How Do We Understand Culture?

On Perlstein, Rothfeld, and reality

The liberal critics demand evidence. This is nothing new, and I don’t blame them. I practice journalism, which is evidence-based, and I have been consuming Nate Silver since he was a young baseball writer during the Bush administration. Statistics, factoids, the firm and hard anecdote—I want it all, and may your arguments come girded with tangible reality. I fret the small sample size. I consider, constantly, whether the United States is simply too large to apprehend, a federal republic of fifty nations sewn into one, yawping about like Hundred-Handers who helped Zeus and his Olympian coterie overthrow the Titans. Against all that, why bother? How do you make your way?

On Sunday, the celebrated historian Rick Perlstein furiously denounced an essay I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about the diminishment of the anti-Trump resistance. I wrote a piece that I think, to most, is self-explanatory: the liberal left is not protesting Donald Trump with the same fervor as they were eight years ago. The marches are much smaller, if they exist at all. I wrote at some length about the term hyperpolitics, coined by the writer and academic Anton Jäger, to describe much of the political mood of the 2010s and early 2020s, when enthusiasm for protest and performance often took precedence over material concerns. Political and cultural movements became moralistic, Manichean, and totalizing. There were political achievements then, and I do not condemn the era in its entirety. It was good, for example, liberals and leftists began to care more about local politics and the socialist left, through DSA, had its revival, which has allowed a socialist candidate for mayor of New York City to fundraise on par with his institutional rivals. I ran for office myself during this time, and appreciated greatly the amount of energy that could coalesce around a state senate campaign. It was, in many ways, a good time be young. If you were practicing politics on the left, there was a tremendous thrill to the work.

But the resistance, as it was constructed, did not succeed. Trump won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, and made 2024 his most dominant showing. He won the popular vote, erasing the illegitimacy that was attached to his prior victory. Democrats have begun to recalibrate. Perlstein was most angry with my essay, it seemed, because I supposedly ignored that there still was a resistance to Trump. But I plainly did not. “What comes next might be a more conventional politics — one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type,” I wrote. “When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Mass protest wasn’t required, nor were calls for a fresh antifascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seemed to be saying, implicitly, that this was enough: action without performance.”

Perlstein, in his frenetic social media posting, pointed to marches and organizing that were happening in his locality that supposedly disproved my thesis. See, we are still resisting! Anyone blessed with a middling degree of reading comprehension, though, could see I was making a comparison of size and scope. Nothing like the 2017 Women’s March consumed Washington D.C. in 2025. Nothing like the 2016 and 2017 protests against the Muslim ban took hold in cities across America. Trump pardoned the January 6 rioters and hardly any protests broke out at all. Perlstein bemoaned the “cultural crisis that agenda-setting elite political journalists have no compunctions about writing things off the top of their head without even a pretense of evaluating evidence.” In his history books, Perlstein amasses plenty of evidence. I am a great fan of Nixonland. In fact, I used it make a soft, and ultimately correct, prediction in 2023 that Trump could very well return to power. I saw, in Trump’s rise, echoes of Richard Nixon’s comeback. I thank Perlstein for those insights.

Let me, however, be somewhat uncharitable here, since Perlstein was not terribly charitable with me. As great a historian as Perlstein might be, he is a midcult, replacement-level liberal pundit in his day-to-day life. There is little I can find in his columns on Trump that I couldn’t fish out from a junior Democratic staffer in suburban Maryland, circa 2019. Perlstein, like many prestige historians, simply cannot offer many original insights into the contemporary Trump phenomenon. The reason, in part, there’s been such a growing distrust of elites over the last decade is that they have failed, over and over again, to understand why tens of millions of people might vote for Trump and how, in fact, this doesn’t mean literal fascism is descending upon the United States. If I want to understand Trump, I will read Zaid Jilani or, more recently, Postliberal Book Reviews. Neither of them has authored a widely acclaimed series of books on the history of the American right, but they can teach me far more about what is happening in 2025 than a historian who still thinks the organizing he witnesses in one American city equates to the mass outpouring of rage against Trump eight years ago.

Perlstein’s greater misgivings seem to lie with the concept of cultural criticism itself. There is not sufficient hard evidence for such an endeavor, he implies. Or the evidence produced doesn’t meet his inner threshold for praise. I am sympathetic—to a point. There is much talk of “vibes” and moods of late, of where culture might be headed, and many different writers have tried to tease out what is in store for us as Trump takes power and the political reaction, objectively, is far different than it was in 2017. None of this is a science. But then again, what is historiography? Books take tremendous amounts of research, facts are tallied, and then the narrative kicks in. Historians, as human beings, make arguments. They stare down a reality that has come and gone and strain to make sense of a world they barely knew as adults or never lived through at all. They align themselves with certain schools of thought or seek to reinterpret what has come before. An essay is not a book, of course, and there’s a natural analytical rigor that is involved in a project that can take many years to complete. But liberal historians like Perlstein always assume the evidence, when strung together, will prove their theses, or simply that scientific rigor itself is proof of serious thinking. The science must belong to them. If so, The Bell Curve, clocking in at almost nine hundred pages, must be a totem of progress. Clearly, Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein, in Perlstein’s mode, were “evaluating evidence.”

Becca Rothfeld, the Washington Post book critic, unwittingly anticipated Perlstein’s qualms when she recently decried the culture writers who weren’t doing proper research when describing so-called “vibeshifts.” Writing on Substack, a platform that has, at times, caused her anguish, Rothfeld declared that “you’re going to need to offer proof that isn’t a couple of Tweets or a personal anecdote.” Since culture writers on Substack and elsewhere—people, I suppose, like me—aren’t always digging through polling data or consulting the “dentist in Vermont” or the “architect in Arizona,” what are we really doing? Or capable of? “Feelings are real and probably vibes are too, at some level; personal experience is data, it just isn’t conclusive data when the claim it aims to substantiate is about not just you and people lke [sic] you but also about people who are radically unlike you.” None of this is wrong, necessarily, and it’s a nice endorsement of on-the-ground reporting. What Rothfeld fails to do, however, is offer much of an alternative: what “proof” would be sufficient, in her view, to prove a cultural thesis? How many conversations with how many dentists and architects? Similarly, when Perlstein responded to me, it was with cherry-picked anecdotes. He did not offer, in any form, a statistically significant sample size. The reality is that no amount of evidence is enough. This is not a call for disregarding evidence or the objective nature of truth—I’ve tired of the deconstructionists and the chaos they’ve wrought on the left and right alike—but it is a recognition that there is a kind of writing that must transcend rudimentary data-mining and quick-hit reportage. A good culture writer, or philosopher, must break free of their social strictures and not let one party or a fast trip somewhere unduly influence what they might write. That’s easy enough to argue.

What is also true is that ambition shouldn’t be restricted. If your abilities of synthesis and discernment are limited, someone else’s might not be. The writer Udith Dematagoda, responding to Rothfeld, said it best when he pointed out that making a survey of so-called vibes is something that philosophers and critics have been doing for centuries. “What else explains concepts such as Zeitgeist or Fin de siècle, or works of crepuscular critique by thinkers like Nietzsche, Max Nordau, Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, Rene Guenon,” he wrote. “These weren’t retrospective ideas.” There’s a tendency, among contemporary writers of a certain professional station, to imagine such thinking isn’t possible—not today, anyway. Only retroactive cultural criticism—or the kind that was produced contemporaneously in the last century—is acceptable to them. Whatever, truly, has safely ossified into history. The academy and the intelligentsia must have the first sign off. To hazard anything now is a mistake—some bar of evidence must be cleared first. Never mind that those who sought to define the Fin de siècle, the Lost Generation, or the reactionary turn against the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s were not chasing precise data sets. In each instance—and many more—critics, philosophers, artists, and historians sought to understand the currents of their era as they were passing before them. It was imprecise work, and not always satisfying. The terrain was contested. Dematagoda dismisses the “spiritual technocrats” who hope to chase writers away from this work, and it is a term, I think, that is quite fitting. A technocrat will not understand the zeitgeist—or even want to understand it.

A shift has plainly happened. The right-wing can be as bullheaded and delusional as anyone, but now it’s a small coterie of professional class liberals who are mired in fantasy. To them, 2017 and 2025 are no different. The culture, they imagine, must be with them, never mind that mass protests have dwindled and few even want to talk politics anymore. Organizing against Trump is happening, of course, and there’s some reason to believe, absent an alienating performative element, it could be more successful this time. At the very minimum, the Democratic Party down the ballot should be fine in the next few years; American politics is cyclical, and the college-educated base of the party will be motivated to vote against Trump in the 2026 midterms. Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is the future. The Senate and the White House aren’t out of reach, either. Republicans don’t dominate America because no one, in this century, can. No party, no person. We are too big for fascism and too big, ultimately, to be destroyed. In the interim, the inquisitive among us will seek to understand the culture as it is and move beyond the paradigms of the past. This is less about predicting the future than trying, in good faith, to understand what is occurring in the present. America is a vast and fragmented country, and we are, thanks to the internet, absent old monocultures. More than ever, the most adventurous and perceptive among us must try to make sense of it. What is the spirit of today’s time? How many spirits might there be? We can’t cower from these questions. And we can’t pretend change isn’t afoot.