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Since 2000, What Events Have Seemingly Most Divided America?
I went back to 2000 on this because it feels like a nice snapshot of “modernity.” It’s almost 25 years ago, so people who were born in 2000 are theoretically entering some form of adulthood right now. Plus, it’s right before 9/11, which would be the first thing on our list.
Here’s my partial list.
9/11: This unified the country (good!), which COVID could not (bad!). The big narrative is about unity, but in reality the unity was maybe 96 hours at most, and even in those 96 hours we were getting into conspiracy theories, anti-Middle East rhetoric, left vs. right, etc. Even though I randomly put the cut-off on this post at 2000, I think 9/11 also showcases that we had lots of these divisions beforehand. We unified for a split second (remember when Bush was at, like, 88% approval ratings?!?!) and then came apart again.
Obama being elected: This is a huge one that you can’t ignore. For some people, this indicated that progress had finally arrived. It had taken him four years from his convention speech to get to this mark. He did his Convention acceptance speech in a damn football stadium. This was electric progressive stuff. But, a lot of people simply could not, and would never, deal with the idea of an African-American being President. Megan…
