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A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
The reactionary equivalent is "this is what they took from us", usually in the context of a picture of a hottie. In the defense of that meme, the pictures of beaches and cities in California where everyone is white look pretty nice and they did indeed take that from us.
"This is what they took from us" works at three levels.
The level it is okay to talk about, and is a real case where something has been lost, is that young people looked better in swimsuits back then because nobody was fat. In that specific sense, society is just uglier than it used to be. (If you look at fully clothed photos like high school yearbooks then the effect is less stark because increased wealth means people have better teeth, hair etc. which partially makes up for the fattitude.)
The level where there is an obvious dogwhistle is the mix of skin colours. I think you can make a case that something has been lost here - the idea that there used to be a time (outside a few cosmopolitan megacities) where you could assume that everyone you meet is a member of your folk community. But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle. Given the actual demographics of both the US and the UK, skin colour is a good enough proxy for folk community membership for the implied statistical inference to be valid. But the folk community is not actually defined by skin colour and the only people who actually care about the mix of skin colours on the beach as such are white supremacists.
The last point is the silly one. The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries felt prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity. A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't. The only thing that has actually been lost is in your head.
This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended. These cities were formerly almost-entirely European descended and now European-descended are in many cases minorities in these same places. Many cities and public beaches which were very nice places are no longer nice places, everyone knows that so the images strike a cord. You can't pretend this didn't happen, you're essentially left saying don't believe your lying eyes.
I basically agree with your last point. My own criticism of the meme is that it whitewashes 50s-90s culture which led us to exactly where we are today. Going back to the 80s is not any sort of solution. The rot was endemic to that culture as well, it just had not yet led to the demographic displacement that the meme is lamenting but it was already on the path. A 1970s muscle car is not a good symbol for "the good times" because it's more symbolic of the vapid changes in American culture that led us where we are today.
That's a retrospective categorization that people living in those historical eras might have accepted as descriptive, but wouldn't have felt was particularly accurate. Imagine if someone from 2060 zapped in and started talking about the importance of being a microsoft windows culture and how the decline of america was due to ios and android destroying traditional microsoft-linux values. Even if their argument convinced you, you still probably wouldn't see your OS affiliation as being central to your identity, and you still wouldn't be convinced to create systems of mutual support and intermarriage within your OS denomination.
But what do I know. Maybe you're an Arch Linux user.
One of the very first laws in the history of US Congress was limiting citizenship to "free White persons of good character", and as late as 1923 there was Supreme Court decision which declared a high-caste Indian who identified as Aryan could not attain citizenship because he was not white.
You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization. It was the most important racial categorization constructed into the very foundation of the country, and consistently so throughout its history for hundreds of years. "This is what they took from us" indeed. It was coldly-calculated, planned, intentional to do so.
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