Footsteps in the Dirt

The culture has begun to settle in the post-election moment. In the duopoly of American politics, this is manifested as the resignation towards cultural solipsism under Trumpism for the Republicans and the resignation to conservative forces for the Democratic establishment. Both these manifestations are psychoses in their own right. They are rejections of reality in favor of narratives about how the world is: Trumpist populism blames material conditions on the excommunicable poor and “elites,” yet they say the people’s salvation is the billionaires who loot the middle class and downtrodden alike; the liberal establishment of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, tells itself that there’s a mythic “swing voter” somewhere in Pennsylvania who will be won over if only they tell them how “lethal” the US military is and how ready the Democrats are to sell out everyone in its diverse alliance—from trans people in red states to undocumented immigrants and those kept in concentration camps at the border—ignoring the millions of people bleeding from their coalition while moving to the right. Trump didn’t become massively more popular between terms, he gained around 2.5 million votes while Democrats lost over 7,000,000 in popular vote totals between 2020 and 2024.

A swindler swindled, that’s nothing new—but Dems failed to have an answer when people cried out about the inflation that was exacerbated by corporate price-gouging. In their blindness, talking heads on the likes of MSNBC and CNN discuss why this means Dems need to push even further to the right. Campaign strategists wanted to do everything in their power to highlight Harris’ reactionary bona fides instead of capitalizing on a wave of youthful energy. Young people on the left spent the last year in popular uprising against the genocidal American military machine and its ultra-nationalist, rogue colonial power in the Middle East. These are people that under basic assumptions would be in a left coalition with the Democrats, yet the party clearly wishes to distance itself from anything approaching that wing, regardless of how those on the right accuse them of being socialists, communists, what have you.

It’s more interesting to talk about liberals this way because of the contradictions inherent to their ideology, and in this critique genuine conservatives and fascists get off the hook because they’ve never pretended to live in reality, always instead yearning for some imagined past. Interestingly, this instinct of return is highlighted by Dean Kissick in his Harper’s cover story that was making its rounds last week, where he points out that this has become a central interest in the basically liberal establishment of the art world within the last decade in the recent explosion in popularity of indigenous artworks, as if in the post-2016 moment liberals went looking for their own pre-(or as is often framed, anti-) western past.

Kissick is onto something by attacking institutions’ lionizing of works which are “progressive in content but conservative in form,” yet he completely misses the real issue: the institutions themselves. Instead, Kissick often falls into an imagined past of a daring art world in the 2000s when he was young and in internship under legendary curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. It only makes sense to describe this era as any kind of Edenic moment compared to the present through Kissick’s lens of his personal excitement in his younger days. It’d be better to understand Obrist’s sense of the “urgent” as resistance to the establishments of the art world themselves, rather than just a better past moment. Art establishments are as conservative in form as ever, although their content has seemingly more “progressive” through inclusivity.

In Kissick’s critiques, the biennales of 15 years ago can be radical locations (as they might once again become if not for invasive, liberal diversity initiatives), rather than elite institutions that prop up the art market (one of the biggest money-laundering schemes for the ultra-wealthy) and are therefore beholden to market forces as well. Right-wingers love to ask if a corporation is “woke” or not because it doesn’t fit their perfect picture of an imagined past. But is something like NASCAR—run by the practically feudal France family—”woke” because they sell pride merch? Is IndyCar—owned by arch-conservative and tentative Trump ally Roger Penske—“woke” because there’s a woman driver sponsored by e.l.f. running in the Indy 500? The answer is not “yes” or “no” because it’s a bad question. These are still extremely conservative institutions, yet what they do is give in to market forces because it’s profitable. Things “go woke” because selling to more people makes more money—it’s purely capitalistic. Art institutions should be scrutinized in the same way, and Kissick is doing the work for the reactionaries by going after manifestations of the industry rather than its foundations. If he did, though, perhaps his story wouldn’t have been selected by Harper’s for the cover.

Last Monday's controversy around the Harper’s cover was quickly eclipsed when on Wednesday Vanity Fair ran an 11,000 word feature on the late Cormac McCarthy having a secret muse—Augusta Britt—whom McCarthy first courted when she was underage. The shock at the revelations about McCarthy quickly gave way to the scrutiny at the writing of the article, and the subsequent defense of the man-with-the-scoop Vincenzo Barney, who was a first-time writer at Vanity Fair. The prolix piece is riddled with juvenile prose and a lack of interest in its ostensible subject, foregoing investigation for an attempt to see this woman through the eyes of the author that was inspired by her. It gives a generosity to McCarthy’s perspective, while at the same time happily accepting Britt’s story at face-value, especially eschewing fact-checking. For instance, Britt says that she “met Cormac in 1976” when she was 16. Their affair would have McCarthy run to Mexico with her, because “they feared had the FBI hot on McCarthy’s tail” for “statutory rape.” Meanwhile, contemporaneous letters from McCarthy suggest that his run to Mexico would’ve been sometime in 1973 or ‘74, and if he was with Britt at the time that would age her at 13 or 14, making the relationship seem more egregious. It calls into whether the relationship was “consummated” (as Barney puts it) at an illegal, morally indefensible age.

Many wondered how such an article could be printed. Perhaps it was a hard stance from the author, telling his editors that they’re at his whims if they want the story or he’ll run it somewhere else. Perhaps it was intentional editorial malpractice, drumming up tabloid-esque controversy about McCarthy and the publication itself to pull ad revenue in the click-economy. The most disappointing answer is the most likely: the editors liked the piece as written, and its (problematically) romantic viewpoint. It’s an affirming feature about a viewpoint-altering subject, one that should be handled with tact and nuance, and instead gives into an avowed mawkishness that does disservice to all involved. Because the reality of the matter would be too upsetting to be of public interest. Reduction is the name of the game in 2024 as it was in 2016. The Harper’s and Vanity Fair articles demonstrate how the world of even “well-read” media, the kind the would be considered liberal, acts as a reactionary force in their faux-institutional critique and embrace of the shock economy, helping to build the conservative world that they say they despise.