Those 90s, those aughts.

We're never going back.

We creatures of the 20th century will almost certainly be the last Americans to have believed, in our bones, that we could simultaneously be rich as hell and occupy the moral high ground.

To make money with diligence and to spend it with glee—this was how we lived our pious faith in market capitalism and liberal democracy. It was a principled life, to produce and consume immaterial things, from words, music, and apps to investor decks, money, and Facebook posts. The major philosophical “work” was to convince ourselves that these things had real, absolute value. That America had won the Cold War not on hard power and economic coercion but on the merits—on our virtuous abundance of Levis, Marlboro reds, and pop music.

We could win with our native glasnost, yes—our happy, wide-smiling American openness which came to be styled a product of liberal democracy—but also on our perestroika, our entrepreneurial brio, our animal spirits. This idea of personal glory as expressed in personal dollars required, of course, a studied neglect of our primordial debts to our fellows and to our planetary biosphere in favor of a blind faith that we as individuals could do it all on our own, had done it on our own.