Labels of generations and eras are simultaneously kind of silly and kind of useful. They’re vague ways of sorting trends, whether it’s as long as the renaissance or as short as The Summer of Love. We all know people aren’t really all that different from year to year, but we also know that Gen X talks like this, and Gen Z stares like that.
The one that always struck me as interesting was Eric Hobsbawm’s description of a “long 19th century” and “short 20th century.” I’ll admit right here that I haven’t actually read the whole book, but the general idea is that the concepts that we think of as representing the 19th century started with the French Revolution in 1789 and lasted more or less until World War I in 1914. After the Great War, the concepts we think of as being truly of the 20th century (the cold war, airplanes, increasingly dominant global trade and mass media) took over, but lasted only until the fall of the Soviet Union. The era we think of as the 21st century, defined for the most part by ever more rapid technological upheavals and multipolar politics, began well before New Year’s Eve 1999.
Of course, these are just different viewpoints and frameworks you can use to look at the world, not actual hard lines. But they are useful for making sense of the deluge of one thing after another that keeps happening to us. And that’s why I love Jamelle Bouie’s recent column about the death of the Fourth American Republic (check the unpaywalled version if you don’t have a Times sub).
The US has had, of course, only a single national government and constitution since its founding, while France has literally had to start from scratch five times since 1789, with the current 5th republic founded in 1958. But while we haven’t had officially new government structures, we’ve had definite eras which you might as well call different Republics. They certainly had different frameworks, major changes to the Constitution and to the overall principles of how the country was run. The first ran from Independence to the Civil War; the second was our brief attempt at Reconstruction; the third was basically Jim Crow, “states’ rights,” and a weak administrative state; the fourth then began with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and is now ending with Donald Trump smearing shit all over the walls.
What next? As Gramsci said (or is alleged to have said, or was mistranslated as saying), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Or perhaps it’s the time of ICE agents wearing AI goggles, arbitrarily smashing windows. (Wasn’t there a word for this in the middle of the short 20th century? Something about smashing windows at night?)
News
The Rule of Law is Dead in the United States. It’s not an exaggeration, really. Laws have always been a little permeable, but we’ve definitely reached an era when there’s a lot less pretense that laws are universal.
Updated list of books banned from K12 schools on military bases.
Oklahoma implements ideological purity tests for teachers with coastal origins.
Lawful permanent resident detained by ICE; citizen beaten unconscious by ICE.
Arrests follow chalk rainbows.
Mystery surrounds $1.2 billion contract to build a concentration camp in Texas.
Secretly Ironic 