people in America have been middle and upper middle class women (mostly white) with their eating disorders, slavery to fashion and current strident “allyship” AND black men with their fashion conscious gangster thuggery.
Upper middle class white women and black men were the first to be untethered. Women from traditional female support systems and black men from the dignity of work or any work at all.
Working class white men have are now being welcomed into the dysfunctional club, not so much because there is no work, but there is no dignity afforded to work.
Just my off the cuff thoughts.
Exactly. The rank sexism that this meme gives off is primary thing I sense whenever I see this, and I wish Matt had talked about that more.
I would be interested in a Matt take on the sexism/'trad-con' element of this stuff, but that would have to be a different post. Kinda hard to shoehorn it into this piece, I think.
Online trad debates are just conceptually confusing because nobody is clear what "trad" refers to. Some definitions capture a majority of American women, some definitions capture a tiny slice of particular religious movements. For example, participants in these debates often use "tradcath" to describe all observant Catholic women, not just the small minority who consider themselves traditionalist Catholics.
DT, I agree: those drawings make my skin crawl. And yet they are actually a pretty good depiction of what my family looked like when I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s . . . it's just those drugged-out smiles on that happy family. They're living the American Dream, except for the wife/mother who seethes about being trapped at home, and the father/husband alienated from his family and escapes to his golf club (or other activities) whenever he can.
"...pretty good depiction of what my family looked like when I was a kid...."
Now I'm going to picture you leaning over the rear seat of a station wagon with a mitt on your left hand and a baseball in your right. Grinning.
My nickname was Opie because some folks thought I looked like the kid from the Andy Griffith show
> This is downstream of material prosperity — mothers are less economically dependent than they used to be — but I think it’s probably not ideal for kids’ social and emotional development.
I think this an instance of a general trend that both conservatives and leftists want to deny: As we get richer, we want to purchase more independence and distance. Everyone wants to believe in some concept of community, people tied together in meaningful interdependence. Yet our revealed preference is that we mainly want to get away from each other.
Our desire for connectivity is likely largely based on the benefits, particularly being able to rely on others. No one is particularly excited about the costs; the obligations to support and accept others. Add in adverse selection, those who can contribute the most have least to gain, while those with greatest needs offer the least, and our illusion of community collapses.
I'm going to partially disagree here. Since I was a city dweller for most of my young adulthood, I didn't buy a car until my early 30s (when I got a job out in suburbia and moved out there accordingly). The mental shift from encountering actual people as I walked/bused/biked to work/school to encountering them in cars was shocking! It was amazing how quickly I became disconnected from others.
Point is, we've intentionally built a car-oriented society that sets up barriers to connectivity with others. And when that's the default choice, you're already starting from a point of greater isolation.
I partially concur with your viewpoint; the built environment indeed influences the extent to which we perceive our connections with others. However, I believe that the desire for single-family neighborhoods, especially among families with young children, has played a significant role in shaping the development of our built environment.
I suspect that a lot of the pressure for single-family home neighborhoods among parents of young kids is due to the fact that you want/need to be somewhat selective about who else is in your community.
And if you -dont- achieve that, you are/are perceived to be throwing your kids to the wolves.
The inability to have that kind of selection through any means but pricing out the 'bad' people means that - surprise! - we rely really heavily on pricing out the 'bad' people.
TLDR, you aren't going to get meaningful communities when most filters on membership are disallowed. People generally just don't engage. Unless they have no other choice.
Aren’t close-in suburbs the ideal here? I’m thinking of places like the inner Main Line bits in Philadelphia, much of Santa Monica, Chevy Chase etc. Are these places simply not considered as spots to imitate?
You know, it's possible for kids in suburban neighborhoods to play with other kids in the same neighborhood, by just walking (or riding a bike). Like I did.
Totally depends!
1. This is a lot easier if you're in a newly built suburban neighborhoods with a lot of families in similar age ranges. My mom had that in her neighborhood growing up. When we lived in the same neighborhood for a while when I was a kid, the other-children-situation was not nearly as good.
2. Read the URL, believe me that there are a lot of results, but do not follow the link. Car-centric, SVH suburban neighborhoods come with their own issues. https://www.google.com/search?q=child+killed+while+biking+in+neighborhood
"Community isn’t really geographic anyway. Most friends with kids we play with are from work or social stuff and live in all different parts of the city anyway."
But you just did describe a geographic community. It's just that the one you described is a little bit bigger than the smaller one you juxtaposed it against. People you're describing as friends you get together with from different parts of the city are all have in common that they live in the same city, i.e., a single geographic community.
There is something lost if kids can't walk to their friends' places. This obviously works better in apartment buildings than in single family detached house neighborhoods.
I think it is difficult to be certain the extent to which single family neighborhoods are desired. Obviously many people want them, but I question whether the desire is for this particular built environment or simply for more housing space and the only way one can do that at a relatively affordable rate is going to single family neighborhoods. Of course space is inherently going to be somewhat more expensive in cities but the American regime of excluding density through zoning means that living in city vs suburb holding price constant is going to be 50% reduction in space vs a 20% reduction in space. That makes suburbs an obvious choice for most, especially when they have kids.
Do you actually have kids? Single family neighborhoods where both spouses work are a royal pain. The suburbs work well only if one of the parents is stay at home or underemployed. Multigenerational family compounds work better with kids.
Single family neighborhoods where both parents work are a pain?
Then why is that seemingly what many/most married couples are drawn to?
I agree that the multigenerational model works better* but for various reasons it hasn't spread widely outside of a few ethnic communities that maintained it after immigrating.
Notably, some of those ethnic communities are among the wealthiest in the US...
* We tried to replicate it, but neither of our parents aren't interested, and they are still well-off enough to maintain their independence.
"Drawn to" is doing a lot of work. What they can afford is maybe more accurate.
Most rich people want to live in the suburbs too though
As a city dweller early in my career, by far the most prominent part of my financial life and material longing was the desire to ditch roommate living and get my own place. Most roommate-havers in my social circles expressed similar desires.
negotiating household management is hard, whether or not you are sleeping with your roommate
Apartments are small & lack acoustic privacy - if one person wants to watch TV or have a loud conversation then that’s what we’re all doing now. Unless you want to drown it out with headphones, which I am already doing (with limited success) all day at work. Managing the cleaning, etc. was fine but being at the mercy of random acquaintances for access to quiet focus time felt very violating. And it’s not like you can tell someone to not watch TV in their own house.