"The Sixties set the stage, the players and the rhetorical range of cultural life. The counterculture became a co-culture, then..."

"... a co-opted culture and eventually a co-opting culture. Cool was absorbed by consumerism, and became a manufactured good, like the battle between liberals and conservatives, or fights between the sexes. The old ferocity and subversiveness was bought off, lobotomized and placed in a zoo. Over half a century, the quality of the animals on display declined. Lenny Bruce became Hannah Gadsby, Joan Baez became Taylor Swift and Malcolm X became Ibram X. Kendi.... There was no Cool left in America by the time the Trump era began, just noise....  Over there: howling patriots, conspiracy lunatics, Nazi bodybuilders, militarized trolls, hustlers and grifters. Over here: brittle liberal worthies, nerds, meritless meritocrats, academic Torquemadas, trust-funded podcasters, pseudoscientific TED speechifiers, hysterical talking heads and way too many lawyers. Not to mention all the creepy racists, the OnlyFans fans, the ‘wine o’clock’ mothers, the whining, weepy- kneeling athletes, the hate-crime fakers, the wannabe Bolsheviks, the acorn-brained influencers, the over-exposed YouTubers, Jerry Falwell Jr’s pool boy, Bret Stephens versus the 1619 Project....  [A]ll the psychotic grouplets of American life studied each other incestuously, searching for their enemies’ blunders and fails.... Cool was an impossibility... Awkwardness and shame brooded over the land...."

From "From Cool to Cringe: what’s happened to American culture?/From Miles D to Cardi B" by Will Lloyd (The Spectator).