Three days before President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks published a column linking the new president to the long history of “carnival culture,” the age-old festive tradition in which hierarchies are temporarily suspended and social norms are openly flouted. Such practices, Brooks noted, have historically allowed for common people to reassert themselves in periods of oppressive stratification. In the Middle Ages, Brooks wrote, “carnival culture was raw, lascivious and disgraceful, and it elevated a certain social type, the fool,” Today, amid “exactly the kinds of injustices that lead to carnival culture … we’ve crowned a fool king,” he said.
Anyone familiar with the works of William Shakespeare will know that this was not as unflattering an assessment of Trump as ordinary usage might imply. The fools who figure crucially in plays such as Twelfth Night and King Lear emerge from the ethos of carnival culture that dates from the Middle Ages. What they say is outrageous, hyperbolic, contorted, and obscure, but their obscene interjections often expose realities that their more respectable counterparts cannot acknowledge. Likewise, per Brooks, Trump’s Twitter presence is “raw, ridiculous and frequently self-destructive,” but the real “point is not the message of the tweet” but “to symbolically upend hierarchy.”
Hierarchical societies such as that of medieval Europe could tolerate the fool’s insolence because of his fixed marginal status. Similarly, the seasonal carnival’s overturning of norms was permissible because it was clearly delimited by custom. According to some theories, the destabilizing effects of carnival culture served a stabilizing social function over the long term. By functioning as a release valve, the carnival allowed social pressures to spill out into the open within well-defined limits.
But what happens when the carnival’s topsy-turviness becomes integrated into ordinary life? The Trump era might be seen as a live experiment revealing the fallout of carnivalesque misrule becoming the rule. In early 2017, Brooks’s column, naively, in retrospect, counseled that pundits avoid confusing the “carnival level” of the president’s persona with the “presidential level.” Coverage should focus, he cautioned, on “what he does, not what he says and tweets.”
But carnival means the blurring of distinctions, and when carnivalesque logic holds sway, any boundaries, including the ones Brooks wanted to maintain, will be transgressed. Moreover, precisely because of Trump’s status as a symbolic lord of misrule, many of the most influential things he did were things he said and tweeted. His provocations, insults, and boasts set the agenda.
The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin was the most influential modern theorist of carnival culture. In his account, the invariable target of its festive subversion is the “official culture” that dominates any given society. In the Middle Ages, this was the culture of the church and the nobility, whose pretensions could be periodically undermined by carnivalesque subversions. Today, our culture is the culture of the Acela corridor media and political class. Ensconced within the heart of this culture, our fool king has systematically violated all of its taboos for the past four years.
According to Bakhtin, the official culture’s toleration of carnival culture depended on it being “separated by strict temporal boundaries.” That is, “the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities” only lasted for the duration of the festive season. The carnival blurred all distinctions except for the line between the brief period of permissive excess and the rest of the year, during which the usual prohibitions held sway. What we have seen in the Trump era, in contrast, is a continuous, indiscriminate mixing of official culture and its carnivalesque opposite.
In response to the president’s absurdist masquerade, the solemn rituals of the official culture also adapted. Consummate insiders lost the serene self-assurance they had once projected. Permanent denizens of the Beltway establishment refashioned themselves as “the resistance.” They presided over a series of public gatherings that all hovered somewhere between a three-ring circus and an evangelical tent revival, creating a strange fusion of the “dogmatism, reverence, and piety” that Bakhtin sees in “official culture” with a carnivalesque spirit of defiant opposition.
Consider a peculiar relic of the material culture of the Trump era: the “pink pussyhat.” This item embodies the contradictions of the countercarnival celebrated by the anti-Trump resistance. In a classic carnivalesque manner, it symbolically brought genitalia and animality into the public square. But the aim was not to celebrate unbridled sexuality. Rather, it was to draw attention to its risks and harms. Its handmade quality seems to make it a manifestation of popular art, but it also embodied the elite taste for Etsy handicrafts. (Its approximate ideological counterpart, the MAGA hat, indelibly linked the solemn office of the presidency to a cheap consumer good.)
The paroxysms of the oppositional official culture reached their peak in 2020. Its enthusiastic support for lockdowns and social distancing in response to the coronavirus pandemic amounted to the anti-carnivalesque crackdown. Early in the year, the political and media classes often seemed to take puritanical relish in stigmatizing the mingling of bodies and shaming disobedience of expert authority. And yet, by summer, the position had shifted dramatically. Many of those who had insisted on lockdowns now celebrated the massive gatherings in opposition to the sanctioned agents of social order. They even justified and provided cover for riots that inflicted destruction in numerous cities.
The Biden administration has sold itself, above all, as a restoration of the “official culture” that found itself perpetually flummoxed over the past four years. It promises to bring back the staid rule of experts that was also the Obama administration’s self-image, if not always its reality. But the subversive spirit that has overtaken our political life seems unlikely to retreat anytime soon.
The corrosion of norms has been accelerated by Trump’s unique public persona, but it is now a bipartisan affair. Official culture is irreparably contaminated by its nominal antagonist: the carnival culture. Moreover, the gaping inequality that triggered the latter’s emergence in the Obama era has severely worsened due to the fallout of the pandemic. Far from an anomaly, our lame-duck carnival king may prove to be a harbinger of even greater destabilization to come.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
