The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

So here’s something interesting about the times happening right now, since “right now” is the only place we can ever be: If you ask a semi-educated young person to identify the root cause of most American problems, there’s a strong possibility they will say, “Capitalism.” Polls taken throughout the presidential tenures of Donald Trump and Joe Biden persistently show that people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine view socialism more positively than capitalism, especially if they’re Democrats (the once-promising 2020 presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren was derailed by her unwillingness to identify as a socialist, torpedoing her vocal support among the so-called extremely online). Capitalism is connected to every extension of American life, so it can be cited as the source for almost any social ill: wealth disparity, the legacy of slavery, housing shortages, monopsony, clinical depression, the tyranny of choice, superhero movie franchises. Its alleged insidiousness is ubiquitous, and that places the present moment at odds with the 1990s. In the nineties, when a semi-educated young person was asked to identify the root cause of most American problems, the probable answer would not have been capitalism. The more likely response would have been commercialism. That shift prompts a loaded question—what’s the core ideological difference between those two generational complaints?