Irony and satire in the contemporary American moment.

In its nightmarish first year, the second Trump administration has worked hard to destabilize the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions essential to modern democracy—above all, the American university, site both of scientific research and liberal education. The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning locates an initial iteration of Trump’s effort, with its America-first targeting of immigrants and “global intellectual elites,” in the original Know-Nothing movement of the early 1850s. Literary and film critic James Chandler shows how, in response to this calamitous echo across long decades, irony has become the central trope of our moment, and with what consequences. Liberal forms of traditional satire now confront the “kayfabe” practices imported by Trump from professional wrestling that mix illusion and reality to turn public life into a “spectacle without thought.”