The Many Ironies of Trump’s Victory and Others to Come

There was a sense after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the wars and recession that followed, that irony was dead—that the use of cynicism and sardonic distance from current events in literature and commentary was no longer suitable for such sobering times. That consensus (ironically!) collapsed quickly. Now, two decades later, surveying the seismic triumph of Donald Trump and the GOP in the US presidential election, we can finally conclude the opposite was true all along: We are living in an age of irony.

Irony, in the classical sense, is a state of affairs that’s deliberately contrary to expectations. For ...