Don’t Cry For The Departed Monoculture

It gave Americans a common culture–and imposed progressive views on them

There’s a lot of talk about the disappearance of a common culture in America, including from your humble writer. This is one of the factors behind America’s lack of interest in its 250th anniversary. Americans are no longer stuck watching the same shows, listening to the same songs, and reading the same newspapers. We have an abundance of options.

Hence, our fractured culture.

Conservative writer Aaron Renn blamed this development for the death of late-night TV in a recent essay. He offered a good summary of what we have lost:

One of the reasons our country features a lack of civic cohesion and a high level of political polarization is the fragmentation of our previous mass-media, mass-consumer common culture. This fragmentation resulted from new technologies, such as cable television and the internet, as well as structural economic changes that helped set the upper middle class apart from the rest of society.

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There was a genuine national common culture in this world, in which Americans coast to coast shared at least some key cultural touchstones and references, even if there was along with this local and regional specific cultures as well. These might include TV shows like M*A*S*H, or news programs and personalities like Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News, or a late night talk show host like Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on NBC.

This common culture had many upsides. It made us turn July 4th milestones into major celebrations. It produced memorable blockbusters and decent sitcoms. It allowed Americans to connect with one another through movie quotes and song choices. It gave us a sense of sharing something together.

There’s a lot of longing for this monoculture, especially among conservatives. It’s imagined as the Golden Age, even if the culture itself wasn’t particularly great or conservative. One sees this in the strange nostalgia for random parts of the 2000s—Blockbuster, shopping malls, and so on.

What’s overlooked are the many upsides to the monoculture’s demise. Its departure makes it far harder for the establishment to psyop the public into positions it wouldn’t otherwise take. This monoculture required Americans to conform to certain habits, tastes, and beliefs. It was mostly a gift for liberals. It helped make gay marriage acceptable and deluded America into thinking there was an epidemic of police shootings. On top of all this, many of its products weren’t that great. There were many horrible TV shows, songs, and movies we had to endure.

It’s good for a nation to have a common culture. But the one we had was past its expiration date. Our fractured age no longer allows such a thing to take hold.

Modern technology made the monoculture possible. TVs and radios connected millions of Americans, giving them access to the same information and entertainment regardless of where they lived. It broke down regional differences, cultural peculiarities, and prejudices. This development made many social movements more powerful than they would have been under the old paradigm.

The Civil Rights Revolution was televised, making it possible to achieve its goals in a way that was once impossible before TV. Millions of Americans watched horrible images of “peaceful” protesters being brutalized by racist policemen and Klansmen. They saw the articulate Martin Luther King Jr. present an appealing image of the movement. The reports and footage led the American mainstream to embrace the radical ends of the Civil Rights Movement, unaware that it would upend their own neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. It was hard for Americans to find out about the negative consequences of civil rights legislation. Their newspapers and magazines told them it would only fulfill American ideals. Hearing dissenting voices required much more effort when Americans were limited to a few channels and print outlets. Besides, the monoculture taught the public that only bigoted rubes opposed the Civil Rights Movement. A good citizen didn’t want to be like them. In their minds, the decent people were on the side of the civil rights marchers.

The monoculture’s grip on society was able to replay this scenario several times, especially with gay marriage. This idea, which was once a joke, became widely accepted thanks to TV shows and movies showing normal gay people who just wanted to “love one another.” Dissenting opinions were once again cast as the views of reactionary morons. To conform to polite society, Americans gave up their opposition to same-sex marriage.

Peak woke was the last hurrah of the monoculture. Americans began to have far more options for their entertainment and information in the 21st century. It was much easier to be into “weird” things such as anime and indie music in the 2010s. But the remnants of the monoculture were still able to exert themselves when it came to social attitudes. You could collect as much manga as you wanted, but you were still not allowed to criticize Black Lives Matter or “misgender” men pretending to be women.

Late-night TV and online news media reinforced these norms in the era of peak woke. While Americans were splitting apart in terms of what they watched and listened to, these forces were still able to wield a common culture around “proper beliefs.” Along with heavily censored social media platforms, they were able to whip up the public into fervors over a variety of left-wing fads. This included anti-Trump resistance, the George Floyd Revolution, COVID hysteria, and more.

But this turned out to be a last gasp of a fading force rather than a well-entrenched paradigm. Late-night TV and online news media are both in steep decline. It’s harder to enforce “proper beliefs” now. We are not going to have Michael Jackson’s insipid “Black or White” PSA song broadcast to nearly every American household anymore. A TV show can’t convince Americans to embrace the transgender cause anymore. It’s even difficult for journalists to cancel ordinary citizens for being “racist” anymore.

The old monoculture lives on in pro sports. It was always the least political element of the common culture. But we still see attempts to use it to push a particular message to the public. Pro sports teams are more eager to celebrate Pride Month than corporations. The NFL still displays BLM-inspired messages in end zones and on player helmets. The black national anthem is still played at the league’s marquee games. Fans thankfully ignore these efforts. They serve as a reminder of the bad aspects of the departed monoculture.

Our new fragmented culture allows right-wing and other dissenting views to flourish. The old dogmas are harder to maintain in an environment dominated by edgy memes and irreverent TikTok videos.

But it’s not all great.

This new environment also allows for a lot of insanity to thrive. You can now become a millionaire peddling the most unhinged conspiracy theories imaginable. It also engenders a hyper-atomized society that’s incapable of unity or even treating events with the seriousness they deserve. Witness how Charlie Kirk’s murder went from a national tragedy to a meme and a source for endless conspiracy theories after a month. It also explains why Americans can’t be bothered to go all-out for America’s 250th birthday. We’re stuck in our own cocoons and have little in common with our fellow citizens.

For all its faults, this is our culture now. The old monoculture is not coming back, nor should we long for it. It imposed a conformist liberalism on the masses, and its products weren’t even that great. For every classic movie, there was a trove of mediocre TV shows and movies alongside it. You now have the choice to cut through all this and watch what you want to watch.

That’s great for individual choice, but not so good for building social consensus.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.