Note that I try not to say this consensus was either a good or a bad thing, only that it existed. It had pros & cons, and trying to weigh them up overall seems a bit of a distraction. I'm glad I don't live under it, although perhaps those who did were also glad not to live under earlier systems. But we don't get to choose when to be born, so we are not obliged to reach a yes/no vote.

Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.