Campaigns are performances.
They star the candidate playing a character of the same name. Trump is playing the tycoon character he shaped on the TV show The Apprentice.
Trump is a made for TV anti-hero, purposely outrageous, purposely watchable, projecting a decisive fighter who wins.
The New York Times TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote a book currently being promoted on the various talk shows and podcasts. His analysis is exactly congruent with what this blog has been describing for four years. "Trump" is an act--a successful one.
The Apprentice had a 14 year run and it allowed him to evolve from a tabloid celebrity to a TV celebrity. The book makes the point that Donald Trump does not play "the good guy." He doesn't wear a white hat in the manner of all-good heroes of TV Westerns. He is more in the manner of the anti-hero character Jack Bauer played by Kiefer Sutherland in 24, who tortures and terrorizes people in order to save America. Audiences found themselves pulling for Walter White in Breaking Bad, for the Jennings couple in The Americans, for Tony Soprano in The Sopranos.
The characters are complex, a mix of good and horrifying. It makes them interesting and oddly un-hypocritical, since they do bad things as part of their work finding the terrorist, cooking meth, spying for the USSR, or running a mafia organization.
Poniewozik writes that Trump plays the Bad Boy. We excuse the bad behavior if the bad boy does bad things consistent with his character and work. Trump asserts that he is protecting Americans from immigrant invasion, that he is packing the courts with conservatives, that he is building a wall, that he created a strong economy, that he is defending Christianity and Christians from insult, and he does it all while mocking and belittling liberals, Socialists, environmentalists, Democrats, and PC woke sensibilities.
The audience--his base--loves the character. He says what they are too polite to say. The more outrageous he is, the more courageous he seems.
He isn't selling virtue; he is selling winning. He will lie, cheat, contradict himself, be disloyal, make outrageous accusations, do whatever it takes, in order to win.
This blog observed that he finished his March, 2016 Boca Raton, Florida speech with a long riff on winning, shouted triumphantly into the microphone:
"You will start to win if I am elected. Win. Win. Win. You will win so much you will start to tire of it. But we will keep winning. You will call out to me, 'let's stop winning so much, we are tired of winning,' but I won't stop. I will keep us winning and winning."
He didn't say he would be a president we could be proud of.
Two Democratic responses.
One approach is to be a different kind of "bad." The two leading progressive candidates don't mind being scary--using the word "socialist" or advocating political positions, that push the boundaries of conventional politics. Being way outside the mainstream is politically dangerous, i.e. "bad." Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren communicate that they understand the world about the way Trump does: this is a cage fight, us against them. It helps explain their unabashed, uncompromising criticism of their opponents. They say the special interest elites in the banks, drug companies, military industrial complex and the GOP establishment are using their power and money to corrupt the government and rig it against the average Joe. Do whatever it takes.
Virtue candidates. Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and the dozen bipartisan work-across-the-aisle candidates are conspicuous in voicing a return to virtue in presidential behavior. "America is better than this," Biden says. "What kind of country are we," Booker asks? Their stump speeches are stories of lessons learned, stories of valor or generosity, validations of America as a country where good people make a difference. Trump is the outlier. Counter bad with virtue.
Buttigieg and the other candidates emphasize civic virtues, of working across the aisle, of getting things done, bipartisan practical progress. Counter endless political conflict with bipartisan peace.
The divide between the progressive left candidates, and the so-called moderate candidates is not simply one of policy, although it is certainly that. It is also a fundamental choice between how to respond to the Trump Bad Boy character.
Is this war, where all is fair, and do Democrats put up their own street fighter? Is politics inherently a state of war, or has Trump an aberration?
There is one big problem to the virtue route. It only takes one person to start a fight, and it is Trump's character to seek a fight. If Democrats don't respond they look weak. Ask Michael Dukakis and John Kerry how it worked out to be "above the fray."
5 comments:
"America is better than this," Biden says.
If we want a better America, we can't elect Joe Biden.
California working class families are now raising their kids in parking lots. Rents are sky-high, wages are meager. A measure was put onto the Cali ballot, Prop 10, to allow cities to enact rent control.
George Marcus, a billionaire real estate owner, spent over 8 million to defeat Prop 10. Marcus is pathologically greedy, a good candidate for the first guillotine when Americans wake up and fight back for real.
George Marcus is hosting a fund raiser for Joe Biden in San Francisco next month.
How exactly will America be better if Joe Biden is elected and billionaires like Marcus continue to have free reign to exploit fellow Americans to their maximum greed?
For one thing, rent control and zoning are state and local issues.
The federal government (taxpayers) can help prevent homelessness by providing more rent subsidies for low-income, disabled, and senior citizens. Also, I believe that there are federal programs to assist certain home buyers.
I'm really starting to think that we need to break up the USA. There are so many regional economic and cultural differences. It has become unmanageable.
Voters reasonably expect Democratic elected officials at all levels, city, county, state, and federal, to work together to make sure Americans have adequate housing.
Blue from top to bottom California is failing to house the hard working people living in the state.
When Joe Biden holds a fundraiser with a billionaire who's done wrong to the people of California, we know whose side he is on, and it's not the working class.
"He will lie, cheat, contradict himself, be disloyal, make outrageous accusations, do whatever it takes, in order to win."
Well said.
Win what?
If there is a characteristic of the last 50 years it is the emergence of a civil rights movement that empowers women and minorities, calling for an end to oppression and discrimination. It's a tough uphill battle, with powerful entrenched forces that would keep the status quo, which is essentially a subservient population, in perpetual debt, insecure, and who share their insatiable greed.
This is what Trump and his enablers are defending. Now that we've seen what they will do to keep power, who they will support, it's pretty clear that the election of the first African American president and the advancement of the Progressive agenda was unacceptable and terrifying.
The thing is, there is no winning, only continued injustice and suffering as America is looted, desecrated, with the promises of the Declaration and Constitution betrayed by those wishing a return to feudalism:
feu·dal·ism
/ˈfyo͞odlˌizəm/
noun
the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.
I don't know why you included John Wayne's picture. He was the biggest phony we ever had. He was no more real than Superman, Batman, or Bugs Bunny. In WWII he was labeled a coward by the very Marines he portrayed in the movies. They knew the truth and let him know it.
Post a Comment