Pop culture went MAGA before the election did

Earlier this year, conservatives on social media claimed an unlikely new icon. It wasn’t a podcaster with questionable views or a libertarian businessman selling a course or any particular ideology. It was actress Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria star and the recent lead of the rom-com Anyone But You. 

Following her hosting gig on Saturday Night Live in March, two conservative outlets published columns heralding Sweeney as a return to conventional beauty standards of the ’90s and early 2000s — or as, Bridget Phetasy for the Spectator put it, “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” Both pieces postulate that, by wearing low-cut dresses and playing up her sexuality, Sweeney was inviting men to gawk at her, therefore raising a middle finger to “woke culture” and the Me Too movement. 

Sweeney hasn’t publicly aligned herself with the right in any way. (Her family’s politics, though, were the subject of controversy in 2022, which may have something to do with the right’s eager embrace of her.) Rather, her ascension as a throwback-y, hyper-feminine sex symbol has given conservatives the rare mainstream Gen Z figure on whom to project their values. For those paying close attention, the past year was rife with springboards for the conservative message.

In the hindsight following Trump’s reelection, it seems the zeitgeist of 2024 was a foreshadowing of his return to office and something forecasters might have considered a little more seriously. “Bro country” singers became the artists de jour, going head-to-head with female pop singers on the charts and, in many cases, outperforming them. The buzziest new reality shows were about Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and Mormon TikTokers. Conservative films from smaller distributors, like the biopic Reagan and Daily Wire documentary Am I Racist?, made millions at the box office. Nominally apolitical podcasters and streamers, from Joe Rogan to the Nelk Boys, hosted presidential candidates and took on an increasingly political valence. 

It’s a sharp turn from the liberal-coded pop culture of the Obama years and the sort of trends that took off in response to Trump’s first presidency — comic-book movies with a progressive edge like Wonder Woman and Black Panther, social commentary films like Get Out and Promising Young Woman, not to mention the explosion of drag culture. 

Joel Penney, an associate professor at Montclair State University, says the overall conservative feel of pop culture at the moment is, in many ways, a response to the Me Too movement and the notion by its detractors that “masculinity is in crisis.” At the same time that we’re seeing Sweeney receive praise for representing “traditional” femininity, the All-American straight white “bro” is getting renewed cultural attention. 

“There’s been a lot of this trying to restore these strong male role models in pop culture, whether it’s Tom Cruise in the Top Gun remake or these ‘bro’ podcasters and country singers,” Penney says. 

2024 was all about the straight white bro 

We can see this happening most visibly in mainstream music. It’s not just that country music — a Southern genre with a past and present of conservative politics — has emerged in the mainstream over the past two years — with much controversy. It’s that this class of musicians — Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Shaboozey, and the newly rustic Post Malone — are glaringly male. Shaboozey’s unprecedented achievements in an overwhelmingly white genre add a refreshing element to this conversation. Beyoncé also released a successful country album this year that features Shaboozey and an array of Black female country artists. Cowboy Carter’s lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em,” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, a shorter amount of time than Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Shaboozey’s No.1 songs this year. Nor was she recognized by the country establishment, getting completely shut out of the CMAs. Overall, it seems like country fans and the average young person, who’s listening to more country music these days, are still more eager to hear dudes croon about beer.

Outside of the charts, these country singers have also become mainstream personalities and subjects of celebrity gossip. In the span of roughly a year, Bryan went from a little-known alternative country crooner posting videos on YouTube to a celebrity whose personal relationships are being analyzed by TikTok users and explained in the pages of People. Jelly Roll and his wife, influencer and popular podcast host Bunnie XO, have also become a recognizable celebrity couple, while Morgan Wallen’s dating life and public antics have become Page Six fodder. 

Elsewhere in pop culture, figures seemingly designated for a more male, conservative audience have gone mainstream. First, there was the viral video of a woman from Tennessee being asked about oral sex outside of a bar — a very bro-y Girls Gone Wild-inspired genre that’s emerged on TikTok — and offering a memorable onomatopoeia. There’s also the viral Florida-based father-and-son duo A.J. and Big Justice, who do food reviews at Costco. With the exception of Big Justice’s sister and mother — who’s literally referred to as the “Mother of Big Justice” in videos — this expanded universe of “Costco Guys” is made of white men and boys from Florida and New Jersey rating foods in a cartoonishly macho manner.  

They’re not explicitly expressing MAGA as a value, but they’re trafficking in spaces that have been less visible in recent years: rural and suburban enclaves, featuring white, heterosexual, male, and even “bro-y” talent that was out of vogue in recent history. 

One can assume that the current MAGA-coded fabric of mainstream culture correlates with a generation of young people who identify as more conservative than their parents, although Penney says the relationship between pop culture and politics is a two-way street. While the media can reflect growing opinions and interests of the moment, it can also be used to shape it. 

“Pop culture doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere,” says Penney, who wrote the book Pop Culture, Politics, and the News. “We’re seeing attempts to shape the culture that are increasingly coming from the conservative media ecosystem.”

Conservatives carved out a space for themselves at the movies 

In March, Ben Shapiro’s media company The Daily Wire released its first theatrical movie, the “satirical” documentary Am I Racist?, which earned $4.5 million its opening weekend. Currently, it’s the highest-grossing documentary of the year along with a handful of other conservative nonfiction films including the Catholic documentary Jesus Thirsts: The Story of the Eucharist, the Dinesh D’Souza-directed Vindicating Trump, and the creationist movie The Ark and The Darkness all making the top 10 list.

2024 saw other movies from conservative studios and right-wing producers make notable financial gains. Despite overwhelmingly negative reviews, the Ronald Reagan biopic, Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, broke into the Top 5 at the box office when it premiered in August, doing particularly well with older, white, and Southern audiences. This summer, the Christian media company Angel Studios also released the pro-adoption movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trout, marketed by Daily Wire+. While it made significantly less money than its 2023 predecessor Sound of Freedom, which had a vocal fanbase of QAnon supporters, its nearly $12 million worldwide earnings are still a massive accomplishment for a small Christian film with no movie stars attached. 

While the performance of these movies has not bred the same immediate concern of something like Sound of Freedom, it does provide a potential incentive for major studios to start courting a movie-going crowd that’s felt alienated by mainstream Hollywood.

Warner Bros has yet to produce its own Sound of Freedom, but we’ve seen hints that Hollywood is interested in movies that at least appeal to white, Southern, and conservative audiences. American nostalgia bait came to the fore in the summer blockbuster Twisters. The Oklahoma-set film with a star-studded, country-infused soundtrack did particularly well in Southern cities and theater chains in middle America, outperforming initial estimations. While it’s probably most accurate to describe the film as decidedly apolitical with some patriotic markers, it does see the white, blond savior (played by Glen Powell) emasculate the movie’s other male main character, Latino storm chaser Javi (Anthony Ramos). Powell happened to produce another piece of Americana, Blue Angels, a look at the US Navy’s flight demo squadron, and the fourth highest-grossing documentary of 2024. He also co-starred in Anyone But You with Sweeney, a film released at the end of 2023 that crossed the $200 million mark in early 2024.

Penney says that corporations will try new strategies and pander to different audiences, as they’ve done with Marvel and Disney’s diversity pushes in recent years, based on what they think will benefit them financially. They’re not really thinking about political impact. 

“That was very much the reality of capitalism at work,” says Penney. “[Disney] was trying new strategies, not because they were really, truly convinced that they were going to save the world through expanding diversity, but they were getting a sense that that’s what the audience wanted. It was a response to Me Too and Black Lives Matter and things that actually resonated with our culture to a degree.” 

This pendulum swing from the sort of diversity-focused art that dominated pop culture during the Obama years to what we’re seeing now is hardly unprecedented. Specifically in music, country’s popularity as a genre has historically corresponded with a push in right-wing politics, from the jingoist anthems following 9/11 to “Okie from Muskogee” during the Nixon years. Pop culture has also seen movies with conservative and/or religious themes, from American Sniper and The Passion of the Christ, break the box office. If this current moment tells us anything, it’s that we’re stuck in an ouroboros of shifting political values and corporate interests. 

Suffice to say, it’s not a question of whether we’ve been here before but whether we’re paying attention to what these signals all mean. With an honest look at our media landscape, were the results of the election truly that surprising?