Funhouse Nation
A retrospective on the quiet absurdity that paved the way to open chaos.
The Mirage of Progress
It’s interesting how our perspective on a time period shifts as we move further from it. The late 20th century, once billed as the afterglow of the American experiment, now looks more like the quiet loading screen before a system crash. The 1990s and early 2000s marketed themselves as the payoff to the Civil Rights era, portraying the age as post-racial, prosperous, and mature. But as we approach the midpoint of the third decade of the 21st century, that framing looks less like triumph and more like denial with a PR budget.
As recent events have stripped away the comfortable myths of American progress, many are beginning to reevaluate the decades that followed the Civil Rights movement with a more skeptical eye. That era, stretching roughly from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, was not a seamless continuation of civil rights victories, but rather an incubation period for a revanchist backlash. It was a time when the powerful told themselves that history had ended, all while quietly laying the foundations for its unholy sequel.
Growing up in that supposedly serene interlude, there was a sense, fostered by textbooks, television, and political triangulation, that the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s had faded into quaint memory. Racism was now fringe, democracy secure, and the market would solve the rest. That was the marketed version. But beneath the image of harmony lay a deeply unfinished story, a metastasizing backlash spreading not just through the political underworld but also through pulpits, editorial pages, and boardrooms.
We now recognize what was forming: another Lost Cause.
Not one built on monuments and Confederate nostalgia, but a softer, slicker myth. This version told us racism had ended, that any residual inequality was cultural or self-inflicted, and that progress had won. It was an erasure wrapped in celebration, a myth so convincing that even some within marginalized communities began to believe it. But like the original Lost Cause of the post-Reconstruction South, this narrative functioned not as reconciliation but as rebranding.
It served power.
The Sanitized Backlash
This new myth didn’t need to defend slavery or segregation. It simply buried their legacies beneath a mountain of consumer choice and bipartisan compromise. From the Sunday talk shows to the Sunday sermons, America was told to move on. Any mention of structural racism was dismissed as grievance politics. The quiet message: the system works only if you don’t question it too loudly.
And yet, from the margins, some never stopped documenting the rot. In the wake of a high-profile death, one that drew bipartisan tributes despite a legacy of inflammatory rhetoric, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates offered sobering, clear-eyed reflections on what this moment reveals about the American project.
Hannah-Jones’s piece, written with the urgency of someone who has seen this movie before, focuses on how mainstream institutions bend over backwards to normalize hate so long as it dresses itself in patriotism or free speech. Her critique centers not only on the man in question but on the reactions to his death, particularly from those who should know better. Mandated moments of silence in schools, tributes from across the aisle, and a media apparatus that euphemizes bigotry as mere controversy. In doing so, she demonstrates how the very discourse that claims to oppose hate often ends up legitimizing it.
Coates, in his characteristically searing prose, diagnoses the moment as one of willful amnesia. He writes of a new Lost Cause, a mythology being built in real time to redeem and martyr those whose politics were built on antagonizing the vulnerable. He notes how sanitized legacies are constructed with alarming speed, and how institutions, terrified of confrontation, lend credibility to that construction.
Together, their essays form a powerful counter-history to the pablum of cable news. They refuse to accept the notion that the backlash we’re living through is an aberration. Instead, they argue it’s a continuation, just a mutation of the old normal, not a break from it. Their work reflects the intellectual honesty often lacking in those who still cling to the remnants of the Clinton-Reagan consensus.
The Echo of Reconstruction
And here we must talk about that consensus. The ghost of the neoliberal center, once so smug in its managerial optimism, now haunts the American political landscape like a retired magician who can’t admit the tricks were fake. That center promised a rising tide, but delivered debt peonage for students, market consolidation masquerading as innovation, and a public square gutted in favor of monetized outrage.
In hindsight, the bipartisan consensus appears to be a bet that spreadsheets and televised charisma could outpace history. Its architects, some now wildly confused at the chaos they helped unleash, are struggling to explain the current political unmooring without admitting that their own era was built on illusions. The institutions they praised as stable were in fact eroding under the weight of tribalism, privatization, and weaponized nostalgia.
We are, in many ways, reliving the aftermath of the Reconstruction era.
The reforms of one era were met not with consensus, but with counterattack. And once again, the backlash has captured major institutions. Where Reconstruction was undone by overt violence and Northern fatigue, the post-Civil Rights era was undone by a subtler sabotage: policy decisions cloaked in neutrality, cultural narratives that framed justice as divisive, and a media landscape obsessed with civility over truth.
But here’s the thing: even amidst all this, there’s beauty in the American ideal precisely because we’ve never achieved it. The promise is aspirational, and that’s not a flaw but the point. We must confront the reality that the decades following the Civil Rights era were not the realization of justice, but a strategic pause. A time of managed appearances, not meaningful transformation.
So, yes, the late 20th century may be remembered not as a golden age, but as a decadent one—bloated with myth, smug in its self-regard, and tragically shortsighted.
The backlash we face now didn’t come out of nowhere. It was always there, growing in the shadow of a consensus too fragile to admit its own darkness.
But if we name it, if we reject the recycled myths of moderation and lost greatness, then maybe the next chapter can be written with eyes wide open.
Maybe the next generation won’t be raised on fairy tales but on hard truths and even harder hope.
Because history doesn’t end.
It echoes.
This song has been stuck in my head:
"So, yes, the late 20th century may be remembered not as a golden age, but as a decadent one—bloated with myth, smug in its self-regard, and tragically shortsighted." You are so right Stew.
I recall Christ Matthews of MSNBC, joyously proclaiming after Obama was elected that we were in a post racial America. The asshole lived and lives in the rarified atmosphere of the insider, far beyond he maddening crowd.
He couldn't or didn't want to see what the rest of us saw, Obama was elected by an astonishing, never before seen turnout of the black vote and white liberal vote. That America was just as systemically and institutional racist as ever before and MAGA is the proof.
Then my question, "Wherefore black MAGA"?