Not all that long ago, in a country strongly resembling this one, it appeared that the left — using that term in its broadest, vaguest sense — had won the culture wars.
It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Marriage equality was the law of the land. A Black man with a conspicuously foreign-sounding name had been elected president twice, by comfortable margins. Trans people, previously a marginal and largely ignored minority even within the LGBTQ+ community, were speaking out about their experiences and demanding equality. Those social and political changes, among many others, seemed to follow and reflect much larger and deeper cultural shifts.
Pop culture became increasingly enmeshed in questions of identity, intersectionality, racial justice, gender and queerness. The #MeToo movement seemed to have transformed, or at least profoundly altered, the nature of power in the cultural industries and the corporate world at large. Film, television and literature leaned hard into the voices, experiences and representations of people of color, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities and other underrepresented perspectives. Capitalism writ large claimed to embrace the values of diversity, equity and inclusion, or at least it stuck those labels on boardroom doors. Interracial same-sex couples — that is, actors playing interracial same-sex couples — appeared in insurance commercials, as a kind of knowing wink to better-attuned viewers: We’ve come a long way, baby!
Of course conservatives complained about all this constantly and at great length, and sporadically tried to organize boycotts or other counterattacks against such shibboleths as “affirmative action,” “political correctness,” “multiculturalism” and “cultural Marxism.” All of which would eventually be subsumed in the all-purpose label “woke” — well, except for “cultural Marxism,” which basically just means Jewish. But for quite a while there, such efforts seemed almost entirely ineffectual and easily mockable: Scared, grumpy left-behinders yelling at the diverse metropolitan types of Obama-era America to get off their lawn.
One of the right’s biggest problems was its near-total exclusion from celebrity culture. For a whole range of demographic and commercial reasons — the widening diversity of global audiences on one hand, the innate tendency of mainstream culture to surf the tide of least resistance on the other — openly conservative celebrities were exceptionally thin on the ground. Outside of mainstream country music, that peculiar realm of retrograde pop-rock for white people, and the nearly-invisible alternate universe of “Christian” (i.e., evangelical) pop culture, purported right-wing celebs were mostly castoffs from earlier generations or exiled weirdos: I mean, Jon Voight, Gary Busey, James Woods, Mel Gibson. WTF?
Sure, the Republican Party still had a large and resentful voter base that refused to die off or shut up, but its demographic was aging and increasingly irrelevant, or so it seemed. Only once between 1988 and 2024 did the Republican candidate win a clear majority in a presidential election. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory looks a whole lot different in the historical rear-view mirror, but at the time it was widely understood as a shocking but improbable fluke — a “black swan” event, created by the Electoral College, the Russians and James Comey — rather than a more fundamental reversal.
Indeed, to most Americans in the leftward and more metropolitan half of the population, all of this looked like a process of irreversible and irresistible change. Culture was leading a decisive attitudinal and ideological shift among younger people of all backgrounds. Yes, progress was undeniably uneven and engendered a surprising amount of pushback, but there was no going back. The right had become fatally un-hip, trapped in a pathetic, imaginary vision of the past. The American future was increasingly urban and multiracial, increasingly open to proliferating sexual and gender identities, and increasingly Democratic with a capital D.
That was just about where Charlie Kirk came in. I had a random encounter with Kirk, as it happens, about 14 months ago on the floor of the Republican convention in Milwaukee. JD Vance was delivering his monumentally boring acceptance speech, and Kirk and I wound up standing shoulder to shoulder, a pair of notably tall white men in a packed aisle just behind the central section of seating. All I noticed at first was a kind of buzz around the person to my right, as if he were a freshly-bloomed flower assaulted by bees.
(Andrew O’Hehir) My close encounter with Charlie Kirk, Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 17, 2024.
Even before I turned and recognized him, I had become aware that I was standing next to a celebrity. Kirk’s particular brand of charisma doesn’t do much for me personally, but its presence and its effects were undeniable. He had that indefinable, invisible glow that changes the atmosphere and draws people in, like a sub-lethal dose of radiation. People kept stopping to talk to him, although they mostly made small murmuring noises, like the fake brook that runs through a suburban shopping center. More than anything else, they just wanted to bathe in his aura for a moment. An actual U.S. senator walked right past us, exchanging nods with Kirk, but no one paid any attention to him. I could feel the slightly contagious properties of fame; people were looking at me and wondering, Who’s the nerdy journalist standing next to Charlie? Is he important?
Kirk surely wasn’t the only young conservative to conclude that the right was effectively locked out of existing celebrity culture and contemporary models of coolness, and therefore had to create its own. (No doubt that idea was extensively think-tanked and focus-grouped and strategized, both before and during Kirk’s rise to stardom.) But he acted out that premise at scale with impressive velocity and single-minded genius, attracting millions of dollars in backing and legions of followers.
Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan and all the indistinguishable flag-waving country singers no doubt had their uses, but no one imagined they had any connection to or understanding of 21st-century youth culture. Kirk was after something cooler, grander, more numinous and entirely of the moment: celebrity as a celebration of itself, untethered to any specific skills or accomplishments. His persona and performance style were generic, superficially agreeable simulations of something that was faintly sinister but never exactly spelled out; he looked a bit like the young Elvis, a bit like a third-generation Kennedy and a bit like Max Headroom, all of whom were photocopies or parodies of the Aryan ideal of manhood.
I’m not here to render judgment on Charlie Kirk’s life and career, which ended last week in such grotesque and spectacular fashion, except to say that it’s a fundamental mistake to understand him as primarily or exclusively a “political” figure. That misses the point of his career and fails to grasp the nature of his accomplishment. As Joan Didion observed nearly 40 years ago, it is more accurate to say that politics is a subset of show business than the other way around. No one on the current American stage exemplified that better than Kirk — and, of course, his friend and mentor now in the White House, who is also a celebrity in a very different register.
None of the so-called opinions Kirk expressed in his campus appearances and social media moments and “debate me, bro” exchanges with liberal stooges were remotely original or especially interesting. His considerable talent lay in translating the knee-jerk reactionary views of Trumpism — everything the libs have done, from abortion rights to Black Lives Matter to proliferating pronouns to low-flow showerheads, is destroying America — into the distinctive cultural language of a younger generation.
Kirk was a child of the internet, steeped in celebrity culture. He was in high school when Barack Obama was first elected and turned 23 during the first Trump campaign. (Despite his association with campus right-wing activism, Kirk only briefly attended community college, and did not graduate.) Everything about his online presence, media appearances and in-person tours was designed to reach younger people who were acclimated to the language and culture of celebrity, but weren’t much interested in the remote, tedious and pointless machinery of politics.
His rhetoric was often extreme and his positions deliberately inflammatory — he claimed to be modeling a rebellion against established order, after all — but his demeanor was radically cool, relentlessly cheerful, and never openly hostile or unfriendly. In our only moment of direct interaction on the convention floor, Kirk glanced at my press badge — which had my name, my photo and the name of this website — and gave me a big collegial grin: “How you doin’, man?“
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If it’s true that Kirk was instrumental in driving younger white men to Trump in large numbers and making the 2024 victory possible, he did that by speaking directly to disgruntled young people who had never voted and hardly saw the point, and who wouldn’t have been caught dead among the cringe-inducing red-hat RV crowd at a Trump rally. Just as important, Kirk sensed and exploited the complacency and weakness of liberal culture, and understood, in the cliché of our age, that politics is a downstream subsidiary. He turned that election into a referendum on wokeness, in its most caricatured form, and an assertion of white, Christian, male-centric pride.
“Woke” culture gets blamed for lots of things it didn’t actually do, or for minor infractions that occurred only on the margins. But there’s no question that liberal culture, broadly speaking, became disastrously overconfident. There wasn’t nearly as much “cancel culture” censorship or ideological infighting as center-right scolds allege, but the internal debates over boundary-policing and language, which led us all the way to “Kamala is for they/them” — surely a landmark in the dark history of political advertising — all stemmed from a presumption of total victory.
It was obvious to all right-thinking people that “we” had won the culture war, despite the occasional flare-up of distressing rear-guard skirmishes. Permanent political hegemony and the final extinction of the troglodyte right might take a while, but were sure to follow. That’s probably how Napoleon Bonaparte felt, three-quarters of the way through the battle of Waterloo.
Charlie Kirk told an improbable story: The right could make itself cool again and stage a massive cultural comeback. Then he willed it into reality. That’s a hell of a legacy.
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