Some things collapse all at once. Others drift there slowly, while no one is looking. This is a memory of the drift — and a refusal to pretend we didn't see it.
I was born in the late 1980s, just far enough back to remember a different country.
Not a perfect one. Not even a good one, in many ways. But a country that still believed, at least out loud, in certain shared ideas.
I didn’t watch it fall apart all at once. Nobody did. That’s the thing about collapse — it doesn’t come like a lightning strike. It drifts in. It settles. You learn to live inside it before you realize what it is.
By the time MAGA hats were bobbing at rallies and Capitol windows were breaking, the roots had already run deep. Most of the country had already chosen sides. Most of the damage was already done.
If you’re wondering how it happened, you have to go back further than a few election cycles. You have to look at what we let grow, and what we refused to see.
The 1980s were supposed to be about "morning in America." That was Reagan’s slogan — a promise of optimism, prosperity, and a rebirth of American strength after the long grind of the Cold War, Watergate, and economic turmoil.
But underneath the glossy ads and confident speeches, a different energy was gathering.
The religious right rose hard and fast. It wasn't just about faith — it was about control. About bringing politics into the pews and pushing the idea that to be a real American, you had to look a certain way, live a certain way, believe a certain way.
At the same time, trust in government started to rot from the inside. Reagan preached small government, but what took its place wasn’t a healthy skepticism — it was a growing contempt. A suspicion that anything public, anything shared, was suspect.
Talk radio exploded. Rage sold. The Fairness Doctrine died in 1987, and with it went the last shreds of balance in American media. By the time Fox News launched in the '90s, the idea that there even was a "neutral truth" was already slipping away.
Politics turned sharper, nastier. Newt Gingrich taught a generation of Republicans to treat politics like war: if you weren't winning, you were losing. Your opponents weren't just wrong – they were traitors.
The ground shifted quietly. Most people barely noticed.
Then came the shocks.
9/11 cracked something open. Fear flooded in. The country accepted a surveillance state overnight. We traded liberty for security and told ourselves it was temporary.
It wasn't.
The wars that followed — first Afghanistan, then Iraq — fed a brutal, simple narrative: us versus them. Good guys and bad guys. Trust the strongman. Questioning meant betrayal.
Meanwhile, globalization gutted the middle class. Jobs vanished. Inequality soared. A handful of cities got rich. Most towns got left behind.
Then the crash of 2008 hit. Millions lost everything. Wall Street got a bailout. Regular people got nothing.
That’s when the anger stopped simmering and started boiling.
The Tea Party rose up next. A movement dressed in patriot costumes and tax protest slogans, but powered by a deeper, older rage. Against government. Against elites. Against a world changing too fast and leaving too many people feeling powerless.
It didn’t take much to tilt that anger toward darker corners. Birtherism spread like wildfire. Obama's election — historic, hopeful — also sparked a furious backlash that no amount of civics lessons could cover up.
The Tea Party normalized the politics of anger. It taught a new generation that shouting worked better than negotiating. That conspiracy theories were easier to believe than complicated realities.
And when the Tea Party’s energy started to fade, something even more potent was ready to take its place.
Donald Trump didn’t create the MAGA movement. He surfed it.
He understood something essential: that the anger, the fear, the loss, the longing for a simpler story — it was all there, waiting. It just needed a voice loud enough, shameless enough, to turn the quiet drift into a roar.
"Make America Great Again." A promise, a threat, a fantasy. It spoke to the part of the country that missed a version of America that maybe never existed — or if it did, only existed for some.
Underneath it all: nationalism, nativism, a deep distrust of democracy itself. If elections bring the wrong outcomes, then the elections must be rigged. If the news reports inconvenient facts, then the news must be fake.
It wasn’t just Trump. It was millions of Americans who wanted to believe it.
We live now inside the world that drift built.
A country where a third of the population believes elections are only legitimate when their side wins.
Where "freedom" is defined by the right to dominate others.
Where conspiracy has replaced conversation.
Where truth isn't defeated in open battle, but slowly drowned under a tide of constant noise.
We didn’t get here overnight.
We built this.
Not all of us, maybe. But enough of us. Enough to matter.
The collapse is not theoretical anymore. It’s visible. It’s measurable.
It’s in the headlines about teachers silenced and books banned.
It’s in the laws making it harder to vote, to speak, to dissent.
It’s in the casual cruelty, the proud ignorance, the eagerness to punish difference.
And yet.
Understanding is not surrender.
Seeing the drift for what it was — and is — means we are not blind anymore.
Maybe we can't put the old country back together. Maybe it was never as whole as we thought.
But we can remember.
We can witness.
We can refuse to become part of the machinery that grinds everything into dust.
They can try to drown the truth.
But they can’t make us forget it.
Not unless we let them.