The Aesthetic That Explains American Identity Now

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm Meher Ahmad, and I'm an editor for New York Times Opinion. I'm here with columnist and sociologist Tressie McMillan-Cottom, who often writes about culture, and photo editor and creative consultant Emily Keegan. Welcome. Hi, it's great to be here. Hello. It's a pleasure to be here. Both Tressie and Emily are keen observers of the cultural zeitgeist. And in their own spheres, they've been noticing an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like Yellowstone. This is America. We don't share land here. And Hunting Wives. What brings you to East Texas? I guess I live here now.

0:52Oh, well, welcome. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter producing country songs as part of their repertoire. And trad wife influencers like Hannah Neelman, popularly known as Ballerina Farm, who has now more than 10 million followers.

1:10So we have the dairy barn where the cows are going to be. Over where Daniel and Martha are standing is going to be the hay barn. So in the hay barn structure will be obviously hay, alfalfa, grain. So what does the mainstream embrace of this aesthetic say about our society and about our politics?

1:34Emily Tressy, just so we're all on the same page, I'd love for each of you to give some examples of where you're seeing the country aesthetic showing up. What makes you define these trends as rural and what are the specific signifiers you're seeing? Okay, I'm going to try not to take all of them. I thought I know I won't. Okay, so reality TV show jumps out there. You have, there's a show where a farmer takes a wife. Who is ready to fall for a farmer? Have you ever dated a farmer? No, I've never dated a farmer before. I love that show. So many people contacted me when the show premiered, which says that I have a brand.

2:15And I was very proud of that. But you can even get into, I think, you know, shows that aren't as character driven, where the reality is actually a character. So then you've got shows where like there are alligator hunters in Louisiana and a show called Swamp People. Last year, the Landrys came out on top in a friendly competition to score the biggest average gator size. I see it in sort of everyday accessible middle market design aesthetics. I'm one of those people in the middle of also decorating my home because, you know, how much more basic can I get? And, you know, the hottest trend right now is farmhouse and mid-century modern are over.

2:55It's all about cottage, modern cottage, you know, cottage chic, granny cottage, all of that just sort of appealing to that idea. I see it in comedians. There's this crop of country, country inflected comedians, someone like Leanne Morgan. I drove to the Walmart in the foothills of the Appalachia Mountains and I took my two babies with me. And I went into the Walmart and bought an EPT pregnancy test. I took it in the stall and I tinkled on it. And my three-year-old boy looked at me and said, what, is it positive? So you see it in comedy. I think it is very popular in social media. And then, of course, all the pop stars that you mentioned.

3:42Emily, what about you? Is there one or two aesthetic trends that kind of made you sit up and notice, whoa, this is everywhere now? Yeah, I mean, I think we've had a very long romance with rural aesthetics in this country. And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. denim is big western culture is big um snl this season had a a musical act on a hayloft in a hayloft real tree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world just uh for for people who might not know what is real tree oh it's um the hunting camouflage so it's like something all of our all All of our listeners will be very clued into hunting camouflage.

4:37Okay, where would you have seen it? You would have seen it on the merch of Chapel Rhone. She had a hat that said Midwestern princess. And again, Midwestern princess, I think, is part of this trend as well. And that was picked up by the Harris Walls campaign. If you recall, they did also have a hat. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so part of this is also, you know, these are cultural signifiers, but are there political undertones to these trends? Like, does it signify a left-right divide or geographical divide? You know, trends are trends and they're always cycling through. What matters is whether or not a trend hits a political moment.

5:22And that's what I would argue we have happening now. Now, you know, cowboy boots will circle right back around in 7, 10, 15 years, whatever. But we may not have the politics to imbue that trend at that moment as a political signifier. I have argued that this is one of those moments, however, where, yes, the cultural turn is mirroring the political turn. And as much as it is about like a real place. So when we're talking about being romantic for rural life, we're really talking about an imaginary place. Right. This isn't really the rural life that actual people who live in rural America tend to be familiar with.

5:58These are signifiers that are maybe less about a physical place, a geography. And I would say the divide is between nostalgia and today's politics. It manifests in many different ways. But when you say something like make America great, that's a backward looking vision, right? That is not about the future, although it's trying to own the idea of what the future should look like. But it is really calling to a nostalgia for an imagined American past where, you know, all families were quote unquote traditional and all women were real women and, you know, home life looked this way. So what happens is when that nostalgia is present, but the politics are also enabling a set of ideas that are mobilized through that culture.

6:46then I think we can say, all right, so the culture, yes, is reflecting something. And more importantly, the politics is trying to reflect the culture. And I think that's one of those things that we have happening right now. I think our culture generally moves by whoever we think is powerful at any given point in time. So we're very curious people, and we're also really interested in power and the stories of the people who we think are holding power. And that tends to shift with the narrative that we give our political moment. So when we have large elections and a narrative is built around the reason for whoever wins, we follow those guidelines, those guides within our culture.

7:33So, I mean, we look at kind of like how culture changed through the Clinton years and what was on TV and when. When the rural revolt happened in 94, we had a narrative around that that was about a shift in a rising conservative culture in this country, which was absolutely true. You know, narratives are based in truth, right? And our television shows followed that. We get shows like that Brett Butler show. Grace Under Fire. Grace Under Fire. Yeah. What happens in 96 is that Clinton wins again. And that upsets this narrative that we are in a moment of a dominant rural culture, and instead we have what is kind of a rural and urban culture mix.

8:33I'm glossing over a lot here. But if we think about our culture as kind of three different groups of storytelling, we have storytelling from Washington and what's coming out of our political narratives. We have storytelling coming out of our entertainment culture. And then we have storytelling coming out of our news and journalism. And how those mix, I think, is where our culture ends up landing. I mean, inherent to what I'm hearing from both of you is that a large part of this trend has to do with our political moment, which is the era of Trump. But Trump himself is kind of a New York City cultural icon.

9:17Emily, you wrote a piece for the opinion section about how he's dipped the White House in gold and nothing about his personal aesthetic seems very rural at all. To me, he's very much a city figure and always has been. But there's no denying the relationship between MAGA and the country aesthetic. Do you see that as a contradiction? No. Yeah, no, I don't see it as a contradiction. This is, again, about keeping in mind that when we talk about Donald Trump being a sort of a quintessential New York urban figure, that may be true in his biography. But we're not talking about real places when we talk about urban versus rural.

9:55And when you appeal to rural, you are always, always calling up the idea of urban. Right. These two things exist at the same time. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I would say that what Donald Trump does, the way he enters into the rural imagination is he does it through Southerness. Now, you can talk about the South. The South has plenty of urban places. You know, Atlanta is a major international city. But when we talk about the South, the way we would rural or urban as an idea, an imaginary, imagined place, a set of beliefs, what we mean is the South holds this idea of the quintessential past that we can be very romantic about, even when it's a dark romance, right?

10:40We're talking about slavery and violence and a civil war and all of that. It is still steeped in a romanticism. And I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southerness when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of, you know, genteel womanhood. All of those things that the South is kind of known for. They came in the figure of Donald Trump in his rhetoric anyway. You know, we keep this big treasure chest, a repertoire of ideas in the South. And when somebody wants to call them up, they can go and open the toy chest.

11:17And there it is. You can, you know, you can pull out the Confederate flag and you can pull out, you know, songs of the South or whatever it is. And suddenly people's imagination is in the South. Well, once you are in the South in the imagination, you are just a, if you'll forgive me, you are just a hayride away from rural America. And so those two things, I think, are happening simultaneously with Donald Trump. Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are for many, many reasons. And that's why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.

11:54Although I'd pay money to see Donald Trump in actual rural America for what it's worth. Well, have you seen him put on a cowboy hat? No, I have not. He's done it once. It doesn't work. It really doesn't work. I've got to see this. It looks, it doesn't fit. On that hair? Yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised. It's a look for sure. You know, Donald Trump, he shows the seams. You see where the makeup ends on his face. It's very clear that his hair is done by himself, right? And you see the grease in it. There's a photo of him where you see that he holds his tie together with tape. Oh, I just felt physical.

12:42That was so embodied. You know, and I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machine and in technology. and you know we think about our urban centers those that is where we produce a lot of our culture but it's also the center of our governments and it's also our financial centers and all of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self.

13:37And that is the schism, I think. So when I look at Trump, I think, yeah, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural because he's not slick. You know, like we look at Gavin Newsom, for example. And Gavin Newsom, to me, despite being... Contessential urban guy. Right. And I think it's just because he uses hair gel. I strongly agree. You know, like, and in the 90s, we were really having this battle between what we thought was virtuous and what we wanted to support as a nation. We made a choice that people with hair gel were the bad guys. Yeah. If you ever watch Mighty Ducks 2, you know that when you don't have hair gel, you are the hero, right?

14:24You're connected to nature. I mean, this is kind of going back to the debate about that's kind of the center of the American Revolution and the story of America. Like, what does the king represent? It represents a power that is not related to the rural struggle and the physical relationship to nature. I love this idea of Donald Trump, however, being manual as opposed to mechanical. Oh, yeah. He doesn't use a computer. The themes on him being manual is just absolutely fantastic. Yeah, he's very embodied in a time when everything from technology to this sort of end of rational science is very much enamored with being disembodied.

15:08The idea that, yeah, he shows up and his body is just so physically present does lend itself to thinking about people who work with hands and work with bodies, which is, yeah, it's fascinating. I wanted to talk a little bit about country music. Tressie, you've written extensively about country music. Do you think the renaissance of country music fits into this rural aesthetic? And like, what does it indicate about the politics at the moment, especially when it comes to race? Okay, but I got to, first of all, acknowledge, I saw what you did there. The renaissance and country music. Okay, so you're going to make me do it.

15:41Okay, so you're going to do the thing. Listen, we cannot get away from the fact that we are cycling through, again, And the trend in country music of moving between pop and country and these intracultural wars about authenticity are endemic to country music. So that part is not new. It has been true since its invention. Country music is invented as a consequence of anxiety about race. Right. You have to call it countries to separate it from what was, you know, at the time early R &B or quote unquote race music. But before even Beyonce does Cowboy Carter, there had been several years of Black artists, queer artists, Hispanic and Latino artists especially, who were trying to make a claim that country music was authentic for them as well.

16:27that I think produced a lot of anxiety in the industry. A lot of it, yes, about racism, whether or not you could sell country music to the typical country music listener, whether or not you could sell to that audience a sort of multicultural rural imagination panicked. A lot of people in the music industry who make a lot of money off of how easy it is to bracket what is and is not country music. At the same time that a political moment came along where there are a ton of political opportunists who are willing to take that anxiety and turn it into a cultural war. If anybody attended the Cowboy Carter concert, I did, one of the nights in Atlanta.

17:10There's a whole part of Beyonce's set where she's just playing people who are talking about how she is ruining the country through country music, right? They had leveled up the rhetoric of, you know, what was really just a pop album, but had leveled it up to the level of political discourse. And I really found that juxtaposition very interesting because when a Dolly Parton, you know, goes pop in the 70s and 80s, yes, it was considered a violation maybe of the genre's boundaries, but it wasn't considered a political challenge. The idea of someone like Beyonce doing it was seen as political. And a lot of that, I mean, I don't assume that that's in good faith.

17:50I think a lot of that is opportunism. But the fact is that we had that moment and you had so many political opportunities. That is about our political climate. I mean, my memory of that moment was going out to brunch with a friend of mine talking about the album. We were both listening to it nonstop. And she's saying to me, but she knows it's an election year, right? Like she's come out with a cowboy hat on. You know what that means, right? Oh, wow. Because when you look at when country hits the top of our billboard charts, for the last handful of decades, it means that Republicans are going to win, right?

18:32And there was this, like, sense that something was afoot in this nation that wasn't being spoken to in our current politics somehow if we were having country back on the table. So that's my memory of that moment. It was a pretty high anxiety moment, I think. And, you know, just keeping in line with that idea of when we see country, when we see cowboys, like are there other moments in history when cowboys in culture have been, you know, a flag of what's to come or a reflection of our political moments? Like how does the cowboy of it all fit in? Well, I want to start by saying that a trend is not causation necessarily, right?

19:17Shark attacks and ice cream sales are popular at the same time. It doesn't mean that they cause each other, right? But if you look at, for example, 1980, huge cowboy moment, there's a big cowboy moment, obviously, in the year 2000, before the Bush election, who himself wore cowboy. Yeah, he tried to embody a cowboy. Tried real hard. Yes, he did. The whole time. And then after Bush, it kind of went out of style, right? We kind of didn't have a lot of cowboy aesthetics during the Obama administration, during the second half, I'd say, of the Obama administration. We don't see a lot of cowboys. I think we do see a lot of interest in Washington and in finance and in tech.

20:18And in tech. And none of those stories, I mean, we look at like what's happening, what the stories that we start to tell about Washington, like House of Cards and Scandal and the stories we're telling are quite dark, right? It's about a place that is not virtuous. It's broken in some way. The cowboy figure is part of the rural imagination, but it's kind of distinct in a way because it is a thread of continuity between, you know, American manifest destiny and however in any political moment we want to borrow that framework to shape the future, however powerful interests want to shape it. So people, you know, power goes back and taps into the cowboy when it is saying there is some new horizon that we need to now capture, tame and own.

21:07And it is dangerous. The reason why we like the cowboy is it is safety in a dangerous world, right? The cowboy comes into a lawless land, always full of a dangerous other, whether it is indigenous people, whether it is immigrants, right? And they are there to stand in the gap where law may not be the best solution. that sometimes you got to do some extrajudicial murder. You know what I mean? And like, but it's somebody who you can trust because you trust his individual moral code. And that gives you some sense of safety and security. And I would argue that one of the reasons we're kind of tapping back into the cowboy figure, you know, shout out to Taylor Sheridan here.

21:46You know how much the Yellowstone is worth? Who timed the market to an immaculate degree. is that what we're looking at is, you know, I think so much of this is generated by a climate crisis anxiety of this sort of unknown horizon where we do not have law or norms yet to tell us how to manage. Like, we don't have any clear answers about how I'm supposed to manage all of this anxiety about this big scary thing that is coming and that is clearly going to threaten to change any way our way of life, not end it, but to change our way of life. The cowboy is the figure that says, no matter what happens, America will still come out on top.

22:29Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Taylor Sheridan. That's where I was going to go next because I think those TV shows very much have that anxiety of what the future has built into it. So the out-of-towners are moneyed tech people that are trying to take our land and change our way of life and change our cities And in the same sense, it's also that kind of idea of rugged individualism, you know, triumphing over these big corporations of people who are all working together to kind of take down the traditional idea of America. Every millionaire I know wants to be a cowboy. Authenticity is the one thing that money can't buy.

23:08So the good and evil characters in those shows are so clear cut in that way that it's really a strong distillation of exactly what you were describing, Tressie. Oh, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor. You know, when I think of like a popular artist who shaped, captured and shaped our understanding of the political moment in popular culture, Obama, it is Shonda Rhimes. I feel like Shonda Rhimes created this fictional universe that had all of Obama's personal and political qualities and the hopes we were projecting onto that into this fictional world, right? Right. Colorblind casting, you know, full of gender diversity, every kind of family imaginable.

23:48Right. The professionals and the elites were in charge, highly expert people, but they were still a little messed up like we were. So they were still relatable. You know, power is both distant and close. And we liked that idea. What Taylor Sheridan was right on time with is he produced a soap opera for Trump's America with all of its anxieties. And yes, this is this idea of now the dangerous others are both coming from outside the country, but also within. So internal migration now becomes a threat, which you now see how that gets leveled up to Trump's national homeland security policies, right?

24:24Picking up on those nuances and turning it into a soap opera is its own special kind of maybe dark gift. But like Taylor really captured it in his cinematic universe. Well, so where do we go from here culturally? You know, I know that this isn't one-to-one, but if Democrats are interested in trying to take back power at a presidential level, like, do they harness these cultural trends or do they buck against them? Well, I think that there's nothing in a trend that is inherently liberal or conservative in and of itself. What we're talking about, all of these trends have a lot of contradictions woven into them.

25:06Any aesthetic can be contextualized in a lot of different ways to communicate one's politics. How do the Democrats win using Realtree and cowboy hats? Is that the question? Yeah, I think it is. I think the question is, can Gavin Newsom win without changing his hair? Oh. I think that people all over this country want our representatives to fight for them and fight for their interests. And when they look at the national culture, and that's the propaganda and stories that are coming out of Washington and the stories that are coming out of Hollywood, and they don't see themselves in some way, they revolt and choose whoever is the opposite of what they're seeing.

25:59So I think that the stories that are coming out of this government right now, I don't know who sees themselves there. I truly don't. Because it isn't clear who it is they are actually fighting for. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting to consider the markers of these shifts as well. I mean, in a certain sense, does the recent blue wave indicate another aesthetic that we're about to experience? You know, I think about someone as magnetic, whether you like him or not, as Mamdani and whether that is going to change to some degree how people are perceiving these trends or if it's making a difference in this kind of era of nostalgia for a bygone America that maybe never existed.

26:54Maybe I'm asking you to trend forecast a little bit. Do you see something coming down the pipeline that's a little bit different than what we've been talking about? I'm with Emily. I think that I will know when the new character emerges and enters the national scene anyway. I think there are lots of really interesting figures regionally, at state level, that kind of thing politically. But I think when we're talking about a meta story or the single story, that's what a politician has to do, right? Especially in our fragmented media, mediatized world, it becomes harder and harder to do. That's one of the reasons why you can have someone, I think, as magnetic as a Mamdani, and it won't quite become sort of a national stock figure.

27:34It is very hard. The amount of charm and power you have to wed to compel a single audience out of our, you know, millions of tiny little media worlds, it gets harder every political cycle. And I think that's one of the things that at the level of storytelling, that's the Democrats' problem. And I feel like we'll know when that character falls from the sky. But I think the era of looking for the antihero is over or needs to end quickly. I think if we didn't learn anything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it should have been we can only metabolize so much darkness before people go reissue Superman.