The prevailing cultural configuration in the United States is indicated by two recent items in the New York Times, whose common background is worth excavating. The first of these is a story published on 28 August entitled ‘Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class’. It traces the erosion of the homogeneous Disney experience under the pressure of rising inequality, by recounting the visits of two families to its resort in Florida. Scarlett Cressel, a bus driver, and her family are intended to stand in for the American ‘middle class’; their household income is almost exactly the national median. The family are relegated to interminable queues because they cannot afford express passes, nor accommodation at the resort’s hotels. Shawn Conahan, a tech executive, and his daughter have an entirely different experience, breezing to the front of the long lines with their $900 ‘Lightning Lane Premier Pass’. The upshot: while the Cressel family started their day at 5am and managed to visit 9 rides, the Conahans arrived at the park at 10am and visited 16. As the article’s author, Daniel Currel, points out, the contrast makes a mockery of the theme park’s historic slogan: ‘Everyone is a VIP’.
Ross Douthat’s column of 20 September, ‘The Conservative Principle Behind the Kimmel Suspension’, deals with an apparently unrelated issue but is another window onto the same phenomenon. The article, which also implicates Disney because the corporation owns the ABC network, is a response to Jimmy Kimmel’s (as it turned out temporary) ouster from his late-night talk show for perhaps misidentifying the political orientation of Kirk’s assassin. Douthat offers a soft defence of Kimmel’s firing, in the course of which he laments ‘the strangeness of watching a cultural zone that used to be pretty apolitical’ – the ‘zone’ of the late-night talk show host – ‘suddenly populated by a raft of increasingly partisan comics . . . each offering a different variation on a hectoring progressivism’. As is typical of Douthat, the argument is a strange mix of insight and profound distortion. Surely no moderately sensible person could believe that ‘a failure of stewardship on the part of people at the top’ led to ‘an emergent left-wing orthodoxy’ espoused ‘by a range of institutions, from academia to Hollywood to Silicon Valley’ during the 2010s. Did this supposed ‘orthodoxy’ ever include much in the way of a critique of capitalism? The question answers itself. Nevertheless, Douthat grasps something quite important: the disappearance of a (however manipulated) mass public, which was a prerequisite for the cultural product of the late-night talk show.
The common note of nostalgia that the two articles strike is remarkable. Both lament the passing of a mass-consumer/leisure culture, low-brow, bland and boring to be sure, but at least rhetorically committed to a mythic ‘middle-class’ common experience and Öffentliche Meinung, now fractured into class-determined shards. One might note Disney’s passivity in all of this: an example of a culture-industry titan facing an increasingly fragmented market as the centripetal force of mass taste is undermined by growing income and wealth inequality. Significantly, the unravelling of the peculiarly American phenomenon of mass leisure and mass consumption is not quite a return to the openly stratified culture of nineteenth-century Europe for example, with its great divide between elite and folk culture. Instead, what is occurring is the transformation of a pre-existing mass culture into something else. The fact that what is arising is after is critically important.
Symptomatically, the tech executive does not renounce Disneyland in favour of some more rarefied leisure destination; he instead demands a version of the same experience but tailored to his class position. This is a general phenomenon in the contemporary US. It is common at upscale restaurants, for example, to find menu items that ‘elevate’ a mass-cultural product: an Oreo cookie re-interpreted as a fancy ice-cream sandwich, a Twinkie presented in the form of a bundt cake, or the innumerable plagiarisms of Big Macs in more or less gourmet forms. The high-income consumer still covets the mass-culture original, but wants it in an appropriately upmarket form. All kinds of other phenomena follow this logic: sporting events, bowling alleys, movie theatres are increasingly sold as upscale experiences, offering fine dining, reserved deluxe seating and so on.
In sum, what is emerging is a cultural configuration that is distinctively ‘post-mass’, neither high nor low but after both. This is also part of the reason why what had once seemed the bland elevator music of contemporary life – like late-night talk shows, for example – have suddenly become a terrain of incandescent political contestation; culture is increasingly traversed by a displaced and distorted class struggle in the realm of consumption.
In a third recent article in the Times, ‘The Retribution Has Begun’, on the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, contributing writer Peter Beinart laments the absence of the obligatory presidential bromide after episodes of ‘political violence’ (a category in desperate need of careful deconstruction; what, after all is ‘political’ and what is ‘violence’?). But he may be wrong, like so many others in the current moment, to attribute this lack exclusively to Trump’s coarseness. For the former Apprentice star’s personal habitus recapitulates the fragmentation of mass culture, of opinion, of ‘common sense’ as Gramsci defined it. The cultural integument is stretching and tearing under the pressure of the terrible angularity of late neoliberalism (or an early stage of what I have called political capitalism) with its promise of a gilded life for the very few, and insecurity and misery for the rest. Whether this dissolution of the cultural glue that cemented US capitalism in its golden age will create an opening for a new avant-garde remains to be seen.
Read on: Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, NLR 138.