Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

excited, hopeful visions of the future came to seem naïve or absurd. *2
    Earlier I mentioned midcentury urban renewal as an example of America’s love for the new turning single-minded and reckless. It was like an autoimmune disease, when misguided antibodies destroy healthy human tissue. But even as that demolition of old buildings and neighborhoods was going full speed, local activists (in New York City most of all) and a few enlightened owners (in Omaha, for instance) started to beat it back—another example of how American citizens have placed essential checks and balances on excessive and misguided power. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by the Manhattan journalist-turned-activist Jane Jacobs, became the manifesto of a successful and powerful new movement in 1961; by the end of the decade, historic preservation was fully institutionalized, and in the 1970s saving and renovating nice old buildings and neighborhoods was becoming the default. *3
    At the same moment, architecture and urban planning rediscovered the amusements and lessons of history. Architects were designing new buildings with columns and pitched roofs and pediments and colorful finishes—a so-called postmodern reaction by elite architects, who used the old-fashioned design moves and materials that the modernist elite had declared taboo for half a century. What began in the late 1960s and ’70s as fond, bemused takes on old architectural styles morphed during the ’80s into no-kidding reproductions of buildings from the good old days. Serious architects and planners calling themselves New Urbanists convinced developers to build entirely new towns (first and most notably Seaside, Florida), urban neighborhoods (such as Carlyle in Alexandria, Virginia), and suburban extensions (The Crossings in Mountain View, California) that looked and felt like they had been built fifty or one hundred years earlier, with narrow streets and back alleys and front porches. A convincingly faux-old baseball park, Camden Yards in Baltimore, established a new default design for American stadiums.
    That two-step rediscovery of the past—at first amused and a bit ironic, but soon wholeheartedly sincere, making the old and uncool cool and then normal —was a sensibility shift made by tens of millions of lifestylizing Americans not yet known as the creative class. During the 1970s, retro became a trendy word.
    The Official Preppy Handbook became a crypto-nostalgic bestseller in 1980 by good-naturedly satirizing a certain archaic strain of rich white American privilege as if the 1960s cultural upheavals hadn’t happened. Everyone started using the new term comfort food, only a bit ironically, to destigmatize old-fashioned American dishes that were familiar, unchallenging, unvirtuous—biscuits, cupcakes, meatloaf, grits, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese. The meaning was soon extended to celebrate any and all of our newly unshackled and unapologetic tastes for the old and familiar. J. G. Ballard wrote that right after World War II, which ended when he was fifteen, “people simply became uninterested in the past”— until the 1970s, he noticed in the 1990s, when suddenly “nobody was interested in the future. Now they are only interested in the past in a sort of theme-park-like way. They ransack the past for the latest design statement.”
    But as it turned out, not just for design statements and lifestyle inspirations. Thirty years ago my friend Paul Rudnick and I wrote a cover story for Spy about how the recent spate of “Hollywood nostalgia productions [had] portrayed the fifties and early sixties as something to be pined for, something cute and pastel colored and fun rather than racist and oppressive.” And how in the 1980s, when we were writing, the new omnipresent nostalgia meant that “you can become Dan Quayle,” the forty-two-year-old conservative Republican vice president, “or you can become part of the irony epidemic. Or if you’re of a mind to