First, a note on Trump. I have to admit that I find the man at once deeply repugnant and inherently fascinating. All that he is, all that he stands for, I find repugnant, but there he is, on a national stage, representing ostensibly "conservative" American politics, mounting a campaign within and against our government, a comic book villain come to life. I can barely stand to listen to one of his rants, but there is no denying that those same rants have connected with an undertow within American life and that the current is stronger than anyone might have imagined. It threatens to pull us under and out to sea. I don't mean to sound apocalyptic. I won't be appearing on a street corner soon with a "the-end-is-near" sign. I do not for a moment believe our politics at the moment are "symmetrical," that Clinton is just as bad as Trump. To support Clinton over Trump is not to "sell out," but to recognize the fundamental asymmetry in our political life. Clinton represents, at least to my mind, a status quo, the promise of politics as usual. We can call it the politics of money. Both parties have been overly dependent upon those that Lawrence Lessing called the "Lesters" in his TED talk a couple of years ago -- the big money donors, bundlers, and lobbyists that support them -- and nothing in Clinton's or Trump's campaign suggests that they want to "do away" with the influence that implies. There are, of course, different sources of big money, and they support different "agendas," and those differing "agendas" have more or less defined the parties. The biggest of the big money has supported the republican party, but their economic agenda laid bare has difficulty getting the support they need among the "voting class." So the republican party, however, has been doing the Faustian invocation for how long? -- since Nixon at least -- calling forth the evangelical right in support of conservative "values," calling forth the nationalist right in support of "states rights" and small government. Therein lies the asymmetry. As so many have noted, they have no cause to be surprised that Satan has at last appeared among them in for the forms of Ted Cruz, as Gary Legum put it, "a hardcore Christian whose family literally thought he was called by God to become the president, a sentiment that would have been unsustainable in a general election, and who was so disliked within the party that many of his colleagues actually preferred Trump." And, of course in the form of Trump, whose supporters, as Bob Cesca has put it, "are non-college-educated white men, ranging from younger “bros” to, more typically, white male baby-boomer retirees with plenty of spare time to be relentlessly irradiated by Fox News and AM talk radio."
As an aside, it is perhaps a minor tic in favor of religion that the evangelical right is less inclusive of the nationalist right than vice versa. The defection of Mormons from the Trump camp is a case in point. He offends the conservative family and church values they espouse and, for the most part, live. I am not making a case for religion, so much as a case for common decency, and the latter is not lacking in the evangelical right, but then again Utah will likely go to Trump in the election, partly out of the sheer habit of pulling the R lever and similar fundamentalist, anti-intellectual pull to the further reaches of the right. Still lurking within and staining the LDS Church are the FLDS types, and those who lean in their direction, where "small government" is heard as "no-government-but-the-prophet's-government," a heavily armed, deeply racist enclave mentality, and they just may trump, pun intended, the more rational, global missionary and global business oriented Mormons, but then again, perhaps not. Utah is a singularly red, singularly urban state that is growing more diverse by the moment. The urbanity and the growing minority population of Salt Lake City might, just might, stump Trump in Utah. It will be interesting, and difficult to parse when all is said and done.
If intellectualism "accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality" and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise," to use Hofstader's line, both the evangelical right and the nationalist right do, perhaps, believe that conflict is a central reality of life, but they see conflict quite differently than the intellectual. Therein lies the asymmetry. I tend to think of conflict as a "conflict of irreconcilable, but equally desirable values" -- i.e. "truth is a virtue," except perhaps when the "truth" does needless harm. We don't tell three year olds that their "art" is beautiful only in the eyes of an adoring grandparent, or that the little black dress really does make make your wife look chunky, just as we don't "bear false witness" when taking the stand in a court of law, or make business promises that we cannot (or have no intention) of keeping. The ninth commandment is compromised right from the start. In a political context, we might say that "liberty is a virtue," except when one set of liberties impinges on other's set of liberties -- i.e. your "religious freedom" begins to affect another's "freedom" to secure a marriage license or even a wedding cake. When values conflict, rarely are there obvious commonsensical solutions, and no matter what the consensus decides, one or another set of values will be compromised. Having said this, however, the further one falls off into a fundamentalism, whether to the left or to the right, the more "essential" and uni-dimensional the conflict between good and evil becomes -- that is to say, the more all or nothing, the more Matthew 12:30 with-me-or-against-me the partisan divide, and the more apocalyptic the conflict becomes -- and the less chance there is a nuanced recognition of conflicting, but desirable values. The less chance there is for a "continuing process of compromise" that results in an "societal equipoise." There are only winners and losers, and one must do everything in one's powers to insure one's own values win. Such is, ultimately, anti-intellectual and anti-democratic in the governing sense of the word democratic.
Again, if intellectualism "accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality" it accepts the humanities as legitimate intellectual disciplines that help us understand the world. When I say "humanities" I am thinking principally of my own discipline, literature, but one could say the same of history and art as well. So, speaking in defense of literature, particularly narrative literature, we have of late given short shrift to "plot." Every plot is animated by "conflict." "Mary went to the grocery, bought steaks and baking potatoes, and cooked dinner for her family" is not a plot until one notes that Mary has grown increasingly concerned with the inhumane treatment of animals and the effect of "feed lot" farming on the environment, until one notes that she has been reluctant to confront her "meat and potatoes" husband because the alcohol that comes before and after dinner fuels a rage, until one notes that he lost a job he despised but one that still provided "for her and his family," a loss that encourages the drinking and fuels the rage that he takes out on her and his family. "Mary went to the grocery" is not a plot, that is, until one adds conflict, and here I want to suggest that the difference between "popular entertainment" and "literature," likewise the difference between "propaganda" and "literature" is the degree to which it recognizes and reveals the conflict between incompatible but equally desirable values. "Popular entertainment" and "propaganda" tends to reduce "conflict" to its comic book simplicity of the good guys against the bad guys, and nuance is lost with the triumph of the good over the forces of evil. Popular entertainment verges into propaganda when it all too clearly supports an agenda. One thinks, for example, of the popular show "24," where the comic book hero, Jack Bauer, battles the forces of evil, almost always a money-inspired terrorism. Supposed good guys can be revealed as evil, but once the mask is removed, there is no ambiguity. They all in evil, as the revelations around the character of Nina Meyers demonstrates. "Literature" is essentially relativist, and reveals its skepticism of uni-dimensional good just as it reveals its skepticism of uni-dimensional evil.
I point this out, in part, because it comes back to critiques of the press, that they print only the "bad news" that develops out of one form of "conflict" or another. True enough. "Mary went to the grocery" is not a story, and the "good news" is that in 99.99 percent of the time, it doesn't result in anything resembling a story. So, yet again, if intellectualism "accepts conflict as a central an enduring reality," it accepts the press and its role in revealing the conflict that so often animates our lives. Having said that, la couple of things. First, the "press" or the "media" is assumed to have a relationship with verifiable facts and consequently, the "truth." Second, let us not speak falsely now, the motivation of the press and the media is not "truth," per se, but "profit," and that in itself gives cause for skepticism around all media, but some more than others. There are plenty of examples of media outlets that suppress and distort verifiable facts, and they do so because they are not after anything resembling the truth. They are after the sort of "story" that will drive "traffic" and "revenues," often with a target demographic in mind. One need only think of the National Enquirer and other print outlets that inhabit the check out counters at the grocery and sell themselves as "news," but have little or no compunction inventing a story more or less whole cloth. There is little reason to believe that the father of Ted Cruz had a hand in the Kennedy assassination, nor is there any reason to believe the allegations in "Princess Di's Confession: Harry's Real Father," or the allegations immediately beneath it, "Dick Morris: Lying Hillary's 15 Biggest Whoppers." There is about as much reason to believe the Enquirer as there is the Onion's "Queen Elizabeth Hoping She Dies Before Having To Knight Any DJs." The Onion's saving grace, of course, is that it doesn't purport to be "news," or have any relationship with verifiable facts. The Enquirer, of course, has become "popular entertainment" as "propaganda" for the Trump campaign, and one would expect "stories" turning Clinton into a comic book villain.
Having said that, the so-called mainstream media works to merit the assumption that it has a relationship with verifiable facts and, consequently, the "truth." It is a self-imposed ethical constraint that facts must be "verifiable" before they are published. The relationship between the "facts" and the "truth," however, is fraught. In a certain respect, the whole of 20th century philosophy has explored this relationship and it is well beyond the scope of a blog post to outline even the most superficial summary. Let me just say this (and for those who care, it is a sort of Rortian pragmatism): a rational democracy is contingent upon the belief that there are "facts," that they can be "verified," and that they cohere to form an "informed" opinion. Based on the same set of "facts," my "informed" opinion may differ from your "informed" opinion, and indeed there is considerable bias in how one "interprets" the facts. The political sin lies, not in the differences of opinion -- that is to be expected, even desired -- but in getting the facts wrong -- the outright misrepresentation of the truth and the suppression of inconvenient truths. It has been the traditional obligation of the mainstream media, so to speak, to "report" not only those differences of opinion and the "conflicting" policies they suggest, but also political sin -- the misrepresentation and suppression of the "truth." Whether she deserves the epithet "lying Hilliary" is a matter of opinion, but the mainstream media HAS reported on her suppression and misrepresentation of the facts, and has done so on numerous occasions. Leaving aside the email controversy, for example, FactCheck.org reports that "Two days after Donald Trump gave a major speech on economics in Detroit, Hillary Clinton came to Michigan to offer a rebuttal. We found that Clinton stretched the facts on a few points." The same organization, under the same banner, also reported, more bluntly, that "Donald Trump made several false and misleading statements in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Aug. 8." The press at its best, that is, aspires to the condition of "literature." Within the partisan divide that animates the plot of American politics, it is essentially relativist, and reveals its skepticism of uni-dimensional good just as it reveals its skepticism of uni-dimensional evil. Neither Clinton nor Trump is wholly blameless, and it takes a complete lack of self-reflective irony to actually believe one's self blameless, but the blame is "relative." On the assumption that the journalists at FactCheck chose their words carefully, there is a difference between "stretching the facts" and making "false and misleading statements." It is a difference of degree, but those differences are ultimately important. There are lies, and then there are damn lies.
So what does it mean when "Trump blames 'disgusting' media: 'I would be beating Hillary by 20%'" as Politico reports. As they go on to write, "His latest tweet storm first targeted The New York Times, which published an article Saturday about the GOP nominee’s allegedly failing campaign, but quickly expanded as an indictment of the media in general." First, it should be remembered that, if one of the traditional roles of the media is to reveal political sin, and they do indeed reveal Trump's political sins, his suppression and misrepresentation of the facts. No political figure enjoys being "outed," and so it is not surprising that Trump does not enjoy being "outed," particularly when the nature of the story runs so counter to his own self-image. Having said that, however, all politicians are "outed." As Plato recognized with his desire to ban the sophists and rhetoricians from his Republic, hence all politicians, the discursive demands of making a detailed and nuanced proposal are one thing. The rhetorical demands of making a point and making it comprehensible to an impatient public -- a public that has grown increasingly politiphobic, increasingly anti-intellectual, and increasingly suspicious of what appears to be double talk in "continuing process of compromise" -- are another thing. The KISS principle -- keep it simple stupid -- under the rhetorical demands of democracy quickly morphs into something less benign -- keep it simplistic for the (proudly and willfully) stupid. Ultimately, even for those politicians who are sincerely idealistic, who want to do good for the nation, the rhetorical demands of democracy, one might say, inherently demand the distortions of "truth" -- the stretching of facts -- that we so decry. The socratic gadfly, the media, is ultimately an unpleasant necessity to democracy, not only to "out" those who distort facts, but perhaps even more important to "out" those who make "false and misleading statements."
Second, Clinton recognizes the inherently antagonistic relationship between politicians and the media and, consequently, exercises caution around the media (perhaps a bit TOO much caution, which itself arouses suspicion). The media has not been her friend, despite Trump's assertion that “The media protects Hillary!” I will not even try to give a complete listing of the stories that have been critical of Clinton over the past quarter century, and unlike Trump, that has perhaps made her a bit media shy. As John Thrust put it in a recent interview with Politico, “There are plenty of other politicians who don't do as much press because they're terrified they're going to do something to hurt themselves.” The terror is perhaps justified in Clinton's case. The press, both tabloid and mainstream, has pounced on the never-ending email scandal, and they have done so, in part at least, because it supports the on-going conservative narrative about Clinton, that she lies, that she is untrustworthy, that she is "crooked." Her denials, I admit, seem to me rather lame. They don't do much to inspire confidence, and when fact checked, don't hold up well to scrutiny. As FactCheck.org put it, "Hillary Clinton wrongly claimed that FBI Director James Comey found her public statements about not sending or receiving classified email on her private server to be 'truthful.'” There isn't much there, however, and to put it into perspective, of the 30,490 emails in question, 0.004 percent, or 110, had classified markings at the time. Her terror as actual terror is perhaps justified as well. As the Wall Street Journal reports, "even by the standards of rowdy Donald Trump rallies, the sight of a boy repeatedly yelling “take the bitch down” about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stood out." It was news, not because of the content of the chant, which has become too commonplace to report, but because a young boy was chanting it, apparently with the approval of his mother. Then too, there is the sort of fatwa that has been issued on Clinton, when Trump himself called out to the 2nd Amendment People. In the context of his rallies, it's certainly not hard to misinterpret the remark as a fatwa, no matter if Trump indeed intended it as a call for guns right advocates to vote her down or as "sarcasm" or as both.
Trump himself, however, we know is something else entirely. It perhaps goes without saying that there is an inherent contradiction in Trump's relationship with the media -- on the one hand, he clearly craves it. There is that curious incident from his past, where Trump himself called a People magazine reporter, claiming to be a publicist for Trump, John Miller. Whether one finds it creepy, pathetic, or playful many depend upon what one thinks of Trump's character, but it unmistakably wants to use popular media as a forum for rebuilding the so-called Trump brand as the rakish and rich, popular and potent new bachelor. People, of course, has a relationship with the truth and is, consequently, a step or two up from the National Enquirer, but their stories appeal to many of the same prurient interest in the lives of "celebrities." Trump, it seems, is comfortable in that media environment, where no news is bad news, for it is being news, reappearing in the public spotlight, that perpetuates the celebrity of the celebrity. I might add that, so far as the celebrity of the celebrity goes, it is a media environment where the negativity of negative content doesn't much matter. An article decrying the divorce of Blake Shelton contributes as much to his celebrity as any other, and perhaps more because it provides the conflict necessary to a very familiar plot line. It is within this circus of this circular media environment, where celebrity perpetuates celebrity, that Trump earned so much media coverage. Trump benefited from abut $2 billion worth of "earned media." As the NY Times reports, "like all candidates, he benefits from what is known as earned media: news and commentary about his campaign on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on social media. Earned media typically dwarfs paid media in a campaign. The big difference between Mr. Trump and other candidates is that he is far better than any other candidate — maybe than any candidate ever — at earning media." He "earned" his coverage by providing "stories," his over-the-top outlandishness tapping into pre-existing conflicts within American life in ways that were far from "politic" in the normal sense of the word, but certainly entertainment tonight.
Trump may be comfortable in the perpetual motion machine of celebrity media, but he is, on the other hand, clearly less comfortable within the confines of the more mainstream media. As Mediate put it, "on Friday morning’s Today Show, Trump was confronted with a clip from that audio, and not only denied it was him, but lashed out at hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie for even bringing it up." The Today Show hovers somewhere between People magazine and the evening news, but in either case, in that context, truth matters, and as Trump's "lashing out" is perhaps a recognition that it might matter beyond that context. Also, though they might have been less successful in this regard than we might have hoped, it is also a recognition that Trump has not quite been able to turn mainstream media into his own vanity press. As Politico notes, "the argument that Trump’s rise was enabled by basic cable and the networks that have raked in millions in badly needed advertising cash (while giving Trump an unmediated platform to spout whatever ooze he chooses) is a core contention of many media analysts and many of Trump’s defeated foes. Ted Cruz and his staff, in particular, are enamored of the idea that the GOP nominee secured the nomination as a result of $2 billion or so in unmediated 'earned' free media." It gives them an excuse for failure. Having said this, however, the counter-argument that Trump's current slump in the polls has been enabled by the same "unmediated platform," who continue to report, just as they did during the primaries, on "whatever ooze he chooses" to spout.
Clearly, what plays in the auditorium with his supporters does not necessarily play with a larger, more diverse audience, and he can't have it both ways. He cannot make outlandish remarks to the adoring crowds at his rallies and then pillory the media for reporting them to a somewhat less adoring "mainstream" audience. Yet that is precisely what he does, and at one level or another, one must assume it is not just disingenuous hypocrisy, but an actual strategy -- one that begs an answer to the question, "why would he continue to do this?" One answer, of course, is that he has no intention of actually "winning" the presidency. There's this on Alternet, as re-posted on Salon: "Michael Moore: Trump is sabotaging his campaign because he never really wanted the job." The subtitle captures the gist of the article: "At first, he might have been running for president to get a better deal for 'The Apprentice.'" The article is mostly pure speculation and itself wouldn't have received much attention had it been my musings, say, and not the musings of a (counter) cultural celebrity icon like Michael Moore. In defense of the article, however, unlike most conspiracy theorizing, it does not strain the limits of credulity. There is no vast secret network, or secret government agencies populated with sinister men in black, and one can easily imagine it happening pretty much the way Moore describes, especially this epiphanic moment: "Then something happened. And to be honest, if it happened to you, you might have reacted the same way. Trump, to his own surprise, ignited the country, especially among people who were the opposite of billionaires. He went straight to No. 1 in the polls of Republican voters. Up to 30,000 boisterous supporters started showing up to his rallies. Television ate it up." Trump had effectively become the star of the reality TV show, "The Presidential Race," but then came the second epiphany, that Moore describes as the "Oh Shit!" moment, that I and others have noted. After winning, he would actually have to govern, something he has shown little interest in doing throughout his business life, as perhaps the history of his Altantic City casino deal best exemplifies.
If the polls are accurately predicting the result in November, and if Moore is correct in assuming that he really doesn't want to actually govern, Trump finds himself in a quandary. He must find a way to "win" by "losing." What happens if enough people really believe despite the evidence presenting in the mainstream media, as fringe groups already believe, that he "cannot lose" unless the election is "rigged?" What happens if enough people really believe, again as many already believe, that the mainstream media itself is conspiring against Trump and that the propaganda media of the increasingly far right alone is "telling it like it is?" At one level, of course, the simplest and perhaps best explanation for these assertions is that he's just giving himself excuses should he lose. If the ump hadn't called him out at home, we'd have had a walk off victory. One doubts that Trump has thought it through much further than that, but here's my own conspiracy theory. Trump has come as close as anyone to "mainstreaming" the far right and his appointment of the disgraced Robert Ailes of Fox News to help with debate prep and Breitbart News Chairman Stephen Bannon as campaign chief executive point to deeper ties to a media propaganda machine with deep ties to the right, but tenuous ties to the truth. One suspects that there is little hope that the Trump campaign will turn itself around, at least not with Trump doubling down on "I am who I am," but there will be a future after Trump. As Josh Marshall has reported in Talking Points Memo, "earlier this week I asked the question whether Trumpism would outlive Trump's campaign." It will and "the GOP is now a Trumpite party and will remain a Trumpite party. To get a little more specific, this means that the white ethno-nationalist party which Trump has brought out of the shadows and mobilized is now and will continue to be the Republican party." Trump's off the cuff musing about the 2nd Amendment People may have been less a threat of violence, less a fatwa per se, more a prediction of a gathering storm.
Here's the conclusion: the mainstream media "enabled" the rise of Trumpism. As Moore put it, "Trump became the first American celebrity to be able to book himself on any show he wanted to be on — and then not show up to the studio! From 'Face the Nation' to 'The Today Show' to Anderson Cooper, he was able to simply phone in and they’d put him on the air live. He could’ve been sitting on his golden toilet in Trump Tower for all we knew — and the media had no problem with any of that. In fact, CBS head Les Moonves famously admitted that Trump was very good for TV ratings and selling ads — music to the ears of the NBC-spurned narcissist." He became the villain people love to hate, deeply repugnant, but fascinating in his own right. But, and it's a big but, now that Trump has said out loud what was already rumbling underneath the surface of 21st century Republican politics" as Marshall observed, "he's normalized a litany of statements and actions that were politically verboten, at least from the party's leadership. He has activated the voice of GOP white nationalism, spoken its language out loud and in so doing made it conscious of itself and expanded its ambitions." If conservative sites like RedState find Trump as repugnant as any die hard liberal, it is in part because he has pulled the pants of the GOP down and revealed the skid marks in the underwear, in part because there really is a place for a conservative party WITHIN American politics, apart from the extremes of evangelical zeal for a christian theocracy and ethno-nationalist zeal to insure that the emergent theocracy is a white theocracy. Trump has insured that the GOP will no longer have a place WITHIN American politics, but is now for the foreseeable future ONLY a radical insurgency that, should they by some calamity actually win, spells only disaster for American democracy that must embrace diversity out of sheer demographic necessity if nothing else. RedState can protest the hiring of Ailes and Bannon, pointing out that, "as has been remarked before, Trump judges' [sic] people's character and competence solely by how nice they are to him. If a person flatters him, they are great at their job. If a person criticizes or challenges him, they are terrible at their job and probably are soon to get fired. This is especially true of people in the media." They are, however, simply pointing out what Trevor Noah has already pointed out, that much of Trump's behavior, especially toward the media, is that of an African president -- is that of a petty dictator of the sort that Trump and his radical insurgency actually admire -- and he has normalized that behavior as well.
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