One thing I actually liked about the early seasons of Futurama was that it parodied the trope of the UN unifying Earth under one government and the implication being that the United States more or less took control of the UN in the same way that China's been doing IRL or how Merkel's Germany more or less controls the EU.
But rather than a utopian "United Earth" common to sci-fi, everything's just as dysfunctional, corrupt, and moronic as it was before.
The 2000's prior to 2007 were honestly a good time compared to before, even with 9/11 and The War on Terror taken into account but then again a lot of that is probably just childhood nostalgia and rose-colored glasses.
I think with the Bush years specifically, a lot of people were convinced that we had to more or less wait out his presidency and the Democrats could return us back to a state of affairs closer to the 90's, at least on a certain level to a certain degree. The Great Recession more or less killed all hope of that and made the cynicism of the culture even worse, but in a different way.
The 2000's was cynical just like the 2010's were, but it was a different kind of cynicism. For the most part, 2000's cynicism was either nonchalant "whistling past the graveyard" nihilism or it was edgy "Sasuke Uchiha/Shadow the Hedgehog/Linkin Park AMV/let's break stuff!" angst and rage.
The cynicism of the 2010's was more of the pretentious "Mean Girls" mentality where you can't be sincere or "cool" and everything has to be cloaked in several layers of postmodern irony and snark. The Woke Left as a whole always has this pretentious aura to them, and the fact most of them are from an academic background doesn't help matters.
I've stated this before countless times, but I think the Religious Right has a lot to do with how the Woke Left came into existence and how they got so powerful by comparison. The fundies had been in play for so long (at least since Reagan's first term, probably since the late Carter years) and by 2000, were starting to decline. The rise of Bush and the surge of post-9/11 patriotism did help give them an unexpected shot in the arm to keep them going a few years but it also meant that they became increasingly tied to Bush and more hated by the rest of the country.
Really, the urbanist approach of the Woke Left and guys like MovieBob really comes across as the natural evolution of the Red States vs. Blue States/America vs. Dumbfuckistan mentality of the Bush years, especially after the 2004 election.
I also think a lot of the most rabid "true believer" SJW's that are White college kids tend to be the ones who grew up in the Bible Belt or in strict conservative families and envied the liberal blue states. Then they got to college, got indoctrinated and took to that like a duck to water because now they had their own cult to strike back. Hell, even the ones who don't get brainwashed in college will do what they can to move to a lefty city to get with the "in crowd" in the trendy deep blue coastal urban areas. MovieBob has this sentiment but never fully realized his dream, while ADF grew up in a conservative household and moved to the hipster part of Philadelphia as soon as he could before moving to the West Coast.
There's this eerie cultural revanchist mentality from White SJW's that makes me think a lot of them want to get back at their families and the areas they grew up in. Doubly so if they lived in a red state and triply so if it was a core region of the Bible Belt like Appalachia or the real deep South.
With black supremacist leftists, the revanchist mindset was always there but it's disturbing to see it from White SJW's and often they believe it with greater zeal and insanity than their black comrades. The whole thing feels like the newly converted Woke Leftist White kids are "born again" and want to get back at their parents and be vindicated by The Right Side of History.
