The parallels, however, don’t end there. Trump’s rambling speeches, to which he returned after resuming his campaign, are reminiscent of Bickle’s own paranoid mutterings  while Kamala Harris’s rhetoric sounds every bit like the empty suit Palantine; in fact, her last slogan “Kamala Harris For the People” recalls the equally inane “Palantine — We Are the People.” Real-world politics seemed yet again to be taking its cues from the Taxi Driver script.

Scorsese’s gritty urban epic was born of a decade (comparable to our own) associated with moral decline, traumatic random violence and paralysing elite failure. The anti-hero Bickle, like many then and now, struggled to give meaning to events and circumstances beyond his control. Today, fear and foreboding once again stalk the land. Is there anything Americans can do to avoid being overwhelmed by the senseless and inexplicable character of historical events?

The Seventies may hold clues. Its preceding decade was one of social revolutions, many of which either failed or fell short (not unlike the 2010s); and so, it is remembered as the post-Sixties’ “hangover”. Yet as historian Thomas Borstelmann argued, it was in these years that the changes initiated in the Sixties became mainstream: the shift from industrial liberalism to free markets; the breakdown of traditional authority and the loosening of social mores; the fracturing of modernity into relativism and hyper-individualism. Indeed, the same bleak environment that inspired Taxi Driver, the near-bankrupt New York City of the Seventies, also gave rise to one of 2024’s candidates. Donald Trump was then offering himself as the saviour who could stem the decay, ultimately personifying the bare-knuckle capitalism that prevailed in the next decade.

It was, therefore, a time when old narratives were dying but new ones had yet to take their place: the problem wasn’t so much that terrible things kept occurring on Americans’ television screens, but those watching lacked the ability to integrate them into shared frameworks of meaning. The succeeding narratives, after all, needed time to emerge organically. In hindsight, it is easy to interpret the era’s chaos: gas lines, rising crime, military defeat, and assassination attempts as the trajectory of a society in the midst of a painful but necessary crisis and transition stage while on the way back to renewal. Much harder to do the same when one is living through it, but finding narrative threads to connect events to their potential historical significance may nonetheless prove to be a worthwhile, even necessary, exercise.

Looking at the recent spate of turmoil, one may be tempted, like Bickle, to react with bottomless dread at what seems like a world breaking apart. Or one can, also like Bickle, by the end of the film, find ways of grappling with a grossly imperfect and contingent reality — but with an eye to arriving at larger sources of meaning and moral legitimacy — that is, to do more than just “cope”. It sounds abstract, but it has been done before and can be done again; after all, the malaise of the Seventies didn’t last forever and eventually gave way to “Morning in America” and the optimism of the Nineties. The question is what can fill the present narrative void?

Take the two-week period between the 13 July attempt on Trump’s life and the unification of the Democrats around Harris by 27 July, which will have to go down as one of the most consequential in US politics. Yet much of what happened was largely the product of chance. A lone assassin managed to mount a rifle across from a former president and the target turned his head at just the right time to avoid a headshot. A week later, a frail Joe Biden stepped aside and instantly endorsed his vice president as successor, who had been chosen due to political considerations from the last election year, when fallout from a contingent event, George Floyd’s death, led to “a woman of colour” being in demand. (The distasteful “DEI candidate” accusation should not detract from the connection, freely admitted to by progressives, between the atmosphere of 2020 and Biden’s selection process.)

Both parties made hasty adaptations to the situation by putting the most convenient spin on it. However, these partisan attempts to ascribe meaning to accidents, being much too grounded in the immediacy of the present, suffer from a severe lack of historical perspective. And while these are perhaps understandable as initial reactions, they will not suffice going forward.

In the case of the Republicans, the defects of this approach became clear at their convention, held throughout the week after the attempt: it was naturally suffused with a sense of awe at Trump’s survival. Yet the question of to what end this emotional power and political capital would be expended was buried beneath the exuberance. Consider the contrasting sets of talking points employed by Trump’s vice-presidential pick Ohio Senator J.D. Vance on the one hand; and long-time Congressman Steve Scalise on the other. Embodying his party’s insurgent “New Right” wing, Vance spoke of breaking with ideological dogmas of the Republican past, and of the need for a “leader who fights for the workers in this country”, as opposed to the “Wall Street barons” who “crashed the economy”. Scalise, meanwhile, argued that the Party should look to make the overwhelmingly pro-Wall Street tax cuts they passed in 2017 “permanent”, a view shared by many of his fellow Republican rank-and-file Congress members. Depending on what the policy direction of a second Trump term ends up being, whether it follows Vance’s or Scalise’s divergent wishes, a future historian looking at this convention would probably wonder what the significance of Butler, Pennsylvania might have been.

This historian could ask: Did Trump’s near brush with martyrdom signify a fateful turning in the transformation of the Republican Party — as affirmed by his anointment of Vance days later? Or did the ex-president miraculously cheat death only to return the Right to the nostrums of the Reagan–Bush era, the same elite consensus he sought to overthrow when he first ran in 2016? One need not be looking back in 50 years’ time, however, to be able to retrospectively confer the highest meaning to the incident at Butler. For the ability to deduce and act upon such a logic in real time is the mark of any great statesman.

Likewise, on the Democrats’ side, there is widespread relief that their ticket is no longer saddled with a nominee in cognitive decline, so much so that the establishment has willingly overlooked the many known defects of Harris as a politician. Indeed, the Party seems to have become carried away with how their new nominee checks many of the boxes in the progressive identity wish list. There is now a question of whether the Harris campaign will lean more heavily into identity-centred messaging, similar to how Hillary Clinton ran her failed 2016 campaign, or whether it will tap into the class-centred populist themes that sustained Amtrack Joe’s successful 2020 run and, indeed, the Biden administration’s own “Bidenomics” industrial policy programme.

Once again, the future historian may wonder at which direction history had moved and why the Democrats, after having been given a lifeline, went back to the race-conscious but class-agnostic “Rainbow Coalition” strategy of the neoliberal Nineties rather than build on the recent gains they made in the industrial Midwest, where they were once able to reclaim the populist torch from Trump. As with Republicans, the danger is that Democrats go for a feel-good approach that resonates emotionally in the short term but which dispenses with the larger historical perspective that’s guided the Biden team’s thinking on policy, namely that “the free market at home and globalisation’s effects wrought havoc”. This is a clue that the party should focus on this reckoning with structural forces underlying America’s economy, from which a universalist message of material uplift can be drawn on to appeal to voters across racial and gender lines.

It would help to understand the 2020s as a yet another transitional stage, when the revolutions initiated in the 2010s, representing a reverse pendulum effect from the Taxi Driver decade, are starting to take hold: free markets are giving way to the next economic paradigm just as the excesses of postmodern fragmentation have led to a yearning for new narratives of unity and cohesion. And as with the Seventies, the transition will be turbulent.

What is needed is a fresh script or grand narrative to relate chaotic events back to just such a larger horizon of time and meaning, one which can fuse small-h history with big-H History. It is undoubtedly the Republican candidate who began our revolutionary moment eight years ago, but it is arguably the Democrat running against him who summarised this view of history best: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Indeed, just as the most banal slogans can be entirely accurate, even the most random events can sometimes bear larger truths.

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

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I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

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Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

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We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.