I hear people talk on here about how things were "optimistic" in the mid-2000's, or the 2010's, or 2016, or whatever. People talk about turning points like Trump getting elected, smartphones, Obama getting elected, etc. I just don't see it.
The real turning point was the early 2000's.
I'm old enough to remember the optimism of the late 1990's. I actually miss it a lot. People were optimistic about the future and happy about the direction of the country. Sometimes I think I'm just looking at my youth through rose colored glasses, but then I see polling data like this. It wasn't all in my head. The country was legitimately optimistic and better off.
Then, the internet bubble blew up. Then, we have 9/11. To me, that was the real turning point. There was this surge of good feelings and national pride in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and then it all just turned dark as the war on terror raged on. The financial crisis then drove a stake through the heart of American optimism.
We never recovered. There hasn't been a single year since 2004 where a majority of the country felt like we were headed in the right direction. The national mood started to flip on 9/11, reached the depths during the financial crisis, and we never got out of the funk. I'd love to see us somehow get our mojo back.
Looks like we ironically hated mid-90's prosperity and effing LOVED the Iraq war.
Gonna try nuance on the internet, stay with me.
9/11 to about 04 and 05 was one of the most powerful social cocktails I have ever experienced. I was a teenager in the Midwest so I was in a prime spot to experience the wave of social unification that came from feeling attacked and having a common enemy.
Especially in 2002, the sense of the country pulling together was incredible. Completely different than the 90s vibes that I had grown up in and culture I identified with as a teenager. I was all about the 90s Matrix/Pulp Fiction/Boondocks saints because it was a rejection and change from the mainstream (so my teenage brain felt). Post 9/11 it seemed much easier to identify with mainstream America and my fellow Americans, which was not the case before.
I remember being annoyed and almost angry with the people protesting the Iraq War, and I knew many even in rural Wisconsin. I didnt get why they couldnt just get with the program and not disrupt the good vibes that could be had when everyone was on the same page. Looking back, it seems clear to me thats its just an innate human desire to feel part of a unified group.
Since then, ive never felt that way again. Every unifying moment has qualifiers and im aware of dissenting opinions which takes the shine off. It was an intense experience and the chart makes perfect sense to me through the lense of my recollection.
I'm a little younger than you, with siblings your age. I remember how it was, especially being in an army family. I'm not too dense to understand that high point was when we all pulled together, or why. It was a joke, my bad.
It's funny though because I almost feel that glimmer in a sort of underdog way NOW. In my twenties I was so political and so against much of what I thought America stood for. I guess the dire circumstances today gave me an odd newfound pride in what my dad was trying to tell me about democracy, US history, etc. when I was too mad at him over his "nationalism" to listen.
It wasn’t ironic; Bill Clinton winning in ‘92 broke the Reaganites’ brains in a prelude to their reaction to Obama.
Being optimistic and bubbly was "uncool" in the '90s. It was seen as being out of touch with reality. Honestly, if that graph is correct, it seems like people are more optimistic about these times than I would've thought. I wonder what caused that spike of optimism in 2025?
It was uncool - but it was just an affectation. The reality is that most people in general were happy with the way things were going. The early 2025/late 2024 bump is Republicans pumped about Trump. The early '09 bump was Dems pumped about Obama.
38% of Americans thought their saviour coming back would change things, and Democrats were already pessimistic.
I read it that way too, the 90s to me seemed awesome. But about every adult during that period told me it was ass.
Based on the graph it seems there’s a rough spike in satisfaction at the beginning of every US presidential term, which makes a bit of sense I guess
maybe more economic, since the prior team would be booted after each economic downturn and then economic boost after
I keep seeing people say they want to live in the 90s when everything was optimistic and amazing, but I remember as a kid feeling like we're going through dark times. It was definitely the sentiment of the early 90s. I think gang activity had a lot to do with it.
Yeah, if I remember right, violent crime peaked in the early '90s. There were riots going on. I remember lots of areas that used to be dangerous in the 90s but are relatively safe or completely safe today. The 90s started off with a pretty bad recession, which harmed Bush Sr's re-election campaign. There was also the Gulf War going on. People (particularly blue-collar people) were worried about their jobs being shipped overseas and the effects of globalization in general. I remember my parents having to hide their cars from the repo man during this time cause business was slow. Lots of arguments during this time lol. There were certainly a lot of people doing well in the 90s as well. People buying fancy new sports cars and nice new 2-3 story homes with their great-paying white-collar jobs, which were plentiful. People with pantries full of snacks. In the late 90s, the economy was much improved compared to the early 90s, so things were looking up, and some people got more "bubbly," I guess. But there was still an undercurrent of uncertainty and pessimism about the future, and fears about the economy going to crap in the 2000s. Not everyone was happy-go-lucky in the late 90s; there were still plenty of Debbie Thornberries among us. Just depended on who you were.
The early '90s and the late '90s were very different. The early '90s had a brutal recession & were the peak of the crime wave that began in the 1970s.
Then, crime declined throughout the decade and the economy roared back to life. 1996-2000 was a very different time than 1990-1995.
The spike at the end seems to be 2022 so it might be less Covid lock downs.
The problem was not 9/11 as shown in the chart, but the War in Iraq. The amount of money spent, total lives lost, and erosion of personal liberties was an absolute failure.
Almost like war is a business and businesses don’t give a shit about personal liberties
That's fair. I suppose there is an alternate reality where we reacted to 9/11 in a better way - tracking down Bin Laden immediately and getting al-Qaeda through clandestine operations vs. getting bogged down in wars.
Still, I'm not sure if there was an reality where that would fly with the American people. After 9/11, Americans basically wanted a war and wanted to see bombs drop on an enemy.
I think the triple whammy of 9/11, the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis all destroyed people mental of people.
This all also happened during the rise of 24/7 news and social media. People became divided amongst themselves on issues that had nothing to do with each other. QE, deficit spending and tax cuts all came from this, despite never returning to the pre-9/11 budgeting. Quality of life has plummeted for the average American for absolutely nothing in return.
To add onto 24/7 news following 9/11 and Iraq, there was a constant bombardment of news reporting (with a mix of credible and straight BS) regarding threats of bombings, bioterrorism, the anthrax episodes, WMDs nuking Cleveland, et cetera. 9/11+Iraq didn't have reporting isolated to them, there were all kinds of tangential stuff that was constantly reported.
It's not hard to see how your trust in society and mental health eroded had you followed news and as such were bombarded with fear porn reporting all the time.
24/7 news had been around way before 9/11.
This graph is a referendum on the economy. The late 90s and early 2000s were excellent for workers of any class and things were cheaper. The low point around 2008 is the recession.
Right, but the economy recovered. Inflation was low 2009-19. By 2019, we had a 1999-level unemployment rate and inflation was low. Still, we couldn't crack 50%.
The absence of monoculture and the rise of the Internet has something to do with it. Clickbait, Ragebait and social media have shown that negative and shocking narratives get a lot of attention. We've been getting fed a steady stream of this since the mid-2000s.
Every time there’s a glimmer of hope some macro event happens to put Americans back in their place, the most recent two being the ‘08 recession and then Covid, as indicated on the graph.
I am old enough to have experienced all of this timeline. This generally tracks with how I perceived things.
The 80s was weird, it was optimistic but also the beginning of the overt worship of capitalism, when selfishness and making money at any cost became synonymous with success. 80s saw high inflation, but I don't remember feeling like I was getting actively poorer like the last decade.
2000s were definitely a fun time to be alive, lots of optimism, the internet was exploding and technology was going to solve all our problems (before we realized it just created new ones).
It's been downhill since then, 2001 terrorist attacks and then the 2008 crisis and we just never recovered from our hangover. COVID and Trump have just made things even more dismal.
The terrorists won
Only a massive cultural shift in either direction will be needed this follows the same pattern with Polarization figures. Half the country is living in a different world than the other half and the internet only served to isolate that gap even further. Voting nowadays isn’t just a declaration of how much the state should spend on certain policies it’s now a literal state of identity look at the radical change in the narrative just since the last election and it’s already changing now. I predict as instability in the U.S. continues more moderate candidates will prevail.
Yep. And many polls are useless because of that. Half of the country always votes “everything is shit” when the other team is in charge.
Better questions are needed, where it would be harder to perform tribalism like this
We might have hit rock bottom, but we can go even lower. It’s still very possible for us to become even more isolated, atomized & hateful. Not sure what backs up the theory that more moderate candidates will prevail, I think things are headed in the opposite extreme direction. People will seek to vanquish the other side who they see as responsible for our problems and instability, we won’t become more moderate.
The late 00s have a large surge in optimism though and younger people drove it, certainly at a higher rate than gen z does and likely a higher rate than x did before. But yeah 9/11 was pretty much THE optimism killer.
yep, well at least video games are better now than before 9/11.
I find it a lot more interesting that we are exactly where we were in 79
It's funny because I would actually say that optimism in America has really been the exception rather than the rule since roughly the mid 1960s (post JFK assassination and Vietnam escalation).
Outside of the 1983-90 and 1995-2001 periods it's generally been pretty damn gloomy and pessimistic the rest of the time. And there was even a brief hiatus as you can see there in the early 1990s with the recession and crack/crime epidemics really driving things back into gloom for a few years.
So you can understand why people do so greatly romanticize the 80s and 90s because it's proven to be such an exception to the periods that surrounded them in terms of the optimism felt.
Why was it so high in 2002?
Aftermath of 9/11. The reaction was national unity & pride in the wake of the attacks. Bush had like an 80% approval rating back then.
I think that's an important distinction. Just because the people were satisfied with what their governments were doing doesn't mean they were overall optimistic. Culturally, 2006 was way more optimistic than 2002, but politically, people were way more pessimistic, which is actually a good thing because fuck groupthink.
Common enemy, always a good motivation.
The fact that plenty of democrats supported W Bush is impressive. I don't think many support Trump, but that has to do with his waaay more divisive and destructive behavior.
Bush was far more of a unifying president early on post-9/11 than Trump was. This perception changed when the Iraq War started, but in 2002 the US was more unified than in the 25 years before or after.
Trump is the opposite of unifying. His main talking point is how his group is superior to the other group.
What happened in the late 70s and early 90s though is what I am wondering.
Late 70s had massive inflation. It was over 10% for years. Unemployment was also high.
Early 90s was all because of the recession at the time. After the boom of the 1980s it was jarring.
yeah basically this is all the chart really tracks
70s started with Vietnam and burning cities and then had burned out end hippies with minds wrecked by drugs and having seedy harem orgies and shit and Watergate (and after Vietname and the Pentagon papers people lost trust in the government) then the great fun of Bicentennial and Star Wars but also huge oil crisis and people waiting for a couple hours for a tank of gas at stations and insane inflation and the Iran Hostage crisis at the end.
Early 90s was right after a late 80s stock market crash and then the 90s had a weak economy at the start. You also had the first Gulf War and the first World Trade Center bombing and the start of mass school shootings (although at the time it was a freak thing and nobody imagined an ongoing pattern yet). And then grunge and gangster rap music went big with some of the younger kids. Pop culture took a turn away from the happy suburban vibe towards a more rough urban oriented vibe which is one that had not really been a dominant part of mainstream pop culture before. That said this poll was more tracking adults. And that latter stuff took over pop culture more later in the 90s fully when those raised on it rook over all pop culture.
Really this chart is just mostly tracking adult households and it's the economy stupid and nobody voting giving much of a shit about anything other than the economy so all the rest is somewhat irrelevant. Just look to inflation, stock market crashes, oil crisis, economic downs.
It seems.
The Bush tax cuts started hitting at that time. We went from having a surplus to cutting taxes on the rich to the point where we have huge deficits and have been debasing the dollar to pay for it.
Political polarization makes 1980s or early 2000s levels of satisfaction impossible. What pleases one side will anger the other. 40-45% is probably the cap at this point in time.
That's when privacy died in the US. First at the hand of the Government. Then soon to be followed up by Social Media. Now you all just generate content for The Algorithm.
I'm old enough to remember when Americans actually BUILT THINGS. 🤦
This also coincides with rise of social media and smart phones. Some of the early 2000s may be residual from 9/11, but the infiltration of foreign entities into social media and dividing/angering our country is not talked about enough. Even when things are good, we are constantly told they are not.
The 90s were "the end of history", except that the 00s disagreed.
I agree that there has been a general pessimism by a large part of the US since 2001. Not just the War On Terror and the Great Recession, but since Obama on there's been polarization on both sides that didn't quite exist in the 90s.
This seems to mostly just track the economy and then later also the rise of smartphone/online everything domination and total polarization.
The chart doesn't even dip down until some years after 9/11. More when the war was dragging on and the nthe economy collapse.
Consider: America was happiest while we struggled with AIDS, Crack, and coming to terms with Iran/Contra, before being as happy or more so during the Lewinsky scandal, being attacked, and subsequently engaging in conflict indiscriminately. We really are the worst.
Keep in mind that crack did only affect a tiny portion of the population. Vastly less than even opioids today,
As terrible as AIDS was it also only hit a small % of the overall population.
Iran/Contra was at the end of the 80s where the graph falls.... but it was more the economic down turn then that made th graph fall. And Iran/Contra was smaller than Pentagon Papers aor Watergate or Jan 6th.
And the 80s had economic book for a bit and super vibrant fun pop culture, amazing movies, upbeat sounding music featuring lots of "us, you, together, love, etc." and not the more selfish and violent or isolating terms in later mainstream music, great and fun style surrounding you non-stop, bright happy colors surrounding you, very relaxed chill attitudes and not digging for ways to be upset over everything little thing or picking everything to bits, no attitudes about it being cool to mock and sneer down at everything or to have to hate the mainstream, no fear of supposed 'cheese' or 'corn' or sincerity, not all "street cred" obsession, all sorts of fun new tech but it didn't dominate society and it was still a super human-scale and naturally connected world, climate change effects only very slightly in evidence, made it easy to be satisfied. (although there was the nasty deregulation and trashing of last great forests of the American West and such that did suck and too much public smoking)
What I keep in mind is that AIDS and crack were "other people's problems," even though AIDS took a massive toll on that "vibrant fun pop culture" you mention, and crack turned inner cities into the very warzones Trump claims all dem-run cities are experiencing today. Iran/Contra (and Reagan's public decline) just reiterated the corruption potential of administrations within a short decade after Watergate. So, to my point, our "satisfaction" seems to come when others are suffering. Respectfully, your parsing does not prove that point wrong.