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Of Nerds and Men; or How Trump Steamrolled the Media and Political Class
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump has been successful because he is able to dominate the media cycle and “troll” his opponents in the internet parlance. No one who says these things ever seems to explain or understand what this actually means. These terms describe how the underlying relationship between Trump and media and the rest of the political class has manifested itself in the campaign. Our entire political and media class are what can fairly be called “nerds.” Trump is not a nerd. This has allowed Trump to use the media and political class’s social disconnect with the rest of America to manipulate them into making what, to the public, are completely inappropriate and counterproductive responses to the things he says. The story of the 2016 campaign has been one of class clown Donald Trump torturing a series of clueless yet earnest teacher’s pets.
The term “nerd” is an old one and one with a particular meaning. A nerd is someone who, despite often being otherwise intelligent, is unable to pick up social cues and context when interacting with the majority of people such that they often respond in socially awkward or inappropriate ways. Nerds do not fully understand the social situations that confront them. To get around this problem, nerds construct their own subcultures with simplified and agreed mores that are understood by fellow nerds. This allows nerds to operate in an environment that they understand and are comfortable. When taken outside of this sub culture and confronted with someone who doesn’t share the agreed upon assumptions of that group, a nerd is completely defenseless and unable to understand the person confronting them.
When people think of “nerds,” guys in horn rimmed glasses working in labs come to mind. Indeed, this type of nerd exists. These “Big Bang Theory Nerds” are not the nerds who inhabit politics and the media. Big Bang Theory nerds are often too introverted and scientifically inclined for the media or politics. Media and politics are inhabited by what I call “alpha nerds.” These are nerds who are not as scientifically inclined as the Big Bang Theory nerds but are extroverted and clever. Big Bang Theory nerds are much more under the radar. They are too busy learning long division and calculus, playing Minecraft if they are the right age, and going on to careers in science and engineering. Alpha nerds are busy being the teacher’s pet, running for student council, joining the debate club and doing everything else necessary to check the blocks on their college applications with an earnestness few normal people are able to achieve. Alpha nerds get around their awkwardness by earnestly following the rules and meeting the expectation of their teachers, bosses, and those in authority; after all, earnestly following rules doesn’t require much emotional subtlety or adeptness.
Since this type of nerd has gotten around their social awkwardness by following rules, they tend to thrive in bureaucracy and rule based environments. They are often predisposed to becoming petty tyrants exacting their revenge on the non nerds whom they never understood or felt appreciated them. They also are usually dismissive of anyone outside of their nerd subculture. Artificially snobbery and credentialism are things that come naturally to many alpha nerds.
For decades, Hollywood has used alpha nerds as comic foils for normal movie protagonists. The alpha nerd’s inability to understand the social cues and subtleties of anyone outside their subculture, their excessive earnestness and complete defenselessness against ridicule can be used to great comic effect. In Animal House, the alpha nerds of the Omega House — with earnest commitment to God, country and Faber College — are destroyed by their inability to understand or respond to the ridicule of the normals of Delta House. Judge Smails and his band of alpha nerds who run Bushwood Country Club can only react in uncomprehending horror at the antics of normal Al Czervik.
Media and politics is inhabited almost entirely by alpha nerds. Like all nerds, the alpha nerds of media and politics have created own subculture that is easier for them to understand and navigate than mainstream culture. Since they dominate media and politics, their nerd culture is our political and media culture. Washington is the national capital of alpha nerds. They run the entire city and by extension the country.
The political and media elite in this country on both sides are nerds compared to the average American. People talk about the divide between Washington and “flyover country.” The geographic divide, however, is a reflection of the more profound divide between the nerd culture of media and politics and the normal culture of the rest of America. The class of nerds who populate our media and political classes and have made it their own safe ecosystem.
Politicians in the past have — if they were not alpha nerds to begin with — learned to pass as such and speak the language and follow the social cues of the alpha nerd media and political sub culture. In contrast Trump in contrast did not. Like Al Czervik stepping onto the course at Bushwood or Eric Stratton walking the halls of Faber College, Trump not only isn’t a part of the alpha nerd culture of politics and the media, he rejects all of its standards and agreed upon social cues. Confronted with someone who refuses to recognize or be a part of their agreed upon culture, the alpha nerds of our media and politics have completely melted down.
Again and again during the Republican primaries, Trump used the media and Republican alpha nerds’ inability to understand context and larger meaning outside of their own subculture against them. Trump turned his campaign from celebrity side show to serious threat to win the nomination when he said that if elected he would build a wall on the Mexican border at the Mexican government’s expense and deport all 11 million illegals in the country within two years.
The media and his Republican opponents, being nerds, took this proposal literally. Further — since it was a violation of the mores of the political nerd sub culture — they figured Trump saying it was an offense worthy of ending his career. So the media and Republican response to Trump’s proposal was twofold; they said it was impossible and that Trump was unfit for office for even proposing it.
Unfortunately for Republicans, the voting public largely doesn’t live in the nerd sub culture of Washington. Worse still, the public had grown tired of attempts to foist it on them in the form of political correctness. Unlike the alpha nerds in the media Republican party, the voting public understood the context of the proposal. Trump’s proposal came at the end of over 20 years of both parties refusing to take the immigration problem seriously despite the public’s increasing concern and anger over it. Taken in context, a politician standing-up and having the audacity to say he was going to build a wall and send Mexico the bill was like a breath of fresh air. Moreover, the public understood that sometimes people say things to make a point and engage in hyperbole to get the listener’s attention and show them they are serious. The public didn’t care whether it was practical to build a wall and bill Mexico or actually deport every illegal alien in two years. What they cared about was that someone was finally willing to take the problem seriously and demand the political class do the same.
So when the Republicans attacked the proposal as being impractical, the attack had no effect. Worse because they thought Trump’s saying it was enough to end his candidacy, Republicans wound up leaving the impression that Donald Trump was the only one who could be trusted to take the problem seriously or offer any solutions. What plans did Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio offer to deal with immigration? I honestly have no idea and neither do most GOP voters. What people knew about Republicans and immigration was Donald Trump wanted to build a wall and deport every illegal immigrant in the country and Republicans thought that was beyond the pale.
This pattern repeated itself when Trump said after the San Bernardino terrorist attack that the US should consider banning all Muslim immigration until we can figure out how to vet them. Again, the alpha nerd Republicans were unable to see the larger context of his statement and were doomed to give a counterproductive response. The Republican party saw this as another grave breach of the rules of the nerd culture of politics. This time they thought for sure the GOP voters would understand how unfit he was. So the Republican response consisted of variants of “how dare you” and not much else.
Meanwhile, the non-nerd GOP voters saw it as a common sense response to a problem. They also understood that you solve problems by having a dialogue. The first proposed solution is not often the one adopted. Banning Muslim immigrants is, like building a will along the Mexican border, an extreme solution. Islamic terrorism is an extreme problem; perhaps it demands an extreme solution. What GOP voters expected in response to Trump’s proposal was for the other candidates to — if not endorse the proposal — offer their own counter solution. What they got instead was outrage over Trump’s disregard of the mores of the media and political nerd culture the voting public neither adheres to nor cares about. Once again Trump’s opponents left the impression that Trump was the only candidate who took the problem seriously or bothered to offer a solution.
Time and again this pattern repeated itself. Trump would do or say something that violated the political nerd subculture. His opponents would then respond with outrage over his breaking their subculture’s rules but fail to offer a meaningful response to the underlying issue leaving the voters with impression that Trump was the only one who cared about solving the problem. The most common answer given by Trump supporters to the question of why they support Trump is that he cares about them and their problems. This is not an accident. This is the result of the media and his Republican opponents being so steeped in their own nerd sub culture that they were unable to get past Trump’s rejection of it and speak to the public in terms sensible outside of that culture.
The media and political class cannot comprehend Donald Trump or understand what he is saying in the same way the rest of America can. This process is repeating itself in Trump’s general election confrontation with Hillary Clinton. The media and Clinton campaign’s reaction to Donald Trump’s invitation to Russia to provide the 33,000 emails Clinton deleted from her private server is a replay of what happened in the Republican primaries.
Normal America understood Trump was telling a joke to make a larger point about Hillary’s email problem. Trump’s statement is the kind of quip someone would make to the person next to them on the train or to the person serving them their coffee “yeah maybe the Russians can give those emails to the FBI.” Everyone in America except the media and the political class knew Trump didn’t mean it as a literal call for the Russians to hack Hillary’s email.
Were our media and political class not entirely populated with over earnest alpha nerds, they would have gotten the joke and responded appropriately. The way to deal with Trump is not take the bait he puts out. Deal with his humor and poking with your own. A Hillary campaign not run by alpha nerds would have said something like “Hillary lost some good recipes and pictures of her grandkids when those emails were deleted. She would like them back too.” That would have defused the entire thing and made Trump look small and unserious as well as reemphasized the point that there was nothing significant in those emails.
The media and political class — being nerds and unable to understand humor or sarcasm that hasn’t been dumbed down for their particular sub culture — didn’t get the joke and thought Trump was calling for Russian espionage to assist his campaign. Their response was unsurprisingly bizarre to the non-nerd observer and turned out to be completely counterproductive to their cause. By taking Trump seriously and accusing him of collaboration with the Russians, they ended up not only looking foolish and humorless but also inadvertently admitting that Hillary’s email problem was a national security issue, something they have been vehemently denying for months. Moreover, since the rest of the country got the joke, the claims that this made Trump unfit for office have had no effect.
Trump is Eric Straton from the Delta House and the media and political class are the humorless Omegas totally unable to understand or respond to the ridicule heaped on them by the Deltas. Unless the alpha nerds of the media and Hillary Clinton campaign figure out a way to relate to and communicate with the larger American public on its terms the way Donald Trump does, he will continue to own the news cycle and steamroll them.
Published in General
Dishes.
Longtime nerd and proud of it. This whole article, well written and thought out as it may be, still feels like a smart person spending far too much time and energy defending a thoughtless, crude and arrogant man; reading qualities into him that will better justify supporting him. The argument would hold more water if it were just the nerds who rejected him, but it is not. It is not that he goes against basic Washingtonian political protocol, but that he violated basic decency, and couples that with proud ignorance, insecurity and vanity. Playing footsie with the alt-right is just the cherry on top.
As long as it does windows I’m fine.
Right, to paraphrase Charlie Brown…”I resemble this post.” It is very interesting how Trump gives people the “vapours” with his speech. If one spends any time with average Americans, the language used doesn’t often lack in a certain crudeness, But with Trump, OMG! That’s what makes a billionaire relatable to the average person. Also, once some people have made their decision to dislike him, every thing he says is picked apart and observed with more scrutiny than a colonoscopy. Yet, even with the critics hovering with wolf pack feeding frenzy intentions, Trump is brave enough to walk out to the podium and answer all questions, 75% of which are sent with arrows intended to kill… for an hour or more, time and time again… freelance. Who else does that? I’ve said it before and borrowed from @freesmith, Trump is a champion for our country and our citizens. He’s not an ideologue, for sure. But he is smart, capable, and is firmly grounded with his heart in the right place. He may not be the only one with these characteristics, but he’s the only one with these characteristics running for President of the United States.
Fair enough. Although it does allude to another problem, which is particularly clear in the case of Paul Ryan. “Well, if this is really want people want…”
But you get that tension with leadership. If leadership pushes too hard, people complain that he is highhanded. If he doesn’t push hard enough, you get things like this. There is no perfect solution.
But overall I agree. This should be easy one.
The respective supporters of Pajama Boy and Duck Dynasty aren’t the whole country. Each of them, in fact, represents only a small minority of it.
Being un-PC is a major Trump appeal, sure. If he uses it to denounce idiocy, I’m in favor of it. If he uses it to tell BS lies about Mexicans, then I’m not.
I don’t care whether he’s PC or not; all I care about is whether he’s telling the truth.
People generally want to like other people, and so they give Trump the benefit of the doubt. He makes them laugh, and they don’t assume he means to be hurtful.
The problem with dealing with Trump’s bullying is that the person being bullied faces only two options: he must either stoop to the bully’s level, in which case clearly the object of the bullying is no better in his own mind and in the mind of those watching than the bully, or he must walk away, keeping his public and self-image in tact.
Furthermore, the people watching don’t want to take sides and so they often reject both people.
This is why Trump does it. It works.
We should be forming a committee for the express purpose of learning how to deal with bullies while staying in the argument and possibly winning it.
This is playground stuff. As a parent, I saw a lot of it. I’m sorry to say I always advised the targets to walk away. Now I realize that there needs to be a different solution.
Otherwise, might will always make right.
Very possible. Was just having fun. Sorry.
I am not sure that I accept this definition of populism. It seems too much like the normal democratic process. You have described the process that all voters go through in picking a candidate.
All politicians whether populist or not are trying to come across as likable. Voters are more likely to support a candidate that they like, that speaks to their issues.
The ideal, true Conservative, candidate would be some one that conservatives relate to, that speaks to their issues and that promises changes that conservative want.
Trump is different though. I think populism does explain him. It’s not just a matter of “likable” in his case, it’s being a non-politician, crude and perceived as non-PC, it’s his lowbrow feel, his appeal to the particular concerns of working class white voters, etc.
Have you ever read Queer Uses for Probability Theory? (Pages 149 – 132 of this PDF.)
It doesn’t address the “taking literally” detail (which is not the reason I’d give for those folks’ finding him beyond the pale), but it does address how rational beings with differing priors quite naturally see new data as part of differing gestalts.
For example, just imagine you had worked for IJ on Kelo. Your prior impression of Trump would likely be a very strong one, and not good, and, since all subsequent news of Trump (or any topic, for that matter) must rely on prior understanding for interpretation, the hypothesis that Trump is worthy of support might always lose out to slightly livelier zombie hypotheses.
Well, John, that’s quite the little worldview you’ve built out of a couple of B-movies. Speaking of nerdy, it reminds me of the universes built out of Star Wars or Star Trek stories by people for whom the line between reality and silly entertainment gets kind of fuzzy.
I especially liked this:
So… The way to show that you are serious about something is to propose something completely impractical. That’ll show ’em. How serious is that!?! Or we could reverse the polarity on the transporter, and rematerialize all of the illegals back in Mexico.
Actually, though, there are a lot of us who care whether the things the President promises to do are utterly ridiculous. Not because we’re nerds, but because we’re sane.
In my part of Fly Over Country, I heard Democrats and Bernie supporters telling this joke before I heard it from Trump.
After reading this, I now know why I hate every character in House of Cards. It’s the same dislike the Deltas felt for the Omegas. I remember the type from college, people who seemed to have their whole lives planned out from the time the graduated high school.
I love this post. You hit the nail right on the head. I know guys like Trump, loud mouthed, sarcastic New Yorkers who talk out of their backside. You can’t take what he says literally, also his whole negotiating methodology is in his book. He tosses out an idea that he knows will never be agreed to but just as a starting point put out the most extreme solution and work back from there. It’s there for anyone to read.
Also, and this is the big issue for many of the alpha nerds you refer to, is that Trump isn’t an ideologue. He has no ideology, really. Which is why he has the ability to change his positions because he hasn’t studied Locke or Adam Smith or the founders and the like. He just believes what he believes because, to him they work, and if you show him evidence that it doesn’t work he’ll change his mind. Most Americans aren’t ideologues, which is why, I think many GOP voters in the primary like him but ideological people (many of your alpha nerds, myself included) don’t.
To me this election is a battle against a leftist culture dominated by a media narrative and I think Trump is the man for the moment because he is able to shake up the political and media elite and break through that narrative. I don’t think Cruz or Rubio would have been able to break the narrative the way Trump has. Look what he was able to do this week, he dominated the news cycle during the DNC convention.
Again Great post.
Cough
Not that I would pass notes in class….
Trump’s success in besting his primary opponents such that they walked away from the fight or gave in completely and kissed his feet was what my fellow Americans saw in him and why they voted for him in droves. They want someone who will defend American interests by any means necessary.
Trump’s bullying tactics will not succeed for long on the national or international stage. When someone invented a gun, it worked for a while, but then someone invented a canon. That’s the way it goes.
But for now, his methods work.
Trump is a pragmatist but I doubt he would call himself that. My point about him not being ideological is that likely wouldn’t be able to point to any philosophy or economic theory that drives his decision making.
I never said and never meant to imply that only nerds rejected him. I am not talking about the merits of his position. I am talking about the inability of his opponents and those in the media to understand what he is saying and respond in productive ways to their cause.
I agree with this. But I think many of the Trump primary supporters believed that, yea Trump is a bully but they wanted a bully to go up against Hillary, and figurativly sock her in the nose. They wanted someone who would get down in the muck with her and fight dirty.
If that were true I would have seen a lot more comments by his supporters about his lie about having met Putin in the Green Room and then his denial yesterday of ever having met Putin. Was he lying about the Green Room, or was he lying about not having met Putin. Blindness isn’t my problem. I would suggest that deafness in the problem of the Trump supporters, selective deafness. As to not understanding Trump, I was capable of understanding his 4th grade level rhetoric at 9 years old, like most fourth graders. There is no depth there, no magical qualities. He is a demagogue pure and simple.
Some people were appalled and some were attracted by Trump’s pronouncements on the wall, the deportations, and the Muslim ban. I don’t buy the nerd vs. regular guy distinction as an explanation of the different reactions.
What did the regular guys think of his mimicking of a disabled reporter? His defense of Putin by saying, “We kill a lot of people in this country, too.” His reference to the size of his package during a presidential debate? His recent statements in support of the crackdown in Turkey? His hints that he won’t come to the aid of the Baltic states if Russia invades? His conspiracy theories? Or is it only nerds who care whether their candidate has a passing acquaintance with reality and the truth, or a modicum of decorum.
Sure, Trump would be a more amusing character to sit next to on a bar stool than some “alpha nerd.” But for president? Shouldn’t the president of the United States be, at minimum, decent?
I think that you are reading more into his use of the vernacular than is probably warranted. Hume didn’t speak english well and never fit into english circles, whereupon he moved to france where he made friends with Rousseau, eventually getting into the first real celebrity feud. It was biggie v tupac before it was cool.
But Trump will buy a bigger better yuuuuger cannon, with gold trim. Obama can prattle on with his pinko commie-lib “At a certain point, you’ve earned enough” blather. But for guys like Trump, you can never have too much of money, boobs or victory. That is part of his appeal.
I’ll be careful with my comment because I suspect this piece may show up in a major publication in the near future. I don’t think there is any real insight as to what the “nerds” did or did not know about the appeal of Mr. Trump. I admit that I, as one middling general issue American, am surprised at the too clever by half discernment of the primary voter. The way they were able to feign fear and frustration to the media and vote for a man that they know to be kind, wise, benevolent and, most importantly, irritating to the establishment. All this must have been divinely inspired and obscured to the nerds. The path to a healthy federalist republic is definitely more clear, now.
Then you are certain to be disappointed. Donald Trump is a lying machine.
This betrays a very dim view of the public or “non-nerds” as this piece describes them. It seems to imply that people are willing to be duped or lied to so long as they get to hear what they want to hear.
This was a really interesting post. I actually think the media/political class gets Trump a lot more than they let on. C’mon, people have been joking about Russia having the goods on Hillary for months. Trump makes a joke poking fun at the obvious and reporters and politicians are so autism-spectrum that they can’t get the humor?
They get the humor just fine. But as you say, they’re rule-based, and Trump breaks the rules, especially about what you’re allowed to say.
I don’t think of the political class so much as nerds, more like Reese Witherspoon’s character in the movie Election. Picture her pounding on that gavel and shouting “order!” To the extent they’re nerds, it’s self-congratulatory, in the sense of “we’re smart, informed and influential.” This is why journalists are proud to call the White House Correspondent’s dinner “nerd prom.”
When has this not been true?
Granted, I’m a misanthrope so I’m pretty down on people in general.