Do me a favor. Picture MTV’s “Total Request Live” at the height of its powers. Carson Daly shouting to be heard over an audience of excited adolescents. Feuds stoked daily between teenyboppers like NSYNC and teenymoshers like Limp Bizkit. Overflow crowds standing on Broadway to scream at the slightest glimpse of a chart-topper in the second-story window of New York City’s One Astor Place.
Now, imagine all that delirium, sign-waving and call-in voting was in service of pushing Art Garfunkel to the pinnacle of the premier music video countdown. Ridiculous, right? Garfunkel’s tender folk couldn’t be farther from the chrome-coated zeitgeist of the turn of the last century. The musicians who supplanted the East Village folkies were by that time dinosaurs themselves, having been rendered extinct by pop permutations several times over. Daly’s daily countdown was about an eternal present, a shiny go-go now that had no time for the dour, mildewy Neil Young worship of the early ’90s, to say nothing of the decades prior.
But that chorus of screams for the latest from Garfunkel, the man behind “All I Know,” shouldn’t sound so odd to us. After all, we’re about as removed from Destiny Child’s first hit (1997’s “No, No, No”) as the “TRL” audience was from “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The seismic shifts in pop culture made something like Garfunkelpalooza feel silly, while culture publications and the wider social internet will regularly reshape entire weeks around the release of Beyoncé’s latest album.
She’s not unique in that regard. Taylor Swift launched a years-long stadium tour nearly two full decades after her first chart-topper. Before it ended in December 2024, the “Eras Tour” rearranged cities that it visited and rejiggered the way that pop fans discussed album cycles and stylistic shifts.
The advent of streaming in the late 2000s replaced syndication with on-demand, binge rewatches, extending the half-life of television toward the infinite. Even the smallest side characters were gifted their own spin-offs in the streaming service-boosted age of marketable intellectual property. Disney got to work making spin-offs of spin-offs of stories about a bounty hunter who had around 10 minutes of screen time in the original Star Wars trilogy. Small-screen stars leaned into the long tail of their most-famous roles, launching rewatch podcasts for everything from “The West Wing” and “The Office” to “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Hot in Cleveland,” further extending their 15 minutes of fame.
Simon Reynolds was one of the first commentators to notice, and pathologized the backwards-looking, stalled-out culture as “retromania” in 2010. Over a decade later, the New York Times thought the problem hadn’t been resolved, wondering whether we were living through a cultural “standstill.” Critic W. David Marx, looking to sum up the curiously stagnant opening decades of the 21st century, cribbed a phrase from one of its enduring icons for the title of his book “Blank Space.”
The last 20 years, Marx said, have been one big “lowest-common-denominator fight for attention,” meaning it was easier than ever to remain a public figure and make money off the resulting eyeballs. He accused the forces of financialization and social media for creating a world where “fame and infamy” were “indistinguishable.”
In 2026, you can see this play out most obviously via former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White. Picked near the top of their respective drafts, both men crafted passable but underwhelming careers in the league. Where prior players would be happy to head home and count their money, popping up on occasion in documentaries to discuss the difficulties of guarding Lebron James, Freedom and Royce have delayed their natural decline into trivia by staging a transgender panic around the WNBA.
Freedom and White clearly see a post-league career in playing into the worst of conservative media’s impulses. To that end, they’ve both become outspoken advocates against trans athletes playing in the WNBA. Realizing there are no trans athletes in the WNBA currently in the WNBA or entering the draft, they resolved to become the issue and declared themselves women who wish to play in the league. In the weeks since, Freedom has taken to his role as a supposed protector of women by verbally harassing current WNBA players while sitting courtside. Knowing that Freedom won’t be deterred from his second-act as a bigot no matter how many arenas he’s thrown out of, it’s hard to get past the idea that we’re playing these arguments out in a void.
Politics as a whole is hardly exempt from these decades of wheel-spinning. The oddly elongated two term-presidency of Donald Trump, a petty man who rarely fails to bring his old grudges, has turned U.S. global and national politics into one big score to settle. The president never got over his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, and the Democrats never got over theirs to Trump four years before. New wars and new horrors carried out by the Trump administration can’t shake the feeling that we’re having the same old arguments.
As the 2028 election cycle draws near — if recent history is a guide, candidates are likely to begin officially declaring their candidacies in early 2027 — many of the Democratic Party’s contenders can draw a direct line to the presidency of Barack Obama. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Kamala Harris look all but certain to join the race . . . again. Expect them to run along similar moderate lines as before, pitching themselves as the sensible choice and avoiding too much chatter about their previous losses.
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Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo didn’t serve in the Obama administration, but as New York’s former governor during the bulk of the Obama years, he is inextricably tied to the era. Despite his loss in the 2025 New York City mayoral race and credible allegations of sexual harassment, he is making unsettling noises about the race, and is apparently hoping to represent the party’s establishment wing, even though his constituency now amounts to almost no one.
Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is old enough to collect Social Security. But reports say he’s stress-testing campaign staffers’ tolerance for colorful language in the hopes of running as a bulwark against candidates who oppose U.S. aid to Israel.
All this is playing out as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is capping a career of failing to meet the moment by hanging on to his seat and leadership position for dear life — and hamstringing the party’s progressive youth movement in the process.
An older, careerist Democratic Party creates a perspective problem that’s hard to overcome. Each passing year carries office holders further away from the median age of their voters and further calcifies their opinions on the way politics gets done. You can see it every time Schumer rolls over for the Trumpist GOP, operating as if the mutual back-scratching vibes weren’t saged from the Capitol Dome the second it was breached by Trump-supporting rioters.
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But away from the party’s power center, the first flashes of something exciting and new have begun to appear.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and his seemingly supernatural competence at both city management and marketing, has laid a blueprint for kitchen-table progressives looking to bust out of the Trump-era holding pattern. The Florida Democratic Party might be running an ex-Republican for governor again, but the Senate candidacy of democratic socialist Angie Nixon gives some hope for forward-thinking campaigns going forward. Any honest rundown of 2028 hopefuls has to include first-wave Sanders-ite Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the strongest indication yet that we might break free from the long shadow of 2016.
A better world, where we never have to type out a name as unpleasant as Gavin Newsom again, just might be possible.
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