"Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today's listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young's tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry's studious disregard of the way America lives now."
"This state of political inertia is probably most advanced in American fiction, where MAGA encounters are routinely transposed into domestic fables of errant masculinity. When I took on the thankless assignment of charting the themes of this subgenre, slogging through fare like Hari Kunzru's Red Pill and Jess Walter's So Far Gone, I found myself turning to a long-discredited work of fictional anti-fascist prophecy as a striking counter-text: Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here."
"Lewis's novel was a response to the initial power grabs by fascist movements in Spain, Italy, and Germany; its title, drawn from a standard refrain of liberal reassurance about the exceptionalist character of the American republic, was meant to shake readers out of their complacent state of Yankee self-congratulation."
Contemporary American culture displays political inertia, with music and film offering evasive or symbolic responses rather than explicit opposition to authoritarianism. Popular music has shifted from being central to activist movements to a scavenger hunt for hidden political messages in veteran artists' songs. Film industry choices emphasize nostalgia and historical echoes that fail to register current social realities. Modern American fiction often domesticates political conflict, reframing extremist politics as personal or masculine drama. A discredited but direct anti‑fascist prophecy from 1935 provides a sharper template for recognizing authoritarian tactics and the complacency that enables them.
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