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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
Of course people are willing to be duped or lied to, it’s called rationalization.
I think there are layers and I think you got one of them. At first, no one felt they had to handle him. He would burn out and no one wanted to alien his voters. Once it was clear that he had a plurality, everyone went after each other to get the remaining votes. So Bush spends all his money on Rubio. And then when Rubio went after him, people started complaining that it was so beneath him and he stopped.
In short, they didn’t recognize the problem. When they did, instead of making the argument, they wanted to win by sheer force of numbers rather than by winning the argument. Then when they did fight, they had to fight with each other first. And then when they fought the opposition, they were criticized for getting dirty.
That last paragraph is everything wrong with the Right for the last decade.
Arbitrary social cues are no more meaningful than unmoored abstraction.
“Omigosh! I, like, literally died last night!” is a statement dripping with connotative and paraverbal meaning, but it’s far less “practical” than, say, “Gosh! I had a terrible night!” Yet socially adept teenagers (and a great many adults) prefer the former; “nerds,” I suspect, would favor the latter.
The codes which govern speech in Middle America might confound Washington, but they’re codes nonetheless, and they surely aren’t practical.
I agree with this, but I think Trump’s primary supporters are not only looking for someone who will go toe to toe with Hillary, they’re also looking for their own bully to send to DC.
Epic Rap Battles: Still better explanatory journalism than Vox.
No, but after checking out that section, I’m pretty sure I’ve been guilty of it.
I get your point about the strength of priors and an auxiliary hypothesis about how one takes Trump’s past positions would affect how different people would understand the next Trump statement. But that seems to just be a way of modeling that divide.
But… wasn’t the attempt by many, including Bush, Rubio, et al, to come up with some practical, realistic solution to the 10-20 million (whatever) illegals living in the U.S. an attempt at dealing with ‘messy facts on the ground’? And isn’t hunting them down, door to door, and deporting them all more like an abstract thought, when compared with reality?
Politically incorrect (conservative version) thought I find myself unsuccessfully fending off daily: the rationales for Trump’s appeal to the GOP voters from intelligent writers like Mr. Kluge have much more depth, thought and adult concern for politics than most Republican voters, and don’t seem to account for shorter, but still surprisingly strong, support for Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, and Ben Carson.
Trump’s campaign was barely damaged by his mocking a crippled New York Times reporter.
Yet I suspect that he would have been hounded out of the race if he had mocked a New York Times reporter’s crippled dog.
Sure, Hillary delenda est, but it is really all a sad, sad spectacle.
I think you might have hit on a divide that’s more explanatory than the nerd/non-nerd divide:
Not everyone trusts “fight”. While many do see fight as indication of caring, many others see it as bluster, as a substitute for caring or getting things done. A divide between those who trust “fight” and those who do not could explain a lot.
I am a bluster-distruster myself. And it does seem likely more cerebral types – including nerds – may distrust bluster. So may more ascetic types, whether ascetic for religious reasons, or because they know too well the dark side of human passion, and would rather not see it spattered about like silly-string without reserve or regard.
It’s possible being a bluster-distruster correlates with scoring high on the Cognitive Reflection Test, which allegedly measures a “disposition to rely on conscious, effortful, ‘System 2’ reasoing as opposed to rapid, heuristic-driven ‘System 1’ reasoning” – colloquially, preferring a “cool” head to a “hot” one. It does seem true that this preference for “cool” isn’t the usual, “normal” preference.
Is the OP an example of “Personal attacks on an individual, group, or class”
It really seems like the slow way to call your opponents an insulting name.
True, it is just a way of modeling that divide, but it’s a way of modeling that acknowledges both sides of the divide can be reasoning equally well.
The first thing that came to mind when I read this was Fishtown vs. Belmont.
The next thought was of how no one in the dystopian future of the movie Idiocracy could listen to Luke Wilson’s character without mocking his manner and tone.
Do the alpha nerds and the normals in this scenario recognize one another on sight? By dialect? Or is the divide only apparent once you start asking about Trump (“Mr. Trump!”) ?
You misunderstand the point. If you don’t understand the cues, you don’t understand what is going on. Why do smart people do stupid things? Because they fail to accurately perceive reality and act based on an inaccurate understanding of it. You can’t perceive reality if you don’t understand what people are saying.
Interesting question. I think they recognize each other by speech. They cannot understand each other’s speech and talk past each other. If we are headed for an idiocracy, it is because our political class has become unrmored from reality. They are the one future inhabitants of the idiocracy, not the rest of us.
It was a way of dealing with it by pretending it wasn’t a problem. It was the yin to the yang of Trump’s proposal to deport them all. What was Bush and Rubio’s proposal other than telling the public “too bad”? Nothing.
There is definitely some truth to that. The fact remains, however, they are not nearly as smart as they think they are.
There are a lot of you. And you are exactly who I am talking about. You apparently lack the ability to grasp higher levels of meaning to language like sarcasm and hyperbole. You can’t comprehend what Trump is saying and thus can’t understand why it appeals to people and assume they all must just be irrational.
True.
The misunderstanding runs both ways, though. “Nerds” may be unable to parse the speech of “normal” people (“Why can’t Trump simply say what he means?”), but “normal” people are equally unable to fathom the ideological consistency prized by “nerds.”
Why, for that matter, must the reality of non-“nerds” be the reality? Neither theorizers nor socialites inhabit a world of cold, lifeless statistics.
Hmm. I would think that Wall St. and Washington’s complicity in 30+ years of not just ignoring, but encouraging, illegal immigration would be one of the subtleties playing into a practical, non-ideological handling of the illegals here now.
But please don’t treat this revealing headline as attributing a feature to Trump that is not found throughout the political realm.
This is brilliant.
Now, I need an enormous sheet of paper, an even larger printer, and a laminating machine.
Ah, probably not.
There’s really not such a thing as “too nerdy” to grasp sarcasm or hyperbole. Nerds are quite fluent in using “higher levels of meaning to language” to communicate in their own style. More germane might be that not everyone appreciates the other guy’s flavor of hyperbole or sarcasm. Milton Friedman’s “Why not use spoons?” moment was typical nerd sarcastic hyperbole. Quite emblematic of how we communicate. But, really not appreciated by those who’d rather not get the joke.
It’s human to find the jokes of those we distrust less funny. Nothing nerd or non-nerd about it, really.
See, I don’t think all fight is bluster. In Republican politics of late, that’s true, but it shouldn’t have to be.
This is the greatest post written on the subject. It accounts for all sides in this election.
We are so stupid to think that the political class are the experts in the broader world. This so explains the GOPe teaming up with the Dems. They share one thing religiously: the rules of the nerds of this niche. It turns out that they adhere to this faith more strongly than they do to their professed ideology.
Ted Cruz and the House Freedom Caucus both attempted to adhere to their professed ideology. They were both “hated” and pilloried by many of the same political/ media class people who now form the #nevertrump movement.
Nope, you’re a nerd, at least in this subject. You paid $X to post comments and make articles on a political site. So am I, and so is everyone on Ricochet (even DocJay). I disagree with OP that nerd-ism is all-encompassing, or that it makes it difficult to understand social cues (nerdism isn’t autism, no matter how many people with autism-spectrum disorders are nerds); but rather that nerdism means passion for a thing, far beyond the extent that “normals” have, and it is that passion that makes it hard for nerds to understand why normals just don’t think as they do.
(As such, “nerd” and “geek” are not synonymous, as “geek” has a specific sub-culture attached; they can overlap, but “nerd” can overlap with just about anything.)
Not at all. But the GOP never responded in any substantive way. They let a counter message get lost in their outrage over Trump breaking the rules. The proper response would have been to propose a different way of controlling the border or have explained why they didn’t want it controlled.
I think that Cruz and a few others were trying to have a foot in each camp. Cruz didn’t feel comfortable enough to go full Trump, though. As was often said: Cruz was Trump Light and people can tell he wasn’t all in.
Because ideology has its limits. Every ideology has situations where it is no longer useful and at some point dangerous. Figuring out when that is, is the challenge.