How we all lost the culture war

Some of us might have woken up with a shock recently to discover that we are already a quarter of the way through the 21st century. By this point in the last century the old monarchies of Europe had made themselves extinct after a world war of unprecedented carnage, one of them had embarked on a political experiment that would cost millions more lives, and the rest of the western world was dancing on the verge of economic catastrophe.

By comparison we seem to have gotten off lightly, though it might not seem so if you believe the mood of most current political commentary. One book that shares this doom-fraught tone is W. David Marx’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, though it has the novel thesis that what makes our world so dismal at the moment isn’t what has happened since the dire scenario of Y2K failed to materialize but rather what didn’t – as implied by the book’s title.

Marx starts by echoing a common complaint: that the last 25 years have seen a lot of smoke but not a lot of fire culturally. In his introduction he quotes a New York Time critic who complains that “we are now almost a quarter of the way through what look likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”

“Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention,” Marx writes, “there is now a blank space. Over the past 25 years, culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics and profiteering – but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.”

The unique lack of cultural resonance – if you start the book in agreement with Marx’ thesis – might make you wonder what actually happened in the last century. And Marx provides a helpful catalogue of the high- and lowlights, over four discrete parts: 9/11, The Onion, Girls Gone Wild, Vice magazine, Kanye West, American Idol, Paris Hilton, Facebook, Barack Obama, Occupy Wall Street, the Kardashians, Lady Gaga, “Arab Spring,” Justin Bieber, K-Pop, Girls, Taylor Swift, Mad Men, President Trump, Pepe the Frog, #MeToo, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, Beats by Dre, TikTok, Jeffrey Epstein, “Old Town Road,” Joe Rogan, China, nepo babies, Gen Z, OnlyFans, NFTs, ChatGPT.

Speaking subjectively, it’s not a list likely to inspire nostalgia, now or another 25 years from now, but you might disagree. Movies haven’t had a lot of cultural traction during this quarter century according to Marx; there aren’t many rock bands that weren’t manufactured, few books that aren’t self-promoting self-help or memoirs, and websites, computer games, and software have become pivotal the way albums, athletes, and hardware once were. Much of what was important happened virtually, shared by communities that never meet in the physical world.

Marx coins some terminology to help explain the trends and ideas that shaped this era. Like poptimism – the precedence of popularity over quality or any critical take on art – and “omnivore monoculture”: the “rejection of cultural hierarchies” which flattens out genres and styles and even historical time and drowns out subcultures.

The story he tells happens predominantly in the western First World and while America dominates the way it has for decades and “previous cultural powerhouses” like the U.K. have declined severely in influence, Marx says that “international cross-pollination has accelerated, with American culture now facing competition from Latin and Caribbean pop, European luxury brands, Korean music and beauty products, Japanese streetwear, and Scandinavian fast fashion and hygge.”

There are some interesting ideas in the sprawling story Marx tells. One is that social phenomena like #MeToo and cancel culture in general might be a response to the general stagnation of the culture, which – at least for most of the century or so that preceded it – required regular cycles of change and revolution to encourage innovation.

“In a poptimism culture, where revenue streams are paramount,” he writes, “being removed from public life was tantamount to death. Yet few remembered that pop culture had long required the removal of once-popular celebrities. The mechanism had simply been different – cancellation by taste.”

Without hierarchies, taste, or critical influence, the culture wasn’t renewing itself – a situation reinforced by the development of superfans or “stans” (apparently a contraction of “stalker” and “fan”) who use social media to quickly and loudly intimidate and threaten anyone audacious enough to criticize the object of their fan’s desire. Having witnessed eruptions of doxxing, death threats, and boycotts from vocal minorities, writers, magazines, websites, and social media platforms learn to embrace the role of publicist over critic.

Young artists and fans who’ve grown up in a climate of political polarization, certain the culture is freezing popular older figures in place, discover the gift of righteous outrage, ready to deploy at the first hint of transgression, easily amplified on social media. “Culture always needs a refresh,” Marx writes, “and in an era when omnivorism ruled, political denunciation became an effective means to clear out the old.”

But it’s not hard to find the bias in Marx’ thesis – that there is a politically conservative impulse at work in a culture that dismisses the venerable old bohemian disdain for “selling out” and celebrates that artist who commodifies their work and themselves quickly and completely. Marx is particularly piqued by Gavin McInnes – the Canadian co-founder of Vice magazine and later creator of the right-wing Proud Boys gang – who stated in the early 2000s that “it’s getting cooler to be conservative.”

The book is also haunted by the spectre of Kanye West, who was widely considered a genius as both a musician and a businessman when he became a star and politically indistinguishable from peers like Jay-Z and Pharrell. His drift into an incoherent embrace of antisemitism and Nazism – impossible not to attribute to a longtime mental health crisis – is rolled by Marx into the idea that the rise of this suffocating, commerce-driven denaturing of culture from high to low can also explain the rise of Donald Trump and his two improbable terms in office.

“The Trumpist movement,” he writes, “with its media savviness and disdain for traditional morality, represented the political culmination of the counter-counterculture that began with Gavin McInnes at Vice in 2001. But unlike McInnes’ predictions, this new right had yet to become cool. The Trump victory felt like a hostile takeover.”

It reads a bit like a conspiracy theory – McInnes at Vice played a major part in creating what would become dominant cultural trends in the 2000s, setting the stage for Trump’s rise to power and co-opting Kanye, who embodied the endlessly commodified artist-as-brand. It’s a flattering take on political conservatives who somehow pivoted to this genius scheme after realizing in the early ‘90s that they were in a “culture war” after decades of withdrawing from every front – academia, media, education, and, especially, the arts – where it would be fought.

So, it’s ironic reading the solutions Marx proposes for “Restoring Cultural Invention” at the end of Blank Space, starting with “Rebuild and Enforce Social Norms.”

“For over a century, the world’s most creative people have viewed social norms with deep suspicion,” he writes. “Norms were, after all, the foundation of middle-class respectability – the very thing that stifled genius … So, society chipped away at the entire idea of norms, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The result was not human liberation but societies in which only money held value.”

It’s hard to pin the blame for our cultural situation solely on either side of the political divide (starker now than it has been in decades). Conservatives certainly weren’t the ones rewarding artists for “freaking out the normies,” but it’s also hard to deny that, at the quarter century mark, the conservative movement has done a poor job conserving anything, culture least of all.

Marx quotes conservative scholar Spencer Klavan conceding that “all conservatives in the arts know that a major sector of the audience they’re trying to reach will go in for the most appalling kitsch if it’s slathered in red, white, and blue.” In this light it’s hard not to conclude that we’re all to blame for getting the culture and the politicians we deserve, irrespective of our politics, and that the simplest diagnosis is that we’re all victims of our own bad taste.

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