Realignment

The online American right is positively obsessed with the nineties. It’s easy to establish the cause here: a surfeit of Gen X and early millennial users, many of whom are fresh converts from within the last decade. Social-media posts by conservative users depicting America’s cities, beaches, and nightclubs from this era regularly achieve staggering virality. The memorialization of these things is justified by presenting them, perhaps not wrongly, as evidence of the cultural homogeneity that America has lost in the past quarter century. There is one tendency among these that I find particularly troubling – lamenting the death of American network television.