Donald Trump and American Mass Culture

In his column in the New York Post back on May 21, "Rat Pack vs. The Hippie," John Podhoretz astutely saw the coming presidential election as a battle between two very different cultures, each of them deriving from the 1960s, and each represented by two very different baby boomers, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  For Hillary, the radicalism she discovered in late Sixties was her golden coming of age; for Trump, the early Sixties of the Rat Pack and its white (with the notable exception of Sammy Davis, Jr.) male sense of entitlement and raucous fun, was the mecca he aspired to and created around him for the rest of his life.  Podhoretz suggests that America today may well be more nostalgic for the boozy antics of the Rat Pack (though he points out that Trump himself does not drink) than for the give-peace-a-chance potheads of the hippie movement (though whether or not Hillary was an active pot smoker or, like her husband Bill, merely inhaled, is anyone's guess).  In November the electorate will get to choose which end of the 1960s decade it wants most to return to.

Like Podhoretz, I'm not a Trump supporter (see my post from July 28, 2015), but history may be on Trump's side. More than one commentator has observed over the years that "politics is downstream from culture."  In other words, the culture introduces changes into society before the political realm picks up on them. We can see how this happened in 1960, when the country fell in love with movie-star handsome John F. Kennedy -- whose father Joe owned  a movie studio during  Hollywood's golden age -- was elected president just as the Hollywood studio system with all its glamour was already becoming an object of nostalgia.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan resoundingly won the White House to the great shock of the educated class, who were thinking still viewing elections through traditional political lenses, whereas most Americans in the economically and intellectually depressed late-1970s were voting based on a growing nostalgia for what they perceived as the more optimistic and affluent 1950s -- witness the success of such TV shows as Happy Days and films like Grease.  Reagan had been a regular presence on TV in the 1950s; he was a familiar figure in American homes and implied a return to that supposedly more innocent decade. The culture had prepared the way for his election.

Similarly, we might see the backlash against the puritanical and stifling politically correct political culture of the last 15 years represented in such shows as Mad Men and The Sopranos, as well as the bevy of coarse but compelling reality TV shows, including Trump's own reality show, The Apprentice.  While the political class still thinks a presidential candidate should be more in the mold of Adlai Stevenson (or at least Barack Obama) than a reality TV star, the rest of the country is quite possibly ready to accept the latter, which may well result in a massive case of cognitive dissonance in countless homes in Cambridge, Beverly Hills, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The chief culprits of this victory will be the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Party, who have not forthrightly stood up against the of politically correct culture, even as those leaders themselves enjoyed the outrages perpetrated by the characters of Mad Men and The Sopranos.  Trump feels no allegiance to the pieties and conventions of American politics past.  He is a creature of mass culture, and a canny purveyor of it as well. (It's no coincidence that Trump's favorite movie is Citizen Kane, a film he has evidently studied quite carefully.)

To repeat: politics follows culture. A Trump victory in November is by no means foreordained, but as the record of the past indicates, neither will it be a great surprise.

Images:  HBO (above) and Getty (top)