On Dan Gardner's "The Counterculture and Donald Trump"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to

Dan Gardner

. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

Like so many writers across the political spectrum, I pretend that George Orwell is my editor when I write. He bemoaned bad prose, with its “staleness of imagery" and “lack of precision.” His first complaint was the “dying metaphor”:

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead" has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

Forgive me, for I am about to use a dying metaphor. Worse, I spent much time literally drawing out that metaphor in the picture above. Because since reading Dan Gardner's essay about “The Counterculture and Donald Trump,” I’ve become preoccupied with the fabric of society.

Maybe I can get away with this, for I mean “the fabric of society” literally as well as metaphorically. Until reading Gardner's essay, I was unaware that protesters in 1960s America were sometimes arrested for wearing clothing depicting the American flag. Wait… what?! That’s free expression! You can't do that in America!

Of course, when counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing an American flag shirt in 1968, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 was as young as a preschooler. I am a patriot who believes that America is the best place in the world (apologies to Gardner, who is Canadian), but there is no denying that my country tends to fulfill her promises belatedly. So upon reflection, what really shocked me is how thoroughly we forgot the norms of recent history.

Sometimes it takes foreigners like Gardner to help Americans understand their country and themselves. When James Baldwin tried to escape America's unfulfilled promises by moving to Paris, he came to be “released from the illusion that I hated America.” He moved back home on the eve of the ‘60s counterculture — a decade in which he would come into his own as one of the great American essayists, while the Civil Rights movement that was meant to liberate him also sidelined him for being gay — and wrote “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American" in The New York Times:

This perpetual dealing with people very different from myself caused a shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held. The writer is meeting in Europe people who are not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different from his own. They may love or hate or admire or fear or envy this country — they see it, in any case, from another point of view, and this forces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken for granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable.

This freedom, like all freedom, has its dangers and its responsibilities. One day it begins to be borne in on the writer, and with great force, that he is living in Europe as an American. If he were living there as a European, he would be living on a different and far less attractive continent.

This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi-driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a cafe terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus. Or it may be the day on which someone asks him to explain Little Rock and he begins to feel that it would be simpler — and, corny as the words may sound, more honorable — to go to Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying to explain it.

This is a personal day, a terrible day, the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending. It is the day he realizes that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself — for America.

Just as Baldwin learned what it meant to be an American from living among the French, Americans today can learn from Gardner's Canadian point-of-view. He asserts that the American counterculture of the ‘60s has culminated in the MAGA counterculture of today. Wait… what?! Those are opposing political tribes! You can't lump hippies in with MAGA!

And yet, Gardner presents two clarifying parallels:

Look at the merchandise bought, worn, and waved by Trump Republicans, while bearing in mind the tropes of the 1960s-era counterculture, and you may not think history is repeating. But it sure is rhyming.

One parallel is that both countercultures have expressed defiance by clothing themselves in the American flag. I suspect that Gardner is correct when he writes that younger Americans are largely unaware that Republicans once despised these outfits. He taught me that “Hippies often turned the American flag into articles of clothing because The Man considered that sacrilege.” While Hoffman was getting arrested, the police tore the American flag shirt off his back. No one would get arrested for wearing the flag today, but few American leftists would ever do so, lest they be mistaken for a Trump voter.

If countercultures aim to unravel the existing fabric of society, then the metaphorical value of wearing the American flag transcends mere transgression. When American countercultures don the flag, they communicate an intent to weave the threads of our torn social fabric back together in their own image. This gesture is a threat or a promise, depending on which side of the culture war you belong.

Gardner's other parallel is profanity:

This was not the first time Trump turned a formal speech into a profane call-and-response game with his audience. This June, while speaking in a church — a church, please note — Trump turned to one of his favourite topics, the criminal charges against him. “I won’t say it, because I don’t like using the word ‘bullshit’ in front of these beautiful children,” he said. Then (“to Mr. Trump’s glee,” noted The Times) the crowd started chanting “bullshit.” In church, I remind you. In front of those beautiful children.

These Trump rallies remind Gardner of hippie protests:

In 1968, the Yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman wrote “fuck” on his forehead before attending a public protest. Hoffman was promptly arrested and charged with obscenity. That is the clash between the “counterculture” and “The Man” in microcosm. …

And The Man despised obscene language. In 1968, if you said words like “ass” or “shit” too loudly in public, you could be admonished by a police officer. Or fined. And if you said “fuck” at the wrong place and wrong time, well, put your hands behind your back, long-hair.

Wait… what?! That’s free speech! You can't do that in America! Well, apparently you could before the counterculture re-wove the American social fabric in its own image. Come to think of it, I suspect it is no coincidence that the famously misremembered U.S. Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States was partially overturned in 1969, soon after the counterculture had begun its work.

Many who admonish “You can't shout fire in a crowded theater!” are unaware that they are parroting a paraphrased Supreme Court judgment that successfully prosecuted Charles Schenck for protesting the draft in World War I. After this judicial precedent was backtracked in ‘69, the idea that an American citizen could be prosecuted for challenging a controversial government policy is widely, decidedly, and rightly considered un-American. Nowadays, inflammatory language can only be prosecuted if proven to have incited imminent violence. Such proof must clear an exceedingly high bar in contemporary American law — this is why it was so unlikely that Trump would be prosecuted for the violence of January 6.

However crude, the counterculture may have helped America fulfill her promise that citizens would not be prosecuted for speaking their minds, even with vulgarity. Gardner continues:

Obscene words were so explosive in mainstream society that book publishers and newspapers often refused to print them, either out of fear of legal repercussions or sincere belief that they were indecent and coarsened society, no matter what the context of their use. In 1948, when The Naked and The Dead was published, Norman Mailer’s brutally explicit look at soldiers fighting and dying in the Second World War never used the word “fuck.” In its place was “fug.” As if a young man shouted “fug!” when shrapnel tore off his foot.

As late as 1974, when the Watergate investigation forced the White House to release Richard Nixon’s secret recordings of conversations in the Oval Office, the Associated Press warned newspapers that its story would include the curse words Nixon was heard speaking. They included “shit,” “asshole,” “bastards,” and “sons-of-bitches.” (Tellingly, they did not include “fuck.” Apparently, that word was too much for Nixon, even ranting in private.) The AP surveyed newspapers to see what they chose to publish. Thirty percent included all the curse-words — a watershed moment in the history of the news — but more than half blanked out most of the profanity while 15% spared America the sight of all the bad words.

The very fact that the mainstream culture found obscene words so appalling — while that culture celebrated so much the counterculture found appalling — made it essentially inevitable that the counterculture would embrace obscenity at every opportunity. As Colonel Kurtz murmurs darkly in Apocalypse Now, released in 1979 but set in the Vietnam War, “we train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

That’s why Hoffman wrote “fuck” on his forehead.

It seems to me that this part of the countercultural legacy is a mark of maturity, akin to the way we self-censor in front of children but speak freely among other adults. It is unbecoming to treat adults like children. Substituting “fuck” with “fug” in a serious depiction of war offends me when the real profanity would not, given the implication that portraying actual torment is less ghastly than a mere word. Moreover, reading “fug” makes me laugh at a silly, made-up word while I’m trying to contemplate the gravest of topics. By attempting to obscure the true soundtrack of war, mealy-mouthed censors disrespect the full extent of each casualty's suffering.

I'm of a mind with comedian Louis C. K. in his offensive words bit:

Everybody has different words that offend them, different things that they hear that they get offended by. To me, the thing that offends me the most, is every time that I hear “the n-word.” Not “nigger,” by the way, I mean “the n-word.” Literally. Whenever a white lady on CNN with nice hair says “the n-word” — that's just white people getting away with saying “nigger”! That's all that is! They found a way to say “nigger.”

It's bullshit, because when you say “the n-word" you put the word “nigger” in the listener's head. That's what saying a word is. You say “the n-word” and I go “oh, she means ‘nigger’” — you're making me say it in my head! Why don't you fucking say it instead, and take responsibility for the shady words you want to say. Just say it, don't hide behind the first letter like a faggot. Just say “nigger,” you stupid cunt.

Mature adults understand words in context and parse intent. Those who blanche every time people utter particular syllables, regardless of meaning, are thoughtless. Such people treat symbols as more consequential than substance, so that their unthinking reflex empowers the very words they abhor.

Nowadays, it is the American left that bristles at profanity while the American right delights at offending its rival. Just as Hoffman flipped the bird while wearing his American flag shirt, MAGA counterculture waves “Trump 2024” flags emblazoned with “Fuck your feelings” and wears star-spangled shirts depicting Trump with two middle fingers raised above slogans like “ARREST THIS" and “INDICT THIS.” Gardner notes:

It’s not merely the presence of the obscenity — on an object to be displayed in public, mind you — that is telling in the flag above, and in so much Trump merchandise. It’s the obvious spirit of transgression and rejection. As with the long-ago counter-culture, the raised middle finger is very much on display. Figuratively. But also literally. MAGA calls it “the swamp.” The New Right calls it “The Regime.” In either case, change it to “The Man” and both the sentiment and the image are startlingly familiar. …

A stunning image of the 2016 election, which I won’t share (you’re welcome), features a woman at a Trump rally held after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. She wears a hand-made t-shirt that reads “Trump can grab my” with a big red arrow pointing to her crotch. She’s grinning happily. In 1968 — or 1988 — she would have been arrested and hauled away, to the applause of Republicans. But today’s Republicans? They applaud for a different reason.

Alas, they do not celebrate the kind of thoughtful rhetorical nuance that I just insisted upon. To the contrary, the Access Hollywood tape was not offensive because Trump used a naughty word; it was offensive because he bragged about leveraging his celebrity to sexually assault women. The substance of his words was disgusting, and that would still be the case if he had used a more polite term than “pussy” to express himself.

Gardner notices a different kind of rhetorical sophistication at work in America’s countercultural profanity:

I also strongly suspect that Trump’s embrace of obscenity is not simply the result of a vulgar man expressing himself in a way he feels comfortable with. It’s tactical. The use of obscene words has long functioned as a way of suggesting, “just between us, let’s speak frankly, without the usual filters.” That’s part of what made it effective, half a century ago, for people like Gloria Steinem to drop in a “shit” now and then. It wasn’t only that they were identifying themselves with the counterculture. They were saying, “I’m setting aside bourgeois norms of polite talk and giving it to you straight.” In the right hands, that can feel like authenticity, and sincerity is compelling. This helps explains the paradox that so many Trump supporters say they know the man is a bullshitter and a liar, but insist he is also a straight-talker.

But that’s a hypothesis for another day.

For now, let’s simply declare the long war over: The counterculture won.

Gardner's observations are like a horseshoe theory of American counterculture. The horseshoe theory posits that the far-left and far-right actually resemble each other much more than their respective moderate wings, so that the political spectrum is not a straight line from left to right, but a U-shaped curve wherein the extreme ends bend toward each other, far away from the center. In the horseshoe theory of American counterculture, spouting obscenity and wearing the flag are tactics used by both the left- and right-wing permutations.

If the counterculture succeeded in weaving our social fabric into its own image, then what does it mean to be an American now? In my estimation, James Baldwin was one of the wisest Americans to comment on our culture, so I return to his essay for advice. He began that NYT piece on American identity by describing its fractures:

“It is a complex fate to be an American,” Henry James observed, and the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex this fate is. America's history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world — yesterday and today — are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America" remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.

I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.) I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them. (I was as isolated from Negroes as I was from whites, which is what happens when a Negro begins, at bottom, to believe what white people say about him.)

In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris. Like me, they had been divorced from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African — they were no more at home in Europe than I was.

The fact that I was the son of a slave and they were the sons of free men meant less, by the time we confronted each other on European soil, than the fact that we were both searching for our separate identities. When we had found these, we seemed to be saying, why, then, we would no longer need to cling to the shame and bitterness which had divided us so long.

It became terribly clear in Europe, as it never had been here, that we knew more about each other than any European ever could.

If American leftists today try to escape our problems by joining Gardner in Canada, as many have loudly contemplated ever since Trump won his first term, then they may find each other the way Baldwin found his compatriots in France. True, Canadians resemble us far more than the French do. But even in Ottawa, perceptive expats will discover together how very American they are.

Yet the wisest among us will still wrestle with their words when they try to describe what it means to be an American now that the counterculture has won. Perhaps more than ever, America contains multitudes that resist easy elucidation. As I mull over this question in the coming years, and try to write well about America, I will imagine that James Baldwin is my editor:

American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity. This is a rich confusion, indeed, and it creates for the American writer unprecedented opportunities. …

Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are. In a society much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them, it will be no easy matter.

Our enormous challenge during Trump's second term will be accepting Baldwin's wisdom that we need not cling to the shame and bitterness that divides us now, and that our polarized political tribes share far more in common than they realize. Gardner's essay on the strange parallels between our hippie and MAGA countercultures is but a starting point for noticing our bipartisan similarities. Here is one more example of how MAGA echoes the hippies: some of Trump’s high-profile nominees for key government positions would be just as comfortable on the far-left in the ‘60s.

Listen to peacenik Tulsi Gabbard arguing just three days after Russia invaded Ukraine that “It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect, and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country.” As Eli Lake recently pointed out:

She uttered those words when Ukraine was at risk of extinguishment by the Russian army. There was no room for both sides at that moment. The Ukrainians were the victims; the Russians were the aggressors. And yet Gabbard believed Russia should be rewarded by preemptively closing off Ukraine’s prospect of joining NATO’s defensive alliance, even after the country had historically been invaded and starved by its powerful neighbor. No thanks.

Back in the ‘60s, American leftists were making excuses for that era’s repressive Russian regime and demanding peace regardless of geopolitical reality; today, it is Trump’s nominee for the director of national intelligence. Similarly, his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., promises that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end” and “its aggressive suppression of psychedelics” tops his list of grievances. Groovy, man.

Full disclosure: I voted for Kamala Harris and feel repulsed by much in MAGA culture. But perhaps because I grew up on American army posts in South Korea and Italy, and therefore shared Baldwin's experience of learning what it means to be American in foreign countries, I still feel a kinship with my friends and family who support Trump — and I urge you to recognize our common bonds, too, so that we may share the burden of repairing our tarnished social fabric.

This does not entail simply forgiving the sins of either political party and their supporters. There should be no sugarcoating our memory of MAGA goons brutally assaulting Congress in hopes of thwarting the peaceful transfer of power — a once unprecedented attack against our liberal democracy — while Trump watched the savagery play out on TV and ignored his own advisors’ and family’s pleas to intervene. Nor should we forgive Joe Biden for pardoning his son after emphatically promising that he would not, which degrades the American justice system to benefit a man who avoided paying millions of tax dollars while making a living by conning foreign oligarchs into compensating him for perceived access to his father. Even if our legal system cannot prosecute these men, the court of public opinion should unequivocally condemn them. When James Baldwin discovered what it meant to be American, he did not just brush aside the obscene racism of Jim Crow America, but used his newfound patriotism and brotherly love to help us find our better angels.

Our counterculture, from hippies to MAGA, has delighted in transgression and provocation. Such impulses diminish America by exacerbating the disgust we too often feel for one another. We need to start treating each other with enough kindness to repair the fabric of our society.

If this seems naïve to you, then consider: James Baldwin overcame his hatred for America in an era when our country had fulfilled far fewer of her promises — so if you cannot emulate him today, in an America much improved by his efforts, then you are a coward.

Cowards cannot help stitch our torn social fabric back together. Move to Canada to discover what it means to be an American, if you must. Return to the home of the brave once you're ready to pick up your sewing needles.