This is an update of my first post Aug. 31, 2024, experimenting with Substack, and no subscribers. If not prophetic, it’s at least worth repeating as we witness what we hope is the unravelling of what may be America’s first Postmodern presidency. Photo: May 25, 2025 No Kings rally.
If you are old enough to remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, that is a marker of its early years, the Postmodern Era. If you remember what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, that is a marker of the beginning of its decline.
In these times of political division and information overload, often obscuring truth, it’s sometimes helpful to step back and seek the big picture, cultural paradigms, or eras. (About disinformation, see my Oct. 2 post, “Disinformation vs. democracy – Attack from within, abetted by digital technology.”)
If you remember 1963, you probably have some recollection of the preceding years. The Modern Era extended into the 1950s. There was unity following World War II, economic growth, hope for the future, a common understanding of society’s norms and values, facts were facts and truth the ideal. Nostalgia for those days, including their dark side, appears to underlie the so-called MAGA sentiment today.
A web search about the Postmodern Era shows much information and conjecture about the 1960-2000 years where cynicism, skepticism, irony and subjective truth characterized much of culture and politics. The Vietnam War, Watergate, economic recession, Reaganomics, the digital age combined in a deluge that drowned the ideals of the Modern Era.
Of course, eras overlap. Modern, Postmodern, and now Metamodern, are names for paradigms that help us understand culture and society. All of their defining characteristics continue, while attention shifts to the one that currently predominates. Today the consensus turns to the Metamodern paradigm, which revives hope, truth, and resolution.
Donald Trump has been called “America’s First Postmodern President,” (Jeet Heer, The New Republic, July 18, 2017). While the MAGA populist movement had been underway years before, it finally broke into the White House. This populist movement has no ideology other than worship of a charismatic, self-serving entertainer, who infects his base with a feeling of power against the elites.
“Trump’s ascendance is no accident. He’s the culmination of our epoch of unreality,” says the Jeet Heer article’s subhead… “As the president regularly decries ‘the Fake News Media’ and journalists catalogue his many lies, the battles of our time seem not just political but philosophical, indeed epistemological: What is real? How do we reach a consensus on the truth?”
Metamodern ascending
Many scholars now point to the so-called Metamodern Era gaining ascendence. Basically, it’s a return to Modern Era values of truth, hope, progress, while maintaining a healthy skepticism. Much of the conversation has been going on in the academic and literary worlds for about two decades.
Today we are seeing these positive values in the momentum among ordinary Americans pushing back against the chaos in an administration that threatens the fundamental beliefs and values on which our nation was built: Constitution, rule of law, justice, public service, voting and civil rights, moral character, freedom of speech and religion, and plain decency.
“Postmodernism died around 20-30 years ago, but academic fools in universities keep teaching it as if it were the latest revelation,” says Jeshel Forrester, an American author who now lives in New Zealand. “Metamodernism goes by many names – metamodernism is the best – but basically it’s about not throwing out the baby of modernism with the bathwater of postmodernism. Synthesis is the key, with discernment.”
My introduction to the Metamodern paradigm came from research for my novels. While striving for meaningful themes, realistic problems, and positive outcomes, I felt out of step with the Postmodern paradigm dominating literature. Metamodernism is a worldview that combines the modern faith in progress with the postmodern critique, says Gregg Henriques in Psychology Today, April 17, 2020.
“As distinct from Modernism, which seeks truth through human inventiveness and rationality, and from Postmodernism, which is skeptical of any sort of universalized, objective truth, and tends to contextualize away individual subjectivity, Metamodernism finds truth in interiority, in felt experience,” writes Greg Dember in his 2024 book, Say Hello to Metamodernism. This evokes Descartes in updated terms, “I experience, therefore I am.”
Postmodern counterattack
If Nine Eleven shocked us out of the Postmodern morass, and if the Obama presidency embodied Metamodern values (Yes We Can, Change We Can Believe In, Winning the Future, Greater Together), today we must unite vigorously against the Postmodern counterattack from Trumpism.
Like the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when fascist Germany counter-attacked the prevailing Allied forces in World War II, Donald Trump is at the head of a counterattack against truth, hope, and progress. These values were rekindled in the wake of Nine Eleven as Americans rallied together against international terrorism.
Today the terrorism comes from within, and abetted by foreign adversaries (Russia, Iran, North Korea, China). It has found a home in the so-called MAGA populism. Ironically, its adherents long for the values perceived in the past Modern Era, faith, family, fortune, progress. At the human level, from whatever camp, we all wish for those good things.
Yet, the figurehead of MAGA couldn’t care less about those good things. Thankfully, with renewed vigor from the majority of Americans who still believe in democracy, it feels like Trumpism is fading in a last gasp of the political Postmodern Era.
Good riddance to both, and hello to the Metamodern Era, where faith, facts, truth, decency, and hope prevail.
