America rode ironic detachment to the brink. Now, it must regain its good faith. Just as Donald Trump won’t leave us quietly, nor will the sense of irony his presence amplified in American life.
Among the many cultural reckonings we must make in the wake of an election where Trump still received over 70 million votes, there are few more pressing than the sense of detachment that helped him take his place at the helm of the American political psyche for four long years. Ironic detachment is at the heart of the Trump story. It’s central to how he was, and continues to be, able to present himself as a viable leadership choice for millions of Americans. But it’s also central to the American story for the last 30 years. As America moves on from Trump, is it time for irony to die?
From the moment he descended a golden escalator in 2015 to kick off his candidacy to his campaign’s final press conference behind a landscaping company in Philadelphia, Trump’s presidency hinged on a denial of reality. Or better yet, it substituted one reality with a new, Trump-friendly, Trump-managed one. As Jeremy Gordon wrote in the New York Times in May 2016, months before Trump was elected president, the success of the alternate reality that Trump created was based on a formula perfected elsewhere in pop culture — in TV and music — but had been first templated successfully by WWE pro wrestling.
Key to that formula’s success was, to some extent, admitting it was semi-scripted, staged entertainment: Pro wrestling welcomed the audience to speculate on the narratives and decisions that went on behind the scenes to create the product they consumed. “The audiences and the creators labor alongside each other, building from both ends, to conceive a universe with its own logic: invented worlds that, however false they may be, nevertheless feel good and right and amusing to untangle,” Gordon wrote.
Like Trump, you’re meant to take everything he does seriously, not literally.
This co-creative process, where the performer feeds off the audience’s knowledge and spoons it back to them, allows not just for the conjuring of entirely self-reinforcing realities, it lets the audience, for all their devotion, to separate themselves when it’s convenient to do so.
In other words, like Trump, you’re meant to take everything he does seriously, not literally. That approach sums up the ironic detachment that helped Trump win and sustain him through four years in office. He remains, even now, meme-like. Those who support Trump can dismiss much of what he says and does as plotted theatrics under the assumption that he, like them, isn’t really serious most of the time. Everything is a joke.
“Four years of exposure to this routine, and more than 200,000 dead bodies, have made it clear that ‘literally’ and ‘seriously’ are not separable, nor are they cause for dismissing anything the president might say,” Tom Scocca wrote at the New York Review of Books this month. But the formula of reality TV, perfected by professional wrestling (whose Hall of Fame includes Trump as one of its members) has worked well in a world where the cultural narrative is driven largely by the internet. And on the internet, people are increasingly accustomed to consuming and creating bullshit. This is the logic that has driven online trolling mobs like the Gamergate bros, whose stated ethical purpose was a convenient screen for unrelenting personal threats lobbed against anyone who questioned their true motive. As the saying goes, the cruelty was the point.
The inevitable end point of the ironic detachment Gordon described is cynicism. If you only engage with something under the pretense that you don’t really believe in it, you’ll probably end up assuming the same is true for everyone else. This is the basis for creating a deeply cynical perspective on the world, where nobody’s motives are assumed to be genuine. What follows is a deep distrust of cultural institutions, leaders, and even neighbors, as well as a growing gullibility for narratives that flatter your distrust — stories that validate that cynical outlook. You are primed to believe the worst.
America is at risk of being ruled by the idea that deception and fraud are normal, and that everyone is working a grift.
Hannah Arendt once noted this to be a key aspect of totalitarian propaganda: “One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof on their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism,” she wrote. Rather than see the truth or abandon those who’d lied to them, people in this situation would instead “protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie.” In totalitarian movements, Arendt wrote, “the essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating.”
America is at risk of being ruled by the idea that deception and fraud are normal, and that everyone is working a grift. It’s already getting close. In this worldview, one that Trump has helped strengthen, politics becomes even more distanced from people. Already, liberal democracy suffers from an assumption that the outcomes are somewhat preordained; that the establishment is impenetrable or that voting is only about creating aesthetic change rather than reforming aging, unequal, and decaying systemic underpinnings. This is the dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy of an ironic, cynical society: If you assume nothing will ever change, one day you find out that it can’t. For that real change to happen, the kind that people have spent much of Trump’s tenure in the streets demanding — let’s call it reform — politics and democracy must be accessible. More than anything, it must build a narrative with citizens that’s in direct opposition to that of the Trump era and all its trolls. It must be a narrative based on good faith.
Trump is not the disease, but the embodied symptom of whatever ills have already infected society. Trump didn’t create ironic detachment. It was already there, a highly marketable phenomenon, gathering further steam online — you could already see it clearly as Gamergate and Harambe, escapades of mass trolling and jape, where the real-world implications never seemed serious enough, or real enough, to slow down the fun. Ironic detachment is the lulz. It was probably only a matter of time before someone leveraged it as Trump did in the political sphere. The question now, as Trump clings to power, is how America might change course.