This is something that I read all the time on Reddit: memories of the 1990’s being full of wonder and hope and the sense of things getting better. Common examples include the early days of the internet, the recent fall of the Soviet Union, the (relative) strength of the (US) economy, and the growing mainstreaming of issues like environmentalism and minority rights. 9/11 and the 2000’s in general, therefore, were considered even more marked a shift than many would consider it.
I rarely see the Rodney King riots or Eastern Europe mentioned. If they are, the lower points seem dismissed as a blip against the overall picture.
It’s my theory that most, if not all, of those who express this opinion are of a certain demographic: white and middle class who were born approximately 1985, and that their recollection of the ‘90’s is heavily rose colored.
People born in 1985 would have been children, even quite young children, during the 90s. Your theory has some truth, but I would say the demographic is much older than that. Born in the 60s and 70s.
True. My guess is because of Reddit’s general demos, and the fact that the examples I can think of feel specifically to me like childhood nostalgia (and general sheltering kids have of the bad parts of the news). I may be wrong more generally!
They were in a certain sense. IMHO the US from 1945 thought around 2015 was in a several steps forward, a few steps back type of progress. In the 90s, we were still in two or three steps forward mode. It’s just that for about the 8 years or so when Bill Clinton was POTUS, the steps back were either minimal or not there at all. Before that we had Iran Contra, the Cold War, inflation, etc. After that there was Al Gore’s loss with the debacle in Florida, 9/11, and Bush Junior’s handling of the War on Terror. The 90s were lacking in those kinds of major problems.
I was born in the 60s and for me, the 90s were a period of hope and optimism, exactly as you described. It was also one of the best times of my life, personally. Nothing to do with childhood memories.
Racism wasn’t a major problem? The rise of the hard right through churches and radio wasn’t a major problem (or maybe it just didn’t feel like a major problem then?)
I guess I feel like there were major issues either there or boiling, but they were just easier for the average white middle class American to either ignore or not hear about? Maybe that’s the angle I should’ve taken to begin with. It feels (for lack of a better word) privileged.
I think I also feel like we would be even better off today if the 90’s truly were this wonderful time of racial harmony and prosperity for everyone regardless of demographic.
Yes, racism was a problem. It just wasn’t as much of a problem as it had been in the 1980s, which in turn were better than 1970s, and so on going back to (IMHO) the 16th century. And certainly there was a “don’t ask don’t tell” type of mindset underlying some of the prosperity, and not just with regards to gay people in the military. But all those problems were either long-standing problems that had been getting better and continued to got better in the 90s, or new problems (global warming, the rise of the far right) which were just getting going but not yet causing noticeable problems in most people’s day to day lives.
ETA. Which is why, again IMHO, the 2000 election turned on “which guy would you rather hang out with and have a beer with” rather than the problems of the day. It’s because there were no acute problems of the day, and the chronic problems were not in exacerbation.
Was it? Maybe my memory is off on the timeline, but the way I remember it, it was the 80s that had a high rate of violent crime. The 90s was when crime started to drop. I know that if I had a time machine and had to go back in time and take a walk at midnight by myself in some random urban area in the US, and my choices were 1985 or 1998, I’d choose 1998.
Same for me. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact communism suddenly collapsed, the U.S. had what was, at the time, the longest period of economic expansion in our history (March 1991 - March 2001), and it seemed, at the time, like a lot of things had changed for the better.
But, then again, I was, in the 1990s, a white, college-educated male, in the top quartile for income, so yes, I was viewing the world from a position of privilege.
Yes, it was, as were continuing issues with sexism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. I’m far more aware of those issues now, compared to when I was when I was younger, in the 1990s, I confess, and while, as @FlikTheBlue notes, they were better than they’d been in the 1980s or 1970s, in retrospect, there was still a long way to go on those.
It peaked in the early '90s for most types of crime. BUT there was also a lot of optimism regarding foreign affairs. So life overall was not exactly doom and gloom.
Also there wasn’t as much breathless “the sky is falling” news reporting as there is now. I daresay that a majority of people think that crime rates are higher now than they were in the late '80s and early '90s, based solely on how the news is reported now.
Here in Illinois, it peaked in the mid-90s, before coming down.
If you look at this chart, the violent crime rate in the years from 1990-1997, every single year was worse than any year in the 80s. If you look at murder, you see a similar pattern. (Though I suppose you should normalize for population or look at per capita numbers, but that’s not going to make it look much different.)
No idea what it’s like in other places, though. Being a Chicagoan, I find it surprising how people forget how bad the early-to-mid-90s were. It hasn’t been great over the past few years, but murder numbers, at least, are much lower than then. (Last year, 695 homicides vs the 90s where there were multiple years over 900. Now, to be fair, better medicine may have led to better outcomes, as well. I haven’t been able to find a general violent crime chart, which would give us a better picture. But sometimes I feel like the only person around here who thinks the 90s were worse than now in that respect.)
The End of History was talked a LOT about in the later 90’s. Meaning everything was now on the road to improvement.
“The end of the twentieth century has been said to have brought with it the end of ideology. According to Francis Fukuyama the end of history has been reached, with liberal democracy being the optimum form of social organization In the 1990s politicians such as Blair and Clinton stressed that they concentrated on ‘what worked’ and were not concerned with what they saw as the outdated ideologies of the left and right. A new ‘Third Way’ between socialism and conservatism had been found, which would allow for the pragmatic coupling of social justice with entrepreneurship. The collapse of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe and the adoption of a form of capitalism by China indicated an end to ideological hostilities. In terms of housing, policies in most developed countries shifted away from direct provision and towards supporting individual households. Owner occupation came to dominate housing systems and social provision increasing became seen as an outdated anachronism, justified at best as a safety net for those unable to gain access to housing through markets.”
Didn’t last, though. 9/11 changed that mood, at least in the US.
Yeah, the fall of the Soviet Union and the whole End of History meme had us convinced that we had conquered the big, existential problem, and now we could work on the little ones like racism, poverty, the environment, etc. American had the same golden age of hope and optimism after World War 2, and that didn’t last all that long, either.
By the 1990s, real incomes for working people in North America had been stagnant for 20 years, unions were under attack, governments were dismantling or reducing social services from medical care to housing to unemployment insurance to education funding, and the US military was deployed from Afghanistan to Zaire, with several stops in between. So it didn’t seem like a golden age for some people.
For me, the 90’s were financially great. Looking at my 401K returns, I was heavily invested in stocks and my average return for the decade was 21.5% allowing me to retire early. Those day are gone.
I’m a Gen X who entered adulthood in the 90’s, and I’d say the doom and gloom attributed to us was more a fashionable thing to express than anything. Deep inside, we had plenty of hope and optimism, due to the End of History.