No More Liquid I.V. for the Republic

The American center mistook a fantasy for history, and the hangover has finally arrived.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. History always remembers what we tried to throw away.

The shock of the 21st century is reminding America that we aren’t exceptional at all, but rather were living through a peculiar historical moment when global and domestic forces collided to make us look like the preeminent power, while unresolved divisions sat beneath the surface like unexploded mines. For decades, we coasted on that illusion, mistaking luck for destiny.

And now?

We’re waking up with no Liquid I.V. or milk thistle for the hangover.

As someone born in the mid-90s and raised in the aughts and 2010s, I didn’t inherit the comforting glow of “Morning in America” or “Third Way triumphalism.” My America looked different: escalating racial animosity, economic precarity, privatized debt traps just for getting an education, growing wealth gaps that mirror the Gilded Age, rising awareness of systemic harm directed against women, the uneven struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights, and the continuation of wars for empire dressed up as wars for democracy. In short, we lived the rot while our so-called storytellers of the political center clung to an old fantasy of exceptionalism.

If you rewind to the great ruptures of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, you find a country tearing itself open over race, gender, war, and class. There were victories, yes: civil rights legislation, immigration reform, women’s rights gains.

But backlash was just as fierce, maybe fiercer.

Political campaigns were launched in places where civil rights workers had been murdered, as if to wink at the old guard. “Law and order” became the mantra in multiracial cities, while “crime” in other spaces was politely ignored. Codes and winks replaced slurs and billy clubs, but the message was the same: multiracial democracy was a threat, and it would be contained.

Then came the post-Cold War glow.

We were told history was over, democracy had triumphed, markets would solve everything, and the midcentury battles would naturally fade away. The political center, both its left-leaning managers and its right-leaning guardians, embraced this illusion. It was a fantasy of harmony through consumption, stability through deregulation, and “unity” through willful amnesia. Candidates posed in towns freighted with racial symbolism or staged dramatic rebukes of cultural figures to prove their seriousness. Meanwhile, malls spread like monuments to a new kind of civic religion, sitcoms sold suburban cul-de-sacs as utopias, and food courts became the modern agora. The generation that inherited power built careers on this story, pretending the storm had passed.

But the storm never left. It just moved underground.

Inequality soared back to Gilded Age levels. Racial segregation persisted through zoning laws, housing covenants, and incarceration. Wars stretched on endlessly under shifting slogans. Gender and LGBTQ+ progress advanced in fits and starts, always contested. And through it all, the center congratulated itself for holding. Cable TV served irony for dinner, junk food culture clogged the arteries, and reality TV politics blurred into reality itself.

The fat of the land became a narcotic—fuel for ignoring the unresolved fights of midcentury America.

Now the mask is off. Political violence isn’t an aberration; it’s the natural fruit of decades of denial. Disinformation, polarization, and institutional rot aren’t shocks; they’re the operating system working as designed. Those who built careers narrating America as a steady ship are stunned, but the truth is they’ve been living in a dream sequence.

History always had the last laugh. It just took its time setting up the punchline.

Of course, there were always individuals and movements who refused to live in fantasy. Environmentalists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, feminists, queer activists, and immigrant advocates fought like hell to keep the spirit of renewal alive. They knew the truth: America’s story isn’t a steady march upward; it’s a constant battle to expand the circle of dignity and rights. But they were rarely given the center stage. The prevailing political atmosphere preferred comfort food to reckoning.

In hindsight, the era that shaped the modern political center, idolized by Boomers, managed by Gen X, sold to Millennials, and now dissected by Gen Z and Alpha, wasn’t a golden age but a fantasy binge, destined to leave us groggy and disoriented the next morning. The hangover we’re living through isn’t a surprise. It’s the inevitable result of mistaking fantasy for history, branding for substance, and denial for progress. And now, the stunned faces of those who once believed in the glow are simply watching as history lands its joke.