Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with its much-heralded Black Hermione, premiered in 2016, offering a highly anticipated extension of a series that had been foundational to the Harry Potter generation as a story of diversity and difference conquering racism and small-minded conformity. Parks and Recreation ended in 2015, and Hamilton premiered in the same year. On the eve of the 2016 election, left-leaning pop culture was celebrating hard work and representation that mattered. We can trace which formerly beloved works of pop cultural liberalism have fallen out of favor in the tumultuous years since 2016, which ones have risen up to take their place, and come to understand what all of the above can tell us about how we’re thinking of America right now. So as 2021 comes to a close, and we have begun to grasp what President Joe Biden’s America looks like, let’s take a step back. They are, in short, media that celebrates the qualities associated with our collective pop cultural understanding of Hillary Clinton. Instead, they are all media that tends to celebrate people who work through the grind of bureaucracy to make their great achievements media much venerated for their identity politics of representation media with a firm but vague political identity of liberal centrism. They’re not necessarily associated with Obama himself. Yet there’s also something about precisely which relics of Obama-era pop culture have come in for special reviling in 2021. They reached a level of cultural saturation that made them inescapable, and a backlash inevitably ensued. Part of the decline these properties have experienced is simply a natural response to overexposure. An article in which fictional character Leslie Knope shares words of comfort after Donald Trump’s 2016 election on this very website? So so so cringe. Grown adults debating their Hogwarts houses? Cringe. Lin-Manuel Miranda gazing out at the audience with misty eyes at the end of Hamilton? Cringe. Political critiques have their place, but the real sign that the shibboleths of millennial pop culture have lost their cultural capital is that right now, they mostly just feel kind of cringe. That’s true of all the works and public figures I’m discussing here. It proves that the show is no longer cool. ![]() ![]() Zoya’s heavy sigh signals something about Hamilton’s current status, too. Why Hamilton is as frustrating as it is brilliant - and impossible to pin down It is no longer considered to be self-evidently virtuous or self-evidently great. She doesn’t have to by now, the critiques of Hamilton are so well established that the audience can fill in the blanks on its own: Hamilton, according to current conventional cool-person wisdom, glorifies the slave-owning and genocidal Founding Fathers while erasing the lives and legacies of the people of color who were actually alive in the Revolutionary era. “No doubt it’s a work of art,” she allows. ![]() Zoya, the wokest of the group and the one with the most sophisticated literary taste, sighs deeply and rolls her eyes. “You know, I saw Hamilton here with Max, before it went on Broadway,” brags one of the teens, hoping to impress his cool new girlfriend Zoya. The 2021 HBO revival of Gossip Girl sees its cast of wealthy Upper East Side teenagers enjoying a night out at the Public Theatre, where Hamilton first premiered off-Broadway in 2015. Gossip Girl, hyper-aware in all its incarnations of the preferred status symbols of mean teens, sounded the death knell there. Perhaps most dramatic of all is the rapid fall of Hamilton and its creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose reputation is now one of embarrassing earnestness. Iconic and beloved Harry Potter is the neoliberal fantasy of a transphobe. Sunny, wholesome, nominated-for-16-Emmys Parks and Recreation is now widely considered an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the failures of Obama-era liberalism. As millennials age into the solid middle of the culture here at the end of 2021, they’re getting to experience that disorienting slip with some of the most beloved pop culture of their youths, and most particularly the pop culture that was celebrated during the presidency of Barack Obama. One of the oddities of getting old is bearing witness as the pop culture you used to think would always be beyond reproach slowly slides out of favor.
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