In the Eighties, Ozzy Osbourne and Hulk Hogan were cultural archetypes — polar opposites in the moral cosmology of Ronald Reagan’s America. Hogan was a sun-bleached emblem of Reaganite virtue: a muscular TV superstar who conquered America’s Cold War-era villains on the wrestling mat, whether it was the USSR-loving Nikolai Volkoff or that avatar of the Iranian Revolution, the Iron Sheik. Ozzy, the Prince of Darkness, was cast as a goblin from Britain’s industrial underworld — an alleged devil-worshipper who haunted the nightmares of suburban parents, an arch-villain of the Satanic Panic era.
Over the next three decades, those roles didn’t just fade — they completely reversed. Ozzy, far from the evil Svengali he was once imagined to be, re-emerged as the harmless, bumbling patriarch of The Osbournes, a proto-Kardashian reality-TV show in which he muttered endearments to his dogs and struggled to work the remote. Meanwhile, Hulk Hogan’s legacy curdled amid sex tapes, lawsuits, and racist remarks.
What’s most striking today, however, isn’t how their reputations flipped. It’s that their reputations were considered important by serious institutions. The cultural gatekeepers who had once ignored or sneered at the two took them seriously once they passed from this earthly veil. A generation or two ago, Ozzy and Hulk were both largely considered lowbrow trash, the obsessions of the prime consumer of commercialized entertainment: the lower middle class. Yet after both figures died this month, The New Yorker ran an obituary for Ozzy, treating him as a misunderstood bard of evil with a heart of gold. PBS News, meanwhile, published a lengthy obituary that called Hogan “an icon to his ‘Hulkamaniacs.’”
Legacy media, the same outlets that looked down their noses at these men during their heydays, now solemnly reflected on their legacies. No one rolled their eyes. Perhaps it’s because Donald Trump, another cartoonish reality-TV patriarch who gained superstardom in the Eighties, has been handed political power twice now, and the old elite are now bending the knee.
If this were the Eighties, this triumph of the lowbrow would be a moment to cheer. A common trope of Reagan-era comedies was the slobs versus the snobs, in which a ragtag gang of working-class kids or bros used their moxie to beat the aging establishment, the pretentious old-money types. But now we know how those stories really ended: the US class structure became even more lopsided, with the top 10% owning nearly 70% of all wealth, while 57% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The culture-industry slobs did not alter this trend. They just lent it a more vulgar veneer.
At the level of the culture, this turn of events does not represent authentic egalitarian progress, but a general decline in standards. The fact that the majority of Americans have lost economic mobility and security, combined with the mentally impairing effects of excessive internet and social media use, has transformed almost all of us into what was once considered lower middle class. Our reverential treatment of Ozzy and Hulk reflects our own childish sensibilities.
If that sounds snooty, look back and consider the breadth and mainstream popularity of elite and middlebrow institutions of the previous century, made possible by a specific set of conditions. The New Deal and the postwar economic miracle created an unusually stable and prosperous middle America comprising salaried professionals, civil servants, unionized workers, and strivers who had both disposable income and leisure time. Aspiration wasn’t just about the pure accumulation of wealth; it also meant pursuing intellectualism and cultural pursuits and democratizing them in the process.
Among members of the Greatest Generation, it wasn’t just the rich who subscribed to literary or political magazines, attended the symphony or opera, were card-carrying members of public libraries, or had museum and social-club memberships. My grandfather, a small-town mechanic with a formal eighth-grade education, once subscribed to National Geographic and Time, regularly tuned into 60 Minutes, and had a cultural and social diet that might now be called elitist.
Two factors changed everything. First, media technology has dramatically improved in fidelity and been integrated into almost every aspect of life, including both work and leisure. The shift from flesh-and-blood life to an internet-first version flattened all forms of entertainment and culture into a uniform sludge of content. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the New Deal order crumbled, and neoliberalism became the dominant political philosophy. The downstream effects of the changes meant that the cultural standards of yore began to slip into oblivion.
“This turn of events does not represent authentic egalitarian progress, but a general decline in standards.”
To get a sense of how much has changed in 50 years, consider the historian Arno Mayer’s 1975 essay, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem.” In it, he described the lower middle class as literate but not cultivated, aspirational yet anxious, self-reliant yet highly individualistic, obsessed with their own property, terrified of downward mobility, and quick to mobilize politically only under conditions of stress. Too educated to be at home in folk culture, too economically precarious to claim elite culture, they became early adopters of the modern mass-media machine. “The modern opiate dispensers provided a heady mix of entertainment, distraction, diversion, and fantasy for a composite lower middle class that was characteristically insecure,” he wrote. As Mayer put it, “media and audience found each other.”
What Mayer is describing sounds less like a small slice of our nation’s class makeup and more like a blueprint for 21st-century American life writ large. Cable television may have given way to TikToks, but it’s still a culture where the defining class condition is not proletarian solidarity or elite professionalism, but a twitchy, consummerized in-betweenness. That psychic tension fuels both spectacle and political grievance.
In 2014, when actor Gary Oldman told Ted Koppel that “reality TV to me is the museum of social decay,” it was the last gasp of a dying worldview. By then, the reality juggernaut, the same genre of television once deemed brain-dead TV, had all absorbed Ozzy and Hogan and Trump into the maw of the spectacle. A decade later, when Trump clinched the presidency a second time, it was fitting that Hogan played a part as an Republican National Convention sideshow. The lowbrow shock and awe of the convention that ushered in Trump II was the culmination of a cultural reorientation that began in the Eighties.
Trump’s place within the unholy trinity is ironic. Unlike Ozzy and Hogan, both of whom were working-class heroes of humble origins, Trump was a man born into wealth but who spoke and had the cultural tastes of someone without a silver spoon in his mouth. He insulted people like a talk-radio caller. He loved McDonald’s and candy. His political base, MAGA Nation, shares cultural DNA with Hogan and Ozzy fandom. They love Trump not in spite of his crudity, but because of it. He sounds like them. He hates the same people. He gets the joke, and is the joke, and doesn’t care either way. And maybe that’s the point. The joke has become the organizing principle of American life. Once, the Ozzy fan or Hulkamaniac was a punchline for the old-school commentariat, a proxy for tastelessness, vulgarity, or low aspirations. Now, those very traits are recoded as authenticity for everyone on the political spectrum, Left and Right.
It’s no wonder, then, that in 2025, the Democrats are casting off the blinkered brand of elitism-dressed-up-as-non-elitism they were associated with in the previous decade — by which I mean identity politics — and disregarding the old Michelle Obama dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Their answer to MAGA is to accept the new rules of engagement and start making stupid memes and yelling the F-word. The liberals have even elevated Kendrick Lamar to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s old post as their symbolic poet laureate — the rapper who used his Super Bowl show as one loud and expensive roast of Drake. In a new profile in The Atlantic, congressional Democrat Jasmine Crockett is presented as the future (“A Democrat for The Trump Era,” runs the headline). Why? She has a big social-media following and went viral for describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as “bleach-blond, bad built, butch body” during a House Oversight Committee meeting.
Forty years ago, Hulk Hogan used to say, “Whatcha gonna do, when Hulkamania runs wild on you?” It was a threat, a promise, and a sales pitch all rolled into one. Today, American culture has yet to answer that question.
