American Pop Culture came into being out of the nationwide hunger for entertainment in the form of nationally distributed music, movies, sporting events, and prime-time television shows. But it is no longer dependent on these categories of spectacle for its legitimacy except in a secondary sense. All it requires now to exist is celebritydom.
Pop music has been in decline since the 1980s. Actual performed and recorded music has long been usurped in national importance by news and events about musicians. The direct influence of individual television programs likewise peaked in the 1970s, when each episode of prime time programming had to function as a self-contained story. People continue to watch, but individual movies and television shows have been eclipsed within the public attention by their respective awards shows, which in turn have been supplanted by commentary about the awards shows themselves, and reaction to that commentary, and so on.
People still listen to music, of course, but the canon of pop music has been closed for years, with only a few minor additions allowed. The canon itself has long since been relegated the soundtrack for movie trailers and television commercials selling consumer products. People listen to their niche Spotify feeds alone with their headphones. Contemporary pop music itself exists primarily to justify the existence of pop stars whose names are among the most famous names in the world, even as many people could not sing a note of their music.
Music, television shows, and other spectacle of Pop Culture now exist primarily to justify celebritydom. We have, effectively, only one television program, the episodes of which are carried by all mainstream broadcast networks in various form, whether as news, entertainment, or sports. It a giant, never-ending, round-the-clock backstage reality program in which the galactic cast includes all of the famous people in celebritydom, playing themselves with overlapping and interweaving plot lines. Most of the cast is allowed to extemporize most of their lines, opining on anything they want. They stay within the cast so long as they do this correctly, receiving the right cues from other celebrities. At sufficient frequency they may perform the nominal activities which made them famous to begin with---releasing an album, publishing a book, winning a sports championship, or starring in a movie---although this is increasingly optional.
Show me someone's Twitter feed and I can tell you their political leanings without reading any of the words directly. Which other users do they retweet, or comment upon? I don't want to know the names they retweet. Just tell which whether the list of voices they choose to amplify are dominated by users with a coveted blue verification badge, i.e. the ones that Twitter staff deem worthy of the designation of a public figure. If so, then that person is almost certainly a progressive. For progressives it is important that we all listen to the right voices, by which they mean the right well-known voices. Hey y'all, check this out. Why retweet nobody's tweet, no matter how eloquent and on-point, when a famous person's tweet saying providing an equivalent message is available, one that carries the imprimatur of celebritydom?
Political journalism and screenwriting have merged. In recent presidential debates, one could hear the candidates insist repeatedly on their desire for national unity. Can't we be unified again as a nation, they asked? By this vague statement they mean unified in listening to the same celebrity voices, while the dissenting ones are confined to the oblivion of non-coverage.
The cultural political goals sought by the Left demand first and foremost their adoption within the sphere of Pop Culture, with the assumption that this will seep into everyday over time.
Decades ago, self-described liberals decried the conflation of political leadership with celebritydom. They made fun of this in their comedy. They decried the "manufacture" of public opinion, and "selling-out." There are fewer complaints about this situation these days---at least not believable ones. Corporate media becomes its own opposition by hosting the debates that attack corporate power in a way that increases it. And of course there is no comedy but mocking.
Cultural conservatives, so long as they choose to accept the ground rules of Pop Culture, have no defense against it. Few spectacles have been more pathetic to watch over the last fifty years than the cultural conservatives waging their rear-guard retreat, ceding territory from Pop Culture to the Left.
Just as the victory of the progressives within Pop Culture is now utter and complete, so is the victory of Pop Culture in becoming the undisputed axis of American culture itself. What used to be mainstream American culture is now a subculture exiled from Pop Culture's ecology. It is a subculture that the Left has grudgingly tolerated up until now, but various reasons, now seeks to annihilate.
It could never have been any other way, I would assert. But of course I am a die-hard McLuhanian.
"I'd rather live in any period (of history), if they would leave it alone for a while."
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