Once progressive ideals became mainstream middle-class virtues, cool opposition lost its traditional target.
Evidence
Historically, “hip” countercultural figures positioned themselves as social progressives opposing the conservative establishment. Scholar Joel Dinerstein observes that coolness was traditionally defined by rebellion against the status quo guarded by conservative “squares.” By 2001, however, this dynamic had inverted. The liberal coalition of the Clinton years, combined with the mainstreaming of alternative music and sympathetic media, had eroded conservative taboos around marijuana, nonmarital sex, gender norms, and homosexuality. Progressive ideals, once transgressive, were now repositioned as middle-class virtues. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about France in 1997, “Why has everything moral, orthodox, and conformist, which was traditionally associated with the right, passed to the left?” This shift created a crisis among the rebels, as cool, by definition, must always be oppositional. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 60
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in status dynamics and the death of the sellout — the mechanism by which rebellion collapses once the transgressive becomes conventional.
- DEFINE: Defines the core precondition of the omnivore monoculture: cool is oppositional by definition, so when the oppositional becomes orthodox, counterculture loses its function.
- QUESTION: Worth pursuing: was posh/hipster irony a genuinely new blankness, or just the same oppositional mechanism re-aiming at a newly mainstreamed liberal orthodoxy?