The Counterculture and Donald Trump

The long culture war is over, the counterculture won, and Donald Trump is conservatives' final humiliation.

Donald Trump has never been shy about swearing in public but he’s really been dialling it up of late.

From a New York Times story about a recent Trump rally:

“Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.”

Many in his audience — which was mostly made up of adults but included some children, infants and teenagers — eagerly filled in the blank, shouting, “Shit!”

Minutes later, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Ms. Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president.”

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.

I’m a history nerd. I’m also an aficionado of offensive language, its constantly evolving role, and what that evolution says about social change. And I think Trump’s use of profanity and obscenity tells us a great deal, and not only about the mainstream embrace of words once verboten.

It tells us that a great cultural clash that started in the 1960s has concluded. That clash originally pitted the “counterculture” against The Man, to use the terms of the 1960s, but as it evolved in the 1970s through the 1990s, it became a fight between liberals and conservatives. Today, in Donald Trump and his fervent followers, we can see the war is well and truly over.

Conservatives lost.

In fact, it was a rout. Conservatives were crushed and swept from the field.

If that sounds confusing — Trump being the undisputed leader of the avowedly conservative party — it’s only because you are stuck in the perspective of 2024.

To see the full story, we need to go back more than half a century and work our way forward.

Abbie Hoffman, 1968, arrested (this time) for wearing an American flag shirt. His later description of the arrest: “Well, the police approached me, and proceeded to rip the shirt. There was a struggle. I was trying to get the Yo-Yo off my finger. They got the Yo-Yo, see, and it was pulling my finger. It hurt. My wife saw that I was struggling and tried to come to my aid a little, and then a whole fracas broke out, in which the police ripped the shirt off my back.”

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.

For counterculture figures like Hoffman, “The Man” (aka “The Establishment” and “The System”) was shorthand for the mainstream, bourgeois-dominated culture, institutions, and government they loathed.

The Man sent kids to Vietnam. The counterculture marched against the war.

The Man loved mainstream news media and Hollywood and patriotism. The counter-culture mocked it all. Hippies often turned the American flag into articles of clothing because The Man considered that sacrilege.

The Man hated marijuana and long hair. The counterculture made both its symbols, which explains why a musical opposing the Vietnam War was entitled Hair. (“Give me a head with hair. Long beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen.”)

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.

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.

He knew it would outrage The Man and get him arrested. He was all about outraging The Man and getting arrested.

Abbie Hoffman, 1968; photograph by Richard Avedon

Obscenity became a badge of membership in the counterculture. “The technical definition of women’s work, as we all know, is shit work,” Gloria Steinem said in a 1974 speech. The placement of the “shit” is key. Coming at the end, it’s the punchline, the shock, the stick-it-to-The Man moment. You see something like this constantly in the language of countercultural figures. It appals the bourgeoisie. But just as importantly, it assures your audience that you are a rebel in good standing.

In 1972, when George Carlin first delivered his famous “seven deadly words” monologue, it wasn’t merely funny. It was transgressive. It was shocking. It made people gasp. It even got him arrested and charged with “disorderly conduct.” But it was also a huge hit — a sign that the counter-culture’s take on obscenity was percolating into the mainstream. (It helped that Carlin was brilliant and his wordplay was so undeniably clever that even the man who took a radio station to court for playing the routine on air admitted that it made him laugh. Proof of how funny Carlin was lies in the fact that even now, long after the old taboos have been forgotten, his routine is still hilarious.)

In the 1970s through the 1990s, as the themes and attitudes of the counterculture were increasingly adopted by the mainstream left, obscenity became another battlefront between conservatives and liberals. And as the Republican Party increasingly purged itself of liberals, while the Democratic Party shed its conservatives, the same clash increasingly became a contest between Republicans and Democrats.

Conservatives/Republicans fought a litany of battles to suppress pornography, pot, and profanity. But they steadily lost ground. And the standards they struggled to uphold shifted along with the culture. What was once received wisdom among conservatives — like prosecuting someone for writing “fuck” on his forehead — became an extreme position and then vanished altogether. I doubt many of today’s younger Republicans even know that swearing in public, or wearing clothing with the American flag, were despised by Republicans not so long ago.

Even marijuana is now, among conservatives, largely a matter of indifference. Or enthusiasm.

Which brings me to Donald Trump’s potty mouth.

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.

Name an obscene word and you can find it on pro-Trump merchandise. Even the word Abbie Hoffman wrote on his forehead.

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.

If you don’t understand the following image, I’m sorry, I don’t have the heart to explain it. (If you must, Google “hawk tuah girl.”) Or better, simply take my word for it that this is the most extreme manifestation of what Republicans denounced for decades as “obscene,” “vulgar,” and “immoral.”

I could go on but, really, there’s no need, is there? Just look around the crowd at any Trump rally.

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.

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. Conservatives lost.

And Donald Trump is waving a “fuck your feelings” flag over the ruins of what Republicans spent decades fighting to defend.