During the summer of 2010, I experienced the inexplicable rampage of Silly Bandz in real time. At a ten-day camp in Washington, D.C. filled mostly with teenagers from the East Coast, everyone seemed to be wearing the same rubber bracelets. They were neon and flimsy and only revealed their true shape when taken off, sometimes a letter, sometimes an animal, always useless.
By the time fall rolled around in Wisconsin, Silly Bandz had arrived thirty miles west of Milwaukee. It felt oddly like clockwork, as though the bracelets marched across the continent and methodically swept middle schools with all the forcefulness of Alexander the Great.
At camp, I’d felt left out. At home, I felt avant-garde. Sometime in August, I noticed the bracelets were in stock at our strip-mall dollar store, and before long, we were all trading zebras for bananas on the sidelines of soccer practice like a conquered civilization.
Some years later I came across an essay Malcolm Gladwell first published in the New Yorker in 1997, then adapted into a chapter of The Tipping Point. Gladwell profiled the “coolhunters” at fashion brands, who observed and traced regional trends with the goal of catering to consumers nationally. When it came to tennis shoes, Gladwell found, “Philadelphia is Reebok’s innovator town.”
“From there,” he reported, “trends move along the East Coast, trickling all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina.”
When The Tipping Point hit shelves three years later, Gladwell fleshed out this idea more with help from DeeDee Gordon at Lambesis, the ad agency that popularized Airwalk. “Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east,” he explained:
But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country. And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to make the jump from the cool subcultures to the Majority.
Gordon told Gladwell that Kurt Cobain painting his fingernails with Magic Marker started first in the Northwest, “then trickl[ed] through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country.”
Obvious as Gordon’s point may sound, this theory helped me make sense of what I was experiencing. The older I got, the more I’d notice on trips to visit family on the East Coast: trends were always coming at us, not from us.
●
My grandparents didn’t graduate from college, but my parents did. By the time I was a teenager, they made great livings, my dad as an engineer for the state and my mom as a human-resources executive. But we lived in the woods, down a long gravel road, where the trees were so tall and thick that even in the winter, our yard was just ours.
We weren’t people of great taste. For whatever reason, probably my parents’ own backgrounds, climbing the socioeconomic ladder didn’t come with cultural refinement for us. My dad allowed an old green dump truck to rust at the end of our driveway for years. (Don’t remind my mom about this, or the .22-caliber handgun he once got me for Christmas.) We had archery targets scattered in the woods.
We’d take good vacations, but my first car was still a used F-150, we still ate our own venison, and we still went wherever the coupons took us. The rocking chair on our front porch was from Cracker Barrel.
I was always a little embarrassed by all this. The quaint town I grew up in was either the last suburb of Milwaukee or the first exurb, just straddling the line of commutability, where the kids of Harley executives shared schools with the kids of gas-station cashiers and dairy farmers. Like many children of upwardly mobile baby boomers, I moved between both worlds.
In 2012, the year after I graduated, someone spray-painted “die yuppie scum” on the brick wall of my high school. This was surprising because the class tension was entirely unspoken—it was barely even noticed—and unlike Silly Bandz, the ripples of Occupy Wall Street couldn’t possibly have washed ashore in 2,500-person Wales.
By then, though, I’d moved from our little pocket of wilderness to a dorm about three blocks west of the White House. Nobody I knew went outside the Midwest for college, but I was desperate to be in the middle of what felt like the whole world—where I could maybe even be in arm’s reach of the action—so my parents dropped me off at George Washington University.
I was more into culture than politics. Part of me wanted to be a stand-up comedian or a sitcom writer, but New York and Los Angeles were terrifying, and D.C. seemed to be the hub through which everything flowed anyway. Almost every spring at GW, my friends and I would hang out across the street from the Washington Hilton to get a glimpse of Hollywood stars in the flesh as they arrived for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
When I came to the capital, Barack Obama was still in his first term. Celebrities flowed in and out of the city to pay him tribute, while power and money migrated from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, bringing hip restaurants and bars to the shores of the Potomac. Much of the country was still recovering from the recession, but in Washington, the smoke-filled backrooms of Georgetown were being replaced by the small plates of José Andrés.
Americans who mobilized against Obama in those years, meanwhile, were often dismissed in elite spaces as being motivated only by racism, while the nut-picking exploits of films like Borat, brilliant as they were, stoked what Hollywood believed to be political divisions that seemed to always pit the rich liberals who were in on the joke against the foolish rednecks who were its target. In response, it was as though the white working class—to paraphrase an Illinois senator—clung even harder to guns and God, even when it came in corporate hip-hop packaging.
People back home, I was told, were starting to watch Duck Dynasty, and I noticed myself getting deeper and deeper into country music, the stuff I grew up on, as the genre itself went full throttle on pushing stark cultural signifiers like trucks, beer and guns. I always thought I was just homesick, but looking back it seems more likely I was sick of being insulted. Flamboyant expressions of Middle America were a form of identitarian catharsis.
Like DeeDee Gordon at Airwalk, the suits in Nashville were picking up on something and selling it back to us. Two years later, Donald Trump would do the same thing with his bright red, boomer-coded MAGA hats.
●
According to Gladwell, Gordon actually sold politics and shoes at the same time. After picking up on the Beastie Boys’ support for the Free Tibet campaign, Gordon integrated monks into a sneaker commercial. For consumers, of course, this doesn’t just normalize the shoe. It normalizes the stance.
Some people react to feeling like outsiders by trying to join the in-crowd. Others double down on being different. During the Obama years in D.C., I was caught somewhere in between, wanting to fit in but hating the people who did, wanting to dress like them but never able to figure it out. Their knowledge of pastels and loafers felt like a natural instinct that just couldn’t be replicated, even if a Vineyard Vines opened in Chicago for the East Coast expats stranded in Naperville.
I couldn’t make much sense of it until I was asked to do research for Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart. I was interning for the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy think tank where Murray is also a scholar, when Murray’s research assistant asked for help correlating zip codes and wealth in neighborhoods around Chicago. I worked for Christina from 2012 to 2014, during the heady days of Jezebel and Wonkette. As Gamergate entered our portfolio, Coming Apart showed how, due to increasingly dense pockets of money and power, socioeconomic stratification was creating increased cultural stratification. America was “coming apart” at its social seams; the people who shopped at Whole Foods were ruling over the people who’d never heard of it.
Christina’s work had always focused on what she considered the shaky logic of progressive feminism, and she’d eventually be profiled by Bari Weiss as a leader of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” I now think I gravitated toward her for the same reason I was clinging to country music. Smacking down Sheryl Sandberg felt cathartic. Maybe it was the recession, maybe it was Obama. It could have been both.
I went down to the Occupy camp in McPherson Square just weeks into my first semester at GW. It did not for a moment resemble anything familiar. The group looked like a bunch of yuppies with various grievances about the patriarchy dressed as David Foster Wallace. In retrospect, it seems like an early warning sign about the difficulty well-intentioned college graduates in urban centers would have connecting their problems to the woes of others, even if they were in debt too.
●
The month after I graduated from college, Donald Trump ran for president. Taylor Swift, who was between 1989 and Reputation, had recently relocated from Nashville to New York City. Weeks earlier, Bruce Jenner had come out as Caitlyn on the cover of Vanity Fair, complete with photos by Annie Leibovitz.
Elite tastemakers felt like they’d conquered the world. If Gladwell fretted in 1997 that “cool was something you could not control,” by 2015 there was a bullishness in C-suites from Nashville to Midtown that was growing something awful in its shadow. Trump knew better. From his hats to his transgressive barbs, he realized enough people craved a vulgar rebuke to the gatekeepers who’d insulted their values and ignored their problems—if they hadn’t gotten rich off of them.
His inkling proved correct, for reasons people in the Acela Corridor have spent nearly a decade now trying to piece together. Trump didn’t try to convince people they needed shoes they’d never heard of, he just sold them the shoes they wanted. Part of that battle is knowing what voters and consumers want. The other part, maybe the harder part, is being willing to degrade yourself in the eyes of your elite peers by making the pitch.
In the summer of 2016, I was on a trip back home from D.C., and assuring anyone who asked that Donald Trump would not be able to win. I wasn’t militant about it, just convinced his norm-breaking made for an insurmountable juxtaposition with the former secretary of state. One moment that gave me pause was a rollerblading trip through a rural lakeside neighborhood mostly comprised of trailers. There, I saw something I’d never seen before: homemade signs for a presidential candidate. These Trump supporters weren’t going to the county Republican Party office and picking up lawn signs. They were spray-painting scrap wood.
It didn’t matter if I didn’t know which fork to use at fancy dinners; I’d lived in D.C. so long that I totally missed what we all know now. Enough people saw Trump as an answer to our collective alienation that he became the first Republican president to win Wisconsin in decades, even if it was by the slightest of margins.
●
I spent a week back in Wisconsin last summer to cover the Republican National Convention as a journalist, something my mom told me I shouldn’t study in college because reporters made no money. She was not wrong. In downtown Milwaukee, where the RNC was held, the landmark Milwaukee Journal Sentinel building where she once worked in human resources is now home to apartment units.
My mom helped me get a summer internship in the paper’s marketing department during college. On a trip to get some decorations out of the basement, I found the dusty old printing press, like a sleeping giant covered in sports sections and cobwebs. It was a remarkable site, though my colleagues who worked there full-time seemed indifferent. I’m honestly not sure if any of their jobs still exist.
But Milwaukee put its best foot forward at the RNC. My parents picked me up and dropped me off every day, taking me from the center of GOP power back to the woods where we had bonfires and watched Dateline. It’s whiplash to go from the life of a journalist surrounded by lobbyists and donors to the quiet of a small town all in about forty minutes. But I realized I’ve long lived that duality, with legs on both sides of the fence, trying to translate between both camps. You miss some things, but you pick up on others.
Oddly enough, there was a lot more camo in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention in August. Wearing a camouflage hat in rural Wisconsin would make a lot more sense than at the United Center under normal circumstances, but not in 2024, the year that liberal elites, having belatedly come to terms with the fact that much of the country now considered them the opposite of cool, attempted to go deplorable chic via the infamous Harris-Walz hunting cap.
In 2018, Hillary Clinton said, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You know: ‘You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs.” Her mention of GDP sparked a debate, reasonably so, about “left-behind” Americans getting short shrift from callous elites who just want to get on with the project of globalization, whatever the cost to “the poorly educated,” as Trump once described a part of his coalition. But that misses Clinton’s breezy connection between economics and culture. It’s as if she read Charles Murray and thought the trends he described were actually good. If you’re poor, you’re probably unenlightened, according to this perspective.
Clinton likely still sees economic success as synonymous with cultural dynamism. She’s not the only one. But by now, Americans aren’t merely exasperated with trickle-down economics, they’re exasperated with trickle-down culture.
●
My dad and his friends from high school have a standing appointment at a small bar every December. Before Christmas, I’d been thinking a lot about all of this, trying to make sense of the last ten years, knowing the decade anniversary of Trump’s golden escalator descent—and my graduation from college—awaited us in the new year.
As we came in wet from the snow, one of my dad’s high school friends who I’ve barely seen over the years zeroed in on me. He’d seen me on cable news and wanted to talk all about what life was like in D.C. After college, I used to do appearances on Fox News to supplement my job writing news stories and culture essays. During the pandemic, I migrated to podcasting and YouTube. The opportunities for people with traditional media experience but less traditional worldviews—previously rare—were suddenly plentiful.
My dad’s friend still watched Fox, though after 2020 he’d also sought out other sources, one of which I’m often on. We talked about the show, and he introduced me to one of his relatives, a niece who was my age and had just returned from a business trip to China. She was in leggings and an oversized Packers sweatshirt, standing next to a digital slot machine and a mop bucket. As we talked, I realized part of her job involved “coolhunting” for a major retailer much like Gladwell’s subjects in the Nineties. She’d never read Gladwell, but when I tried to describe his reporting, she jumped to point out that the industry worked very differently today. Regional trends still exist, of course, but she felt like everything was flattening out. Like it was melting into something much more predictable and easily controlled.
That sounds right to me, but it also seems crucial that Gladwell’s “tipping point” is under threat from a democratized digital landscape that may be fomenting—dare I say—a class consciousness poised to upend the battle lines of our culture war. In the age of new media, people outside the tiny community of Rivian owners and Nissan Leaf enthusiasts are able to make themselves heard at a volume that’s threatening to rival the political class.
Today, Kurt Cobain’s Sharpie nails would go viral within hours, darkening the fingers of fans from Seattle to Miami almost instantly. There is no more nineties-era process where fashions migrate over months; the kids of Wisconsin see the same videos as the kids in Washington at the same time. Among other things, this sets up a tug-of-war between the one percent and the 99, to borrow a dichotomy.
So what comes next? We can continue scattering into an unruly collection of discordant niches, or allow monoculture to return with more force and less democracy than anyone ever envisioned. Or maybe we can find that middle ground, where the “coolhunters” of politics accept that there’s a real competition.
Art credit: Pat Perry, TV, 2022. Acrylic on panel, 19 × 19 in. Courtesy of the artist.
During the summer of 2010, I experienced the inexplicable rampage of Silly Bandz in real time. At a ten-day camp in Washington, D.C. filled mostly with teenagers from the East Coast, everyone seemed to be wearing the same rubber bracelets. They were neon and flimsy and only revealed their true shape when taken off, sometimes a letter, sometimes an animal, always useless.
By the time fall rolled around in Wisconsin, Silly Bandz had arrived thirty miles west of Milwaukee. It felt oddly like clockwork, as though the bracelets marched across the continent and methodically swept middle schools with all the forcefulness of Alexander the Great.
At camp, I’d felt left out. At home, I felt avant-garde. Sometime in August, I noticed the bracelets were in stock at our strip-mall dollar store, and before long, we were all trading zebras for bananas on the sidelines of soccer practice like a conquered civilization.
Some years later I came across an essay Malcolm Gladwell first published in the New Yorker in 1997, then adapted into a chapter of The Tipping Point. Gladwell profiled the “coolhunters” at fashion brands, who observed and traced regional trends with the goal of catering to consumers nationally. When it came to tennis shoes, Gladwell found, “Philadelphia is Reebok’s innovator town.”
“From there,” he reported, “trends move along the East Coast, trickling all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina.”
When The Tipping Point hit shelves three years later, Gladwell fleshed out this idea more with help from DeeDee Gordon at Lambesis, the ad agency that popularized Airwalk. “Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east,” he explained:
Gordon told Gladwell that Kurt Cobain painting his fingernails with Magic Marker started first in the Northwest, “then trickl[ed] through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country.”
Obvious as Gordon’s point may sound, this theory helped me make sense of what I was experiencing. The older I got, the more I’d notice on trips to visit family on the East Coast: trends were always coming at us, not from us.
●
My grandparents didn’t graduate from college, but my parents did. By the time I was a teenager, they made great livings, my dad as an engineer for the state and my mom as a human-resources executive. But we lived in the woods, down a long gravel road, where the trees were so tall and thick that even in the winter, our yard was just ours.
We weren’t people of great taste. For whatever reason, probably my parents’ own backgrounds, climbing the socioeconomic ladder didn’t come with cultural refinement for us. My dad allowed an old green dump truck to rust at the end of our driveway for years. (Don’t remind my mom about this, or the .22-caliber handgun he once got me for Christmas.) We had archery targets scattered in the woods.
We’d take good vacations, but my first car was still a used F-150, we still ate our own venison, and we still went wherever the coupons took us. The rocking chair on our front porch was from Cracker Barrel.
I was always a little embarrassed by all this. The quaint town I grew up in was either the last suburb of Milwaukee or the first exurb, just straddling the line of commutability, where the kids of Harley executives shared schools with the kids of gas-station cashiers and dairy farmers. Like many children of upwardly mobile baby boomers, I moved between both worlds.
In 2012, the year after I graduated, someone spray-painted “die yuppie scum” on the brick wall of my high school. This was surprising because the class tension was entirely unspoken—it was barely even noticed—and unlike Silly Bandz, the ripples of Occupy Wall Street couldn’t possibly have washed ashore in 2,500-person Wales.
By then, though, I’d moved from our little pocket of wilderness to a dorm about three blocks west of the White House. Nobody I knew went outside the Midwest for college, but I was desperate to be in the middle of what felt like the whole world—where I could maybe even be in arm’s reach of the action—so my parents dropped me off at George Washington University.
I was more into culture than politics. Part of me wanted to be a stand-up comedian or a sitcom writer, but New York and Los Angeles were terrifying, and D.C. seemed to be the hub through which everything flowed anyway. Almost every spring at GW, my friends and I would hang out across the street from the Washington Hilton to get a glimpse of Hollywood stars in the flesh as they arrived for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
When I came to the capital, Barack Obama was still in his first term. Celebrities flowed in and out of the city to pay him tribute, while power and money migrated from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, bringing hip restaurants and bars to the shores of the Potomac. Much of the country was still recovering from the recession, but in Washington, the smoke-filled backrooms of Georgetown were being replaced by the small plates of José Andrés.
Americans who mobilized against Obama in those years, meanwhile, were often dismissed in elite spaces as being motivated only by racism, while the nut-picking exploits of films like Borat, brilliant as they were, stoked what Hollywood believed to be political divisions that seemed to always pit the rich liberals who were in on the joke against the foolish rednecks who were its target. In response, it was as though the white working class—to paraphrase an Illinois senator—clung even harder to guns and God, even when it came in corporate hip-hop packaging.
People back home, I was told, were starting to watch Duck Dynasty, and I noticed myself getting deeper and deeper into country music, the stuff I grew up on, as the genre itself went full throttle on pushing stark cultural signifiers like trucks, beer and guns. I always thought I was just homesick, but looking back it seems more likely I was sick of being insulted. Flamboyant expressions of Middle America were a form of identitarian catharsis.
Like DeeDee Gordon at Airwalk, the suits in Nashville were picking up on something and selling it back to us. Two years later, Donald Trump would do the same thing with his bright red, boomer-coded MAGA hats.
●
According to Gladwell, Gordon actually sold politics and shoes at the same time. After picking up on the Beastie Boys’ support for the Free Tibet campaign, Gordon integrated monks into a sneaker commercial. For consumers, of course, this doesn’t just normalize the shoe. It normalizes the stance.
Some people react to feeling like outsiders by trying to join the in-crowd. Others double down on being different. During the Obama years in D.C., I was caught somewhere in between, wanting to fit in but hating the people who did, wanting to dress like them but never able to figure it out. Their knowledge of pastels and loafers felt like a natural instinct that just couldn’t be replicated, even if a Vineyard Vines opened in Chicago for the East Coast expats stranded in Naperville.
I couldn’t make much sense of it until I was asked to do research for Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart. I was interning for the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy think tank where Murray is also a scholar, when Murray’s research assistant asked for help correlating zip codes and wealth in neighborhoods around Chicago. I worked for Christina from 2012 to 2014, during the heady days of Jezebel and Wonkette. As Gamergate entered our portfolio, Coming Apart showed how, due to increasingly dense pockets of money and power, socioeconomic stratification was creating increased cultural stratification. America was “coming apart” at its social seams; the people who shopped at Whole Foods were ruling over the people who’d never heard of it.
Christina’s work had always focused on what she considered the shaky logic of progressive feminism, and she’d eventually be profiled by Bari Weiss as a leader of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” I now think I gravitated toward her for the same reason I was clinging to country music. Smacking down Sheryl Sandberg felt cathartic. Maybe it was the recession, maybe it was Obama. It could have been both.
I went down to the Occupy camp in McPherson Square just weeks into my first semester at GW. It did not for a moment resemble anything familiar. The group looked like a bunch of yuppies with various grievances about the patriarchy dressed as David Foster Wallace. In retrospect, it seems like an early warning sign about the difficulty well-intentioned college graduates in urban centers would have connecting their problems to the woes of others, even if they were in debt too.
●
The month after I graduated from college, Donald Trump ran for president. Taylor Swift, who was between 1989 and Reputation, had recently relocated from Nashville to New York City. Weeks earlier, Bruce Jenner had come out as Caitlyn on the cover of Vanity Fair, complete with photos by Annie Leibovitz.
Elite tastemakers felt like they’d conquered the world. If Gladwell fretted in 1997 that “cool was something you could not control,” by 2015 there was a bullishness in C-suites from Nashville to Midtown that was growing something awful in its shadow. Trump knew better. From his hats to his transgressive barbs, he realized enough people craved a vulgar rebuke to the gatekeepers who’d insulted their values and ignored their problems—if they hadn’t gotten rich off of them.
His inkling proved correct, for reasons people in the Acela Corridor have spent nearly a decade now trying to piece together. Trump didn’t try to convince people they needed shoes they’d never heard of, he just sold them the shoes they wanted. Part of that battle is knowing what voters and consumers want. The other part, maybe the harder part, is being willing to degrade yourself in the eyes of your elite peers by making the pitch.
In the summer of 2016, I was on a trip back home from D.C., and assuring anyone who asked that Donald Trump would not be able to win. I wasn’t militant about it, just convinced his norm-breaking made for an insurmountable juxtaposition with the former secretary of state. One moment that gave me pause was a rollerblading trip through a rural lakeside neighborhood mostly comprised of trailers. There, I saw something I’d never seen before: homemade signs for a presidential candidate. These Trump supporters weren’t going to the county Republican Party office and picking up lawn signs. They were spray-painting scrap wood.
It didn’t matter if I didn’t know which fork to use at fancy dinners; I’d lived in D.C. so long that I totally missed what we all know now. Enough people saw Trump as an answer to our collective alienation that he became the first Republican president to win Wisconsin in decades, even if it was by the slightest of margins.
●
I spent a week back in Wisconsin last summer to cover the Republican National Convention as a journalist, something my mom told me I shouldn’t study in college because reporters made no money. She was not wrong. In downtown Milwaukee, where the RNC was held, the landmark Milwaukee Journal Sentinel building where she once worked in human resources is now home to apartment units.
My mom helped me get a summer internship in the paper’s marketing department during college. On a trip to get some decorations out of the basement, I found the dusty old printing press, like a sleeping giant covered in sports sections and cobwebs. It was a remarkable site, though my colleagues who worked there full-time seemed indifferent. I’m honestly not sure if any of their jobs still exist.
But Milwaukee put its best foot forward at the RNC. My parents picked me up and dropped me off every day, taking me from the center of GOP power back to the woods where we had bonfires and watched Dateline. It’s whiplash to go from the life of a journalist surrounded by lobbyists and donors to the quiet of a small town all in about forty minutes. But I realized I’ve long lived that duality, with legs on both sides of the fence, trying to translate between both camps. You miss some things, but you pick up on others.
Oddly enough, there was a lot more camo in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention in August. Wearing a camouflage hat in rural Wisconsin would make a lot more sense than at the United Center under normal circumstances, but not in 2024, the year that liberal elites, having belatedly come to terms with the fact that much of the country now considered them the opposite of cool, attempted to go deplorable chic via the infamous Harris-Walz hunting cap.
In 2018, Hillary Clinton said, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You know: ‘You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs.” Her mention of GDP sparked a debate, reasonably so, about “left-behind” Americans getting short shrift from callous elites who just want to get on with the project of globalization, whatever the cost to “the poorly educated,” as Trump once described a part of his coalition. But that misses Clinton’s breezy connection between economics and culture. It’s as if she read Charles Murray and thought the trends he described were actually good. If you’re poor, you’re probably unenlightened, according to this perspective.
Clinton likely still sees economic success as synonymous with cultural dynamism. She’s not the only one. But by now, Americans aren’t merely exasperated with trickle-down economics, they’re exasperated with trickle-down culture.
●
My dad and his friends from high school have a standing appointment at a small bar every December. Before Christmas, I’d been thinking a lot about all of this, trying to make sense of the last ten years, knowing the decade anniversary of Trump’s golden escalator descent—and my graduation from college—awaited us in the new year.
As we came in wet from the snow, one of my dad’s high school friends who I’ve barely seen over the years zeroed in on me. He’d seen me on cable news and wanted to talk all about what life was like in D.C. After college, I used to do appearances on Fox News to supplement my job writing news stories and culture essays. During the pandemic, I migrated to podcasting and YouTube. The opportunities for people with traditional media experience but less traditional worldviews—previously rare—were suddenly plentiful.
My dad’s friend still watched Fox, though after 2020 he’d also sought out other sources, one of which I’m often on. We talked about the show, and he introduced me to one of his relatives, a niece who was my age and had just returned from a business trip to China. She was in leggings and an oversized Packers sweatshirt, standing next to a digital slot machine and a mop bucket. As we talked, I realized part of her job involved “coolhunting” for a major retailer much like Gladwell’s subjects in the Nineties. She’d never read Gladwell, but when I tried to describe his reporting, she jumped to point out that the industry worked very differently today. Regional trends still exist, of course, but she felt like everything was flattening out. Like it was melting into something much more predictable and easily controlled.
That sounds right to me, but it also seems crucial that Gladwell’s “tipping point” is under threat from a democratized digital landscape that may be fomenting—dare I say—a class consciousness poised to upend the battle lines of our culture war. In the age of new media, people outside the tiny community of Rivian owners and Nissan Leaf enthusiasts are able to make themselves heard at a volume that’s threatening to rival the political class.
Today, Kurt Cobain’s Sharpie nails would go viral within hours, darkening the fingers of fans from Seattle to Miami almost instantly. There is no more nineties-era process where fashions migrate over months; the kids of Wisconsin see the same videos as the kids in Washington at the same time. Among other things, this sets up a tug-of-war between the one percent and the 99, to borrow a dichotomy.
So what comes next? We can continue scattering into an unruly collection of discordant niches, or allow monoculture to return with more force and less democracy than anyone ever envisioned. Or maybe we can find that middle ground, where the “coolhunters” of politics accept that there’s a real competition.
Art credit: Pat Perry, TV, 2022. Acrylic on panel, 19 × 19 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.