Let the 21st Century Begin

TW: We tend to mark eras based on round numbers like 2000, 1990 etc. Real events certainly evolve in a more random manner. EJ Dionne posits in this piece about 2009 as a transitional fulcrum into the 21st century. It is time for new approaches, to terrorism, to the exercise of American strength, to capitalism, to many things. The world is in an extraordinary crisis, we have expunged a failed POTUS and with luck elected an extraordinarily competent one.

From EJ Dionne at WaPo:
"Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe's 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call "The Sixties" in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year's election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century...

For all the chatter about the world changing decisively after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our reaction to the attacks was conditioned by 20th-century assumptions...

Reactionary terrorists whose actions reflected the weakness of their position were raised up to world-historical status. They were "totalitarians," which suggested that they represented a threat as powerful as those embodied by Hitler and Stalin. They were "Islamofascists," a sobriquet that credited them with battling under the banner of a coherent, modern ideology when in fact they were inspired by a ragtag jumble of ideas rooted in the medieval past.
Osama bin Laden's commitment to reviving the power of the old Islamic "caliphate" was taken to be as real as the danger of Soviet troops pouring across the old East German border or of Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia. The new "global war on terror" was endowed with the same coherence as the old Cold War.

It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions. Our battle with the terrorists is difficult precisely because it doesn't fit into the familiar categories. It grows out of struggles within Islam over which we have little control -- between Shiites and Sunnis, between modernizing and reactionary forces, between old regimes and new contenders for power...

We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.

Nowhere is the need for a new understanding more obvious than in economic matters. Capitalism will not disappear, but the current crash has destroyed a series of damaging myths.
Those brilliant financiers were not so brilliant after all and certainly did not deserve the outsized rewards our system showered upon them for three decades. They did not understand that the financial instruments they created contained time bombs that would eventually rip apart the very system from which they so profited.

The market cannot operate without significant regulation, and dreaded government turns out to be the only institution with the capacity to repair things when market actors are routed from the field and sit, petrified, at the sidelines.

Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/29/AR2008122901897.html?hpid=opinionsbox1