The "end of history" never ended

You may not think you want to read a medium-length essay about the 1998 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle "You've Got Mail" but you really ought to. The cultural zeitgeist of the 90s was all about sublimating anxiety about the total victory of capitalism over everything.

For a comparatively complacent political period in the United States, the ’90s boast a surprisingly large number of mainstream romantic comedies about fighting the Man or resisting the pressure to sell out. There’s no coincidence here. It was as if the culture was grappling with the implications of having abandoned even the pretense of crusading reformism, to say nothing of socialism, in favor of an unapologetic celebration of corporate values and business culture.

The lesson: It sucks. But what can you do? Maybe there are little opportunities to make a kind of personal peace with your conscience.  But nothing that rises above the petty or symbolic. In any case, it's best just to look inward, give up, hide if you can. 

Still, defiance of one kind or another was the norm in this genre until, as far as I can tell, You’ve Got Mail hit theaters. That was the genius of the film’s appeal: it was not only a clever and captivating love story, but also a fantasy that spoke to the neoliberal subject’s thorough exhaustion with politics and yearning for acquiescence without punishment. To the extent that it was even happening, resistance didn’t seem to be working. What if you didn’t have to resist anymore, and nothing was lost? What if “the Man” turned out to be Mr Right?

Meagan Day wrote this article after watching "You've Got Mail" and talking about it on the Michael and Us podcast which has been one of my favs for a while. One unstated thesis in the show is that all this late 90s "End of History" stuff is embedded in popular culture. I think a lot about what that's going to mean during the Biden years. How are we going to dissociate and pretend all is well even as the world is visibly burning? Don't be surprised if we find it easier than you may think.