For most of the eight decades following World War II, the political Left has defined the counterculture and, by extension, what counts as cool. Beatniks in the 1950s condemned suburban conformity. Hippies in the 1960s rejected the Vietnam War and the gray men running it. Punks in the late 1970s and early 1980s scoffed at Nixon’s “silent majority” and Reagan’s optimistic “morning in America.” Hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s gave voice to black men angry at white America. Independent film, college rock, gay theater, and queer photography all flourished as protests against a presumed mainstream that was white, square, Christian, and Republican.
That is no longer the world we live in. “One of the most remarkable things we’ve seen in the last couple of years is this sense that Trumpism is at the cultural cutting edge, or the avant-garde,” says Matthew Schmitz, “and liberal America is racing to catch up.” Schmitz, the cofounder and editor of Compact magazine and religion editor at the Washington Post’s opinions page, recorded a podcast with us last week. Schmitz lives in Manhattan, a county that went for Kamala Harris by more than 80 percent, and grew up in rural Nebraska, where his county went for Trump by 86 percent. He calls himself a conservative but spends much of his working life among liberals.
