The 21st Century: Our Century of Discontent

Photo via Esquire

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It all started on December 12th, 2000—the day the United States Supreme Court overturned the 2000 presidential election results and elected George W. Bush president of the United States. Bush v. Gore was decided on nonsensical grounds “limited to the present circumstances” in a partisan 5-4 split, in part by a justice who wanted to retire and in part by another whose “best friend” stood to benefit from a Bush win. These are what any impartial observer would call disqualifying conflicts of interest, yet these two justices did not withdraw from the case or face impeachment for their failure to do so, as would have occurred inside any healthy judiciary. Instead, the Supreme Court got away with the crime of the century, unpunished.

For the first time, an American election was stolen, setting the precedent for all future elections to be put into question by a conservative apparatus of think tanks, law firms, and media organizations, institutions created, infiltrated, or controlled by conservatives and corporate activists, as formulated in Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 Memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce. Furthermore, because of Bush v. Gore, the subversion of American democracy was opened up, leading to the dysfunction of 2016 and the disgrace of 2020. Distrust and apathy, along with inverted totalitarianism, were formed—and would only grow from here.

Next came 9/11, blowback for our overseas interventionism—the vast, vast majority terrible misadventures. On that fateful day, two Boeing 767s crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in our home, New York City, a horrific image viscerally seared into Americans’ minds then, now, and for generations to come. The terrorist attack took close to 3,000 American lives. 

In the aftermath, directly claiming close to a million lives, the perpetrator’s primary motives were debated. The debate continues to this day, although the answer has always been clear; their primary motive was not irrational, radical Islam, as some, primarily neoconservatives and New Atheists, would most often claim for nefarious purposes, but their raison d’être, or reason for being, was a response: a response to poverty and American imperialism—our occupation of their land, our sanctions, and our devastating campaigns of murder of innocent peoples. 

We had the opportunity to prove them wrong after 9/11—to act with restraint and prosecute only those responsible– al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—but instead we fell into the trap of war. Our supposed virtue was exposed as a cruel lie through our actions—through all the murder, pillaging, and torture. Torture, like in Abu Ghraib; pillaging, as in the case of the Iraq National Museum; and finally murder, like in the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike and the Nisour Square massacre.

The Bush era left us low. Then Barack Obama emerged and was elected President of the United States on empty promises of Hope and Change, a self-described “neat trick,” as documented extensively in Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Barack Obama, a “vessel [that] was hollow at its core,” as Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Garrow pronounced it, would go on to sell out to Wall Street and the security state in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 financial crisis. To make matters worse, somehow, instead of becoming post-racial, the Obama era made us race-obsessed. The first Black president, in a tragic twist of fate, hurt race relations, through mostly no fault of his own.

Scars on our nation continued unabashed. In particular, Sandy Hook and Parkland, the deaths of our country’s youth to the plague of gun violence, devastated America. In spite of the blood on our hands, common-sense gun legislation was not, and has not since, been passed. One of the major reasons why, besides the NRA, has been our Second Amendment, written for civil militias, as demonstrated exceptionally well in Fordham professor Saul Cornell’s numerous amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs to the Supreme Court and standout novel, A Well-Regulated Militia. 

Thanks in part to the flooding of money into politics following Citizens United v. FEC (2010), a case that has essentially corrupted American democracy, the Second Amendment has become a millstone around our country’s neck in its maximalist and ahistorical misinterpretation by conservatives and pseudo “originalists.” The Supreme Court, abetted by Mitch McConnell vis-à-vis Merrick Garland and Citizens United, once again, has not been undeserving of criticism. Since Bush v. Gore, the judiciary’s corruption has metastasized, apparent in the abundance of ethics scandals and shoddy scholarship originating from the Court, forming a crisis of legitimacy.

Finally, we come to the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency. In 2016 and even in 2024, the media made the fatal, mind-numbing mistake of lampooning the populist appeal of Trump and his legitimate contentions. There was a stark, almost absolute refusal on behalf of the uniparty to reckon with the very real perils of mass migration, the cultural turmoil it brings, and the country’s massive debt and devaluation of the dollar. Clinton and Harris subsequently lost not because they were women, but because they were poor candidates who did not campaign effectively and who, along with the Democratic Party, took Americans for granted. 

Trump may have sold a bag of goods to disaffected, working-class Americans, but at least he maintained a facade of being pro-worker. From the demise of unions to the passage of NAFTA under Hilary Clinton’s husband, Former President Bill Clinton (the latter of which Trump loudly opposed), Democrats sealed their own fate.

In the aftermath of Trump’s win, celebrities publicly fantasized about the President’s death, and Trump was essentially persecuted, including by the hysterical “Russia Russia Russia hoax.” Liberal elites embraced the maligning of Trump supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic… deplorables” in 2016 and “garbage” in 2024, and the electorate responded accordingly. A zero-sum game was taken on, and the world broke, splintering again with COVID-19.

During COVID, social media transformed, becoming what today is negatively affecting the rising generation on a scale “large enough to cause changes at the population level.” Additionally, in one of the greatest hypocrites of the modern day, Black Lives Matter, a group that supports the “abolition” of “prisons and police,” galvanized the public to take to the streets following the appalling murder of George Floyd. After months of hysterical, authoritarian government lockdowns, and the shutdown and demonization of anti-lockdown protests and sentiment, it was rules for thee, but not for me. Although mostly peaceful, cities went up in flames during the dysfunctional and traumatic 2020 “summer of love,” and Antifa, critical race theory, and the like were permanently emboldened and brought into the public consciousness and mainstream.

Onto present day, the Joe Biden cover-up was exposed far too late, despite his cognitive decline already being readily apparent to the public before his disastrous June 27th debate. Democrats, unrepentant, have continued to avoid accountability, such as former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who dismissed criticism of Biden’s time in office, defined by rampant border crossings, an abysmal economy, and weak foreign policy, as “very misinformed.” On the other hand, on the Republican side of the aisle, Trump has betrayed his constituency, running a criminal presidency, flouting court orders and basic human decency. Although his toxic rhetoric poisoned our politics before, his second administration is brazenly that of a despotic king. 

This has been the history of the 21st century, our century of discontent.  Chaos, or inequality and lawlessness, reigns supreme, and it feels like the times depicted in Joker, where “if it was me dying on the sidewalk, you’d walk right over me.” Every facet of our nation has been hollowed out, and our institutions and our communities more broadly have failed us. Our places of employment, products of pure neoliberalism, could not care less about us, and our schools are a mess of violence and disorder—resulting in 1 in 4 American adults being illiterate. Our government has sold us out—at home and abroad, and what was once standard, or projected idealistically as such, has been lost. The worst has been confirmed. 

The illusion, or the myth of American idealism, that which permeates all aspects of our existence, is dead. This is a problem. Societies operate on noble myth; when it dies, with it comes a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle of violence and war, and the death of the civilization itself.

Thus, I believe we are in an unprecedented era of American history. We had our founding, we had industrialization, and now we have our fall. It is all entirely predictable, just as blowback always is, dating back to the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision, but we are too sedated with our own drugs of choice, Brave New World style, to care. Even those who try to understand, who want to care, face a zone too flooded in action and propaganda and disinformation, along with a media too irrevocably posed to shamelessly reinforce the political class, manufacturing consent, that it is almost impossible for us to decipher our reality. History rhymes, but when history is weaponized against us, when the past and present are obscured and perverted, there is no hope. As George Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Our society of discontent may collapse. But, although oxymoronic, I believe the best of us, left and right, will continue to challenge our power structures and the wrong unremittingly, showing no fear with Truth, Justice, and Reason on our side. I truly believe that truth will write history, and that, as long as there is bravery, there is hope.

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This article was edited by Simon Shalett and Cynthia Duchitanga.