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.