The George W. Bush era is back, at least in some cultural sense. On retail playlists in America’s hipper precincts, the top 40 hits of the 1980s and 1990s are replaced by indie rock from the halcyon days of Pitchfork. The vapid, hot-person romantic comedy sits perched once more atop the box office. Waistlines have receded to latitudes that recall Paris Hilton in her prime.

Like most waves of nostalgia, this one serves more as a self-justifying mirror for our current beliefs than any real examination of recent history. A political climate that saw the largest anti-war protests in history becomes the waning days of sleepy, pre-Trump “uniparty” hegemony. The chaotic, money-soaked cultural recklessness chronicled in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom is repackaged as TikTok-friendly “indie sleaze” (and inevitably set to the period’s most godawful music). The advent of the Kardashians and the Real Housewives becomes the Genesis moment for reality television, eclipsing The Real World and its fellow early experiments in the medium.