Trump and the politics of new media
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In a democracy, people get the leaders they deserve, so the saying goes. I wouldn’t go that far, but Trump's meteoric rise to the top of the heap of this year’s presidential election cycle is not really that surprising. Trump is a directly a product of the postmodern pop culture that enfolds not only the US, but most of the westernized world as well.
It is from this culture of social media that Trump draws his
strength, and his appeal. In the process, he has demolished the traditional
notions of acceptable behavior for presidential candidates. People are
naturally puzzled how we have arrived at this state of affairs. So I will
attempt to provide an answer through a lens that I am very familiar with, that
of new media and its influence on our lives.
To begin, traditionalists and the self-appointed protectors
of decency have bewailed the corrosion eating away at culture for many years.
Corrosion or a savvy campaign strategy notwithstanding, Trump has gleefully overturned
the standard practices of political campaigning. In the not-too-distant past
(like, before Trump announced his candidacy), politicians engaged in a feigned
“perfidious veil of politeness,” as the 18th century French
philosopher Rousseau puts it, where “no man will grossly abuse his enemy, but
will slander him with skill.”[i]
Trump, however, has simply chosen instead to abandon polite
rhetoric and abuse his enemies with gusto; and once more, he’s gotten away with
it. It isn’t that political campaigns haven’t always been bruising and nasty.
But up until this point they haven’t been so sophomoric.
Promoting a civil society has always been an integral part
of the American experience as a cornerstone of a well-functioning democracy. As
such, the civil society attempts, with varying degrees of success, to define
lines that separate acceptable or civil behavior from uncivil, uncouth behavior
– behaviors that could threaten democracy through the brutish and base perfidy
that appears to lie just beneath the surface of every civilized people. As
author and sage Louis L’Amour was want to opine, civilization is, after all,
only a thin veneer.
Proper manners, polite gestures, and learned codes of acceptable
conduct – originally class-based actions through which patricians distinguished
themselves from the unwashed masses –
were adopted by the democratic civil society as a means to ensure that peoples
of all segments of society could successfully interact with each other in the
public sphere. Civility, in short, is the grease that lubricates the rough
edges of people’s communal existence.
Every generation believes the generation following it is
lacking in proper conduct. And we have indeed seen a steady decline from the
primness of the Victorian era in all areas of society, not than in a lot of
aspects it wasn’t a change for the better. However, nowhere is the decline more
noticeable than in visual media, certainly revelatory of the current state of
culture if any cultural expression is.
That the lines of demarcation between the acceptable and the
unacceptable have been noticeably and steadily dissolving since at least the
late 60s is beyond dispute. This is when Hollywood,
in attempting to compete with the popularity of television, moved away from the
classic Hollywood cinema formula of happy
endings and the good guys triumphing over the bad guys. Defying the old restrictions
of the motion picture code launched cinema into the realm of harsh realism, anti-heroes,
and graphic and gratuitous violence.[ii]
Television, spurred on by cable and satellite offerings,
responded with its own loosening of standards. Topics, taboo only few decades
or so ago, became prime storylines. Sexual innuendo, puerile jokes, and
off-color humor were gradually expanded as staple fare for television
screenwriters. Cable channels brought adult content into livingrooms.
By the 90s, the rise of the Internet and social media democratized
all of media, making it accessible to all – but with the old media gatekeepers gone, it
has also continued on in this self-same downward spiral of standards of decency…standards
which once relegated the profane and the vulgar to the barroom and private
conversations among like-minded friends.
We see daily the final disintegration of politeness and
civility on the pages of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Despite site administrators’
valiant attempts at policing their sites, the vulgar memes – the insults – the overheated
disputations on every subject imaginable – the use of crude and profane
language – reflects and mirrors the state of pop culture at the moment. And now with Trump on the scene, even what constitutes proper presidential behavior is now a subject of negotiation.
All of this is why – love him or hate him, and like it or
not – I believe Trump will be our next president. I was certain of this after his Saturday Night
Live appearance in November of 2015.
In explaining why a SNL show becomes a pivotal movement in
understanding a political movement, I should preface this by stating that it’s
not because I believe Trump is the superior candidate – it’s not primarily because
of his politics, his ideology, or anything he claims to stand for. And it’s not
because of his opponents’ positions, parties, or weaknesses, either. I want to
be clear that I’m not endorsing him here in any way whatsoever.
Rather, my reasoning centers on the observation that Trump instinctively
understands the postmodern digital age of “Virtual Reality” and its
manifestation in online social media, and how to manipulate its environs. Trump
has bragged that he “understands new media better than anybody else,” and it’s
true.[iii] He
has fully immersed himself into the web with millions of followers across the
span of social media. His pithy comments resonate; it doesn’t matter whether
they generate agreement or outrage – he’s getting noticed with every tweet.
This is an age where Real World (RW) reality and the Virtual Reality (VR) of postmodern digitization have merged – or collided – to create an entirely new way of viewing the world, one which combines elements of both. There’s no stability in this world, because as the prophets of postmodernism like Baudrillard[iv] have shown, there are no longer any fixed points of reference to refer to.
It’s a world where people, as in Lord Tennyson’s epic poem
Ulysses, “hoard, and sleep, and feed” and move about on a physical level, but
their minds are engaged on a virtual level through the devices of the digital
age. There are physical constraints in the RW for what one does and how one
lives; there are none at the virtual level. This blurring between RW and VR is
being masterfully exploited by Trump to his own advantage, whether he realizes
it, or does it intentionally, or not.
Within this volatile mix of reality and unreality Trump has
ridden to the rescue of a world in disarray, especially the angry Americans who
have come to believe that the “establishment” (which might have analogies with
Hardt and Negri’s concept of “Empire”)[v]
has robbed them of their birthright with impunity. Trump, positioning himself
as the anti-establishment candidate, spews out hyperbole and bombast and the
kind of soundbites that tickle the ears of his supporters – all the while
making at times close to superhuman claims of the policies, changes, and
turnarounds he will implement as president.
The practicality of such claims, however, are relevant only
to the RW - on the virtual level they are neither preposterous or impossible.
Anything is possible in virtual reality, as the grounding of physical
constraints has been lost. So The Donald has positioned himself as the bridge
between these two worlds.
Trump’s appearance on SNL in the monologue and skits reflects
this ambiguity, where the lines between irony and satire, on one hand, and
sincerity and honesty on the other, are impossible to detect.
In the dialogue and interplay between Trump and the SNL
cast, which statements represent the “real” Trump? Which represent Trump in
self-deprecating satire? Is Trump mocking himself or is he spouting out
campaign slogans? Does it even matter? When you get down to it, is there
really any difference between Trump the person and the Trump imposters who
flank him at one point on stage during the opening monologue?
Actually, to me, Trump's whole appearance was quite bizarre.
To an older person like myself who is not native to the digital era, watching
the show almost produced a vertiginous state where there was nothing
substantial to hold onto, nothing firm to grasp about who the man is or what he
believes and what he plans to do.
Whereas President Obama in 2008 presented himself as the atavistic
candidate to which people attached and ascribed their own hopes and desires to,
Trump has taken manipulation of the people to an even higher level: he presents
himself as the candidate who has the powers of a VR avatar to do whatever he
wants on behalf of the people.
Whether he can actually do any of this in the physical world
is now beside the point – people are immersed in their virtual worlds to such
an extent now anything Trump says he can or will do, like his promise of
remaking the US into the greatest economic engine ever, or building a wall
between US and Mexico and making Mexico pay for it, seems reasonable and
doable.
On SNL, the blurring of reality and unreality was complete.
The script could have been completely lifted from Trump’s campaign platform.
Or, it could have been a mocking satire on behalf of the whole SNL team.
Whatever the case, SNL gave Trump a golden opportunity to showcase his prowess
in standing astride the liminal boundaries between VR and RW like no other presidential candidate.
Trump, with the flair and ease of a ringmaster in a
three-ring Barnum and Bailey circus, deftly inserted himself into a postmodern
pastiche of self-reference, appropriation, and irony. Trump himself playing
Trump is indistinguishable from Trump playing Trump himself. Self-reference
turns into the referential self; the RW mirrors VR and vice versa.
A second factor comes into play to explain Trump through the
lens of new media. That is, Trump as a meme-come-to-life. It is another crucial
aspect of his appeal. The successful meme, in its guise as either a combination
of imagery and text that communicates an instantaneous visceral message of a
particular viewpoint, or as a symbolic image or gesture, spreads across VR like
a contagious virus. Every time Trump tweets, he generates in people’s minds a
meme-type VR avatar; every time he makes a public appearance, he fills the
avatar’s shoes with a RW person to the delight of his media-saturated audience.
Finally, in my view, the American people are reacting
against 28 years of the establishment-enabled presidencies of Bush, Clinton,
Bush, and Obama, replete with things such as unpopular blood-for-money wars of
intervention and anti-American trade and jobs policies. The country has not
only been sucked dry, but it’s now in an existential crisis. A public,
distracted by spectacles of visual culture and the distraction of virtual
reality, has finally awakened to the machinations of the ruling class, viewing
all of the current leadership with suspicion and distrust. Trump and Sanders’
popularity resides in their being seen as the only anti-establishment candidates.
References:
References:
[i] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
(1750). Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences. Trans. Ian Johnson.
Accessed 2 March 2016. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rousseau/jean_jacques/arts/#rn3
[ii] See Kirshner, J. (2012). Hollywood’s last golden age. Politics, society, and
the seventies film in America.
Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
[iii] See Parkinson, H. (2015). Can Donald Trump’s social media genius take him all the way to the
White House? 23 December 2015. The Guardian. Accessed 2 March 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/donald-trump-social-media-strategy-internet-republican-nomination-president
[iv] See Baudrillard:
A critical reader, e.g. Tseëlon, E. (1994). Fashion and signification in Baudrillard, p. 120 in the same
volume. Baudrillard: A critical reader. D. Kellner, Ed. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers.
[v] See Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard University
Press.
No, Trump won't be elected. Have hope!
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