Ryan Zickgraf of Unherd recently reviewed a book by David Marx titled Blank Space, published three weeks ago. David Marx is a writer focused on American fashion and culture. He writes about America from his home in Tokyo, Japan.
Blank Space is a history and critique of 21st-century American culture, which the author feels has been degraded into a commercial enterprise and no longer fosters innovation or risk-taking.
Marx asks the question, what happened to culture in America? It seems as though art, music, and our culture as a whole have been driven to the brink of extinction. Take the music industry as an example. Publishers are buying up AI-generated versions of famous artists’ works to create their own music. No more paying musicians, no more recording studios, and only the marketing remains. Unfortunately, the music is awful, obviously machine-generated, and lacking in originality, emotion, and human character.
Marx worries that the lack of pretense (artists’ claims to authority) in contemporary culture is a bad thing; it signifies that our culture is dumbed out of existence. He argues that “art, entertainment, and fashion since the year 2000 have been some combination of uninspired, recycled, soulless, corporatized, or plainly dumb — so much so that there is a blank space where a distinct cultural imprint should be.” Marx describes a disposable, amoral culture led by “charlatans and reprobates.” Since creators are no longer driven to pursue artistic excellence, culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.”
Boredom, previously the driver of creativity, has been abolished because we have something new available to us every second of the day via some media source. Commercialism, profits, and low intellect infect the content we receive, so cultural innovation is absent.
Marx attributes our present ills to the suffocation of the 1960s counterculture and their followers by neoliberals. Now, all we have is pseudo-art used as marketing symbols. He plays down any blame on the left for this crisis and blames conservatives for this turn of events. Marx looked to the late Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson, who said, “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production.”
The author’s argument for the culpability of the conservatives is the post-2000 hipster scene, self-centered and lacking creativity, which would usher in the advent of “Dime Store Conservatives.”
Here, we pause for a moment to define terms. Hipsters are members of a contemporary subculture that values authenticity, originality, and indie/alternative culture, often rejecting mainstream trends while ironically adopting certain styles. Hipsters have appeared in several waves, starting with the Beat Generation in the 1940s. Despite their underground operation out of the public eye, they exert significant cultural influence. Their influence falls on fashion and athletics, food and drink, music and media, and language. Brands and media follow the hipster space because they typically pre-screen mass public taste.
Dime Store Conservatives are “cheaped out” conservatives who refuse to accept the conservative ideology fully. Examples include establishment Republicans who embrace just enough Democratic positions to keep being elected, or moderates who sit on the fence to avoid ideological commitments.
Post-2000 hipsters sought to set themselves apart from prior generations, whom they blamed for everything that went wrong in the United States. They are friends of the environment and the visual arts. They are mainly a subset of disaffected or stressed urban professionals who are developing a counter-culture centred around the worship of strength and the restoration of “natural hierarchies” among large human groups, as supposedly revealed by IQ. The aristocratic or adventurous human spirit, once free to roam and to assign value on its own, has tragically been imprisoned by the feminist movement, which is obsessed with equality.
Marx asserts that the Dime Store Conservatives merged with MAGA and made Trump possible. Trump’s embrace of conservative values meant death for the anti-establishment crowd.
Actually, the current edition of the hipster movement grew out of disillusionment with American society and the embrace of anti-social libertarianism (self over society). It did not create Dimes Store Conservatism because the ladder has been around since the early 20th Century.
Blaming capitalism for the demise of counter-culture overlooks the fact that the movement collapsed under its own weight and was helped along by changes in American lifestyle. Television and the Internet have created an anti-social society in which people prefer staying home rather than participating in social activities. Americans spend less time with neighbors and friends than at any time in American history. This change was laid out beautifully in Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone.
Marx argues for the revival of old norms, but his norms come from the left, and it was they who gave them up. Their point was to question authority, mock propriety, scandalize the bourgeoisie, and liberate the individual. And they won. All that was left for them to fight for was a set of new social taboos created by the race-and-gender-obsessed professional-managerial classes. The old norms were history.
These misinformed emerge when fashion critics delve into history and politics. Marx missed the part where the left became the neoliberals during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. There are conservative neoliberals, but they are not dominating today’s political narrative. The left neoliberals are aligned with the European globalists and embrace Plan 2030, put forward by the World Economic Forum. These are the people who have turned every American institution into a capitalist enterprise.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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