Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Yet Another Theory of Trump
Here’s another theory of Trump. Well, it’s not really a theory, more just a set of disparate observations. I’ve broken it into chunks so you can tell me which parts you agree with, don’t agree with, and why:
- Trump means ratings. Trump means pageviews. Trump means advertiser sponsorship. The media (very much including Ricochet) deserves a large share of the blame for the Rise of Trump, in so far as it’s driven by relentless competition for profit. The media gave Trump a massive amount of free publicity, not realizing — because the media is part of a clueless elite — that Trump was not just an entertaining bonanza for ratings and a guaranteed-clickbait diversion, but a serious political candidate who spoke to and for a very significant number of their fellow Americans.
- The opening of the ownership of broadcast channels, cable, and satellite to private investors has changed our civic culture, and not for the better. It did not result in a competition to provide informative news coverage to a civic-minded public. It resulted in just what you’d expect: competition, period — and thus a race to the bottom for ratings. The result was the creation of a mass culture of empty commercialism and short attention spans unconnected to deeper spiritual, moral, or civic values. Shopping channels, infomercials, product placement, and reality TV gave rise to a population fascinated, even obsessed, with consumer brands, products, celebrities, and super-celebrities. The Rise of Trump or someone like Trump was, in this culture, inevitable.
- The Internet, likewise, failed to meet its potential as an instrument for communicating conservative political ideas, traditional and religious values, and democratic civic mores. Only media outlets with well-established brand names and an already-large audience, or huge financial resources, have been able to enter the Internet media market and draw the attention of the public in significant numbers. The profit model of major media and their portals (Facebook, Google) is based on selling goods. The audience is no longer captive — as it was in the time of newspapers and the broadcast cartel — and thus there’s ferocious competition to amuse it and keep it from switching to another channel or clicking on another site. The media has severely cut back on news reporting and analysis; what little reporting they do is often based on press releases from corporations and lobby groups, foreign and domestic. (The number of people who work in PR now vastly exceeds the number who work in investigative journalism.) There’s a massive focus on providing shows and websites that are immediately attractive to audiences and advertisers: sex, sports, violence, and comedy, rather than detailed and informative reports about complex trade negotiations, the budget, tax reform, or health care.
- Advertisers don’t, generally, like programs and websites with complexity and disturbing reporting that interferes with the “buying mood.” They seek programs, themes, and stories that lightly entertain and fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program: selling their products. (Thus people are far more likely to read about restaurants and vacation destinations abroad than elections or deeper geopolitical trends.)
- Western elites, political and economic, understood the fall of the Berlin Wall as a vindication of free-market capitalism. The victory was so complete and so overwhelming that regardless of evidence, this elite has blindly assumed free trade to be always and everywhere benevolent and even democratic (although exceptions are allowed when private firms need subsidies and bailouts). The mainstream media, which is part of this elite, internalized this ideology.
- The steady encroachment of marketing and advertising into every aspect of our lives displaced both religion and the political public sphere, replacing it with a shallow consumer culture unsuited to thoughtful, democratic participation. Increasingly, we live in a world of virtual communities built by advertisers and based on consumer demographics.
- Whereas once we lived in a world of physical communities, sharing a social life and common concerns with our fellow citizens — of all classes — increasingly we live in virtual communities that may superficially be political, but whose chief purpose is to buy and sell goods, not to create or service the public political sphere and a healthful democracy.
- This social sorting has been accompanied by geographic sorting: Increasingly, we literally have no idea how the other half lives. They don’t live in our neighborhood; they don’t watch the same television, and we don’t even talk to them on the Internet. In fact, we deliberately “unfriend” people who don’t share our view of the world. (This helps to account, for example, for the massive disjunct between the Ricochet primary and the real primary.)
- Non-stop entertainment (including sports) doesn’t just help to sell goods. It is, even if inadvertently, a vehicle for the transmission of the elite class’s political ideology, as well as the contemporary equivalent Roman circuses. It diverts the public from politics, reinforces the beliefs of the elite class, and creates political apathy — until the dam breaks.
- The public has nonetheless been aware that it has been working harder with stagnant or declining incomes; it has inadequate medical care at high cost, and education is the pathway to the elite class — but education is increasingly unaffordable, and the culture of our educational institutions increasingly bizarre. It knows that things are done in their name all over the world, often involving their sacrifice or that of their families, but not, seemingly, to their benefit. Few understand our foreign policy or its history, because the media provides almost no substantive information that would help them place any of it in context. Neither does our educational system. The media does not see providing this information as its key responsibility. Its key responsibility is to shareholders and advertisers.
- Case in point: NAFTA. Substantial American majorities opposed NAFTA. Only the elite favored it. But media editorials, news coverage, and “experts” overwhelmingly reflected elite preference. The “experts” repeatedly intoned that the benefits of NAFTA were obvious and understood by all qualified authorities, and that only demagogues and “special interests” were opposed to it. (The “special interests” who were the losers included lower middle-class white males.) The media dealt with the awkward fact that polls showed steady majority opposition to the agreement mainly by ignoring it or occasionally suggesting the public was uninformed and didn’t recognize its own interests.
- The lower-middle class, white men in particular, has been under siege in the United States for the past several decades, adversely affected by the deflationary policies of the 1980s, corporate downsizing, globalization, and the government’s support of, or indifference to, the damage being done to them. While this class experienced significantly diminished wages and benefits, more onerous working conditions, and greater insecurity, a “protected” elite in government, finance, tech, tenured academia, and the media failed even to notice this, no less consider its long-term political implications.
- Since the 1970s, the income of the top 1 percent of households has grown by 85 percent and the top 10 percent by 45 percent, but the bottom 60 percent lost ground. The income of the lowest 20 percent fell by 12.5 percent. Real hourly earnings among the working class fell 5 percent. This, along with the adverse trend of social indicators (morbidity and mortality, drug addiction, suicide) suggests that the welfare of the majority of the country declined in the age of globalization — a point that was unnoticed because of the abovementioned points: The elite class became ideologically ossified after the failure of the USSR, which they took as dispositive proof of the benevolence of free markets and their ability to lift all boats in their rising tides; moreover, the elite class mentally and geographically separated itself from the rest of the country, and thus literally did not see what was happening to it. The mainstream media, drawn from this class, barely noticed that only a minority had been the beneficiaries of global trade. It briefly noticed this issue during Pat Buchanan’s 1996 campaign, then forgot it again entirely.
- The media and professional politicians — the elite whom Peggy Noonan calls “protected” — thus failed to notice the discontent of the public. The elite domination of the media occurs so naturally that media news people, even when operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. These constraints are so powerful, and built into the system in such a fundamental way, that they don’t see that they’re operating within them. Thus the media confused a public that had been lulled into apathy by cheap imported goods and cheap non-stop entertainment for a public that was, in the main, satisfied with politics as usual.
- As a result, the media both failed properly to report the sentiments of this public to policy makers and failed properly to report to this public with information it could use to guide its political decision-making. This public is now in full-scale revolt.
Do you agree with some, all, or none of the above? If so, why?
Published in Culture, Education, Entertainment, General, Politics
Claire,
Click Bait….hmmmmm
Regards,
Jim
The only other thing I would add is that you have completely ignored the PC movement and the culture of victimization which the white working class has by turns bought into to scapegoat others for their plight and rejected feeling like they are falsely targeted as the enemy and root of the problems in the country.
Having your traditional beliefs and values constantly distorted, maligned, and mocked while being tarred as racists, idiots, and stooges is as much a part of the problems as any economic distress felt by the lower classes
A truly classy person puts everyone else at ease.
By definition, Trump may be rich, but he has no class at all.
And if the message those supporters are seeking to convey is wrong, what should those “leaders” do?
Claire,
You must add this to your analysis. A university system that was both secular & aphilosophical thus unable to explain the most fundamental ideas of Western Civilization other than with social scientific statistics. This system educated a class of intellectual elite with no loyalty to the values of the West and vulnerable to the arguments of Marxism in both its hard and soft cultural version. This led to the Obama Administration’s hideous anti-Western character and the media’s collusion with it.
Like it or not the flip side of Marxism is Fascism. Nazi stands for National Socialist Party. Ayn Rand understood this completely recognizing Fascism as the crudest form of collectivism. After 8 years in which the Obamite Crypto-Marxist regime is forced upon the electorate, it is not surprising that their visceral reaction is to go for a Trump.
Federico Fellini remembers his childhood. Amarcord.
Regards,
Jim
Every time I hear Trump describe someone as a “loser,” I am shocked.
Making fun of people, using the word “loser,” would have been the worst sin a kid could ever commit when Donald Trump (who is older than I am, by the way) and I were kids.
I don’t have to know one more thing about him than that he uses that word about people to know that he and I grew up on different social planets.
No idea. I’m trying to get the diagnosis right first before I offer prescriptions.
I think as far as the media is concerned, I diagnose the Trump problem as people having too much information these days.
People are suffering mightily from information overload.
It feels to people as though he is cutting through the verbiage.
And ever take a gander at the state-sponsored “art” of the Third Reich?
My mom always said that! She said the most well bred person is the one who makes everyone in the room feel welcome and comfortable. Stay classy, Donald
Should be 666.
Trump means ratings. Trump means pageviews. Trump means advertiser sponsorship.
I agree with Claire’s point #1 above, among others. I don’t blame Ricochet so much, though, as the TV news people. They interrupted a Marco Rubio event to broadcast Donald Trump speaking! I mean huh??
Trump has been planning a run for the Presidency since 2013. It wasn’t a lark.
National Review has become unhinged about Trump, and Ricochet is damn close in their wake.
I think that the main reason that the traditional media and the internet have failed in shaping a more responsible, thoughtful, moral culture is that the dominance of the West in terms of standard of living has led it to take for granted the role those virtues played in creating the prosperity it enjoys. Tecnnological innovation has obviated the need for those virtues to a large degree and so the West has been able to continue its dominance and even increase it, even as the culture has rotted. Achieving success despite the decline in our national character tells people that character isn’t really what matters. It is dispensable, so why bother?
The existential threat of the Soviet Union kept minds focused and maintained a proper level of sobriety and obligation among the elites, although many were seduced by the lies of communism and leftism as well. Now, though Islamic extremism is seen as a dire threat, it is not taken as seriously as the undeniable potential of nuclear annihilation posed by the USSR.
Perhaps all we need is proper scare and commonly recognized threat to wake the people and the elites up and realign their priorities and values sensibly.
But I had the sense it was a lark for him too.
He is the consummate actor, is he not?
I was completely surprised to read Conrad Black’s column about how long this run has been in the making and how carefully researched it was.
There is a lot of support for Trump on Ricochet.
You can’t blame people for having doubts about him. He is a hard guy to read. And some of that is what he wants. He avoida specificity. Everyone is guessing.
Because that’s what Medicine told us at the time. And we believed it. Just like they told us that salt was bad, if you didn’t eat bran muffins you’d get colon cancer, and that alar on Apples would kill us.
“Medicine” is one of the reasons people are losing faith in “science” as an institution. In living memory, as you put it, they have a bunch of neverminds fresh in memory, contradictions from people that are supposed to be experts. One of the things I see happening more and more this century is increasing faith in technology, but decreasing faith in science, because technology is tangible and works, but “science”… medicine and physics especially… is often contradictory and in a couple of decades reverses things we were told was the final gospel. “Yeah, that bran muffin stuff? All the tasteless crap we told you to eat in the 80’s and 90’s to prevent colon cancer? Doesn’t work, it seems. Nevermind.”
I don’t blame people for having doubts. They should talk about it. But there’s doubts, and then there’s swearing a blood feud against the guy, going 24/7 in negative coverage. That’s what NR has done, and as I look at the Ricochet main feed, half of it is some anti-Trump post or another right now. National Review dedicated an entire issue to stopping Trump, recruiting Glenn Beck of all people to make “serious” arguments against him. Glenn Beck. The crying guy on TV that keeps hinting that Jesus sent us Ted Cruz to save us, that the Lord God may have struck down a Supreme Court justice to help Cruz in the election. There have now been several pieces there (and one here) that openly compared Trump to Hitler.
That’s not doubt. That’s not discussion. That’s obsession.
It’s funnier in the original Aramaic.
Huzzah!
and a vulgarian extraordinaire. Some people really don’t like that in a man, let alone a Presidential aspirant. Jack Wheeler over at ToThePointNews put it pretty well:
“His entire moral universe is predicated on a preteen morality of liking those who praise him, and hating those who criticize him.”
Whatever his virtues its pretty hard to get past that failing.
I agree with this. I think he’d be a mirror image of Obama, not listening to advisors and firing those who say things he doesn’t like.
Read Thomas Sowell re: your point #13. That’s the Sanders line, for sure, but it is simply not true. Household wages are not a helpful metric when households are not constant. Even consumption doesn’t indicate all that much, because many formerly-luxury goods are so much more affordable today.
Our poor are not poor.
That’s right. Think the poor in India have cars and microwaves and a plasma TV?
Please. Recall how things worked before we had primaries. Did these political leaders do all of the voting then?
At least not since the 19th century, except maybe in the NFL, the NBA, and the Oscars. Show biz, in other words. Oh yeah. And China, India, the Arabian Gulf, the former Soviet Union (Eastern Europe in general, for that matter,) and…. Oh, forget it.
Back to our mutton. Trump seems to dress pretty well, at least on camera; at any rate, he’s no Al Czervik. He does seem willing to do things that would embarrass many people to promote his businesses.
On the other hand, Trump seems to treat his help pretty well. Here, his butler speaks.
Well, the most sensitive part of any successful politician’s anatomy is their political antenna. So sure.
My point is that these political leaders would be functioning in the role of experienced decision-makers. Of course they would balance political factors when making a political decision. This is no different from elected members of Congress–who are also decision-makers–weighing political factors when they decide how to vote.
One of the purposes of representative government is to disconnect erratic swings of popular emotion from governmental action. This is to protect the citizens from self-destructive impulses.
To return to your question, Claire, of course these political leaders would be aware of political sentiments, but their role is to be a responsible decision-makers and not merely passive political weather-vanes. Consequently, such political leaders would properly ignore popular pressure to select Trump for the same reason adults would ignore a toddler’s loud demand to be allowed to play with a loaded handgun.
This analogy works at multiple levels.
To be clear, I only mean to say that representative government is only a temporary buffer against political emotion; not a permanent one. Over time it will yield to sustained political pressure. This is because a free people have the liberty to mess-up their societies, if they are determined to do so.
Two forks: the audience and the unregistered study “Baltimore stockbroker” problem. I would think that most astronomy, physics, geology studies etcetera don’t find nearly the popular audience that nutrition and health studies do. That drives problems.
Also, the problem of unregistered studies creates a fallacious bias toward publishing nonsense.
BDB—I’ve never heard of these concepts before, but you’ve gotten me interested. Thanks for the suggestions; I’ll read up on these.