Explaining the 2016 Election and the Rise of Donald Trump

Bill Newmann

September 2016

 

 

Attempting to explain the 2016 election, the transformation of the Republican Party, and the rise of such an unconventional candidate as Donald Trump is probably a foolish thing to try to do in the middle of all the political higgledy-piggledy. Whether the political earthquake of 2016 ends up being a small tremor or a shift of tectonic plates is still unclear.  Scholars will likely be trying to explain this for the next thirty years.  The next five essays are my early shot at making some sense of it.  When you’re a political junkie and you spend night after night watching the news thinking “what in the world is going on,” you want some explanations.  Then I remember that I teach the US Presidency.  It’s my job to try to make some sense of this.  Here it is.

 

The following essays are basically a short history of the world since 1945, with an ever-narrowing focus – from the global economy down to what social media does to our politics.  There will be, obviously, things I can’t include and, ultimately, what is happening in 2016 requires a book to explain it all.  This will be short and brief, a first rough cut.

 

A first point is this: We all haven’t gone insane. We are probably watching an electoral realignment that is decades in the making.  There is a logic to the frustration with both the Democratic and Republican parties, and there is a logic to why a break-all-the-rules candidate like Trump has emerged within the Republican Party.

 

Changes in the global economy (essay 1) such as globalization, the victory of capitalism over command economics, and the opening of countries like China and India to world trade led to the free movement of labor and capital.  Foreign competition, the movement of US companies overseas, and technological advancements have hollowed out US manufacturing, leaving many lower tech workers, as well as sales forces and middle management, out of work.  The US economy and the US educational system (essay 2) have been slow to adjust to those structural changes. There is a perception that the financial sector in the US has thrived in this environment even as financial crises crush the prosperity of many Americans. Job loss in the industrialized world has exacerbated income inequality, left lower-skilled workers with fewer avenues of employment, and given rise to anti-globalization sentiment in political parties throughout North America and Europe.

 

The polarization of US politics (essay 3) has prevented the political system from solving any of these problems.  For Trump and Sanders voters the message to the Democratic and Republican Parties is simple: you’ve had your chance and you failed; it’s time for something different. The problem for the Republican Party is deeper than on the Democratic side (essay 4).  The Republican style since the 1990s, a sort of Joe McCarthy-Richard Nixon smear-as-standard-operations, institutionalized by Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh, has overtaken the traditional message of the Party.  Propaganda was supposed to serve the Party by mobilizing voters.  Instead, the hyperbolic propaganda replaced the ideology. It should come as no surprise that the 2016 Republican nominee got his big break in politics peddling the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  When Republican leaders are shocked by Trump’s latest statements and apoplectic over his nomination, they have to ask themselves why they never stood up and corrected Trump’s accusations against Obama, but instead sought Trump’s support and his money.

 

The relationship between politics and US culture (essay 5) is a subject where Political Science training is less useful.  The essay suggests why many Americans have accepted a style of campaigning based in what has been traditionally defined as bullying.  The Trump style – name calling, trash talking, peddling of conspiracy theories, and policy prescriptions based in racism – would have disqualified any other candidate. How can Trump not only survive this, but thrive this way (so far)?  The answer may be simple: he’s a celebrity and Americans are obsessed with celebrities and everything they do.  Celebrities are forgiven because they are entertaining, because they are seen as winners, and because early in our era of social media, civility doesn’t always seem to be trending.

 

Is this a “desperate times call for desperate measures” for many people? Trump’s core supporters, from a demographic and economic perspective, are non-college educated men who are unemployed or underemployed.  Angry with decreasing prospects and political parties that seem not to care, they have turned to someone willing to express that anger and revel in it.  When his supporters explain that Trump is the only person who seems to understand them, the only person speaking on their behalf, they are expressing an age-old sentiment of many emerging political movements -- Trump is giving voice to the voiceless.  The controversy is what that voice is saying.

 

These essays are focused on the economic and political logic of the emergence of Trump.  It’s probably best to read one every few days, rather than trying to digest them all at once.

 

 

Essay One: Explaining the 2016 Election: Changes in the Global Economy  

                                                                                                     

A quick note first: The computer revolution and the Internet play a special role in any analysis of economic life in the late 20th and early 21st century. The economic changes we are experiencing today are a revolution akin to the industrial revolution (you really can’t say that enough).  They have an impact on the global economy and the US economy.  Their specific roles are described in essays 1 and 2.

 

Since WW II the western world has had a clear agenda on trade: increasing the volume of trade and decreasing the barriers to trade.  The architects of the post-war economic system in the US and the UK saw free trade as the key to continuing prosperity. They believed that the restrictions on trade of the late 1920s and 1930s had created and then intensified the Great Depression.  Sustained economic growth could be achieved if restrictions on trade were reduced. A large middle class, based in real economic and social mobility, would be satisfied with its economic life and support the political and economic system of the nation (as long as it was increasingly democratic). This would also help contain the spread of totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism or communism by proving that capitalism works better than communism.   This is the “Washington Consensus” that is often lauded or criticized, but its bottom line is an agreement among policy makers, as well as economic and academic elites in the western world, that free trade can be the bedrock of economic and political stability.  GATT, the IMF, and the World Bank (IBRD) were the institutional foundations of this. 

 

Technological changes that accelerated globalization helped move the world in that direction.  The increasing ease of travel (jet aircraft) and shipping (the container) and the mobility of capital (the norm of recognizing and trading the currencies of capitalist nations as the foundation of the evolving Bretton Woods system) can be seen as the foundations of globalization’s spread.  Computers transformed the world by revolutionizing the way we access and share information and communication across borders. The Internet added a revolution on top of that, transforming business and daily life as broadly and deeply as the industrial revolution.                                          

While Western Europe and Japan recovered from WW II and stabilized economically and politically, the situation in developing world was more uncertain.  Decades or centuries of colonialism would not be wiped away with a declaration of independence.  These nations were poor and politically unstable.  The leaders of these newly independent nations made political and economic decisions about what type of nation they planned to create.  Many chose the Soviet model (or had the Soviet model imposed on them).  Others chose democracy or anti-communist authoritarianism (often led by the few in defiance of the many).  The first of these nations to have economic success were eventually called Newly Industrialized Countries. Led by South Korea and Taiwan (Singapore and Hong Kong rounded out the Four Tigers), these economies prospered by using a model based on the Japan system.  A business–government partnership guided them toward economic prosperity even under authoritarian rule.  Eventually South Korea and Taiwan made a transition to democracy, and a model for the developing world was hailed. Authoritarian capitalism could work and had within it the seeds for the flowering of democracy. Other nations sought to replicate this model and its key component, an acceptance of integration with the world economy.  Though the movement of capital and rules of investment in these emerging economies were not completely free, they were much more open than the global norm before WW II. This globalization spread before the term became a buzzword.

 

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China followed their lead and borrowed heavily from their ideas as it opened its economy to the world under Deng Xiaoping.  Of course, the story is familiar by now.  China became capitalist in a controlled manner, while the Communist Party remained securely in power.  It made a transition from a totalitarian dictatorship with a command economy to an authoritarian capitalist system, a state capitalist model under the firm direction of the Communist Party’s leadership. China went from an economic backwater to the fastest growing major economy in the world. The boom and the way it transformed China cannot be overstated.   Historians often put it this way: For the past 5,000 years China had been the most advanced nation in the world, except for the last 500; China is now returning to its traditional role.

 

The 1980s saw the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, as new generations of communist leaders were able to make reforms the previous generations could not. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev led a new generation of Russian leaders in their hopes to transform Russia politically and economically.   This allowed Eastern European nations to initiate the economic and political reforms they had tried to begin several times before (but were stopped by the USSR).  This time Russia applauded the reforms. Recognizing the futility of communist economics, Russia and the nations of Eastern Europe moved toward capitalism, ending the cold war in the process.  The success of the Russian and Eastern European transition can be generously termed “uneven.”  Most importantly, though, the notion of communism as a rival ideology to capitalism in Europe had died.

 

The early 1990s saw the confluence of several things.  The Soviet Union itself shattered apart.  India, facing an increase in oil and weapons prices, massive debt, and a growing insurgency in Kashmir, began an economic reform based in the same principles that had succeeded in East Asia and China: integration with the world economy in a more free and open system. China accelerated its economic reforms in 1992 as Deng Xiaoping won arguments against the more conservative elements of the leadership group, who had tightened the Party’s grip on the economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mexico also moved toward a more open economy as President Salinas initiated his own reforms, capping them off with the North American Free Trade Agreement with the US and Canada. 

 

NAFTA was just the first of a number of free trade agreements that punctuated the success of the post-WW II Western economic system.  The norms of free trade, reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and decreasing governmental intervention in trade were enshrined in international agreements (APEC’s Bogor Declaration, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Maastricht Treaty that accelerated the integration of the European Union, and the World Trade Organization). 

 

The WTO in particular, an institution designed to set rules and settle disputes, has the purpose of expanding trade.  The European Union represents something even deeper, the notion that borders themselves, as economic and political obstacles to integration, are anachronistic and counterproductive (though as we’ve seen there are challenges to that consensus).

 

The architects of the post-WW II world could only have dreamed of such successes in institutionalizing free trade. 

 

The bottom line for these changes is simple: free movement of labor and capital in a global economy.  One of the central points of the Cold War was the West’s conviction that capitalism was far superior to the command economics of communism.  Over a period of about twenty-five years, roughly four billion people were allowed to test that theory.  That ideological victory brought with it complications.  These four billion people were now competing with the economies of the industrialized world for investment, labor, and customers.   Factories in the US could move to China; broccoli could be grown in Mexico rather than California; shirts could be made in South Asia or Central America, not South Carolina.  What we are seeing now is a backlash against this trend in the industrialized world. The rise of the far right in Europe (National Front in France or UKIP in the UK) and the entire Brexit movement is similar to the anti-NAFTA sentiment among both the Trump and Sanders supporters. Jobs lost in the US, shipped overseas as part of the general trend in globalization (that was accelerated by free trade agreements), have led to resentment against globalization and free trade agreements and anger at the traditional wings of the both Democratic and Republican Parties that support free trade. 

 

 This sets the global context for the changes in the US economy explained in essay 2.

 

One quick ending note: Rolling back globalization raises tremendous complications.  Globalization is essentially what happens when people and corporations are free to do what they want to do economically.  Can you end or slow down globalization without restricting basic economic freedoms?  Maybe not.  In addition, most economists argue that technological change is a larger cause of job loss in US manufacturing than free trade.  In any case, the real electoral issue today is that many people share the sense that they are losing because the system is rigged against them.   Two factors become crucial.  First, is the system fair?  Trump and Sanders voters and those who voted for the UK to leave the European Union resoundingly answer “No!”  Can trade agreements be written that make everyone play by rules that are fair?  Some argue that this is exactly what they do; others argue the opposite.  Let’s hope the 2016 election includes a lot of debate on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Second, and maybe more important, and too often ignored, is the question about whether nations are preparing their citizens for the economic competition of the 21st century.  If capital and labor are free to move around the globe, it will flow where the workers’ skills and economic environment promise the most profit.  In this sense, education is the key. Ironically, we’re focusing on the election of the president, the person who will lead the federal government, the level of government that has the least important role in our educational system.  Since Americans demand local control of education, are we barking up the wrong tree when we demand that the federal government resolve these economic problems that are rooted in educational issues? Some of this is addressed in essay 2.

 

 

Essay Two: Explaining the 2016 Election: Changes in the US Economy

 

In the post-WWII era, the US economy expanded and middle class dreams flourished.  For the high school graduate it might be a union-based manufacturing job with essentially lifetime employment and great benefits (including generous pensions).  For high school and college graduate alike it might be the life of a salesman.  For the college grad the goal was membership in middle management as an “organization man.”  In the 1950s, it seemed that life was good for “everyone.”  The US won the war, and in its aftermath the US economy ran the world.  The suburbs were the height of achievement, and everyone could own their own home with a two-car garage and send their children off to college.  Of course, women and minorities were either excluded or limited to specific roles in such a profound way that if the US of 2016 and the US of 1952 were two contemporary nation-states, the US of 2016 might consider economic sanctions against its earlier self. The 1960s ushered in a necessary awakening, but until then we all liked Ike, and what was good for General Motors was good for the US.           

 

Slow economic growth hit the US in the 1970s.  The reasons why are still being argued (oil shocks, a lack of investment, foreign competition, the lack of competition, simple aging of the manufacturing base, too much planning, too little planning, too much government intervention, not enough government intervention,  union power out of control, poor management, Democrats, Republicans, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, deficits, pick yours).  The US economy recovered in the 1980s, but that recovery came along with massive government deficits and private debt. 

 

Three important things changed.

 

First, large shifts in manufacturing in the US have occurred. All the changes described in the first essay led American corporations to shift some of their production overseas and increased the foreign competition to American manufacturing giants.  Think of the shift out of the US for textiles, consumer electronics, steel, or automobiles.  Foreign competition also began to beat US products in the US market.  Chrysler, a US auto giant, first went under in the late 1970s.  The city of Pittsburgh nearly passed away when foreign steel manufacturers emerged.  After the 2008 recession, Chrysler failed again and General Motors, the undisputed flagship of American manufacturing might, collapsed -- RIP Detroit, Michigan.  The golden era of traditional manufacturing described in the first paragraph has faded. 

 

In addition, high-tech manufacturing (new processes which lower the number of workers to complete the same task) has decreased the labor needed to produce a product.    These were the jobs that non-college grads counted on.  The sales force and middle management of these sectors were also hard hit.  Even when these sectors recovered, the pressure on wages is downward.  A sales force that had been upper middle class may be hard hit by layoffs and threatened with extinction. When it recovers, there are fewer workers and they are lower middle class.

 

Perhaps many of these workers could move into the retail sector. The rise of on-line retail, however, has badly hurt traditional retail.  Think of the number of bookstores or record stores today compared to the 1980s. 

 

The news isn’t all bad.  The shift from manufacturing to services has maintained a solid growth in jobs, but the income from the many of these jobs, particularly the ones for non-college graduates, is much less than the income from a traditional manufacturing job.  It’s unlikely to be enough to support a family and it certainly contributes to growing income inequality in the US.  

 

Second, there has been a related financialization of US economy.  This subject is too big to tackle here, but the short version is this.  The US economy can be divided up into sectors – agricultural, manufacturing, financial, retail, government are the major ones.  One of the indications of the modernization of the US economy in the 19th and 20th centuries was the shift from an agricultural economy to one based in manufacturing.  Manufacturing was seen as the sign of a modern economy and the prerequisite to a large middle class.  Since the 1980s, the US has been shifting to an economy based more and more in finance.  It’s true that the difference between the financial and the manufacturing sectors is not entirely clear cut; the theoretical reasoning behind financial manipulation is to increase capital available for investment, investment that can build new factories, increase R&D, modernize manufacturing, hire more workers, or bankroll start-ups.  The dilemma comes when there is greater return on investment in cases where the capital is reinvested endlessly in financial markets and hedge funds, rather than used in opportunities that will create jobs (except in the financial sector).  This is the trend that accelerated in the 1980s. The US government exacerbates this trend by taxing investment income at a lower rate than paycheck income. 

 

Financialization accelerates the free flow of capital across borders, and leads to the type of speculation, malpractice, and “irrational exuberance” that causes financial collapse. Welcome to the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, the Tech Bubble collapse of the 2000s, and the Great Recession of 2008. Of course, the perception is that everyone was hurt by these financial disasters except the financial sector; each time, the financial sector recovered more quickly and more deeply than everyone else and, worse, didn’t learn its lesson.  This perception can be debated, but that debate is too big for this essay.

 

Third, the modern conservatism of the Reagan era flourished. It rejected two aspects of the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson – government spending and the taxes to pay for it.  The tax revolts of the 1970s slashed state income taxes, and the federal government joined the income tax cut bandwagon when Reagan was elected.  The Reagan administration, however, never did cut government spending as it had promised. Federal spending continued to grow (even if at a slower pace), and the result was massive deficits (This was bipartisan; don’t blame on Democrats or Reagan alone).  The federal government managed this by operating at a deficit year by year, borrowing money to stay afloat (selling government bonds, for example, to foreign governments or state pension funds or to the US Federal Reserve).  States, however, often had laws that required a balanced budget.  As they faced deficits, they had to slash spending or get aid from the federal government to add to their yearly revenue.  When states were faced with budget crises, they looked for places to cut spending.  The typical target was education spending. From elementary to higher education, budgets were cut, teachers weren’t hired, schools weren’t modernized, and investment ended. In 1983, the US Department of Education wrote a report entitled “A Nation at Risk.”  The report’s introduction stated this: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” I kid you not.  Most state education systems haven’t recovered.  You can be the judge of whether SOLs have fixed this. 

 

The impact of the computer revolution on education in the US is partly answered by a few questions. How many years of Civil War history do you get in the average elementary and secondary school in Virginia?  Compare that to the number of years of computer science you might get.  Which might be more important to your ability to be productive and gainfully employed in the 21st century economy?    Another example might be that in the College of Humanities and Sciences General Education requirements, the Science and Technology choices do not include anything on computers.  This is not meant to single out VCU. It’s true almost everywhere.  In short, for various reasons (local parochialism, a lack of investment, an inability to pay computer science teachers a wage that would keep them in the classroom rather than in the private sector), the education system of the US has not modernized to keep up with the technological and economic changes of the last forty years.

 

All of this contributes to income inequality.  It is very possible that all of the political turmoil of 2016 has a single root cause – the fact that income inequality in the US is at a level rarely seen since before the Progressive era of the 1890s.  Economic historians have noted that rapid economic and technological change exacerbates income inequality.  There are winners and losers.  The financialization of the economy amplifies the division between winners and losers. Wall Street wins; Main Street loses. Those individuals with the skills and education to adapt to the change and secure a job and those companies that can find a way to attract customers and capital in the changed economy are the winners.  Those left out in the US (and Europe) seem to be the people whose skills and training fit best in the old manufacturing era – non-college educated men.  Again, these are Trump voters.  Sanders voters are college-aged Americans earning degrees or the recently graduated who find themselves in a slightly different situation.  They have or will have shiny new diplomas that seem to have earned them the ability to pour coffee at Starbucks. Worse, their math skills are only good enough for them to calculate how much money they owe in student loan debt.  Their prospects are much better than for the non-college educated, but even so they might ask if they are getting the education they need to prosper.  (That will be the subject of another essay down the line – the need for every high school and college student to learn basic economics, basic business administration, and basic accounting, subjects at least as important to basic functioning in the world economy as English composition).

 

The bottom line of these complex changes is this: The US economy is undergoing vast structural change, and while voters argue that they want less government, they strangely also demand that government do something about the problems that caused the structural change.  Democrats and Republicans are asked at every election: How will you fix this?

 

                       

Essay Three. Explaining the 2016 Election: Changes in US Politics   

 

The Republican Party is shattering before our eyes.  Outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have had huge (pronounced yoooge) success in 2016. The reason why is simple at first glance. The traditional establishments of both parties seemed unable to solve any of the economic problems that have been discussed in the previous essays; voters looked for other choices.  

 

But why have the traditional party establishments seemed to fail so badly, and why did it impact the Republican Party more than the Democratic Party?  This is where it gets complex.  Ultimately, the mess of 2016 is a culmination of forces brewing in US politics for decades.  The major political changes in the US since the end of WW II, but especially since the 1960s, have all contributed to a polarization that has prevented the two political parties from being able to cooperate long enough and deeply enough to solve any serious problems.  Internal Republican Party politics has broken the uneasy alliance between the traditional wing (tax cuts and limited government) and the movement wing (social conservatives).  The winner of that battle turned out to be an unknown neglected wing (non-college educated whites who don’t believe that tax cuts will solve every problem and look to government for leadership on the economy).  They are the core Trump constituency.

 

A host of political trends have changed American politics profoundly. Almost all them have contributed to polarization.

 

Electoral Realignment

The first cause of polarization is the big electoral realignment that accelerated in the 1960s.  The South moved to the Republican Party!  Southern states had been the core of the Democratic Party since the Civil War.  Civil rights legislation, the US loss in Vietnam, and the expansion of federal spending and power (at the expense of state power) moved the South into the Republican column. The change could be traced to Strom Thurmond’s challenge to Harry Truman in 1948 (over integration of the armed forces), Barry Goldwater’s victories in the South (after the Civil Rights Act of 1964), George Wallace’s successes in 1968 (46 electoral votes on a pro-segregation ticket), and Nixon’s Southern strategy in 1972 (a Republican sweeping the South).  It was consolidated by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.  Both Parties had been coalitions of moderates and conservatives. Once the South (the conservative wing of the Democratic Party) moved to the Republican side, more liberal Republicans (think Illinois or New York and New England) moved toward the Democrats.  The parties evolved into a new alignment: a very conservative party (Republicans) and more solidly liberal party (Democrats).  Both were more ideologically uniform parties.  Those sharper ideological differences have an obvious impact on polarization.  After the 2000 election, the media began to use the shorthand of Red states (Republican) and Blue states (Democratic).

 

The Religious Right

Religion became a key element of Republican Party politics as evangelicals evolved into the core of the Republican base. For some voters, this became a sort of religious test for Republican candidates and a test that Democrats will always fail (because of abortion or LGBTQ rights). Electoral realignment occurred as the role of religion in American life began to change.  The Supreme Court declared prayer in school unconstitutional (1962) and abortion legal (1972).   Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 also argued that integration was an assault on traditional Christian values.   Remember that the Southern Baptist Convention fervently opposed integration. What could be uglier than merging Christianity with white supremacy? But that was exactly the thought process for many southern political leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.   In response, the “solid South” became the Republican South by the 1980s.

 

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was abortion, prayer in school, the teaching of evolution, and more recently same-sex marriage that became the key religious features of social conservatism.   As evangelicals grew their movement and turned toward politics, they transformed the Republican Party, making religion a foundation of the Party’s philosophy.  Political disagreements that are wrapped up in different interpretations of religious scriptures obviously reduce the potential for compromise on many social issues.

 

The traditional conservatives or moderate wing (think Eisenhower and GHW Bush) lost control of the Republican Party to the social conservatives (or Movement conservatives) by the mid-1980s.   

 

Demographic Changes, Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Sentiment

At the same time, demographic changes were under way.  The US was becoming less white and less Christian, even as the Republican Party was getting whiter and more Christian.  Minorities became the most reliable Democratic voters.  Some of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and xenophobic aspects of Trump’s campaign rhetoric can be traced to this.  Some of it has economic roots (a sense that immigrants are stealing American jobs; see below). It is often combined with anti-Muslim sentiment following the 9/11 attacks into a general xenophobia.  Typically that xenophobia was an undercurrent, but politicians often stoked it by claiming that white Christians (still the majority) were being discriminated against.  The election of the first African-American President and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement were used by some more irresponsible politicians as a rallying cry for resentment.        The rhetoric can get absurd. The “War on Christmas” is a case in point. Christmas is the only religious holiday that is also a federal holiday.  That doesn’t sound like discrimination against Christians or much of a war on Santa (but it is a violation of the First Amendment; no other religion has a federal holiday).                                                 

 

The Permanent Campaign, Single-Issue Voters and Lobby Groups

Political scientists argue about when the permanent campaign began, but they almost all agree on the basic point – candidates are always running.  Every move they make is recorded, scrutinized, and used for or against them in the next election.  They are also always raising money, and similarly every word they speak is a reason for someone to give them or not give them the funding they need to stay in their jobs. The rise of single-issue voters and lobby groups has developed an entire range of mobilized forces that exacerbate this pressure on lawmakers. First, it means that the party has less control over the political winds that blow candidates away or sail them into office. Second, the single-issue crowd often refuses to compromise over their issue.  Period.  And they insist that the candidate cannot compromise.  This is the origin of the “litmus test” for candidates, a qualifying or disqualifying belief or stance that is the prerequisite for support from a voter or lobby group. The issue of abortion became one giant fault line in the political landscape, often threatening to divide American politics irretrievably. As campaigns became more expensive, parties relied more and more on the ability of lobby groups to mobilize voters and on donors who contributed money based on their interests in a single issue.  Wealthiest Americans, of course, have an advantage here.  They are more able to contribute to campaigns than anyone else.   The bottom line here is that if a member of Congress wants to be reelected, the person’s motivation for every action (speech or vote) may be to play to an audience that is likely to vote for the person or contribute money. This mean pandering to a single-issue voter or wealthy lobby group or wealthy donor or to an ideologically gerrymandered voting bloc in the member’s district or state.  See the next paragraph.

 

Ideological Gerrymandering

This is my least favorite thing in the world.  I like catheterization better.   Seriously. Gerrymandering is the age-old art of drawing US House of Representative districts to increase the ideological purity of the voters.  The drawing of these districts is the legal responsibility of a state legislature.  State legislatures draw up those districts to maximize the probability that their party will win more seats in the next House elections (If the state legislature is controlled by Democrats, they will draw the districts to increase Democratic seats, and a Republican-controlled legislature will do the same to increase Republican seats). As state legislatures created more and more districts that were solidly Democratic or solidly Republican, more and more districts became uncompetitive.  In districts like this, you win by playing to the base, by becoming more ideological, by fighting to defend “real Americans” from the “dangerous” opposition. There is no incentive to cooperate with a member of the other party. In fact, it becomes dangerous to your electoral survival.  Nothing could be worse than to be seen as a compromiser, someone willing to betray party principles.  You might get “primaried” by someone to your right (for Republicans) or left (for Democrats).  This has been worse for Republicans and some giants of Republican politics have lost their seats to newcomers who were more ideologically pure (farther to the right). People like Senator Richard Lugar (should have been President), Senator Robert Bennett, and Representative Eric Cantor lost their jobs.  In some ways the entire campaign of Bernie Sanders can be explained as the “primarying” of Hillary Clinton, an establishment figure being challenged by someone more ideologically pure.  The bottom line here is that as ideological gerrymandering becomes more pervasive and based on computer models that refine the drawing of districts, candidates who win today are farther to the left or right than candidates in the previous era.  These candidates are less likely to cooperate with the opposition.

 

Blame Game

Single-issue voters and lobby groups combined with gerrymandering make something awful into something toxic. There is no incentive for cooperation.  You win reelection by blaming the opposition for the problem, not by solving it. There is a twisted logic to this. Who gets the credit for bipartisan legislation?  Both parties. How do you differentiate your party from the opposition if you agree on the key issues?  You need distinction and difference to win.  The incentive is to highlight the differences and to turn differences into causes and causes into noble quests.  The opponent needs to be an enemy. Passing bipartisan legislation is seen as betrayal, aiding and abetting the enemy, treason to the party.  Republican Governor Charlie Crist of Florida hugged President Obama as a greeting during an Obama visit to the state in 2009 following a hurricane.  That was the end of Crist’s future in the Republican Party. The hug was proof that Crist wasn’t really a Republican.  A real Republican would never greet a Democratic President of the United States with a friendly hug.  The June 2016 votes on several pieces of gun legislation (background checks and the seemingly easy issue of preventing people on the various Terrorist Watch Lists from being able to buy guns) was a great case in point.  Members of Congress seemed ready to compromise, but clear pressure from lobby groups, the NRA in particular, cranked up the ideological fervor, closing the policy window for compromise and convincing both sides of the aisle that more headway could be gained from blaming the other side for failure than by seriously addressing the problem.

 

Rise of the Punditocracy

Media also changed.  Twenty-four-hours news and the expansion of cable television in the 1980s and ultimately the Internet boom of the 1990s led to an explosion of partisan media.  Pundits became media stars that mobilized voters for the party establishment. Beginning with Rush Limbaugh, the pundits began to eclipse the party establishment in influence; they defined the party ideology and forced the party organization and candidates to follow their lead.      In battles between the RNC Chairman and Limbaugh, Limbaugh would win.  See the next essay for more on this.

 

The 1990s and Polarization

The 1990s were the key period for polarization. After a crushing defeat in the 1984 election (losing 49 states), Democrats shifted to the center and away from their leftward drift.  Bill Clinton’s attempts to portray himself as a New Democrat led Republicans to try to discredit him and highlight ideological differences. Partisan media emerged as a money-generating propaganda machine that hammered Clinton day by day and set a Republican agenda of finding a way to remove Clinton from office (Rush Limbaugh should really send Clinton a royalty check every month).  The anti-Clinton effort redefined both Republican campaign strategy and ideology. Republicans moved to full demonization of Democrats -- blaming them for anything and everything.  Clinton was accused of murdering over 300 people.  Also remember that the Independent Counsel who investigated Clinton was actually sworn in before Clinton committed the crime that almost removed him from office (yes before).  In effect, after the prosecutor was sworn in, he expanded his mandate (by permission of a Democratic Attorney General) to investigate anything the President might be doing that could be considered illegal. The fact that Clinton did have an affair in the Oval Office, did lie about it to a Grand Jury, and did maintain support of the Democratic Party, led many Republicans to an all-out hatred of anything Clinton and the Democratic Party. The American public as a whole, however, was not as angry.  Clinton’s approval rating actually went up as Republicans tried to remove him from office.

 

Democrats did not begin to respond with their own media propaganda machine for another decade (accusing GW Bush of anything and everything and shifting back to the left).  The Democratic punditocracy is not as successful as the Republican version.  Compare the influence and revenue of Fox News (the conservative standard-bearer) to MSNBC (several hours of “progressive” programming every night).  Fox News often leads the Republican Party strategically and ideologically.  MSNBC has a few hours of Democratic cheerleading and liberal analysis every night and weekend mornings.

 

The Internet

The Internet expanded all this.   Television can be partisan, but the Internet is wide open to every conspiracy theory you can image.  If you don’t like the analysis you’re getting from traditional media, the Internet will give you whatever “facts” you need to support your opinion.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.  Sadly, on the Internet, you are entitled to your own facts.  They’re just a few clicks away.  Believe that George W. Bush was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks?  There is a website that shows you how he did it, even though it is absolutely demonstrably false.  Believe that Barack Obama included “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act that will decide who lives and dies when we begin rationing health care?  There is a website that will explain exactly how Obama himself will choose whose grandparents survive the culling, even though it is absolutely absurd and there is nothing in the bill even remotely suggesting anything like that.  People used to be skeptical.  “I’ll believe it when I see it” was the old phrase.  Now with the Internet and political polarization, we have a new way of thinking: “I see it because I believe it.”

 

Anti-Globalization, Anti-Immigration, and Culture War

The changes in the world economy and the changes in the US economy have created or intensified several of the political trends mentioned above. They merit special consideration.  Trump and Sanders voters are clearly anti-globalization; they blame bad trade deals for much of the economic woes of the US.  In the UK, the successful Brexit vote to withdraw the UK from the EU was also propelled by the sense that the UK was suffering from its integration with the rest of Europe.  In this case, the “leave” movement was an anti-globalization movement.  Trump voters and many Brexit voters also added anti-immigration to the political mix.  While globalization led to foreign competition and local jobs moving overseas, immigrants actually come to your country to steal your job.  Again, it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump’s big break in the 2016 race was an anti-Mexican immigration tirade.  It captured the moment and rocketed him to frontrunner status.  Underneath all this is the notion that immigration is changing the culture of the nation, making the nation unrecognizable. To “real Americans,” immigrants are culturally alien and damaging to their image of America (often straight out of Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best, TV sitcoms of the late 1950s and early 1960s).  English-only movements in many states are reflections of this.  New voter identification requirements in many states also have their roots in fears that illegal immigrants are illegally voting and tipping elections away from the interests of “real Americans.”  As the Democratic Party relies more and more on minority voters and as some elements of the Republican Party stoke the culture war, the nation seems to become more polarized.  Whether that is an accurate reflection of national sentiment or just the result of the hyper-demagoguery during an election is an unknown.  

 

Red and Blue World

How does a nation govern when the bases of the party have been conditioned to view the opposition as an enemy and candidates win when they stoke this demonization and refuse to compromise?  The answer is you don’t.  You solve no problems; you make no progress; you just shout, accuse, and blame. Partisanship has prevented action on most important issues and why the nation seems stuck in gridlock. It explains why the most recent Congress is considered one of the least productive since the Civil War and why each political party thinks of the enemy.  Maybe we do have a Red and Blue nation.  If the Founding Fathers had behaved this way, the British would have won the war and the US would still be a part of the UK (how would you have voted on Brexit)?  But why did all this affect the Republican so deeply that Donald Trump, literally a punchline in the summer of 2015, became the leader of a powerful political movement and the presidential nominee? That’s the subject of the next essay.

 

 

Essay Four: 2016 Election: Why This Impacted Republicans More

 

Before this essay continues, let me add a brief note. The following is not a very flattering look at the Republican Party, but it is not partisan.  For presidential elections, I root for one from the Democratic side and one from the Republican side and hope these two wonky and boring candidates will meet for some very detailed and dispassionate debates on the national debt, tax rates, and whether the US might slow China’s efforts to dominate the South China Sea by having the Senate approve the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.  It never happens.  In analyzing what is happening in the Republican Party, I begin with the premise of what the Republican Party has been for over 100 years and how it is now changing in fundamental ways. The Republican Party’s core messages of limited government, strong defense, and a belief in private enterprise and free trade are important and essential ones (as are Democratic core messages), but they are being cast aside in in 2016. Trump is not a consistent believer in any of the core Republican principles.  In that sense, this essay is more of a lament than an attack. That doesn’t mean I am necessarily a Republican or a Democrat.  My favorite Presidents are Truman and Eisenhower, and I have a life-sized cardboard Teddy Roosevelt in my office (who helps me draft my fantasy football teams).   Full disclosure: I think both Reagan and Clinton should have been removed from office. I’m just a Political Scientist watching an important political party self-destruct.  The essay is an attempt to answer this question: Why does a belief in limited government and a faith in free enterprise now require you to believe that Obama was born in Kenya and Hillary Clinton is murderer?

 

For critical and often incredulous analysis of Trump that comes from the establishment wing of the Republican Party, see articles by Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Marc Thiessen, and Peter Wehner.  George Will has written some eloquent pieces on Trump’s candidacy and then resigned from the Republican Party. These are savage attacks on Trump from highly partisan Republicans, flag bearers for the Republican Party orthodoxy as it has been for decades.  They represent what the Republican Party has been.  Its philosophy and leadership has been one of the pillars of the Republic since 1854.  In spite of this, amazingly, both the leadership and philosophy of the Party have seemed to vaporize over a period of six months. The Party’s nominee is running on a platform that includes open religious bigotry, racism, misogyny, bullying, acceptance of dangerous urban legends (vaccines cause autism) and incredible conspiracy theories (Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination), and a bevy of lies and fabrications boggle the mind. How did this happen?

 

A restatement of the question is this: Every party has its wingnuts, but why did they gain more control on the Republican side?  On the Democratic side, GW Bush was accused of stealing the 2000 election, of planning the September 11 attacks, and of knowing that Iraq did not have WMD.   These conspiracy theories, however, did not find their way into the Democratic Congressional agenda.  They remained Internet-driven fringe ideas. In the Republican Party, however, the wild ideas have thrived.  In polls over the last decade, roughly 30% of the Republican Party believes the most wild-eyed unsupportive nonsense about Democratic leaders and the Democratic Party.  A January 2016 Huffington Post poll found that 53% of Republicans have doubts about whether Obama was born in the US. Why would anyone believe that?  There’s not a drop of evidence to suggest he wasn’t born in Honolulu. Why would a sizeable constituency of one political party latch on to the most absurd ideas? Why would a political party nominate a candidate who wallows in this silliness and whose ideas often fly in the face of the Party’s core ideas? The very short answer is this:  Republican pundits used exaggerated rhetoric and wild accusations to mobilize the base of the party.  These ideas have become Republican orthodoxy for a sizable percentage of Republican Party voters because very few Republican leaders challenged the most insane charges (such as Obama being born in Kenya or the State Department has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood).  Any facts that challenge these ideas are just part of the liberal media’s lies or nefarious Democratic Party machinations.

 

First, the strategy of throwing wild accusations at Democrats worked.  It consistently mobilized voters. The anti-Clinton campaigns were so hyperbolic they seemed absurd, but they were so successful that they increased in volume and intensity—a snowball rolling down a hill.  Rush Limbaugh went from a little-known radio show host to a multi-millionaire whose presence at Republican gatherings was the main event.  He became the ideological standard bearer.  (Notice the similarity between the Limbaugh and Trump styles –the outspoken belief in one’s own greatness, the stream of consciousness rhetorical style, the belittling of your enemies).  Limbaugh led a resurgence in conservative radio.   Now there are many Limbaugh-types on the air.  Fox News moved into the arena in 1996, supplying conservative-leaning news analysis.  Both Limbaugh and Fox News pushed back against the traditional media by labeling it “liberal.” The attempt to discredit traditional media was political (or evil) genius (depending on your point of view). It implicitly and explicitly pushed the notion that other sources of media lie; you can only trust us.  That makes money and changes attitudes. Along with the internet, it provided viewers with the increased ability to choose news sources and even facts that fit their political viewpoints.  Polling shows that CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC viewers have different versions of key events in recent history. For example, Fox News viewers are more likely to believe that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks (even though President Bush repeatedly stated that this was not the case). In the 1990s, “CNN Lies” and “Rush is Right” bumper stickers began appearing. 

 

Maybe more importantly for the Republican Party is that the efforts to demonize Bill Clinton worked. Republicans took the House and Senate in 1994 and kept them in 1996!  They lost them briefly in the 2000s, but have maintained control of Congress more consistently since 1994 than at any period since 1918-1928. The strategy of demonizing your political opponent is as old as the Republic, but the modern tactic pioneered by Richard Nixon was elevated to an art form by Representative Newt Gingrich on his way to becoming Speaker of the House in the 1990s.  The polarization of US politics was not just an observation made by scholars and historians; for Gingrich, it was a strategy for gaining power, and it worked. Making Bill Clinton into a hideous beast who must be destroyed was the key to success.  Clinton thwarted those goals by shifting toward Republican policies and won the 1996 election. This led Republicans to push back even harder, trying to remove him from office.  This failed, and Gingrich was the main casualty (leaving Congress in 1999 after Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterms).

 

The success of this demonization of Bill Clinton and the continued demonization of Obama and Hillary Clinton can be debated, but the strategy continues. Conservative media embraced and publicized a series of conspiracy theory-worthy ideas.  There are too many to name; let’s go with the big ones: Clinton was accused of murdering Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster and having a US military plane shot down in Bosnia to silence Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.  Obama’s health care plan supposedly included “death panels” that would decide who lived or died; Obama was dubbed a socialist who hates white people and doesn’t love America. Hillary Clinton has been accused of cancelling a rescue mission that would have saved the lives of those killed in Benghazi in September 2012.  Underneath it all is a sometimes hidden and sometimes explicit accusation that Democrats are not really Christians and don’t even believe in God.  Implicit in this is the idea that America’s leaders must be Christian.  Note the attacks on Obama in 2008 arguing that he can’t be President because he is a Muslim (he happens to be Christian, and in any case there is no religious test for public office in the US; you don’t need to be a Christian and you don’t even need to believe in God; it’s only the First Amendment). It should come as no surprise that the Republican nominee in 2016 gained his political fame spreading the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be President.  It should also come as no surprise that Trump has called for a ban on Muslim immigration to the US and implied after the Orlando shootings that Obama actually founded ISIS.

 

Second, the battle between the moderate Republicans (traditional small “c” conservatives and the Movement (capital “C”) Conservatives was won ideologically by the Movement Conservatives.  By 2016, Ted Cruz was more representative of Republican ideology than Jeb Bush.  In the 1990s, Jeb Bush was considered a conservative and Ted Cruz would have been an outlier. How did this happen?  How many Republicans are watching Trump on television right now and trying desperately to understand why Jeb Bush floundered so badly and why major figures such as Senator Lindsay Graham or Governor John Kasich never gained serious traction with voters?  Graham, a sitting US Senator from South Carolina, one of the leaders of the foreign policy wonks in the US Senate, with the solid credentials of being one of the House of Representatives managers of the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office, didn’t even get enough support in the 2016 Republican primaries to make the cut for the main debates! 

 

The third point may explain it: The pundit-backed conspiracy theory-leaning accusations began to define the Republican agenda. The moderate or establishment wing of the Party had tolerated and even encouraged the pundits’ hyperbole and demagoguery because it helped mobilize voters.  Did they ever point out that there was nothing even remotely like “death panels” in the health care legislation, or that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, wouldn’t have the authority or ability to call off a military rescue mission in the Benghazi situation? They tolerated Trump’s “birther” campaign for years (Mitt Romney even told the nation in a major press conference how honored he was to have Trump’s support in 2012).  The 2012 Republican Convention spent an entire night focusing on Obama’s statement that “you didn’t build that,” a reference that Republicans claimed revealed Obama’s belief that the US government needs to control the economy and that business success isn’t because of hard work, it’s because of government (you didn’t build your business; the US government did). In reality, Obama was discussing infrastructure and the need for government action to build and rebuild roads and utilities.  The “that” in “you didn’t build that” was a reference to a bridge. Obama was making the not very controversial or ideological point that if you are a business, you expect the state and federal government to maintain infrastructure, and to that extent you do rely on some government-organized efforts of the community (If your business is located on the other side of a bridge from your customers, you hope that the government keeps that bridge in safe and working order).  In the 1950s, Eisenhower understood this simple point and the interstate highways system was born. In 2012, the moderate wing chose to go with the demagogic lie.  They may have believed that the pundit wing was a useful tool and that the establishment wing still had the power.  It had been powerful enough to secure nominations for moderate George W. Bush in 2000, Reagan conservative John McCain in 2008, and moderate Mitt Romney in 2012.  By 2016 something had changed. In part it was what some call “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The pundit wing of the Party was incensed by Obama’s victory and furious that the Republican leadership could not stop what they saw as Obama’s “radical agenda.” Remember that to many Republican pundits, Obamacare wasn’t just too much government; it was tyranny and an end to American liberty. In part, it was also the 2008 recession, which exacerbated all the economic problems discussed in the first two essays. In 2016, the pundit wing had all the energy, most of the votes, and the establishment wing was the useful tool, a place to find funding for campaigns.  The moderates, now charged with being, compromisers, not true conservatives, or worse yet -- RINO’s (Republicans in Name Only) -- should shut up (Trump even said this explicitly in June 2016), contribute to the campaign, and vote. The hyperbole and demagoguery had redefined Republican ideology so thoroughly that Trump won the nomination handily. 

 

Maybe the best way to explain it is this.  For years the Republican establishment (or moderates) used the rhetoric to mobilize voters for elections, but then would get down to the business of governing when the election ended, a business that required cooperating with Democrats. The demagoguery and demonization was just the rhetoric of campaigning, but when we get to the Senate and House floor we get to work because that was what we were hired to do. But what happens if a sizeable number of voters believes the rhetoric, takes it to heart, sees it not as just the noise of politics, but as the real truth, a call to action.  Those voters may feel betrayed when their member of the House or Senate compromises with the unprincipled, socialist, America-hating baby killers.   This goes for the Democratic rhetoric too.  There is a constituency in the Democratic Party that also wonders how their members of Congress can compromise with woman-hating, gun-loving, racists.  Bernie Sanders supporters who hate Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street ties (even though as a Senator from New York she did represent Wall Street) are a reflection of this dynamic.

                       

This is just a short answer to why the Republican Party has nominated Trump. A full explanation might need a book.  For now, it seems obvious that in this polarized era of Red and Blue constituencies (not really Red and Blue states, more like rural (red) vs. urban plus college towns (blue) with the suburbs in play), the Republican Party has been deeply changed.  Enough of its core supporters and perhaps new converts to the Party or to political participation in general want a different Republican Party.  These changes plus the economic changes mentioned in the previous essays may explain why this chant was recently heard at a Trump rally: “Build the Wall; Kill them All.” 

 

 

Essay Five: Explaining the 2016 Election:  US Culture and Politics: The Acceptance of A Bullying Political Style

 

This essay is the least academic of them all.  As a Political Science professor, I am only an amateur sociologist and cultural critic, but I do have a keen interest in the way culture and technology influence politics.  Start from where we finished up the last essay. International and domestic economic changes left a large demographic of American workers with decreased job prospects. Polarization meant that Republicans and Democrats couldn’t really deal with the problem in any serious way.  The Republican Party began to crack under the weight of its own contradictions, and the winners of that internal battle seem to be those who have a view of the US based, in part, on conspiracy theory-laden rhetoric.   Fine, but why do you get a candidate like Donald Trump? 

 

Imagine this scenario.  You’re in a VCU classroom. Let’s say it’s my POI 308 US Presidency class.  We’re discussing the best US presidents and we’re debating whether Truman belongs in the top ten. 

A female student says this: “I think Truman definitely belongs in the top ten.  He made the US a global power after World War II and defined post-war foreign policy as the containment of Soviet power and communism, a definition that lasted through the entirety of the cold war. Remember that the US disarmed after World War II and that there was a real debate about going back to being a regional power.” 

A male student responds to her by saying this: “You’re a clown.  You’re dopey.  You’re a pig. The US never disarmed after World War II. It was always a global power since Teddy Roosevelt.  Truman was a political hack. The worst president in the history of the US.”  

That’s not civilized behavior.  It’s not behavior that would be tolerated in a classroom for a nanosecond.  I would shut that student down immediately and we would have along talk after class. If the student did it again, I would begin disciplinary procedures against the student and remove him from class as soon as legally possibly.  Also, the second student is historically wrong, absolutely 100% historically wrong.  Uncivilized and wrong doesn’t seem to be a winning combination.

 

So how does that student go on to become the nominee of the Republican Party?  The previous essays make the case for why we might get a candidate with a set of historically and politically unconventional views.  This essay tries to explain how we get a candidate with a style that seems at odds with civilized behavior.  Think about it. Any other candidate at any other time would have been effectively eliminated from contention for saying one-tenth of the controversial things that Trump has said. You wouldn’t tolerate that behavior from someone in a classroom or someone you invited into your house.  You wouldn’t put up with a drunk at a party who acted this way. But Trump thrives.  Even with the 2005 tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, he still thrives.  At the time of this writing (mid-October 2016) Florida and Ohio are still close. Why is someone who behaves like this still in the running to be President of the US?

 

There are two related arguments that I want to mention then put aside. It could be that Hillary Clinton is such a divisive figure (for legitimate and illegitimate reasons) that 35% of the electorate wouldn’t vote for her if she was the last candidate on the planet.  So they vote for Trump.  It could also be issue-based. Of the four candidates that anyone can name (Trump, Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein), Trump is the only one who is against both abortion and same-sex marriage.  Voters who see these issues as their top priorities have no choice but to vote for Trump (unless they’re in Utah and they can vote for Evan McMullin). 

 

But that doesn’t explain the devoted, almost cult-like following that Trump has and it doesn’t explain how he won the Republican nomination. The notion that Clinton is unacceptable argument is irrelevant in the intra-Republican fight and almost all of the Republican contenders were anti-abortion and anti-same-sex marriage.  How did he get the nomination and how can he remain a serious candidate when he behaves this way?

 

The answer rests partly in changes in US culture and their impact on US politics.

 

One of the major trends of the 20th century was the growing importance of advertising to US culture.  Different scholars trace it to the 1950s or 1960s, but in any case, the power of television intensified the impact of advertising.  Advertising shaped the way Americans thought about themselves, their society, and the way they defined their goals -- the suburban dream of the post-WW II order.   The way this impacted American society is best described in a book by Daniel Boorstin, The Image, from 1962, still one of the best non-fiction books ever written about anything, ever.  In short, advertising and marketing triumphed over reality.  Our expectations and beliefs about what was real were defined by the images and messages we saw in advertisements rather than what was actually happening in American life.  Things are important because we are told they are important. Events are important because we see them on television and if they are not on television it’s because they aren’t important.  Advertising can then create events (Boorstin called them “pseudo-events”), events manufactured by celebrities and politicians and corporations to hype whatever it is they are hyping. The point is to get publicity, to get people talking. If we talk about it, it’s important. If we don’t, it might as well not exist.  The weirdest way we this occurs is when people are famous for being famous.  Hold that thought.

 

Add celebrity worship to it.  Entertainment is one of the things Americans love the most.  It is one of our biggest exports.  We pay entertainers immense amounts of money.  Think about this for a second: when we buy t-shirts with sports figures names and numbers, when we stand in line for hours for concert tickets or go see our favorite movie two or three times, what are we doing?  From one perspective, we are middle class or low income people enthusiastically trying to find as many ways as possible to give our hard earned money to the wealthiest people in the entire country.  Americans have always had a weird (unhealthy?) preoccupation with celebrities.  It’s not new, but modern media deepens it.  The average American spends far more time thinking about celebrity gossip than about the coming geopolitical rivalry between the US and China that will likely shape the 21st century or the intricacies of tax policy, even though those are the things that will shape our lives much more deeply than celebrity divorces or who wins the Super Bowl.  (And speaking of sports, don’t people feel better about themselves when their favorite team wins a championship or the big game. Isn’t that weird?)

 

Add advertising and celebrities together, and you get most of the modern advertising strategies based on celebrity endorsements, effectively celebrities explaining why buying this product will make you more like them. It is an aspect of advertising, which takes advantage of that celebrity worship.  Well, if someone famous says it, it must be true! Drink Gatorade and you’ll play basketball as well as an NBA player!  Does anyone believe that drinking Gatorade will make you able to leap from the foul line and dunk a basketball?  No, but as long as you buy Gatorade as if you believe it, you’re happy, Gatorade is happy, and you’re more like the basketball player you worship.  I say “worship” deliberately.  Isn’t the devotion to Elvis somewhat cult-like?  It can be fatal too. In California, a centerfold, turned actress, turned social activist became the leader of anti-vaccine movement.  A significant number of parents stopped vaccinating their children. Children died! What was the logic there? Who should I believe: the entire medical community on the planet or the woman whose skill is taking off her clothes? Enough people rejected the doctors in favor of the naked woman and watched their children die.  (Surprise. Donald Trump has also pushed the false argument that vaccines cause autism.)

 

What does this have to do with politics?  Imagine if candidates are sold like toothpaste or sports drinks? What if celebrities champion political causes or run for office?  Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign was a campaign based on modern advertising. Read Joe McGinnis’ The Selling of the President.  Nixon actually did sell himself like a consumer product.  Literally the point of the 1968 campaign was to market the new improved Nixon (Now With Less Paranoia!). H. R. Haldman, a former advertising executive, designed Nixon’s campaign strategy. He became Nixon’s Chief of Staff and helped create the White House Office of Communications, the office in charge of maintaining the President’s image (effectively continuing to market him after the election).  Ronald Reagan was an actor long before he was President. After his acting career wound down, Reagan became a spokesman for hire (General Electric and Chesterfield cigarettes, for example).  A critical view of Reagan suggests that he was essentially the spokesman for the conservative movement.  The movement needed a figurehead, and Reagan knew how to deliver his lines.  That’s partially true, but Reagan was also a true believer in the conservative movement and an obviously gifted politician, not just a mouthpiece.    But when a celebrity-spokesman like Reagan becomes the most influential Republican President since Teddy Roosevelt just at the moment when television becomes a 24-hour-a-day medium (the early 1980s), it might be significant.  Hold that thought.

 

A mid-essay question is helpful before I move on: Is Donald Trump selling you a brand, an attitude, an emotional appeal?  He doesn’t say specifically how he will fix problems, but he assures you he will.  “Believe me,” he says.  And many will take him at his word, no details necessary.  Is that because he is a celebrity?  He’s on TV; he must be important; what he says must be true. Why else would he be on TV?

 

Now considers sports, the way sports are advertised, the merging of celebrity and sports, and the ethics that come from sports.  We admire and worship sports figures because they win.  The fact that they win makes anything and everything they do admirable and acceptable.  We want to be winners, and for some people that it is the highest compliment, (“you’re a winner”), the most important goal, and the most important value we hold. Winning becomes a philosophy. It justifies anything.  Sports announcers applaud those players who cheat well. There is only one great sin in this world for many people: losing.   Another aspect of sports that has evolved over the last twenty or so years is trash talking.  Mocking your opponent is now an art form, again something admirable and applauded, as long as you can back it up, again, as long as you win. In the past, rooting for the underdog was a core part of the American character.  But the need to win has overwhelmed that for many people. Americans bandwagon with the winner these days.  Hold that thought.

 

Add the Internet.  

 

A caveat is needed here.  On the whole, the Internet and social media are phenomenally good things.  The availability of information, the communications capability, the way we can organize politically and socially to make a difference in the world, and the way we can keep in touch with friends who live anywhere on the planet is amazing.  Politically, this has become obvious.  Authoritarian states fear the Internet because it enables citizens to organize.  In democracies it allows small movements to become larger movements that reshape politics (from the Tea Party to LGBTQ rights).  It’s easy to see the limitless nature of how this can change the world.

 

But there is a dark side. This is where the US becomes like a 315 million-person middle school.  Social media can make society a place where we’re all sitting across from each other in the cafeteria gossiping about each other like immature 14 year olds.  We snipe; we bully; we spread rumors.  Anonymity has added the worst side of social media – the troll.  Look at any comment page at the end of any article or essay or Twitter feed and you’ll see the angry, profane, hateful response to just about any opinion anyone expresses.  Most of this comes from angry individuals who are freed by the anonymity of the web and wiling to use that anonymity to toss slurs and anger and ridicule at anyone who dares to have an opinion that differs from theirs. Think of Gamergate and the dozens of examples of bullying on the Internet and the tragic instances of Internet bullying leading people to commit suicide. The Internet is an incredibly effective way to publicize new ideas, but it is also an effective way to crush ideas and opinions under the weight of bullying.  Beyond individual trolls are the armies hired by political parties or foreign governments whose job it is to harass anyone who expresses an opinion that challenges the party or government line.  In a democracy it’s a way to manufacture public opinion or undermine critics or win arguments within a party. In authoritarian states, it’s a way to crush the dissent that threatens regime control.

 

Anonymity in political discourse can protect someone from reprisal, but it also enables those reprisals.  The Internet doesn’t change character; it reveals it; maybe it magnifies it.  Hold that thought.

 

Go back to the classroom I mentioned in the beginning of the essay.  Imagine that classroom is the American electorate.  Nearly half the class cheered the student who said: “You’re a clown.  You’re dopey.  You’re a pig…” and who was completely wrong about the historical record. Wow!  How can that be?  How can the students in the classroom be so different from the US people?

 

Maybe because of this: The Republican nominee is a celebrity who starred in his own television show, a billionaire who markets anything and everything under his own CAPITAL-LETTERS-ONLY name, who explains that people should vote for him because he’s a winner and his opponents are losers, who brags about how he doesn’t pay taxes precisely because he’s a winner, who gives his opponents insulting nicknames to brand them, who trolls and trash talks his opponents on Twitter as part of his standard campaign strategy, and who is in many ways famous for being famous.  To borrow a phrase from a Don Henley song: he’s the “perfect beast” for our time.  If you believe the system is rigged against you, you need a beast to tear it down.

 

If we think of the impact of changes in media and technology on politics, we can identify a progression.  Teddy Roosevelt mastered newspapers when that was the main medium for political communication.   FDR mastered radio when radio was the medium.  Reagan was the master of television. Trump is the master of social media.  Significant Presidents master the latest form of communication, and maybe no one can master today’s style better than Trump.  One thing that needs to be said though is this: TR, FDR, and Reagan were all candidates of hope.  Trump’s downfall (and he is sinking badly in the polls) may be that he sells fear.  Can you win if that is the core of your message?