Late night TV comedy is a paradise for progressives, full of laughs. Watch out. Making fun of Trump is a boomerang.
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| The Daily Show |
Progressives have a silver lining in the election of Donald Trump. They get to go to sleep laughing at him. There are lots of them, Trevor Noah at The Daily Show, Steve Colbert on CBS, Seth Meyers on the Late Late Show, plus Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Bill Mahar with their own weekly shows. There may be more.
So much satire. So little time.
Trump does startling things to get attention. (Surely this is a statement that is flatly factual and non-controversial, even for Trump supporters. After all, Trump wants to be in the center of attention and he makes news constantly, by intention.) It puts Trump in the position of contradicting himself or appearing foolish. Trump intentionally operates in big broad strokes in the political version of physical slapstick comedy. That is his genius. He acts like a TV reality show star, not a boring politician. It makes him interesting, bold, brash, newsworthy, and therefore dead easy to mock.
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| Mocking Trump at the Tony awards |
Here is the problem for Democrats: Donald Trump speaks for a great many Americans, possibly a majority. They want a blunt dominant guy running the country. Trump says things many Americans think but don't know how to say, or think they shouldn't say because they would get into trouble, what with the "political correctness nags." They are impatient with gridlock and procedures and lawyers and nuance. They want to "Get 'er Done!" in government. They don't want nuance; they want decisive bold action.
When comics mock Trump they are mocking those voters, by extension. They resent Manhattan-based comics making fun of them. The fact that their hero, Trump, is in fact guilty of hypocrisy and ham-handedness doesn't mitigate their resentment; it amplifies it, because they are being mocked alongside Trump for who Trump really is, not a false exaggeration of who he really is.
For example, comics might catch Trump saying something baldly anti-Muslim, expressing fear and distaste for Muslims, and laugh about it and say it exposes him as prejudiced. However, since what Trump said was what many people privately think, therefore their private prejudices are being mocked as well. No one likes being called prejudiced, even people who are a little bit prejudiced. After all, everyone knows people far more racist that themselves--they are the racists. In defense they also mentally deflect and point to racist blacks or insular minority communities, or hypocrisies on the left.
People defend themselves mentally against being mocked, not by accepting the criticism but by fighting back.
The result is backfire for Democrats. The comics are solidifying the resentment and desire for payback among the large Trump base. Comics mock him, but Trump gets the last laugh.
Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer made a similar observation in a recent comment on this blog. Victimhood does not lead to contrition. It leads to vengeance.
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| Guyer |
Victimhood is the common currency of popular political culture left and right. This then energizes popular vote and participation. Both parties promise to end the victimization through reform, legislation and budget appropriation. Trump has added a feel good self-righteousness to his formula-- revenge.
Vengeance is biblical, it underpins conservative ideology in criminal justice, especially the death penalty. When Trump says "I am victim" he tells his base and beyond "we are victims". Leftist ridicule of Trump and his supporters is political gold, the more extreme the ridicule the more empowering and base-broadening, egs. "deplorables", "white nationalists" "Russia collusion", impeachment obsession, antifa violence, mock beheadings and assassinations.
Trump"s cry of victimhood and the media's excesses of ridicule are building an armory of vengeance that won't be fully unleashed until after the 2018 midterms. I hope centrist democrats can save the left from itself.
Trump"s cry of victimhood and the media's excesses of ridicule are building an armory of vengeance that won't be fully unleashed until after the 2018 midterms. I hope centrist democrats can save the left from itself.
[Note: Thad Guyer is an attorney with an international practice representing primarily whistleblower employees. He practices in federal court and before federal hearings bodies, and does it from wherever he chooses to be in the world, 24-7. He is currently in Saigon, Vietnam, where he observes the US closely, from afar.]
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6 comments:
Thanks for the heads up. I never thought of it in this fashion. I'm glad you are doing this.
Thanks for the heads up. I never thought of it in this fashion. I'm glad you are doing this.
I agree, this stopped being amusing last July. Comics like Colbert were comfortable mocking Regressives when they were out of power, but now the jokes, by depicting them as incompetent and ineffective, dampen the outrage. This may be reassuring to some, but it plays into the Republican tactic of downplaying the impact of policies that are taking the nation backwards.
One cannot help but notice that Trump is brewing up the perfect storm within himself. Paranoia, Delusions of Grandeur, Humiliation, and Adulation mixed with an obvious lack of sleep, unhealthy diet and the all important declining polls...all seem likely to point to his own undoing. If he could somehow reveal himself to the sheeple is my hope. I agree, with the moratorium on comedic rage...we who know the score do not need it as much as we did in the beginning to deaden the pain. Just as I do not flaunt my intelligence when I teach ninth grade in order to allow the students to make inferences, come to conclusions and hopefully create new endings...this barrage of high brow satirical humor is lost on Trump supporter. I know better than to ridicule or provide a student with a "better" answer," because I do not want to destroy their ability to come to their own conclusions. Now we need to "shut up and show up."
Regarding your concluding sentence of the penultimate paragraph, "I hope centrist democrats can save the left from itself," I reiterate the point I made in a comment on one of your recent blogs: if you fault Democrats for leaving their working class base, how can you continue to believe that Sanders and his followers were the spoilers in 2016 and that we should rally around the Clintons/centrists to achieve future victories? You accept that Hillary was rightly perceived as tied in with Wall Street and out of touch with Main Street. Despite all the other factors in her loss, one must say that the largest factor was she herself. Do you really want another of her ilk as the party's standard bearer?
Excellent comment, Herb. Realize that this section was the guest post by Thad Guyer, not from me. Sanders die hards have no obligation to support Democrats, and a great many did not. My blog does not endorse Hillary's version of being a Democrat.
I criticize her for embracing ethnic group resentment both because it divides rather than unifies and because it backfires with white backlash being greater than the positive value. I criticize Hillary for not pushing back on Black Lives Matter. Of course they matter, period. But in saying that "all lives matter" is an implicit criticism of "black lives matter" she went too far and she, once again, created backlash. And Hillary-Democrats did not focus on lawfulness as a Democratic virtue, which fueled dissent even among Hispanics (30% voting for a Trump who insulted them) and a majority of white women. And Hillary did not do enough to make clear that she would put controls on Wall Street. She could have said that Obama's indulgence was necessary to get out of the recession but now that the economy has better stabilized the county needed to begin breaking up the banks.
Still, there is a great hypocrisy within the anti-globalism notion. Progressives drive cars and even a Prius (Toyota) uses gasoline (Exxon) created by resource extraction. Democrats need to address globalism proactively but they both lose rural votes and they lose general credibility when they act as if global companies are bad while they use their Apple or Samsung phone, have a gmail account, and shop at supermarkets. Only the Amish can be consistent in anti-globalist policies. Democrats have to work with globalism, not oppose it on principle.
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