The rise of a 21st-century Voldemort.
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The final installment of a three-part recap of the 2010s.
On the right, his victory was seen as cleansing retribution for the decadence of the Obama era.
Trump was the lens through which all else was viewed.
In the early months of 2017 you could not watch anacceptance speechor read amovie reviewwithout encountering his name.
Every public competition became an opportunity to psychologically replay the race.
Sometimes, as at theMoonlightversusLa La LandOscars, the good guys pulled off the last-minute victory.
There was a widespread sense that the world had been knocked off its axis.
The presidents governance encouraged this bang out of thinking.
With so much of society clearly rigged,scammingbecame a hallmark of the age.
Scammers were not aspirational figures, exactly, but nor were they necessarily scorned.
The strippers ofHustlerswere celebrated, while figures likeAnna DelveyandElizabeth Holmesbecame objects of fascination.
(It helped, too, that his hypebeast victims seemed almost fair prey.)
The election of a rank misogynist to the presidency could not help but have an effect on American women.
In the fall of 2017, many once-dominant men discovered just how potent this anger could be.
This sense that the past was up for continual reinterpretation was felt throughout popular culture.
The 90s in particular came under the microscope: In 2016, apairof critically acclaimedprojectsinvestigated the O.J.
Feminists reconsidered their earlier opinions ofMonica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt,andAndrea Dworkin.
The Trump era was also a time of trauma.
Society, too, increasingly focused on trauma.
(The title of a buzzy nonfiction book of the era reminded readersConflict Is Not Abuse.)
There was a notion, put forth subtly innovels likeA Little Life, and less subtly inM.
Night ShyamalansSplit, that trauma was a necessary precondition of a truly authentic life.
The celebrity who best personified these times was afive-foot-tall former child star from Boca Raton.
In the last half of the decade, the life of Ariana Grande was marred by frequent tragedy.
In 2017, the singers Manchester concert was the site of a terrorist attack that left 23 dead.
The following year, Grandes ex-boyfriend, the rapper Mac Miller, died of an opioid overdose.
In this era, new heroes and villains were being created every day.
And the right was equally capable of instrumentalizing outrage to target their ideological enemies.
The debates over cancelation also played into a widening generational gap.
Trumps election solidified the emerging consensus that the moderates had let the side down.
For politically engaged millennials,socialismwas not a dirty word,capitalismwas.
As always, commerce was ready to step in and exploit the new tastes of the young.
Box-office successes likeGirls TripandCrazy Rich Asiansdemonstrated that diversity, aside from its other virtues, was profitable.
But the fall of 2019 would reveal just how deep a modern corporations ideals ran.
What they showed was not pretty.
Can the small, the weird, the homemade survive in such a world?
I wish the children good luck in the decade to come.
But when will that decade start?
Stray Observations:
Scammers were not the only ones who could create their own reality.
By the end of the decade, independent film had been usurped as a driver of conversation by television.
In one tiny blessing, the nation spent this era terrified thatlow-rise jeans were about to make a comeback.
Thankfully, they never did.
