On Disenchantment

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Herdt, Jennifer

Abstract

Disenchantment is often used as a synonym for disappointment. But disenchantment also has another meaning: it is the process and program of reason overcoming magic and myth, and the implicit sense of having direct access to reality. To be disenchanted is to throw off the rose-colored glasses of magical thinking and finally see the cold hard world as it is. I argue that disenchantment is both the feeling of the times and a regnant structure of belief—a structure of belief that not only gave rise to liberalism but has also become its undoing.I focus, in particular, on the way that liberalism surfaced in popular culture between 2016 and 2024. These eight years saw the peak and decline of liberalism’s dominance in American popular culture. For a few years, it seemed as though the concept of universal equality and liberty finally had some critical force. Mass movements both physical and digital emerged to protest racial and gender oppression at unprecedented scales. These movements yielded such fruits as DEI initiatives and, if not legal sanction, then social ostracism (“cancellation”). But then, almost as swiftly as they arrived, the DEI initiatives were gone, and people who were once pariahs crept back into our films and TV shows like nothing happened. I focus on culture—including films, novels, discourses, and hashtags—because culture is where we find traces of our shared values and read the tea leaves of the moment. I am especially interested in how liberalism rather than the far right has shaped our culture even as my writing is motivated by the terrifying ascendence of the far right over the last few years. I take my cue from Stuart Hall’s astute observation: “it is always the case that the right is what it is partly because of what the left is.”

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