US satire and the everyday politics of decline

The article analyses US satire as a cultural archive of American decline. Extending the everyday turn in global politics, we argue that US satire—from sitcoms like The Office to political parody shows like The Daily Show and dramas like Succession—reflects and narrates perceptions of decline in American political discourse. By comparing the burgeoning US satire industry at the start of the twenty first Century with the British ‘satire boom’ of the 1960s, we highlight how this cultural archive of jokes and irony negotiates social anxieties about imperial decline. On one hand, we observe, US satire is dominated by a recurring attempt to resolve such anxieties through progressive liberal narratives of renewal. Yet, on the other hand, a more critical line of humour anticipates a deeper reckoning with the limits of US hegemony. Beyond mere entertainment, US satire serves as an important and productive site for understanding embedded global power hierarchies. An everyday politics approach to US satire can foreground the recurring myths of American exceptionalism and the contingent limits of liberal progressivism in addressing systemic crises. The article develops the literature on US decline to transcend materialist questions of whether it ‘is’ or ‘is not’ happening to examine the prevalence of declinism in the popular psyche. As such, the argument contributes to the everyday turn in global politics by (further) centring the role of humour in constructing and developing the everyday practices and routines of global power even – or especially – in the more ‘resistant’ tones of satire.