After terrorist attacks on New York and Washington shocked people around the world on September 11, 2001, it seemed to many Americans that everything had changed. The government promised a rapid response to counter the unexpected national security threats, and the public rallied behind the president. Some members of the nation’s intelligentsia also viewed the traumatic attack as a cultural turning point. Roger Rosenblatt of Time and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair suggested that U.S. culture had reached the “end of irony.” These critics (among others) thought 9/11 would cause Americans to return to the serious-mindedness of prior eras, putting an end to the political and cultural frivolousness of the prosperous 1990s.
Their diagnosis soon appeared premature. Their pronouncement was mocked by defenders of the ironic sensibility in the months after the shock of the terrorist attacks wore off. Developments during the years that followed 9/11 proved the skeptics right. Like partisan politics, culture wars, and pop culture frivolity, the ironic posture of cultural mavens was stalled briefly by 9/11, but returned stronger then ever in the years that followed. Irony reached a new apex in the form of “hipster culture” during Barack Obama’s first term. Hipsters would wear T-shirts ironically of “uncool” bands and products that they disliked. They used this sartorial gesture to signal their wit and hipness to those sophisticated enough to “get the joke.” The ability to mockingly appropriate the lowbrow became a highbrow status marker.
However, with the economic recession and the revival of economic and racial tensions during the Obama years, irony became less compatible with the cultural zeitgeist. Google Trends indicates that the search term “hipster” peaked in the early 2010s and has been in a steady decline ever since (and by 2015, some outlets writing about the hipster movement were declaring it dead) which likely indicates a decline in irony’s centrality to our cultural conversation. During the 2010s, grassroots anger on the Right led to the Tea Party movement and popular conspiracy theories about President Obama’s true allegiances. The Left responded not just with “Daily Show” style satire and mockery, but with also with serious-minded (if not entirely successful in the short-term) activist movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
In elite academic, artistic, and media spaces, a new wave of earnest activism led to stricter rules about language and conduct, critically documented in a much-debated New York magazine article by Jonathan Chait. This new, earnest “social justice” aesthetic sometimes limited wiggle room for engagement in playful (critics would say nihilistic) ironic mockery. An assertive tendency arose in feminism and identity politics that had little patience for the ambiguity that surrounds “ironic” content. Attempts to eliminate “microaggressions” were critiqued by some thinkers (well-documented here by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic) who alleged campus activists were adopting a narrow and oversensitive worldview; meanwhile, social justice advocates countered they were simply showing morally necessary sensitivity to historically marginalized people. “Ironic” T-shirts became less fashionable in this cultural environment. One could not wear a Ted Nugent T-shirt ironically if it would be interpreted as a harmful microaggression against women and minorities (even if the wearer’s intention was actually to mock Nugent’s noxious and bigoted views as well as his passé musical stylings).
Thus, self-representation became less focused on signaling a sophisticated cultural sensibility and more focused on signaling empathy for (and avoiding potential provocation of) the historically marginalized. Indie rock culture declined and became less central to the culture of white urban progressives. Elite art became less about fashionably rebellious intellectual posturing and mockery of bourgeois hypocrisy, and more about expressing ineradicable identity markers and representing the marginalized.
The rise of music-snob hipsters and bands they championed such as Death Cab for Cutie, Vampire Weekend, The Decembrists, and Arcade Fire, had initially been attacked as a marginalization of unpretentious rock bands and their fans. In 2011, writer Michael Hirschorn critiqued the excessive “tweeness” of Fleet Foxes and similar acts. Music critic Steven Hyden notes that The Black Keys (one of the few rock acts that achieved stardom in the early 2010s) engaged in a “class-based” critique of indie culture. Guitarist Dan Auerbach suggested middle-class guys from Akron didn’t have the luxury of being as indifferent as a Brooklyn trust-funder to commercial and audience-building concerns.
However, another argument surpassed this posture as the predominant critique of indie-rock culture. Gen-X musicians who championed such “virtues” as punk purity, ironic detachment, and esoteric obscurity were dismissed by many in the next generation of critics as an elitist club of pretentious white men competing to appear hip by signaling their obscure, “authentic”, and edgy musical taste. A new movement of “poptimist” critics alleged that “rockist” critics often dismissed and neglected popular music made by women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities. Poptimists sought to celebrate pop stars such as Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga, and to take both their music and their fans seriously. In this way, the music world pivoted from Gen-X cynicism and irony to Millennials’ earnest celebration of diversity and self-acceptance.
Technological changes in media dynamics also changed the cultural conversation. Social networks helped enable two predominant forms of cultural expression. One was a celebration of one’s own life, family, and friends. The other was sincere outrage about distant events. With the rise of social media, a positive and upbeat tone came to be the predominant form of self-reflection and self-representation in Internet culture. Heartwarming stories and personal accomplishments tended to result in more “likes” than posts with a neutral or negative valence. A sincere and celebratory tone dominated most personal “life update” posts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (with Twitter the relatively snarky exception to the rule). However, outrage became the predominant form of political expression on social media, and the rise of online outrage culture helped lead to today’s popularity of hyper-partisan Internet personalities and eventually to fictitious online journalism disguised as genuine journalism, e.g. “fake news.”
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States was both a reaction to and a result of the culture of online outrage. Critics in the years immediately prior to Trump’s political ascendancy complained about the rise of “p.c. culture” on social media, and many Trump fans said they supported the reality-TV demagogue because they admired his defiance of “political correctness”. However, the right-wing equivalent of “woke” internet outrage culture helped Trump to victory by spreading all sorts of nasty slanders and rumors about his Democratic opponents.
The Trump election victory was likely the final nail in irony’s coffin. Hipsters still exist, but they would never wear a MAGA hat ironically in 2019 (except perhaps a small minority with alt-right leanings). Indeed, the rise of the alt-right may have ruined irony for the left-leaning intelligentsia by taking it to its most absurd potential end point, embracing quasi-ironic racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and responding to accusations of bigotry by claiming they were only kidding. Angela Nagle’s work has documented this phenomenon quite well. Less offensive iterations of irony still exist within meme culture (across and outside of the political spectrum), but fewer spaces exist for ironic expression than there used to be. Irony will always be with us, but its cultural centrality has waned.
“Irony culture” need not be mourned, and it likely will be viewed by future historians as an odd cultural artifact of a time when artists and thinkers used ironic distance to signal their skepticism and non-conformity with an epoch defined by an unusual degree of material prosperity and ideological consensus. With severe disruptions to the international political and economic order having already occurred and being likely to further proliferate, it will be understandable if many Americans become nostalgic for the era when we had the luxury to indulge in irony. After all, deep conviction, for all its existential comforts, has the potential to lead to dangerous fanaticism when accompanied by extreme and Manichean views. It is often more explosive and dangerous than the relatively apathetic cynicism that often accompanies an ironic disposition.
But the current cultural seriousness may result in the redress of problems and injustices in American society that went neglected during the age of irony and ambiguity. Prof. Christy Wampole argued in the New York Times that ironists “forfeit their civic voice” by “hiding behind the ironic mantle” and by wasting their energies upon ephemeral self-presentation and snark. Perhaps the decline of irony was necessary to provide space for earnest reform movements seeking to meet the challenges of our new age of inequality.