The end of the Trump Monoculture
The Trump administration ended this week, and with it ended America’s last remaining social monoculture. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s something that comes from economics — a monoculture economy is an economy that’s dependent on a single output, usually a crop or oil. A social monoculture is a term that my friend Andy introduced me to, and it makes enough sense that it’s stuck with me. Allow me to explain.
Mainstream American culture used to be smaller. There were only so many channels on TV, or movie distributors, or AM/FM radio stations, and it provided a shared experience for everyone. Sure, you could be a Leno household while your neighbors watched Letterman every night, and there were alternative scenes you could be a part of if you sought them out, but everyone was all swimming in the same big cultural pool, more or less. Then everyone logged onto the internet and began to dig their own pool in their backyards. People stopped watching the same things at the same time and started having their own customized and algorithmic radio DJs and subscriptions to one of twelve different streaming services. If you want a good time frame for when the shift really started to take hold, think about The Office. It’s the last big American sitcom, and it’s still powerful enough of a cultural force that NBC launched an entire streaming service whose pitch is “It’s where you can watch The Office now” even though the show is 15 years old. Somewhere inside of 2005 and 2013 is when people decided to start digging their own pools because it was too cheap and convenient not to, and the monoculture started to crumble.
However, to borrow a device from documentarian Adam Curtis, something strange happened — a former reality TV show host realized that he could get even more attention than he already did by running for President, and in doing so turned politics into the American monoculture. A historian once said that Presidents shape the culture of America, and because Donald Trump has no higher goal in life than to keep people talking about Donald Trump, that’s how the culture was shaped. It didn’t hurt that Trump’s presidency was a series of scandals and flubs, a kind of 24-hour news cycle vaudeville act with recurring characters and bits so it didn’t seem like we were only talking about Trump every day, but the Donald J. Trump Show was the entertainment and cultural event that was on everyone’s mind and lips for five years. Trump was the thing to talk about, and if you were paying attention you noticed that if you casually talked to someone for longer than 15 minutes, that conversation would mention Trump at one point or another.
This led to the normalization of something that began in earnest in the 2016 elections, posting-as-punditry. In fact, you’re reading some of it right now! Sometime during the 2016 primaries, right around when the Donald Trump show became the thing everyone watched, we all became pundits. We had the platforms that we had assembled from Facebook friends and if you were Very Online, the Twitter followers you got from making tweets like “What moron called it a Jetski and not a Boatercycle?”, and we all started using them to talk online about the thing that we were talking about in real life. But posting online doesn’t work like a conversation, it’s more like a personal press release or publishing a broadsheet. Because the posts were all about politics, everyone became a pundit. You didn’t have to write thousands of words to be a pundit either, all you had to do was like and share to give your voice to someone else and still get that little hit of dopamine when someone hit the like button. When it started we all assumed that it would go away once the election was over, but Trump won and posting-as-punditry was normalized and accelerated. Heck, even Instagram’s political now.
Because it’s been normalized for so long, it’s easy for us to think that everyone’s going to be a pundit forever, but I’m not convinced. I watched pieces of the Biden inauguration this week and what really struck me about the whole thing was how much it felt like the entire event was built to try to will culture back to the early 2010s. Glossy celebrity performances urged us to work for a hopeful, united, and diverse America in a way that didn’t center an individual or even a coherent political message, a hallmark of the Obama era. Katy Perry sang Firework — a number one hit in 2010 — as the grand finale for chrissakes! I think people want to go back as well, especially after the past year. Everyone’s tired, and the pandemic that we all still have to live with now feels like a bummer of a hangover from the Trump administration, if only because the mishandling of the pandemic is the Trump administration’s most obvious legacy. If we can stop it, there is a sense that we’ll finally be free to return to the normalcy we remember. We can go back to our own pools and watch whatever shows we like instead of keeping a wary eye on CNN or MSNBC. There’s going to be less news, and maybe the return of the pre-Trump culture means we can forget that politics exists sometimes, like before.
That’s not to say that we should forget that politics exists. Because it was so easy to forget that politics existed for large swaths of the Obama administration, it was easy to ignore the problems that we should have been paying attention to. America collectively shrugged at the drone program and increased mass deportations during the Obama administration, and seeing the horrific acceleration of the things under Trump that we let slide should be enough to convince you that we can’t all just go back to brunch. And it’s not like our new political monoculture is going to crumble to dust overnight. The old monoculture is still around in a diminished fashion, just turn on network TV for a little while and you’ll see that it hasn’t really changed, there’s just fewer people watching it
Of course, there are people and organizations who are going to do the opposite of checking out from politics. These are the accounts who decided in the Trump years that their whole Thing is to post about politics all the time, and they’re going to try to keep doing that as hard as they have for the past five years. This behavior was enabled by the Trump administration, where everything that happened seemed like a five-alarm crisis, and there was a new crisis every week. It’s what kept us all hooked on the Trump show, and kept people coming back to the accounts that claimed, like I have many times, to be able to help make sense or entertainment out of the constant noise. All the people with big platforms, or small ones, who have come to prominence through Trump are going to realize very quickly that they’re out of road and are about to plummet like Wile E. Coyote. Some of them are going to try to pivot to keep their fame and prestige, others are going to just try to keep doing what they’re doing, even as they become increasingly desperate to keep it going. Some of them are going to try to run for office, you’ll be able to spot them easily because they’ll keep talking about national issues in state and local elections. People with small platforms can make an easy exit, but we all have to watch out for the ones with big platforms, people like Sarah Cooper, Jimmy Dore, or all of the faceless Occupy Democrats and Ridin’ With Biden accounts that have peppered our timelines through the Trump era. They’re going to try to keep getting those dopamine hits and fame with increasing disregard for what kind of collateral damage they do to the waning online political discourse.
Here in January of 2021 we find ourselves faced with two extremes. We can stay in the big pool with a bunch of increasingly loud and self-serving voices and all the fatigue of the past five years, or we can take up the promise of the Biden administration and retreat to our own personal pools. It’s clear that neither is a particularly good option, so I would like to propose a different way forward. Things are going to slow down in the Biden administration and because of that the most useful skill that any of us can cultivate is the ability to determine the urgency and importance of issues. Like I said earlier, we’ve all been trained by the Trump administration to think that everything is an immediate crisis. Some things are urgent (preventing another attempted coup, providing more COVID relief) and others aren’t (forcing a vote on Medicare for All, investigating Russian interference). If we can all cultivate our ability to resolve the urgency and importance of the issues and upcoming scandals it will make everyone more durable political actors as we enter a time where there might be some room to breathe. The Trump monoculture is gone, but I hope that we all can recognize the importance of being politically engaged even when there isn’t a new twist on CNN every day.
