Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (58 page)

Why such prosperity in the United States in the late 1990s? Answers to this question pointed first of all to a number of historically important forces, notably America’s huge domestic market, its great natural resources, the strong work ethic of its people, the revitalizing infusion of energetic immigrants, and the openness of its democratic, and entrepreneurial culture. Downsizing in the 1980s, business leader added, had helped to streamline major corporations so that they could compete in international markets. Other beneficial forces were more specific to the 1990s: the government’s newfound fiscal discipline that was ending budgetary deficits; low interest rates, which the Federal Reserve maintained after mid-1995; strong consumer confidence and spending; low oil prices; and a weaker dollar (allowed to drop against other currencies by Clinton and his advisers) that benefited a number of American exporters.
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Many analysts of economic trends also emphasized the virtues of America’s embrace of free trade policies, which, they said, helped to promote a more open and connected world of international trade and finance.
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This was hardly an entirely new embrace: Especially since World War II, when the United States had taken the lead in establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, American business and political leaders had vigorously pursued policies that aimed at lowering trade barriers.
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This effort had greatly helped American producers gain access to overseas markets and served to bolster the already gigantic economic power of the United States. With the passing of the Cold War, the goal of expanding America’s international economic power rose even more to the forefront of foreign policy concerns, and by the late 1990s “globalization” had become a buzzword among many politicians and businessmen in the United States. The size of American exports and imports increased in these years as a percentage of GNP, from around 17 percent in 1978 to 25 by 2000.
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American champions of globalization—that is, market-friendly expansion of free and easy flows of money, goods, communications, and people across international borders—hailed it as a boon for exporters and consumers and as forwarding the “knowledge economy.” They asserted that it also benefited people in poor nations, lifting millions of peasants out of misery by enabling them to advance to a better world of wage labor. Change of this sort appeared to be taking place during the 1990s in various parts of the world, notably in rapidly growing areas of India and China. President Clinton, a fervent advocate of such freer trade, urged Americans to accept the “ultimate logic of globalization, that everything, from the strengths of our economy to the health of our people, depends on events not only within our borders but half a world away.”
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A related source of America’s economic progress in the late 1990s, many analysts maintained, was computerization, which expanded dramatically during these years. The spread of computers and of the Internet was said to be creating what one enthusiastic writer called a “third industrial revolution of communications and technology.”
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The Internet, advancing rapidly after 1991, seemed to become an almost irresistible force, at least to investors. When stock in Netscape, which created a popular Web browser, was initially offered to the public in August 1995, its price per share zoomed upward from $14 to $71 in one hour.
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Within four months its capitalization exceeded that of Apple Computer, Marriott International, United Airlines, and Tyson Foods. A dot-com mania obsessed investors in the next few years, driving the NASDAQ index, which featured technology stocks, up by 86 percent in 1999 alone. By 1999, the stock of Microsoft, the leading producer of software, had a listed value of more than $500 billion. Its rapid growth enabled its widely photographed chairman, Bill Gates, with a net worth of more than $50 billion, to become by far the richest person in the United States.

The explosive expansion of the software industry, and the spread of computer ownership and Internet connection, prompted a spate of rosy predictions in the late 1990s. Excited promoters of the expanding cyber world proclaimed that the World Wide Web, unlike TV, which tended to isolate its passive viewers, would bring people together. Because the Internet enabled users to seek their own sources of information, optimists added, it was a powerfully liberating, egalitarian force that would break down corporate hierarchies and revive community participation. Some enthusiasts, hailing the speed with which information traveled on the Web, anticipated that the Internet would ultimately become more important than television or newspapers as a source of news. The editors of
Time
magazine, enthralled, selected Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel, the computer chip maker, as their Man of the Year in 1997. The microprocessor,
Time
proclaimed, was a “force for democracy and individual empowerment.”
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Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, hyped his company’s successes by declaring in 1999 that advances in electronic communication were “clearly the biggest revolution in business in our lifetimes.”
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Not everyone, of course, heartily applauded the surge of globalization and computerization. Skeptics of globalization pointed out that it created losers as well as winners. They added the obvious: It could not and would not benefit millions of people in the world, such as most of those who lived in sub-Saharan Africa and other very poor and troubled places lacking in electricity, medical services, and decent sanitation. Skeptics added that globalization did not seriously threaten many long-standing sources of economic injustice and political oppression in the world. The Chinese, for instance, embraced freer trade when it benefited their rich and well-connected business interests while their Communist bosses maintained a corrupt and despotic hold on the country. China’s booming factories, relying on low-wage labor, dirtied the environment and flooded other nations with cheap exports. Overmatched textile plants in the United States, threatened with bankruptcy, lowered wages and dismissed thousands of workers in desperate but sometimes losing efforts to stay afloat.

Echoing foes of NAFTA, opponents of globalization reiterated that it accelerated outsourcing of workers from companies in the United States and elsewhere. By championing market forces, critics added, governments in developed nations such as the United States were surrendering their supervision of trade policies to large-scale business interests. These interests, allied with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were said to be enriching themselves in an increasingly unregulated economic world. Moreover, it was evident that developed nations were hardly consistent devotees of free trade. The United States, for instance, was one of many countries that continued to subsidize and protect wealthy agribusiness interests, therefore sponsoring what some critics called “farm socialism” that hiked food prices at home and that aroused widespread anger among farmers in developing nations. Policies such as these spurred some 35,000 people to protest angrily against the World Trade Organization, an enabler of globalization, in Seattle in December 1999.

Skeptics about computerization and the World Wide Web were equally outspoken. Robert Putnam, observing that relatively few blacks could afford personal computers, wrote of a “digital divide” and of “cyber-apartheid.”
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The
Washington Post
grumbled that the Internet was “digital Ritalin for the attention-deficit generation.”
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Other writers, questioning the potential of the Internet as an egalitarian or community-enhancing force, argued that it spit out a glut of scarcely digestible information that glued people to their computers: Like television, it was a “weapon of mass distraction.” Still other people disturbed by the spread of the Internet perceived it as primarily a marketing tool that was accelerating the commercialization of the country, as well as a dangerous threat to privacy.
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It remained to be seen, doubters emphasized, whether computerization and the Internet would have anything like the revolutionary impact on productivity and economic growth that the greatest of earlier technological advances—the steam engine, the electric motor, and the gasoline engine—had had. To be sure, these skeptics conceded, the Internet was an amazing source of information. E-mail became a virtual necessity for millions of people. Computers revolutionized workplaces, virtually eliminating typewriters and steno pools and vastly speeding up the exchange of information. High-powered computers were vital to the work of researchers, physicians, economists and financial analysts, bankers and businessmen, the military, and many other people. They transformed the production and design of a host of products, including automobiles. Skeptics nonetheless argued that computers had not done a great deal—at least not yet—to advance productivity or to enhance creative thinking or better writing. They also worried that the boom in dot-com stocks, which took off in the late 1990s, was a speculative orgy. Sooner or later, they predicted, the enormous bubble would burst and gullible investors would be drowned.
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D
OUBTS SUCH AS THESE
exposed broader unease even amid the good times of the late 1990s. Many Americans remained restless and unsatisfied. Novelists such as Richard Ford, John Updike, and Philip Roth captured some of these emotions, describing Americans as hyper-competitive and materialistic people who often compensated for feelings of spiritual emptiness by lusting after possessions, drinking excessively, and engaging in promiscuous sex. In these and in other ways, it seemed that many people were following in the footsteps of their forebears. As Alexis de Tocqueville had observed a century and a half earlier, Americans, more nearly enjoying social equality than the citizens of other nations, appeared to suffer from “that strange melancholy which oftentimes will haunt the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance, and [from] that disgust at life which sometimes seizes upon them in the midst of calm and easy circumstances.”
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Reflecting restlessness of this sort, polls in the mid-1990s suggested that while most Americans were very satisfied with their personal lives, they also believed (as they had since the early 1970s) that their parents had lived in a better world.
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In 1998, the newscaster Tom Brokaw seemed to capture nostalgic sentiments such as these in his popular book
The Greatest Generation
, which hailed as “greatest” those Americans who had coped bravely with the Great Depression of the 1930s, fought and won World War II, and later stood firm during the Cold War.
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A film about American heroes of the Normandy invasion of 1944,
Saving Private Ryan
, presented a similar (though gorier) message in the same year.

Other polls at the time indicated that most Americans expected their children’s world to be worse than theirs. Responding to attitudes such as these, James Wilson, a thoughtful social scientist, observed in 1995: “Today most of us have not merely the hope but enjoy the reality of a degree of comfort, freedom, and peace unparalleled in human history. And we can’t stop complaining about it.”
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His reflection, which echoed Tocqueville’s, underlined two key points about American attitudes, then as in the 1970s and 1980s: Americans had grown hypersensitive to national flaws; and expectations about life had grown steadily during these years, to the point where they often exceeded the possibility of realization. Though the majority of Americans were more comfortable, wealthier, healthier, and assured of more rights than ever before, they often longed for the past, complained of stress, and worried about the future.
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Anxieties such as these, however, did not overwhelm a reality of late twentieth-century life in the United States during the late 1990s: In part because many deeply troubling problems of the recent past (the Vietnam War, Watergate, the stagflation of the 1970s, the Iran-contra crisis, the Cold War, the recession of the early 1990s) had passed, many people were better able to concentrate their efforts toward enlarging the satisfactions and rewards of their own lives—and of others. The culture of the United States, though crass in many respects, also continued to be dynamic, forward-looking, and supportive of the rights that millions of people had won in earlier years.

As if confirming expectations such as these, many aspects of American society did improve at the time. Rates of teenage pregnancy, motherhood, and abortion continued to drop. So did rates of violent crime. Welfare dependency and homelessness declined. Liberals were pleased that the number of death sentences, and of executions, began to fall.
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Above all, the economy was booming, in what was to become a ten-year stretch of uninterrupted economic growth that extended from 1991 to March 2001. This was the longest continuous expansion in modern American history. Clinton, addressing the Democratic national convention in 2000, proudly recited developments such as these and maintained, for the most part accurately, that the United States was not only a richer nation—it had also become a better, more decent, more caring place.