A Dreary Decade's Long Shadow

Terror loomed over the decade from start to finish. So did excessive partisan conflict.

Saturday, Jan. 9, 2010
by Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

How fitting, though dispiriting, that the final major event in the decade that expired last week was a terrorist attack immediately followed by a political firefight over its lessons.

Terror loomed over the decade from start to finish. So did excessive partisan conflict, over security and everything else. That may be two reasons that polls suggest the "Aughts" couldn't end soon enough for most Americans. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans ranked this decade the worst in half a century. Although the 1970s (Vietnam, gasoline lines, the Bee Gees) can stake a claim, it's difficult to quarrel with that judgment or the instinct to close the books on these difficult 10 years.

But that won't be so easy. The economic, demographic, and political trends that most shaped the past decade still loom over the one that has just begun. And although these dynamics are diverse and distinct, they share one common effect: Each is eroding our capacity to build the consensus needed to confront the United States' toughest problems. The most powerful tectonic forces rumbling beneath American life now serve more to separate than to bind.

The first of these is economic weakness. Economic commentators haven't exaggerated in describing this time as "a lost decade for ordinary Americans."

From 2000 to 2008, the median income declined by more than $2,000 and the number of people in poverty increased by more than 8 million. Each of those statistics was the worst 10-year showing in decades. And the ghoulish recession guarantees that both of those numbers deteriorated further in 2009, probably sharply. After generating 23 million new jobs during the 1990s, the economy incredibly produced no net increase in the first decade of the 21st century. Compounding the pain, the stock market ended the decade lower than it began it.

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