The Dying Consensus
On Fantasyland, the failures of America’s political center, and the work of renewal.
I can’t help but keep circling the same question I’ve been stewing on for weeks: why do so many of the storytellers I once listened to between 2017 and 2022 no longer seem to hold the narrative in their hands the way they once did? I’m talking about figures at legacy institutions like The New York Times and those at the crop of center-left or center-right start-ups and policy shops. I still respect much of their work, but it feels as if they are incapable of breaking free from the assumptions and meta-narratives that once guided them. They’re trying to navigate new waters while clutching old maps. And as the body politic enters a new phase, not ahistorical, not aberrational, but deeply rooted in the American throughline, their words drift more like echoes than orientation.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that accepting the energy of progressive young people and those now entering middle age is, for them, a quiet indictment of the political center in which they were raised.
That’s psychologically discomforting.
Their very public personae are built on the aura of revered intellectuals of the past, prescient in their own right, but never infallible, never immune to the ground shifting under their feet.
This is where Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland comes to mind. In that remarkable book, he traces the history of American religion, civil rights, and magical thinking, arguing that the past forty years are less an anomaly than a culmination of these trends. A centuries-long gathering of fantastical forces in the American psyche. His chapter on the Reagan era is especially telling. Reagan didn’t just govern; he performed. His Hollywood training gave us a presidency staged as a spectacle. Think of the “welfare queen” myth he immortalized: not simply racist policy rhetoric, but full-blown narrative myth-making, a fantasy woven into American identity. That kind of performance politics blurred reality long before Trump. It’s no wonder our current narrators lose their grip because their analytical tools were built on a consensus that was theater from the start.
I still listen to some of these voices, such as Ezra Klein. However, the recent debate surrounding his columns underscored for me how quickly even the sharpest minds can lose their bearings when trauma and disorientation strike. This isn’t about Klein alone; it’s about how those once at the height of intellectual debate, revered for their brilliance, falter when the very stage they’re standing on starts to disintegrate. For me, listening has shifted from seeking guidance to sociological observation: watching how voices tethered to a dying political center wrestle with their own irrelevance. A center that, I suspect, was built on sand to begin with.
It’s hard to untangle because of my own youth. I was raised in the declining corridors of that political center. One that prioritized market growth over the public sphere, that mishandled multicultural democracy, that cloaked its failures in digital gloss and rhetoric of boundlessness, even as real quality-of-life indicators declined. Segregation may have been legally outlawed, but the pathogens of generational bigotry and tribal social codes lingered. America wasn’t post-racial; instead, we were stumbling through a perilous experiment that’s been tumultuous since the death of Jim Crow. The election of a president of color revealed that tumult for what it was: sabotage and dysfunction on the front page, the radicalization of one of America’s oldest political institutions.
So are the resistance voices I once followed irrelevant, or always wrong? Not exactly. But perhaps the ones who could have predicted this moment —the organizers, the identity scholars, the voices from the margins — were dismissed as unserious, accused of an obsession with race and gender, or faulted for making the game too complicated. Now those same voices are healing from the psychic trauma of watching democracy threatened in broad daylight, while the narrators of the center seem wholly incapable of imagination. They can describe symptoms but can’t touch the roots of anti-democratic fervor.
Anderson’s account of the Tea Party helps explain why. After the 2008 crash, a movement fueled by grievance and fantasy stormed onto the stage. What began as tax complaints turned into chemtrail conspiracies and birther crusades. This was Fantasyland breaking into governance. Yet the center told itself it was temporary, a passing fever.
It wasn’t.
It was the dress rehearsal for today. The tents were pitched, the carnival in full swing, but the narrators of consensus insisted the fairgrounds were stable.
Religion intensified the spectacle. Anderson writes about the current president’s shallow Protestant affiliation and how it aligned with prosperity gospel, a faith built on magical thinking, material reward, and the conviction that belief itself creates reality. For many White evangelicals, Trump became a champion not despite his flaws, but because his bluster confirmed their worldview: feelings over facts, spectacle over substance. The narrators of the center were unprepared to explain politics as theology, fantasy, and entertainment fused into one.
And then came the internet. Anderson calls it a double-edged sword: democratizing information while turbocharging misinformation. The current president knew instinctively how to use digital platforms to bypass gatekeepers and make fantasy the coin of the realm. The Klein-era narrators, by contrast, cut their teeth in the pre-algorithmic blogosphere and early podcasting days, when reasoned debate still felt viable. Once the terrain shifted to the fantasy-industrial complex, where the most outrageous claim wins the click, their authority began to crack.
Nostalgia sealed the deal. The “Lost Cause” mentality that Reagan nationalized in the 1980s metastasized into a broader yearning for a homogenous past. Every promise to “Make America Great Again” was really a promise to rewind history, to retreat into a manufactured memory. The center could never fully confront that because it, too, had been sustained by nostalgia, by the illusion that the postwar consensus was stable and just.
It wasn’t.
So yes, I find myself no longer shocked, no longer waiting for headlines to deliver a thunderclap. Version 2.0 is not a surprise but a slow reveal. The exposure of how arrogance, denial, and lack of imagination squandered earlier chances to stop the madness. I say this with some grace: narrating the death of consensus is brutally hard work. But the attempt to reanimate a corpse, to dress its withering flesh in the robes of credibility, is worse.
If we’re serious about surviving this moment, if we want to remind the world of America’s better angels, our “last best hope,” then we must acknowledge the failure of the era that brought us here.
Fantasy didn’t just lead us down this rabbit hole; it built the rabbit hole itself.
The work ahead is reality-based, imaginative, rooted in fact and solidarity rather than nostalgia and denial. The storytellers who can do that are not at the current center.
They never were.
But here’s the thing: this is not a call to abandon the center altogether. Healthy political centers are vital; they provide stability, continuity, and a place where pluralism can coexist without fracturing into chaos.
But the center isn’t a marble statue.
It shifts, it reforms, it demands renewal. What fails us is not the existence of a center, but the selfish attempt to freeze one in amber, to insist that the old coordinates must still guide us even as the landscape has changed. The real work, and the real hope, is in building a center that belongs to this moment, not the last one.
