People used to have a “midlife crisis” in their late 30s, or even earlier, back when a man might reasonably say that he expected to die “in my late 50s with a heart full of pastrami.” The midlife crisis moved to later ages with advancing life expectancy, and I suppose it was a decade or so ago I began to hear people talk about the “quarter-life crisis” at age 25. As the 21st century enters its second quarter, one might wonder if this century is going to provide anything except crisis.
A short summary: The final month of the 20th century saw the Supreme Court forced to settle Bush v. Gore, a lawsuit stemming from the most seriously contested presidential election outcome in American history. The Democratic Party went a little nuts after that, which was a nice historical echo: The modern Democratic Party owes much of its character (and its existence) to the controversial 1824 presidential election in which the “Corrupt Bargain” between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams denied the presidency to Andrew Jackson. Bush was denounced as illegitimate—a claim that remains an article of faith among some Democrats—and the Supreme Court was abominated as a gang of political lackeys.
Bush, the popular former governor of Texas, had wanted to focus on domestic policy and had big ideas about education, middle-class wealth-building, and entitlement reform. He got 233 days to work on that agenda—on the 234th the United States endured the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Bush spent the rest of his presidency dominated by the foreign affairs that he had wanted to make a minor part of his presidency.
With the United States having won the Cold War and shown itself an unparalleled military power in Operation Desert Storm, Bush and many of those around him believed that the United States had the power—and, perhaps, the responsibility—not only to hunt down and kill those who had attacked the country but to spark and sustain a series of political and cultural reforms throughout the Muslim world, working across a dozen cultures and an extraordinarily complex mix of political realities and religious tendencies. The United States failed at that, and Bush’s presidency ended with the 2007-08 financial crisis that coughed up the Great Recession. The already sorry fiscal situation of the U.S. government continued to deteriorate, and Barack Obama came into office with a lot of messianic talk about justice and transformation but succeeded only in creating another gigantically expensive health care entitlement.
Dissatisfaction with cultural changes, trade, and (above all) immigration led Americans in 2016 to do something unusual: They took the real and symbolic power of the presidency away from a younger generation and handed it back to an older one. Barack Obama had been born in the 1960s, and in 2016 both parties fielded candidates born in the 1940s—Donald Trump was only a year older than Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he was, culturally, much more of a throwback, 1953 to her 1975. The Trump movement was profoundly atavistic, but that atavism is at least as much a feature of left-wing politics (looking back longingly, and mostly ignorantly, to unionized factory jobs and high statutory income tax rates in the postwar era) as it is of right-wing politics (which valorizes the largely imaginary homogeneity and stability of the 1950s). But Trump was no Dwight Eisenhower and no Warren G. Harding, either, and a “return to normalcy” was never in the cards.
Rather than a nationalist restoration, the Trump years ended with COVID lockdowns and the attempted coup d’état of January 6, 2021. Trump was replaced in the 2020 election by a man born four years before him—a man born during the first year of the American engagement in World War II, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. The Biden years were marked by a needless extension of COVID emergency measures and profligate spending that helped inflict unusually high inflation on the country. So it was back to Trump and his all-crisis-all-the-time reality-show presidency: troops in the streets, a lawless administration with critical roles filled by feckless minor celebrities, destructive trade wars waged against our allies even as the president courts such adversaries as Russia and China.
Ben Hecht, a writer born at the tail end of the 1800s with vivid impressions of the first half of the 1900s, called his famous memoir A Child of the Century, meaning the 20th. If someone born in 1994 were looking to imitate him, what would he call his memoir of the 21st? A Bastard of a Century? Perhaps.
Among the deaths of 2025 was John “Paddy” Hemingway, the last surviving pilot to have fought in the Battle of Britain, one of those men Winston Churchill was talking about when he observed: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” The British have a collective national memory of fear at home—but the United States never had that. It is for that reason I believe the 9/11 attacks to be the single event that has done the most to deform our national politics—and our national character—in the 21st century. That infamous day uncorked a tendency that always has existed in American life but that rarely has had the upper hand for very long, something we can see traces of in Jacksonian ochlocracy and Trumpian ochlocracy, in Know-Nothingism, in George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” a politics of fearfulness beyond prudence, of resentment, xenophobia, bitterness, and desperation. Americans are not cut out for that kind of hardship–no stiff upper lips here in the land of therapy and self-esteem. Paddy Hemingway had his Hurricane shot out from under him twice in August 1940 alone, events recorded “almost nonchalantly” in his logbooks, as the Royal Air Force put it.
Well, yes, but have you seen the price of a tuna melt lately?
Every generation has its burdens to bear, and many of Americans’ burdens—9/11, COVID, etc.—are not burdens of Americans’ choosing. But some of those burdens Americans have chosen: the national debt, inflation, the unresolved problems in our immigration system and in urban administration, the cozy crony capitalism that has contributed to economic stagnation, a class of elected political leaders that range from time-serving mediocrities (Nancy Pelosi, Mike Johnson) to corrupt authoritarians (Donald Trump) to elderly incompetents who used to be middle-aged incompetents (Joe Biden). Some of our troubles have been dropped upon us as though by some malevolent storm cloud, but others we have chosen. Into every nation’s life a little rain must fall, but the decision to spend all our umbrella-and-galoshes money on gelato and strip clubs while letting the gutters clog up and the storm sewers go unmaintained—that is on us.
That capital-H History of the Hegelian imagination has no motive—it does not mean us harm any more than the malarial mosquitos does, or the earthquake, or the tsunami. It does not recognize the turns of the centuries or the relay race of the generations. It is our problem, but it is not our enemy. If Americans do not like how the 21st century has been going so far, they are in a position to do something about it. In fact, they are the only ones in a position to do something about it vis-à-vis the American project. But what needs doing cannot be done without effort or without cost. Americans may have thrilled to “History Has Its Eyes on You” in Hamilton, but they do not seem to have taken the meaning. In September, we will be a quarter-century on from 9/11. And though the idea may seem alien to many Americans right now, 25 years is more than enough time to grow up and get your act together.
