You know for a while we have been in a race between “these insurgent ideas are so fundamentally dumb and self-undermining you can’t build any viable structure that takes them seriously” and “these established ideas are an attempt to hold on to a stale ‘90s consensus that was just a ripening of an '80s Reaganite reenchantment of the '50s as cover to bring back the 1920s”

Like a lot of our modern pickle is “public culture and media became less racially, class, and politically diverse by the 90s than they had been in the 70s-80s, but cultivated a sense of progress through demonstrative tokenism even as this progressed slower than the demographic change accumulating, until the 2010s when the weight of changes and the massification of internet communication finally yielded a shift, where even approaching an approximation of modern distribution of weight is felt as a sharp discontinuity with a culture whose stability the regime legitimated itself by ensuring”

But then “new, exciting, dumb” vs. “established, stable, irrelevant” is the classic liberal vs conservative dynamic now that history has restarted, innit?