United States in the 2000s

The new millennium announced itself tragically on September 11, 2001, when Islamist extremists aligned with the Al-Qaeda network headed by Osama Bin Laden (1957–2011) carried out a series of devastating terror attacks in the United States. The event jolted the United States and the rest of the Western world out of the afterglow of the peace and prosperity that had largely defined the 1990s, ultimately putting the nation on the path to multiple complicated and controversial long-term military campaigns in the Middle East, which extended into the early 2020s.

As the United States and its allies sought retribution for the September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) attacks, the US-led October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan initially had very high levels of public support. The campaign focused on removing the Taliban from power. They are a militant Islamic fundamentalist political organization that controlled Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks, from power. US leaders had identified the Taliban as having provided a safe haven and materials to support Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden, enabling the extremist group to plan and carry out the ruinous acts of terrorism that removed the World Trade Center from the New York City skyline and killed nearly three thousand civilians.

After quickly achieving its objective in Afghanistan by ousting the Taliban, the United States turned its focus to Iraq, which was then under the grip of tyrannical leader Saddam Hussein (1937–2006). The United States and Hussein had already engaged in armed conflict during the Gulf War (1990–1991) under President George H. W. Bush (1924–2018). The elder Bush’s son, George W. Bush (1946– ), was in power in the White House when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The country planned to dismantle a Hussein-led weapons program that the Bush administration claimed posed an acute national security risk to the United States.

The Bush administration’s narrative regarding Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program was ultimately shown to be misguided if not an outright falsehood. With the conflict in Iraq dragging on, US voters pushed for change in 2008 by electing Barack Obama (1961– ) as president. Obama became the first Black president in the history of the United States, and his election marked an optimistic turn for the nation’s fortunes. The 2008 election took place against the backdrop of a steep stock market crash, which began that autumn with the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market and quickly engulfed the entire global economy.

These events occurred as internal dynamics within the United States were shifting due to a confluence of factors including the increasing penetration of Internet technology, the rise of social media, and xenophobic anti-Islamic sentiment rooted in the 9/11 attacks, which concentrated mainly within the country’s political right wing. By the end of the decade, this set of dynamics had redefined the nation’s social landscape, guiding it on a path toward the hyperpolarized political climate that came to define the 2010s.

Society

The events of 9/11 marked the beginning of a turbulent and volatile period for the United States socially and politically. Muslim Americans and others of Arab descent were victimized by a sharp, sudden uptick in racial and religious discrimination, xenophobia, exclusion, and hate crimes. Analysis of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics, published by ABC News, reported a hate-crime surge at this time against Muslim and Arab Americans of more than 1,600 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Dramatically increased and invasive surveillance and security protocols disproportionately targeted Muslims and people of Arab ethnicity, fueling a wave of terrorism paranoia. The George W. Bush administration was later accused of exploiting this mindset to justify the country’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In many ways, the widespread institutional distrust that came to overshadow the US government in the 2010s and 2020s is directly rooted in the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Bush administration, represented by Secretary of State Colin Powell (1937–2021), staged a presentation to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in February 2003. Citing intelligence reports alleging that Hussein was actively stockpiling WMDs, Powell’s presentation endeavored to justify the Bush administration’s imminent plans to invade Iraq, stop the country’s weapons program, and remove Hussein from power. Despite waging a military campaign that persisted into the next decade, the United States never found any WMDs in Iraq. Many commentators believe the inaccurate intelligence regarding Hussein’s alleged WMD program was used as a cover for other objectives such as increased US control of Iraq’s oil resources, a desire to maintain the US dollar as the international reserve currency, and the younger Bush’s yearning to remove Hussein from power and close an unresolved chapter of his father’s earlier presidency. Powell later publicly admitted to regretting the statements he made to the UNSC, which analysts have widely characterized as diminishing the credibility of the United States and souring relations between the country and the UN for years afterwards.

Meanwhile, US consumers had been building up mortgage debt at breakneck speed, doubling its levels between 2001–2007. The debt parade was driven by the lax standards of a subprime mortgage lending market, which offered homebuyers and homeowners the opportunity to finance and refinance real estate at below-standard interest rates and purchase homes with little to no money down. Numerous Wall Street investment firms and brokerage houses repackaged these risky loans into tradable securities with vastly overrated safety profiles, and by 2007, the first signs of serious economic trouble were beginning to show in the US economy and financial markets. These underlying dynamics led to an infamous international economic meltdown commonly called the Great Recession (2008–2009). The recession had the general effect of further undermining public confidence in US institutions, particularly after government-backed bailouts rescued multiple financial services firms complicit in the economic crash while leaving retail investors and other members of the public caught in the crosshairs of the tumult to shoulder devastating financial losses.

As these events unfolded, US society continued to adapt to the profound changes brought on by a combination of advancing Internet technology and ongoing social liberalization. Marriage rates plummeted to unprecedented lows as young people increasingly elected to pursue higher education and career ambitions rather than start families. US Census Bureau data comparing 1970 to 2000 and 2008 quantifies the trend. In 1970, only 36 percent of women and 56 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 24 had never been married. By 2000, those numbers had climbed to 69 percent for women and 79 percent for men before rising again in 2008 to levels of 80 percent for women and 89 percent for men. Higher education was promoted as a vital strategic tool for young people seeking to improve their earning potential and long-term financial outlooks in the wake of the 2008–2009 recession, which had the long-term effect of ballooning national student debt burdens.

The 2000 US census brought positive race relations data, showing that the racial segregation of Black and non-Black Americans had fallen to their lowest levels since 1920. Obama’s compelling 2008 election to the presidency on a platform conceptually built around hope and change also marked a major step forward for the nation’s Black community. Overall, the 2000s had the effect of increasing public awareness of issues related to racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity and inclusion, with pushback against post-9/11 Islamophobic sentiment becoming stronger and more vocal as the decade progressed.

Science and Technology

The 2000s witnessed a maturation of the connectivity, mobile, and electronics technologies that began to emerge with the Internet revolution of the mid-to-late 1990s. Wireless Internet gained a dominant foothold over the course of the decade, marking a next-generation shift that vastly accelerated mobile computing capabilities and laid the foundations for the rise of smartphones during the 2010s. USB “flash” drives improved data portability, while mobile telephones began to include camera systems. SMS “text” messaging benefitted from ubiquitous inclusion in mobile phone service plans, combining with the development of mobile devices with more advanced keypads to make texting an increasingly common feature of the telecommunications landscape. Apple returned to technology industry relevance after an extended period of decline with the introduction of the wildly popular iPod, a portable media player that made it possible for users to store their entire music collections on a lightweight and easily transportable device. In addition, the company’s 2007 introduction of the revolutionary iPhone is now widely viewed as marking the beginning of the smartphone age.

Though it was soon made obsolete by Internet-based media streaming, Blu-ray technology marked another data storage advancement during the 2000s, improving on digital video discs (DVDs) by introducing high-definition playback capabilities. Amazon’s Kindle, an electronic reading device capable of displaying book content and other text-based media, debuted in 2007 to enormous consumer demand. Short-range wireless Bluetooth technology, which debuted in the late 1990s, became increasingly affordable in the 2000s and made major inroads in consumer electronics markets. Video games, which were rapidly becoming more elaborate, media-rich, and realistic, were further revolutionized by the 2006 launch of Nintendo’s Wii system, which introduced motion-activated controls that enabled physical activity in gaming. Computer operating systems, particularly those produced by tech giants Microsoft and Apple, also took major steps forward during the 2000s to significantly upgrade and modernize the personal computing experience.

Social media evolved from its nascent roots in the late 1990s to become a highly influential aspect of the virtual world during the 2000s. Early services like Friendster and Myspace ultimately yielded to the dominance of Facebook, which was founded in 2004 by a group of Harvard University students led by Mark Zuckerberg (1984– ). By year-end 2010, Facebook had an estimated 608 million active users globally, making it the world’s most widely used social media service. Twitter and LinkedIn, two other leading social media platforms, were also founded in the early-to-mid 2000s.

Medical science continued to advance at a rapid pace in the 2000s, carrying forward a trend that defined the latter decades of the twentieth century. Particularly important advancements occurred over the course of the 2000s in fields including genetics, cardiology, stem cell research, cancer therapy, and robot-assisted surgery. The Human Genome Project, which endeavored to map all genetic information encoded within the human body, issued its first complete draft of the human genome in 2000, with additional updates following in 2003 and 2007. The project has been credited with cataloguing information that has gone on to inform a long list of medical breakthroughs while significantly advancing the increasingly important field of preventative medicine. New classes of statin drugs, which became widely used in the 2000s, proved highly effective in slowing the development of arthrosclerosis, leading to national reductions in coronary artery disease fatality rates of nearly 40 percent. Despite being fraught with complex ethical questions, stem cell research emerged as a highly promising field of medical and scientific inquiry during the 2000s. Evolving classes of targeted drug therapies continued to improve the prognosis for HIV/AIDS patients and people afflicted with certain types of cancer, including breast cancer, leukemia, and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs), among others.

Accelerating improvements in information technology also introduced data-enriched insights to medical treatments, improving patient outcomes across a broad spectrum of illnesses, injuries, and medical conditions. Paper-based medical records were also increasingly replaced with electronic files, vastly improving caregiver access to patient information but also creating a novel set of cybersecurity and privacy risks.

In 2006, astronomers updated their model of the solar system to reflect emerging findings indicating it to be a far more complex and dynamic structure than previously thought. One major result of this reconfiguration was Pluto’s downgrade from a planet to the newly created classification “dwarf planet.” The change officially reduced the number of planets in the Solar System from nine to eight.

Economic and Cultural Trends

Economic Turbulence and the Great Recession

Apart from the popping of the so-called “dot-com bubble” in 2000–2001, US stock markets and the nation’s economy generally developed along a path of stability for much of the 2000s until early indications of the impending Great Recession manifested in 2007. The financial disaster unleashed by the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market and its associated mortgage-backed securities had a profound impact on Americans’ personal wealth. US households suffered combined losses of $16 trillion in net worth during the worst throes of the recession, with about one-quarter of the country’s households seeing their net worth evaporate by 75 percent or more. The apocalyptic situation was compounded by millions of job losses, which led the drive of the nation’s poverty rate from 12.5 percent in 2007 to more than 15 percent in 2010—an uptick of approximately 20 percent.

One of George W. Bush’s final consequential acts as president was the signing of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), commonly known as the “bank bailout.” The unprecedented government intervention in the private sector represented by the act proved highly contentious among broad cross-sections of the US public, as it restored stability and financial viability to the banking institutions complicit in the 2008 crash using money supplied by the very taxpayers left to absorb the worst of the losses. A rationale commonly iterated as “too big to fail” justified the bailouts, with supportive lawmakers and economists predicting that the financial collapse would have been even more profound had the bailouts not been authorized.

Post-9/11 Security Paranoia

The aftermath of 9/11 was chaotic, bringing a series of other troubling events including a spate of anthrax poisonings, the infamous “shoe bomber” terrorism attempt of Richard Reid (1973– ) during a transatlantic 2001 flight, and a series of mysterious fatal sniper attacks that plagued the Washington, DC metro area for three weeks in late 2002 before its perpetrators, John Allen Muhammad (1960–2009) and Lee Boyd Malvo (1985– ), were apprehended. These events had the combined effect of stoking security paranoia among the US population to even greater heights, with fear of terrorist activity within the United States approaching the level of hysteria.

Retrospectively, the post-9/11 landscape was the catalyst for a major expansion of federalized US surveillance and security operations. These operations were primarily led by agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), established in November 2002 by the George W. Bush administration, and the National Security Agency (NSA). Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden (1983– ) revealed the sweeping scope and deceptive practices of these surveillance operations when he became a whistleblower in 2013, adding to previous disclosures issued by the WikiLeaks organization founded in 2006 by the controversial Australian activist Julian Assange (1971– ).

The 9/11 attacks were a generational event of profound social and cultural significance. Pew Research Center polling data from 2014 indicated that 97 percent of respondents who were at least eight years of age at the time of the attacks remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the tragedy. The closest comparable event was the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), which had a recall rate of 95 percent.

Media and Popular Culture

Commentators frequently cite the rise of reality television as the defining media trend of the 2000s. The television show Survivor, which debuted in 2000 and challenged contestants to battle for survival, supremacy, and a million-dollar jackpot on a remote island, is often characterized as heralding the arrival of reality TV as a major mainstream cultural phenomenon. In a more sobering take, media historians often describe the traumatizing television coverage of the 9/11 attacks as another defining event in the evolution of the reality television paradigm.

The US film industry continued to embrace the franchising model in the 2000s and moved toward cinematic versions of established intellectual properties as the increasingly corporatized ownership of US motion picture studios sought to optimize the commercial appeal of major releases. Key examples of the trend include the critically acclaimed Lord of the Ringsmovie franchise, directed by Peter Jackson (1961– ) and released from 2001–2003, and a trilogy of Spider-Man films directed by Sam Raimi (1959– ) and released between 2002 and 2007. Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration also lobbied the Hollywood industry to generate cultural support for the so-called War on Terror by producing blockbuster films with patriotic themes.

In popular music, rap and hip-hop continued to dominate and diversify into new subgenres, such as the “Dirty South” sound that achieved profound mainstream success during the 2000s. Rock music was also invigorated after an extended period of decline by a garage rock revival led by bands such as the Detroit-based White Stripes.

About the Author

Jim Greene is a freelance writer and Canadian expatriate currently based in the European Union. A graduate of the University of Guelph (BA, English), Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA, Film Studies), and the University of Southern California (MFA, Creative Writing), he has been writing professionally since 2001 through his owner-operated editorial services and consulting firm.

Bibliography

Alfonseca, K. (2021, September 11). 20 years after 9/11, Islamophobia continues to haunt Muslims. ABC News. abcnews.go.com/US/20-years-911-islamophobia-continues-haunt-muslims/story?id=79732049

Cox, L., & Peck, P. (2009, December 17). The top 10 medical advances of the decade. Everyday Health Group. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/publichealth/17594

Desilver, D. (2014, May 14). More than a decade later, 9/11 attacks continue to resonate with Americans. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/05/14/more-than-a-decade-later-911-attacks-continue-to-resonate-with-americans/

From patriotism to recruitment: How Hollywood helped the US military sell the War on Terror. (2020, May 25). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. www.cbc.ca/radio/from-patriotism-to-recruitment-how-hollywood-helped-the-u-s-military-sell-the-war-on-terror-1.5580543

Glaeser, E.L., & Jacob, L.V. (2001, April 1). Racial segregation in the 2000 census: Promising news. The Brookings Institution. www.brookings.edu/research/racial-segregation-in-the-2000-census-promising-news/

Jacobsen, L. A., & Mark, M. (2010, October). US economic and social trends since 2000.Population Bulletin, 65(1), 2–20.

Sandling, M., & Chandler, K. (2021). Exploring America in the 2000s: New millennium, new US. Routledge.

Schwarz, J. (2018, February 6). Lie after lie: What Colin Powell knew about Iraq 15 years ago and what he told the UN. The Intercept. theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin-powell-knew-about-iraq-fifteen-years-ago-and-what-he-told-the-un/

The US war in Afghanistan. (2022). Council on Foreign Relations. www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan.