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.