How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?

Quite apart from the fact that 20 years ago, almost none of our supposed thought leaders foresaw that the United States would slide into a fascist-style dictatorship by 2025, there have been surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.

Endemic racism is often put forward as a rationale. That’s clearly true to some extent, but isn’t quite a sufficient explanation. Racism has been a feature of American history since the first slave ship hove to off Jamestown in 1619. But persistent as that has been, racism did not cause half the electorate suddenly to opt for authoritarian rule. Nor does it explain the shift of many nonwhite voters toward Donald Trump.

A more likely era than the present for a seismic political shift caused by racism would have been the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act became law. There was, to be sure, a boomlet for George Wallace, but his popular vote share in 1968 was only 13.5 percent. (Wallace did carry five states in the Deep South, marking the last time a third-party presidential candidate won any electoral votes.) And shortly thereafter, when Nixon attempted to act as dictator, the entire establishment of both major parties, along with popular opinion, rose up to force his resignation.

Neither do facile excuses like “economic anxiety” cut it. The Great Depression of the 1930s was incomparably worse than anything the country has experienced since then, and it did not cause voting majorities to opt for a dictator. The US in fact has done better economically than most developed countries over the last two decades, yet Freedom House now rates America lower in political freedom than most countries in Europe, and lower than nations like Belize, Mauritius or Argentina.

How can economics possibly explain why those groups who fare worst under a would-be dictator’s economic policies are precisely the ones who support him most strongly? The percentage of farmers voting for Trump has steadily increased in the last three presidential elections to almost 80 percent, yet his tariff and immigration policies have devastated both their foreign markets and their labor supply.

Much of the Midwest, where American manufacturing is concentrated, appears to have moved from political swing status to Republican, in spite of the fact that Trump’s tariffs on commodities like steel and aluminum have made American-manufactured products less competitive internationally. Auto manufacturers and other major industrial producers must now pay a premium for aluminum of $900 per metric ton above the international price. How does that make the U.S. auto industry more competitive? No, the “economic anxiety” dog won’t hunt.

Racial animosity and dysfunctional economic choices at the ballot box are better understood, in fact, as symptoms of an underlying mindset that is more difficult to define. Many of the same people who howled that Biden was wrecking the country because gasoline went up by a nickel a gallon, but praise Trump to the skies even as his tariffs damage their business and threaten to leave them unemployed, are clearly not operating according to the rational choice theory beloved by economists and political scientists.

Even a straightforward racism theory becomes more complicated in the face of a Trump-supporting immigrant, detained by ICE for a prior criminal conviction, who still spouts MAGA slogans. Every small town in America, it seems, has its Trump boosters who want to rid the country of immigrants while gushing over “their” favorite local immigrant handyman or friendly 7-Eleven clerk.

A long-standing cliché has it that politics lies downstream of culture, and if conventional political or economic rationales fail to explain our current crisis, then perhaps culture — using that word in its broader sense — is the place to find answers. The course of American culture over the last 50 to 60 years has some surprising resonances with the decay of our democratic institutions.

Is there anyone who still remembers the release of the film “West Side Story” in 1961? Aside from being a hit, it was artistically groundbreaking: The music was daringly polyphonic. Leonard Bernstein’s score represented a significant and “difficult” departure from standard, hummable melodic show tunes of the Rodgers and Hammerstein variety. Yet the broad popular audience ate it up, as they did the avant-garde dance choreography. It was both a critical and popular success.

Fast forward four or five years, and “West Side Story” already seemed embarrassingly outdated. The idea of teenage delinquents in ducktail haircuts strolling through the Manhattan slums, clicking their fingers in unison and protecting their turf, was already quaint lore from the half-forgotten Eisenhower era. The Vietnam War was raging, American cities were burning, university campuses were stirring with protest. The Jets and Sharks seemed pretty pointless after a presidential assassination, a war, Black Power and nascent feminism. What was contemporary and cutting edge in 1961 seemed, by the mid-’60s, as a pre-World War II Fred Astaire musical.

By about 1966, even the early 1960s folk revival, which brought us Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, was being rendered obsolete by the British invasion led by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, which in turn gave way to acid rock, blues rock, heavy metal and their numerous offshoots. Each genre reflected the rapid evolution of political and social events in the larger society. All was constant churn and movement; there was considerable dross, but also genuine, spontaneous creativity. One can look at documentary footage of the era and often tell, within a year or two, when it was shot by the evolving dress, style and turns of phrase, so quickly did the culture change.

By contrast, consider the TV sitcom “Seinfeld.” Its huge success, critically and in ratings, is well known, and it has garnered numerous awards. One reviewer went so far as to say, “It may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art.”  Its final episode aired in 1998, but the series has been broadcast continuously since then, first in syndication and then through streaming. “Seinfeld” is, in relative terms, nearly as popular now (considering the fragmentation of entertainment media and its viewership) as it was when it was a first-run show.

What is so culturally significant about “Seinfeld”? One can view an episode that is three decades old and, except for the shoebox-sized mobile phones, nearly everything in the dress, slang and behavior of the characters looks contemporary with 2025. The street scenes in New York could almost have been filmed today, as do the interiors. Consider this  contrast: If we had viewed “The Maltese Falcon” or “Sullivan’s Travels” in 1971, we would immediately have been conscious of how different the physical appearance and texture of the American scene was in 1941.

It has become that way across the board. Once upon a time, each decade had its own distinctive look in dress and music, and the appearance of architecture, cars, furnishings and appliances changed noticeably, about every 20 years. Now, except for electronic gadgetry, the physical façade of American life, as well as its cultural manifestation in popular entertainment, is roughly the same as it was in about 1985.

Author Kurt Andersen already noticed this phenomenon in 2012:

New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (“On the Waterfront,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) versus one from 20 years before (“Grand Hotel,” “It Happened One Night”) or 20 years after (“Klute,” “A Clockwork Orange”), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington).

He contrasted earlier decades of the 20th century with the recent past:

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey — both distinctions without a real difference — and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco.

Andersen goes on, rather self-indulgently, to name-check every cultural totem from Aeron chairs and Alessi teakettles to “Mad Men,” and somewhat underplays the political significance of his own findings. Perhaps in 2012, with Barack Obama in the White House and MAGA a yet-to-be-devised acronym, the political ramifications were less than obvious.

With the benefit of hindsight, I propose a more uncompromising thesis: American culture has become incurious, unwelcoming, backward-looking and fearful. It does not seek the new, but demands endless repetition of the same themes, merely with greater elaboration, gaudier technical effects and greater expense. The culture industry (now synonymous with billion-dollar mega-corporations) does little more than regurgitate stereotyped forms and simulacra. Its symbiosis with a political era that is reactionary, anti-intellectual and xenophobic should be clear.

The fulcrum of a cultural transition from vibrancy to stagnation was the 1970s. An era remembered now, if at all, for leisure suits, burnt-orange shag carpeting and muttonchop sideburns, it marked the passage from progress to reaction. Perhaps the largest events were the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, a putative victory for democracy and constitutionalism. Another memorable event was the final, inglorious end of America’s two-decade-long intervention in Vietnam, a bitter vindication for those who had always said it was a pointless and bloody mistake.

In his two histories of the political passage from Nixon to Ronald Reagan, “The Invisible Bridge” and “Reaganland,” Rick Perlstein writes that deposing Nixon and withdrawing from Vietnam ought to have been an occasion for the American people to grow up and take a more mature view of their country’s place in the world and their responsibility for democratic self-government.

Instead, a backlash against the turbulent 1960s and a nostalgia-tinged desire for a simpler America fueled a reactionary political movement that gained traction even as the Congress elected in 1974 (the “Watergate babies”) passed progressive legislation on election reform, the environment, personal privacy and consumer protection. Just as politics in Washington moved left, the stirrings of a countermovement began: politicized Christian fundamentalism, the founding of right-wing think tanks, Phyllis Schlafly’s jihad against the Equal Rights Amendment, a property tax revolt in California and sputtering fury that gasoline would not remain at 30 cents a gallon for all eternity.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube — or wherever you get your podcasts.

These crosscurrents were visible in popular culture. New Hollywood was in full flower, as the fall of the studio system and the end of censorship led to more creative and daring movies with darker themes. But exactly the moment when the genre peaked in the mid-1970s with films like “Chinatown,” “Taxi Driver” and “Network,” a countermovement hit the screens: the blockbuster. “Jaws,” which premiered 50 years ago this summer, was the first of the big-budget action pictures that spawned a near-infinite series of remakes, sequels and franchises. These drove New Hollywood and arthouse movies into the shadows.

The blockbuster formula hasn’t changed in five decades: entertain cinema-goers; don’t present anything that might induce that dreaded experience, thought. At least a plurality of the recent high-budget, big-box office movies coming out of Hollywood involve action heroes derived from comic books. In the 1950s and ‘60s, comics were fodder for pre-adolescent boys; even a high school kid still reading them would have been regarded as backward.

Popular music soldiered on and continued to develop during the 1970s, but tailed off at the end of the decade. A sure sign that contemporary music was running out of creative steam was the 1980s proliferation of “classic rock” radio stations that endlessly replayed standards from the previous two decades. By the new millennium, as the boomers began to reach the end of their shelf life, acts like the Rolling Stones became a nostalgia fetish, much as the music of Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey had been for the World War II generation.

Since then, the music scene has ossified to the point where journalist and popular music critic David Masciotra writes, “It is the culture of the pre-packaged interview, the ‘social media consultant,’ the Instagram filter, the carefully parsed public relations-penned announcement, statement, or apology, the focus group tested product, and the imperialistic, hegemonic algorithm, forever directing people what to consume, when to feel, and how to think.”

As an example, we need only to think of the interminable reign of Taylor Swift (even the Beatles lasted barely half a decade as a live act at the top of the charts): innumerable dance-pop songs with seemingly identical beat and dynamics, glitzed up with ever gaudier and costlier visual pyrotechnics. And “country,” the hands-down favorite music of “real Americans,” has long been a production-line item with as much idiosyncrasy in the songs as Olive Garden breadsticks. A decade ago, one writer (who wasn’t even being critical) discovered that every hit country song sounded exactly the same.

Whether or not he’s getting any satisfaction, Mick Jagger is still on stage at 82, performing to what is largely his own demographic. Could that, and the fact that Harrison Ford still played Indiana Jones at 80 (using digital de-aging), have anything to do with our seeming preference for geriatric politicians? The 2024 presidential election was a contest in which the octogenarian incumbent had to drop out, but his 60-year-old replacement lost to a late septuagenarian.

The current Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, is a sprightly 74. Mitch McConnell recently stepped down as Senate Republican leader for appearance reasons (he kept freezing up in public and on camera), but at 83 still holds his Senate seat and strategizes as the Professor Moriarty of Republican schemes. The president pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is 91, and third in line for succession to the presidency.

The fossils the American people keep on electing seem to reflect the public’s habits and preferences. Americans move less frequently than they used to. They stay at home more, socialize less and read less. The U.S., once the premier country of upward social mobility as well as geographic mobility, is now less upwardly mobile than many other developed countries. Indeed, the reactionary codgers whom Americans vote for tend to enact social policies that guarantee low social mobility, thus empowering a vicious cycle.

Life expectancy, probably the best surrogate for quality of life, has stagnated as well, while other countries have improved: The U.S. is now 55th in life expectancy, behind Panama and Albania. In GOP strongholds like West Virginia and Kentucky, life is shorter. The residents of Owsley County, Kentucky, have a typical lifespan almost 10 years below the American average. Shockingly, it has declined by almost two years since 1980, the year Reagan was elected. In 2024, Owsley County went 88 percent for Trump.

Stagnation feeds upon itself. In Weirton, West Virginia, a steel town fallen on hard times, a battery manufacturer came to establish a new industrial basis for the community. The problem was that the company couldn’t tout it as green energy, because the phrase provoked too much knee-jerk negativity. While some residents understood that steel wasn’t coming back and that the town should embrace new opportunities, others denounced it as some sort of woke Democratic plot to undermine the community. Predictably, the stupidest comment came from Weirton’s Republican state delegate; the new company, he said, was “a joke and not the future. The facility will probably be vacant in two or three years.” Cultural stagnation is a form of willed self-destruction at the popular level.

At the more exalted level of national politics, cultural stagnation is a dive into tackiness and kitsch. Trump has been busy (when not otherwise occupied ruining the country) desecrating the White House: bulldozing the Rose Garden and slathering everything that doesn’t move with faux-rococo gold leaf, transforming a once-restrained neoclassical structure into something like one of Saddam Hussein’s Tikrit palaces or a 19th-century Naples bordello. Which, upon consideration of the president’s current Jeffrey Epstein-related difficulties, is grimly appropriate. He even intends to deface the entire White House complex with a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, Versailles as reimagined by Tony Soprano.

Its estimated $200 million price tag (which is likely to double) is supposed to be paid for by donations. I am sure billionaires will happily line up to contribute, confident that their bribes will gain them business subsidies and pay them back a hundredfold. Trump being Trump, he will surely stick the taxpayer for the cost, just out of stubborn principle, and his budget director, Christian warrior Russ Vought, will find a way to conceal all this in the federal budget, perhaps in the classified intelligence funding line.

When culture stagnates, and the degradation of political life feeds back into that culture, it doesn’t merely stay the same; it degenerates into a hideous pastiche of itself. Where have we seen Trump’s megalomania before? Hitler’s plan to transform Berlin into Germania? Stalin’s wedding-cake architecture? The extravagant kitsch monument in Rome, finished under Mussolini’s rule?

There is of course no firm one-to-one correspondence between a stagnant, decaying culture and the collapse of civic politics into dictatorship-as-reality TV. But as with pornography, we know it when we see it.