How did we get from the '60s to Trump's kitsch White House? [View all]

How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?
Our culture turned on itself, stagnated and went rancid — that's how

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published August 9, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

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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.

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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.

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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. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/09/how-did-we-get-from-the-60s-to-trumps-kitsch-white-house/