A Decade of Disruption: America in the New Millennium

by Garrett Peck

Overview

An eye-opening history evoking the disruptive first decade of the twenty-first century in America.

Dubya. The 9/11 terrorist attacks. Enron and WorldCom. The Iraq War. Hurricane Katrina. The disruptive nature of the internet. An anxious aging population redefining retirement. The gay community demanding full civil rights. A society becoming ever more “brown.” The housing bubble and the Great Recession. The historic election of Barack Obama—and the angry Tea Party reaction.

The United States experienced a turbulent first decade of the 21st century, tumultuous years of economic crises, social and technological change, and war. This “lost decade” (2000–2010) was bookended by two financial crises: the dot-com meltdown, followed by the Great Recession. Banks deemed “too big to fail” were rescued when the federal government bailed them out, but meanwhile millions lost their homes to foreclosure and witnessed the wipeout of their retirement savings.

The fallout from the Great Recession led to the hyper-polarized society of the years that followed, when populists ran amok on both the left and the right and Americans divided into two distinct tribes. A Decade of Disruption is a timely re-examination of the recent past that reveals how we’ve arrived at our current era of cultural division.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643134444
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.50(d)

About the Author

Garrett Peck, the author of six books, is an American historian who serves on the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Museum of American History, and the Smithsonian Institution. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. Please visit his website at www.garrettpeck.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

1 From Dot-com to Dot-bomb 1

2 Dubya 7

3 9/11 23

4 Scandals of the Decade 46

5 The Iraq War 64

6 Katrina 92

7 A Nation of Minorities 104

8 Gay in America 115

9 The National Pastime 139

10 A Smaller World 167

11 The New Retirement 184

12 The New Urbanism and the Housing Bubble 195

13 The Great Recession 208

14 The 2008 Election 223

15 Obama 243

16 The Tea Party Strikes Back 279

17 History Is Not Over 291

Acknowledgments 301

Bibliography 303

Notes 319

Index 341

Editorial Reviews

The first decade of the new millennium was an epochal “decade of disruption” as Garrett Peck convincingly describes it, setting the stage for the rise of Donald Trump in our current age of polarization and discord. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the opportunities, challenges and fault-lines facing America and the world today, and how we got here.

Richard Florida

Peck not only sets out these “key events that Americans shared” in a concise narrative history, but he also offers a thoughtful and informed perspective. He obviously reads wisely and widely, and is able with clarity and logic to explain complex information (such as what led up to the collapse fo the financial market) as well as to call upon pertinent expert for additional analysis. He is exceedingly fair, carefully totting up George W. Bush’s successes and failures and, above all, he is hopeful.

The Literary Hill

"Peck’s pointillist picture of America on the home front will be sure to interest World War I buffs.

The Wall Street Journal [praise for Garrett Peck's 'The Great War in America.

"The story traces America’s journey from geopolitical isolation to engagement and back to a more committed isolation—a retrenchment that Peck considers a mistake. Peck shares plenty of details worthy of their own histories."

The Washington Post [praise for Garrett Peck's The Great War in America.]

Peck not only sets out these “key events that Americans shared” in a concise narrative history, but he also offers a thoughtful and informed perspective. He obviously reads wisely and widely, and is able with clarity and logic to explain complex information (such as what led up to the collapse fo the financial market) as well as to call upon pertinent expert for additional analysis. He is exceedingly fair, carefully totting up George W. Bush’s successes and failures and, above all, he is hopeful.

The Literary Hill - Karen Lyon

The story traces America’s journey from geopolitical isolation to engagement and back to a more committed isolation—a retrenchment that Peck considers a mistake. Peck shares plenty of details worthy of their own histories.

The Washington Post [praise for Garrett Peck's 'The Great War in America.

2020-03-16
A lucid history of the first decade of the 21st century, which set trends in motion that are with us today.

What to call that time? Washington, D.C.–based historian Peck dismisses “the aughts” as “too Victorian,” and he suggests that the “decade of disruption” is just about right to describe an era in which technology ravaged entire industries. He examines many other trends that seemed to happen overnight but that took years—e.g., the constantly threatened right of gay couples to marry, the rise of the tea party as a directly racist response to Barack Obama, and the still reverberating consequences of the Great Recession, among them the political polarization that reigns supreme today. Peck has a keen eye for the small but telling detail, such as the fact that Wall Street analysts were publicly promoting the dot-com boom but privately keeping their distance, aware that it was a bubble about to burst. (Make that two bubbles: the internet and the telecommunications sector.) The cynicism of Wall Street and Washington are constant threads, with “shareholder value” and giveaways to the already rich being the main ends of the denizens of both. Disruption holds sway throughout Peck’s narrative, but there are plenty of old-fashioned decadence and con games as well, from the fraudulent Trump University to Tiger Woods’ infidelities. By Peck’s account—and he’s a military veteran—the single greatest mistake of the decade was an act of hubris: “following a false trail of evidence and messianic zeal to overthrow a Middle Eastern dictator,” thus leading to the invasion of Iraq. In his nimble yet fact-dense account, the author enumerates many other errors, from gerrymandering and the expansion of the imperial presidency to the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party and the destruction of the middle class.

A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today. (16 pages of color photos)

Kirkus Reviews