The Untethering

Politics and culture are bound to separate

One question I’ve wrestled with, as a writer, is how another Trump presidency would subsume the arts. As I’ve offered already, I do not know who will win the presidential election and speculation like this shouldn’t be taken as an assertion that Donald Trump will be our 47th president. But since his chances of winning are roughly equal to Kamala Harris’, his impact on the nation must be considered. Mainstream media outlets don’t care too much about cultural questions. They are, above all else, invested in politics and policy, red v. blue, and that’s understandable. It just doesn’t help get at the heart of the matter.

Not long ago, I speculated on whether a Trump victory could trigger another great “awokening” in the United States. This refers to the period, from 2016 through 2020, when social justice politics were most in vogue, the anti-Trump resistance was at its height, and identity concerns, often shallow, were fretted over most. It was the peak of performative radicalism. Unlike the 1960s, the 2010s and 2020 did little to inculcate genuine radicalism, except perhaps on the far-right when it came to the deluded Trumpists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. There were no neo-Weathermen, no neo-Black Panthers, nothing like the domestic terrorism that flared up in the nation in the late 1960s and 1970s. No one was blowing up government buildings or plotting violent kidnappings. The right-wing, too, lacked the ferocity of groups like the Minutemen, which may have produced the Zodiac killer. Antifa, with its call for punching Nazis, was a frail echo, at best, of the Maoists, Marxists, and Black separatists who mobilized a half century ago. Much of the anti-establishment fervor of the 2010s was radical chic in nature, and a lot of it, among professional class elites, amounted to a form of consciousness raising and thought management. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo were the icons of the age. They did not offer prescriptions for overthrowing capitalism and the military-industrial complex. They preached, rather, buying their books. DiAngelo herself was a proud capitalist.

The social justice era had a flattening effect on mainstream cinema, television, and literature. It created an oppressive purity culture in independent music. I do not believe, as a rule, politics and art must be aggressively separated or that there can’t be great music, literature, or film that isn’t infused with a political argument. Plenty of wonderful novels have a politics to them, a moral universe, and the socially aware folk and rock of the 1950s and 1960s produced a bevy of brilliant songs. There is no Bob Dylan without Woody Guthrie, and the folk rock explosion of the 1960s looks very different without Pete Seeger, whose “Turn! Turn! Turn!” became a major hit for the Byrds. Tupac’s activist bent made his rap music all the more powerful.

The trouble arises when specific political demands are made of artists. Not all artists choose to be activists. An argument that found new credence in the Trump era was that all art must have “good” or “correct” politics and that art created by someone who is deviant or sinful in some manner should not be praised or celebrated. Fascists (Pound, Céline) and right-wingers (Eliot, Woolf in certain aspects) were not to be extolled. Those dead and famous, at least, could have their works in print, but a literary novelist or poet with openly conservative or heterodox politics had little hope in the 2010s. The elite artists of the era were fully committed to resistance-style posturing, their de facto lodestar the Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen who argued for the full politicization of art. Good art can have good politics, but it also might not. It might have no politics at all, or one not easily discerned by the left-right binary. It might exist in its own realm, metaphysical or cosmic. Sometimes, like church must be separated from state to both ensure politics doesn’t descend into discriminatory madness and religion itself (as Roger Williams once argued) isn’t corrupted by secular matters, art must be held completely apart to better flourish. Art can be propaganda, but it won’t be very good. And propaganda won’t be art.

Slowly, slowly we have passed the peak of the resistance, of the heedless social justice era. A Trump victory could, in theory, reinvigorate those currents, and make the forced merger of arts and politics permanent. I don’t believe, though, the 2010s are coming back. Not now, anyway. Art will be treated differently.

A Harris presidency would simply reproduce the conditions of the Biden years, which sapped momentum for activist causes and lessened pressure on the arts to conform to a specific brand of Democratic Party-endorsed liberalism. The last burst of this was probably early 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine briefly, among artists, made support for immediately arming a foreign nation on par with the movement for Black Lives. Elizabeth Gilbert, in 2023, had to claw back her novel about Russia on the pretext that she was insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian cause. Since then, however, most Americans have grown numb to the carnage and calls for a negotiated peace, once regarded as dissident or even fascist-enabling, have been mainstreamed, if not yet endorsed by most Democrats. The greater point is that, absent Gilbert, it will probably become much easier to write Russian-themed novels in the future or to at least resist a social media mob. Social media itself, thanks to algorithmic shifts and the explosion of TikTok at the expense of other platforms, can no longer breed consensus in the same way nor intimidate non-conforming voices. The “cancel culture” uprisings are logistically more difficult to achieve. They seem spiritually exhausted, too.

A Trump victory could reverse this to a degree, but my belief is that, as Harris says on the stump, we are not going back. All enthusiasms and all awakenings are cyclical, and recurrences can’t come so soon after a fall. Counter-reformations need time to marinate. Generations, too, can be drivers of change, and there’s anecdotal evidence that the overt social progressivism of the millenial cohort might be shoving generation Z to the right—young men, at least. Corporate liberalism—Nike and Amazon momentarily embracing DEI—has become particularly cringeworthy for the young, and they have wearied from living through an era in which politics suffused all aspects of their lives. The recent graduates who had to endure college in the social justice era or those younger than them who spent their early teens performing activism are now hunting for a reprieve. Trump certainly can make politics exhausting, but he can’t, on his own, make Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, or former FBI directors culturally relevant again.

Art, gradually, will untether itself from politics. It will be possible for writers, painters, filmmakers, and showrunners absent a particular brand of politics—or those not completely aligned with DNC-endorsed liberalism—to thrive, and for free discourse to return. Phil Klay, an award-winning novelist, published a denunciation of Nguyen’s manifesto this summer in the Times Magazine and the response was warm if muted—there was no opposition to shout him down or rush to Nguyen’s defense. Most of the ideological warriors of the 2010s have sheathed their swords—or they pretend they never wielded them in the first place. A few lonely warriors battle on, hollering into the void. One of them wonders why an allegedly offensive interview with a writer from 2022 wasn’t pulled from a literary website and the editor replies that she has no intention to take it down because why should she? The warrior has no choice but to slink away. Perhaps Trump invigorates him anew. Perhaps, perhaps.

The available evidence suggests this era will run cool rather than hot. Political elites in both parties call this election existential—it could be, they say, the very last one—but it doesn’t feel that way at all in the United States, as the writer Shadi Hamid argues. It might be, of my own lifetime, the most culturally irrelevant general election, the brief burst over Harris’ Brat Summer fading into a fall in which politics was, at best, a backdrop to other concerns. Turnout will be high because we live in polarized times but it is bound to decline from 2020. The mass protests that greeted Trump in 2016 and 2017 will not be so large if he returns to the White House. There will be protests, of course, and enough Americans will be alarmed. What will be missing is the breadth and the enthusiasm; that may never be matched in our lifetimes. Nothing, too, can approach the George Floyd summer of 2020. The first term Trump and the pandemic helped to make it possible. A second Trump term will lack novelty, and it’s novelty that’s the best rocket fuel. Artists, perhaps, can learn to think less about the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and just create. The stakes, for them, must be more timeless. If, as Woolf once wrote, the very rock you kick will outlast Shakespeare, Shakespeare has certainly outlasted his share of monarchs, presidents, and ephemerally famous apparatchiks of the nation-state.