POLITICAL SCIENCE
This
political spectacle
What
links Vladimir Putin to Barack Obama to Donald Trump.
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
6/11/16, 5:33 AM CET
We live in a new
populist age. The leading players fit multiple conventional
categories and at the same time none of them. Pablo Iglesias in Spain
is on the far reaches of the left, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and
Viktor Orbán in Hungary the right, Jeremy Corbyn and the UKIP
“Outers” in the U.K. span the ruler, and the Dutch and French
have varietals of the far-right blooming ahead of critical elections
next year. And in America you have in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
two men who until not long ago didn’t even belong to the Republican
or Democratic parties, respectively.
But what’s really
new? Certainly not the public anger and thirst for change that drives
this crowd’s poll numbers and thrusts them close to or into power.
Muslim migration in northern Europe or Mexican immigration in U.S.,
austerity (southern Europe), threats to the welfare state model
(France’s hot spring of strikes) are sparks particular to the time.
But the urge to upset an existing order is as old as politics. No
need to fall back on analogies to the 1930s to clarify our thinking.
Here’s Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “O gentlemen, the
time of life is short! … An if we live we live to tread on kings;/
if die, brave death, when princes die with us!”
There has never been
a better time than now to pull off the Trumpeze act.
The new wrinkle is
the means available to the would-be revolutionaries. In our age, with
the speed of politics sent into hyperdrive by modern media and
communications, the smart politician shrinks the distance between
himself and the voter by neutering or bypassing, whether through the
tube or Twitter, the traditional arbiters: political parties, big
donors (a force more pronounced in America than in Europe) and the
media.
The last “normal”
presidential election in America was in 2004. The incumbent, George
W. Bush, and challenger John Kerry were approved by the usual
vetters. Back then, for probably the last time, newspapers were the
dominant agenda-setters in media. It was Barack Obama, not Donald
Trump, who showed how a charismatic new man could upset the system.
When Hillary Clinton came into 2008 backed by her party, big donors
and some of the media, Obama used his natural charisma on the
television screen, and soon a mastery of digital data and media, to
trump, ahem, her. He got around Big Money by going straight to small
donors, a trick that Bernie Sanders used to stay competitive with
Clinton to the very end in this cycle. Eight years after the then
part-time state legislator and part-time law professor couldn’t get
into the hall at the 2000 Democratic national convention, Obama was
the true “maverick,” to use the phrase that became a punchline
about that other outsider of 2008 Sarah Palin (a mentally duller
version of Obama).
The brilliance, if
you will, of Trump in 2016 is to take the Obama playbook to another
level. Unlike the sitting president, Trump didn’t start the
campaign as a sitting U.S. senator; he’s never won public office.
Trump didn’t even try to win over party mandarins. The so-called
establishment was more useful as a foil to mobilize his supporters.
He didn’t need big donors. Trump has some money, though a lot less
than he claims, and what’s more he got so much free media and
advertising (about $3 billion worth, far more than anyone else, by
one count) that he had no reason to buy his own. Spurning the media’s
authority, as the media critic Jack Shafer has pointed out, he used
it and all the other platforms at his disposal better than anyone on
the Republican side. It helped that Trump spent the last decade plus
honing his shtick as a reality TV celebrity.
There has never been
a better time than now to pull off the Trumpeze act. The arbitrators
that people once relied on are not only less dominant — radio
didn’t kill the newspaper, but the Internet shrunk all traditional
media down in size — they’re also more openly distrusted and
disliked than ever in history. More than three in four Americans had
a positive view of their government in 1960, according to the Pew
Research Center. With a brief blip up to 60 percent around 9/11, that
number has fallen steadily since Watergate to 19 percent in 2015. The
military and small business are the rare institutions that remain
high in peoples’ esteem. The media tracks the sorry record of the
rest. In 1976, a few years after Watergate, over 70 percent of
Americans told pollsters they trusted the media. An all-time low of
40 percent do today, while 55 percent don’t trust it, according to
Gallup. The recent falls in support have been steeper among Democrats
than Republicans, even if the GOP traditionally views “liberal
media” with deeper disdain.
Putinism comes West
The departure from
the scene of the Walter Cronkites, who like Simon & Garfunkle’s
“gone Joe DiMaggio” personified the certainties and authorities
of another time, brought in a new nastier climate. People don’t
merely hold different opinions about politics. They can express more
loudly than ever irreconcilable versions of reality. Again from Pew:
64 percent of Americans in 2015 said they feel “their side” loses
more often than it wins in politics (80 percent among Republicans, 52
percent Democrats). Surely majorities can’t all be getting shafted.
But they think they are, and that’s what matters. On top of that, a
majority, 59 percent to 39 percent, thinks that “compared to
elected officials, ordinary American will do better to solve the
country’s problems.” So naturally they hanker for “authentic”
“non-career politicians” and hate the “elites.” The joke is,
of course, that born-rich billionaire Donald Trump or the
Oxford-via-Eton patrician Boris Johnson are the “authentic
outsiders” of our day.
This new political
style has a surprising early pioneer in Vladimir Putin.
“Here we are now,”
Nirvana sang, “entertain us.” Substance is out in our politics.
In this media world, basically our real world, showmen are would-be
kings. The masses want their candidate to “tell it like it is,”
“stand up to the man,” “relate to me and you” (at a large
distance via the cable news show or Twitter feed). The smarter
politicians have figured out how to use the media without playing by
the media’s rules, without deferring to it. You can’t trust these
guys, Trump told these guys in a press conference last week, covered
fulsomely in turn by the same guys. Iglesias, the co-founder and
leader of Spain’s far-left Podemos, gets the rules too. The
charismatic upstart with a clear message doesn’t need to resort to
coup or violent revolution (one assumes). All the disruptive tools
are available for the savvy pol in our democracies. Speaking to the
filmmaker Fernando Leon de Aranoa in the new film “Politics, a
Handbook,” Iglesias says: “Doing politics for real is doing
politics inside TV sets and in the newspapers. They’re much more
important than parliaments.” We’ll see for sure later this month
in the Spanish elections, but Iglesias knows the media and political
environment he is living in better than his opponents.
This new political
style has a surprising early pioneer in Vladimir Putin. The former
KGB lieutenant colonel never had to fight for votes or win over
crowds the conventional ways. He came from nowhere to grab hold of
Russia’s throat for the past 16 years. His demiurge is a man named
Vladislav Surkov, a former playwright and brilliant cynic who forged
Putin’s various images — from young modernizer to “sovereign
democrat” to nationalist war leader — by manipulating the
(state-dominated) domestic media message. The best book on this
period is Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing is True and Everything is
Possible,” published in 2014, which doesn’t even mention Putin by
name in describing the cold brilliance with which Surkov has kept his
man in power so long. “I am the author, or one of the authors, of
the new Russian system,” Surkov told Pomerantsev.
Behold the spectacle
And in his own way,
elements of our own. “Nothing is true and everything is possible”
captures Trumpism’s blend of mutating political positions and
outrageous gaffes that would kill off a more mortal, or conventional,
pol but in his case so often seem to make him stronger. It captures
well a lot of current political mood in Europe, not least in the
debate ahead of the Brexit vote later this month.
Politics were always
a bit of a spectacle in democracies.
A year before the
Paris May of 1968 ushered in another revolutionary era in Europe, the
French Marxist Guy Debord wrote a somewhat abstruse philosophical
tract, “The Society of the Spectacle.” Roughly translated, the
final stage in the degeneration of bourgeois democracy comes when the
media-driven “spectacle supplants genuine activity,” Debord
argued. The most visible, “spectacular” show of democracy leads
to its destruction. Debord presented his argument in the form of 221
discrete paragraphs. #9: “In a world that really has been turned on
its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.” #60: “Media stars are
spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the
essence of the spectacle’s banality.”
You see of course a
lot of the Debordian spectacle in our current politics. Left is right
or vice-versa, truth is a lie, image is substance and reality is the
show. Yet remember that one man’s populist is another man’s
successful electoral politician. Politics always had a large bit of a
spectacle in democracy going back to Athens. So maybe the parting
lesson for beleaguered establishments in this unsettling day is
simply this: Learn to play by the rules of the fast-paced game to
defend and propagate your so-called mainstream ideals, or soon find
yourselves as outsiders. Or as Trump loves to put it, losers.
Matthew Kaminski is
executive editor of POLITICO. This article is adapted from a lecture
on “America’s Global Election” at the Amerika Haus in Vienna
last week.
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