We were Trumpified before Trump
Self-flagellation over the 2024 presidential race loss continues among Democrats. It is fueled by simplistic press narratives that I hear as: Millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face losing their country, Gazans face continued slaughter, and the world faces the collapse of NATO and the rise of fascism American-style because Democrats have a messaging problem. The 75 million whose votes empower those outcomes? Their hands are clean.
Brian Beutler is not buying it either:
For all the unfolding recrimination, a fairly strong consensus has already formed across the left that last week’s election results are part of a global, post-Covid, post-inflation backlash against incumbents. And for what it’s worth, I agree with this consensus; Occam’s razor applies too neatly to start the analysis elsewhere.
Operative word: start. The information environment itself is a place to continue:
For instance:
- If nothing about the information environment changes between now and Inauguration Day, I predict Trump will quickly claim credit for the economy he inherited, and for economic sentiment to shoot upward, as millions of Republicans reverse their stated views on the material world.
- Once he’s in power, I suspect many, many Trump-aligned or Trump-sympathetic media figures will trash their old scripts and either start talking about how many groceries they can afford all of a sudden, or simply stop talking about the economic status quo at all.
- If Trump’s policies or corporate blackmail practices don’t reduce prices, or if prices go up, I suspect he and his aligned media will blame all the hardship on Biden from the outset, that about half of Americans will come to believe this, and that Democrats will be ill-equipped to deliver a louder, simpler, more accurate message. It’s not that I think Trump would be completely immune from backlash to another burst of inflation, but that the bottom wouldn’t fall out from under him the way it fell out from under Biden.
“Working the refs” was once an art. Under Democrats’ noses, the right has made it a science. (They won’t call it that, of course.) The right attacks. The left fails to respond, resulting in what this TikToker finds:
Charlie Sykes is also skeptical of the emerging narrative.
“Apparently, the Democrats have decided to bypass the autopsy and move straight to an orgy of self-flagellation,” he begins. He agrees with a lot of the criticism of Democrats but sees it in a broader context of what won out: Trump’s amorality, Republicans’ ethical collapse, “the utter failure of the criminal justice system,” and journalism’s failure as fearless truth-tellers.
About those 75 million Trump voters?
I know that it is now unfashionable to criticize the wisdom and sagacity of American voters, but this ought not be sanewashed as a normal choice in a rational or sane democracy.3 When we are done flagellating other institutions, we need to admit the possibility that something is profoundly broken in the American psyche and character.
For decades we have told ourselves stories about American exceptionalism and leadership — a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. And, indeed, we remain the world’s greatest superpower.
But we found out last week that we are a profoundly unserious country.
Americans, those lovers of freedom, TikTok and reality TV, chose a profoundly unserious man for dictator-in-waiting. He’s already making predictably unserious choices for his administration.
Sykes references an observation by Neil Postman that I hadn’t seen elsewhere:
Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
To wit:
Our national idiocracy was a pre-existing condition just waiting for the coming of a cynical demagogue like Trump. Our guardrails and norms proved to be far more fragile than we imagined, because they had been hollowed out and dumbed down.
Postman wrote that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was more likely where our world was headed than George Orwell’s “1984.” Postman wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Kurt Vonnegut was more memorable. Welcome to the monkey house. Only in Vonnegut’s future, people were numb from the waist down.