Why so much Obama-era nigger pop culture feels so cringe now

[Lol at Change]

One of the oddities of getting old is bearing witness as the pop
culture you used to think would always be beyond reproach slowly
slides out of favor. As millennials age into the solid middle of the
culture here at the end of 2021, they’re getting to experience that
disorienting slip with some of the most beloved pop culture of their
youths, and most particularly the pop culture that was celebrated
during the presidency of Barack Obama.

Sunny, wholesome, nominated-for-16-Emmys Parks and Recreation is now
widely considered an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the
failures of Obama-era liberalism. Iconic and beloved Harry Potter is
the neoliberal fantasy of a transphobe. Perhaps most dramatic of all
is the rapid fall of Hamilton and its creator and star, Lin-Manuel
Miranda, whose reputation is now one of embarrassing earnestness.

Gossip Girl, hyper-aware in all its incarnations of the preferred
status symbols of mean teens, sounded the death knell there. The
2021 HBO revival of Gossip Girl sees its cast of wealthy Upper East
Side teenagers enjoying a night out at the Public Theatre, where
Hamilton first premiered off-Broadway in 2015.

“You know, I saw Hamilton here with Max, before it went on
Broadway,” brags one of the teens, hoping to impress his cool new
girlfriend Zoya. “You into that play?”

Zoya, the wokest of the group and the one with the most
sophisticated literary taste, sighs deeply and rolls her eyes. “No
doubt it’s a work of art,” she allows. “But …”


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Zoya’s heavy sigh signals something about Hamilton’s current status,
too. It proves that the show is no longer cool.

That’s true of all the works and public figures I’m discussing here.
Political critiques have their place, but the real sign that the
shibboleths of millennial pop culture have lost their cultural
capital is that right now, they mostly just feel kind of cringe.

Lin-Manuel Miranda gazing out at the audience with misty eyes at the
end of Hamilton? Cringe. Grown adults debating their Hogwarts
houses? Cringe. An article in which fictional character Leslie Knope
shares words of comfort after Donald Trump’s 2016 election on this
very website? So so so cringe.

Part of the decline these properties have experienced is simply a
natural response to overexposure. They reached a level of cultural
saturation that made them inescapable, and a backlash inevitably
ensued. Yet there’s also something about precisely which relics of
Obama-era pop culture have come in for special reviling in 2021.
They’re not necessarily associated with Obama himself.

Instead, they are all media that tends to celebrate people who work
through the grind of bureaucracy to make their great achievements;
media much venerated for their identity politics of representation;
media with a firm but vague political identity of liberal centrism.

They are, in short, media that celebrates the qualities associated
with our collective pop cultural understanding of Hillary Clinton.

So as 2021 comes to a close, and we have begun to grasp what
President Joe Biden’s America looks like, let’s take a step back. We
can trace which formerly beloved works of pop cultural liberalism
have fallen out of favor in the tumultuous years since 2016, which
ones have risen up to take their place, and come to understand what
all of the above can tell us about how we’re thinking of America
right now.

On the eve of the 2016 election, left-leaning pop culture was
celebrating hard work and representation that mattered. Hillary
Clinton was its poster child.

To be clear, when I’m talking about our pop cultural understanding
of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the actual Hillary Clinton, the
politician who published real policy papers and had an interesting
if fraught voting record. Nor am I talking about the shrill,
castrating harpy (or villain in a pedophile-ring conspiracy theory)
that many on the right talk about when they use Hillary Clinton’s
name. I mean the liberal caricature of Hillary Clinton, the flat but
far-reaching portrait of Hillary that dominated the left-wing
political ecosystem for decades.


In tandem, pop culture properties like Hamilton, Parks and
Recreation, and Harry Potter celebrated the heroes who made their
way through boring political red tape to enact true change.


So it came to be fashionable, during the 2016 election, to draw
recurring parallels between Hillary and all of her hard-working pop
cultural analogues. Hillary Clinton is the Hermione of politics,
commenters argued. Or, in fact, she is Leslie Knope, which means the
haters need to get over themselves. Clinton herself quoted Hamilton
when she accepted her nomination at the 2016 Democratic National
Convention, and then Lin-Manuel Miranda rewrote the lyrics to “The
Ten Duel Commandments” for a Hillary fundraiser.

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Besides being celebrated for her work ethic, Hillary was also
celebrated for the historic nature of her identity. She was the
first woman to win the nomination of a major party for the
presidency. She was the first woman to win the popular vote for the
presidency. Regardless of where her politics lay, the sheer fact of
her existence was radical and boundary-breaking.

Likewise, Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter were all
celebrated for the symbolic force of their politics of
representation. Hamilton had actors of color playing the Founding
Fathers in a move that was, New York magazine’s 2015 review
declared, “more than colorblind; it’s a key to the story as it
projects into the future.” Parks and Rec was lauded for the “quietly
consistent argument for feminism” in its portrayal of an ambitious
female politician. Harry Potter had earned feminist credit for its
strong female characters, the argument being that “the Harry Potter
universe is full of take-charge women and supportive men who don’t
let a silly thing like gender constructs get in the way of their
fight against the evil forces of the world.”

Then Donald Trump became president instead of Hillary Clinton, and
everything changed.

Since the 2016 election, cultural capital has ebbed away from
Clinton and the pop culture most associated with her
In the five years since Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of
Donald Trump, pop culture’s support of her — and of her specific
hard-working archetype — has waned.

Pop culture was still interested in wholesome stories about good
people during the Trump era. Certainly there were still plenty of
antiheroes and villains; The Handmaid’s Tale made Trump’s misogyny
the leering ogre at the center of its dystopia, and Succession’s
cynical Roy family views the world through the same power-above-all
lens that Trump did. But there were also shows like The Good Place
(from Parks and Recreation showrunner Michael Schur) and Netflix’s
revamped Queer Eye, both of which made their debuts to critical
acclaim during this era.

What distinguished the wholesome pop culture of the Trump era was
that it seemed to be starting from zero. While pop culture’s
Hillaries tended to be presented as fully-cooked good people whom we
could all emulate, in the Trump era, wholesome pop culture tended to
center itself around fundamentally flawed people who were trying to
be good, and not always succeeding. The protagonists of The Good
Place started in hell and had to work their way painfully up to
heaven over the course of four seasons. The heroes of Queer Eye all
had some major personality flaw or emotional obstacle to try to
conquer over the course of each episode.

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Moreover, the pop culture of the Trump years wasn’t always sure what
goodness itself would look like. The Good Place held up one moral
philosophy after another for examination and often found them
wanting. Queer Eye could not always offer its subjects a convincing
redemption. It was as though we were in an era in search of an
ideal.

And when we came out the other side, pop culture seemed to have
concluded that it wasn’t going back to the Hillary role model.


Meanwhile the real tell, as ever, remains the mean teens.

Early on in HBO Max’s buzzy The White Lotus (not a show about pop
culture liberalism per se, but very much a show about cultural
capital), two terrifyingly cool college students begin gossiping
knowingly to each other about Hillary Clinton. “Like she actually
cared about the working poor,” one of them says dismissively.

“She was a neoliberal war hawk,” returns the other, Olivia. “She was
a neolib and a neocon.”

“Oh. Oh, is that the trendy thing they’re teaching now, to hate on
Hillary Clinton?” demands Olivia’s mother, a high-powered executive
in her 50s played by Connie Britton. “Hillary Clinton is one of the
most influential women of the last 30 years, and many women in my
generation very much admire Hillary Clinton.”

“Mom, don’t get triggered,” Olivia says. She adds sarcastically, “We
all love Hillary Clinton.”

Like Zoya with Hamilton, Olivia doesn’t need to explain why she
doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. The fact of her not liking Hillary
signifies Olivia’s cool, her progressive politics. It shows that she
has her finger on the pulse. Her mother’s knee-jerk defense of
Hillary, meanwhile, shows how behind-the-times she is.


Hamilton is understood to use its color-conscious casting to
“whitewash” the slave-owning founding fathers. Harry Potter, fans
note to each other significantly, “was a trust fund jock who became
a cop and married his high school sweetheart,” and moreover his
author is transphobic. Parks and Recreation is a symbol of the
failure of liberalism in the face of Donald Trump.


I am not here to argue that these properties are all definitively
regressive works of neoliberal propaganda and that there is no other
way of understanding them. It’s still possible to have more radical
interpretations of all of these works, perhaps especially of
Hamilton. It’s also still possible to respect the achievements of
Hillary Clinton. But the pendulum of cultural opinion has swung out
of their favor.

It used to be that you demonstrated your cred by saying you saw
Hamilton at the Public. Now you demonstrate your cred by saying you
have your doubts about Hamilton’s racial politics.

The new face of mainstream American pop cultural liberalism is Ted
Lasso
I also don’t want to argue that this shift away from Hillary and her
analogues means mainstream America is moving toward embracing a
radical new leftism in its popular culture. What I think it actually
means is that pop culture’s understanding of mainstream political
virtue has shifted toward a new model, one that is slightly,
tellingly different from the one Hillary symbolized.


But while Parks and Rec was organized around a hard-working and
ambitious blonde woman, played by an actress who had played Hillary
Clinton on SNL, Ted Lasso has a different anchor.

The titular Ted Lasso is an American college football coach who
moves to England to coach a professional soccer team, and he is the
moral center of his show. Ted is a folksy, avuncular figure. He is a
white man who understands the problems with white men, who is
working hard to redeem the rest of his gender. He is able to walk
into a football franchise that has been run into the ground by poor
leadership and turn it around again, not with dull paperwork and
rule-following — both of which escape him — but by the sheer force
of his vision. His superpower is his empathy, and he is much admired
for his ability to find common ground with some of his enemies, as
well as his willingness to declare others (notably Rebecca’s wicked
ex-husband Rupert) beyond help.

He is even played, like Leslie Knope, by an actor who played a
prominent politician on SNL; Jason Sudeikis used to be SNL’s Biden.

As both the backlash toward Ted Lasso’s second season and Biden’s
plummeting approval ratings both demonstrate, our patience with this
archetype is not infinite. Still, right now, Ted Lasso is the
collective liberal fantasy of who Joe Biden could be if we maybe all
wished hard enough. He’s replaced the collective fantasy of who
Hillary Clinton could be after she failed to best Donald Trump. And
only time will tell us if we’ll end up repudiating him — and all his
pop cultural analogues — too.

https://www.vox.com/22641501/hamilton-parks-rec-harry-potter-
cringe-obama-era-pop-culture