The Week the Market Died

So America has finally sobered up. Now what?

Greased by years of a self-satisfied belief that we’d finally beat the system, the “Great Crash of 2008” has finally arrived. Early Monday morning, Bloomberg’s top breaking news headline warned that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley’s changing structures are “Ending an Era for Wall Street.”

But in the collective fretting about now-precarious internships and post-grad job prospects that understandably accompanies the market’s dramatic volatility, we must not forget to step back from the hypnotic graphs and statistics that got us in this mess to begin with. Forgetting the values of America’s ideological identity and losing hope in their guarantee of a better tomorrow will mean the true crash of our century.

America’s economic history is pock-marked with monetary failures, all of which were seen as the darkest times yet. Then as now, business-minded undergraduates around the country sat perched at the brink of a major economic crisis, wondering whether their perfect futures looked so perfect after all. But just as we learned of—and, we hope, from—1929’s infamous failings from the dulled pages of textbooks and PBS specials, so too will this year’s still-stinging upset be studied by generations to come.
Markets rise and fall and rise again. The end of one era signals the arrival of another.

It is our responsibility to make this next era a greater, stronger one than the last. But this lofty goal will not be achieved by mimicking the past indiscretions of our materialistic Olympus on Wall Street. The high-brow numbers game played by so few at the expense of so many is a broken system, one for which reform is undoubtedly necessary. Yet shattered though our market’s operations may be, it’s naïve to think the Four Horsemen are riding victorious down Wall Street, with the rest of the country’s quaint, suburban cul de sacs soon to come.

From Barack Obama’s salvation-laden rhetoric, you’d think we had before never seen—or survived—a crash of either the market or public opinion. His brand of blind hope is one that will lead us straight back from where we came, boats against the current, with our collective faith newly invested in an institution just as flawed and twice as risky as the Wall Street operations our nation is condemning now: Big Government.

The events of the last week have showed us that our pan-Hellenic chorus of investment bank demigods was not so godly at all—this is for certain. But we cannot fall into the trap of trading one comforting illusion for another. Human fallibility does not implicate government and its talking heads as saviors from our desperation. Our resilience as a nation depends not on the feeble institutions proffered as the standard-bearers of our society, but on the values and ideas that made our nation so great to begin with.

Obama asks us to believe, but in what? He wants us to believe in the power of belief itself—a hollow, reflexive logic that marks his most salient ideological failing. This is what Obama and his Chosen Ones believe our new era should become—some esoteric notion of our nation’s great future, devoid of any recognition of our nation’s great past.

In the words of essayist Bill Whittle, this fundamental “unwillingness to identify with the values and customs that have produced such wonders” guarantees a great civilization’s—indeed our civilization’s—downfall more than an 800-point, three-day drop in the Dow ever will.

What John McCain lacks in pizzazz and marketing, he makes up in ideological truth. Our nation’s success rests on reviving a respect for what we have been and what we are, using these as anchors for what we can become. This is not to say forward-thinking should be eschewed, but a post-apocalyptic notion of an ideological regeneration is a farce. Though we may be flawed, though we may be struggling, we are a great and valiant nation, one that has rebounded and will rebound again.

So let’s usher in a new era for America. But let’s do it from the inside—with the understanding that the political, economic, and moral greatness we so desire is to be inherited, not created; repaired, not revamped; and, most of all, that we have faltered, not failed.

The author is a Barnard College sophomore. She is an associate copy editor.