There is a perhaps apocryphal story that stuck in my mind when I first heard it. When Ray Goulding of the great radio-era comedy team Bob And Ray was asked why they didn't do political humor, Ray responded with a question of his own: How do you make it funnier?
Exactly. I always hesitate to write about contemporary American politics because one quickly runs out of words — sham, circus, cluster-fuck, bogus, fraudulent, bamboozle, etc. These are all good words, but somehow none of them seems to capture what's really going on.
I will depart from my usual stay-above-the-fray stance today because there are a couple Flatland lessons in it. My usual reluctance was shattered when I saw Nate Silver's Stop Comparing Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders (fivethirtyeight.com, hat tip Tim Iacono).
A lot of people are linking the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump under headings like “populist” and “anti-establishment.” Most of these comparisons are too cute for their own good — not only because it’s too early to come to many conclusions about the campaign, but also because Trump and Sanders are fundamentally different breeds of candidates who are situated very differently in their respective nomination races.
I had no idea this was going on. JFC!
The Flatland lessons are easily stated.
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The very existence of a clown like Donald Trump at the top of the Republican polls makes a mockery of the American political process. Therefore, Trump gets a lot of negative attention from mainstream media types representing America's elites because his existence threatens the legitimacy of those elites. I've heard political reporters on NPR become apoplectic talking about Trump. The motivation behind these journalist's fury is simple: Trump is mocking them and the political status quo they must defend.
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If the reality-TV star Trump must be marginalized because he's an unprincipled clown, Sanders must be marginalized for different reasons. Bernie's seriousness must be questioned because he is going around talking about enormous inequality in America and other egregiously immoral situations too numerous to list here. Bernie knows that Congress has been bought and paid for, and he's talking about it. And a surprisingly large number of people are listening to him. Thus Sanders is enough of a threat to the status quo to make elites nervous. The marginalization of Sanders is accomplished simply by comparing him to Trump.
Now I want you to consider these lessons from a psychological point of view. It's not as though a bunch of elite guys got together in a room and said "We've got to take down Sanders. Let's compare him to Trump, that should do the trick. Let's get our guys at the Times and the New Yorker to do it."
On the contrary, the threat to the status quo resides in the unconscious mind. There is no conspiracy. All of the sudden, coming seemingly from out of nowhere, the linking of these two very, very different politicians becomes a very natural thing to do.
And thus the evil deed is accomplished when someone actually links the two men in print. (When one person does it, many others will follow.) Once the despicable, invidious comparison is made, the linkage between the two men is irrevocably established in the unconscious mind. Nothing can undo it.
like peas in a pod
Let's look at one of these hatchet jobs so you'll see what I mean. Let's use George Packer's The Populists (The New Yorker, September 7, 2015).
Ah! Now we understand. Sanders and Trump are both populists. That's the evil comparison in a nutshell.
Thomas E. Watson, the populist from Georgia who had a long and increasingly demagogic career in American politics, wrote in 1910:
The scum of creation has been dumped on us. Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American. The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us. The vice and crime which they have planted in our midst are sickening and terrifying. What brought these Goths and Vandals to our shores? The manufacturers are mainly to blame. They wanted cheap labor: and they didn’t care a curse how much harm to our future might be the consequence of their heartless policy.
The objects of Watson’s bile were the Italians, Poles, Jews, and other European immigrants then pouring into the United States. A century later, in the populist summer of 2015, some of their great-grandchildren have been cheering Donald Trump as he denounces the latest generation of immigrants, in remarkably similar terms.
American populism has a complicated history, and Watson embodied its paradoxes. He ended his career, as a U.S. senator, whipping up white-Protestant enmity against blacks, Catholics, and Jews; but at the outset, as a leader of the People’s Party in the eighteen-nineties, he urged poor whites and blacks to join together and upend an economic order dominated by “the money power.”
And now Packer compares both Trump and Sanders to this scumbag Watson.
Watson wound up as Trump, but he started out closer to Bernie Sanders, and his hostility to the one per cent of the Gilded Age would do Sanders proud. Some of Watson’s early ideas—rural free delivery of mail, for example—eventually came to fruition.
That’s the volatile nature of populism: it can ignite reform or reaction, idealism or scapegoating.
It flourishes in periods like Watson’s, and like our own, when large numbers of citizens who see themselves as the backbone of America (“producers” then, “the middle class” now) feel that the game is rigged against them. They aren’t the wretched of the earth—Sanders attracts educated urbanites, Trump small-town businessmen. They’re people with a sense of violated ownership, holding a vision of an earlier, better America that has come under threat.
There it is. The despicable comparison has been made. The link in the unconscious mind has been established, never to be undone. There is more invidious bullshit of course, for Packer must reinforce the comparison. (I'll skip further emphasis; you know what's going on.)
Populism is a stance and a rhetoric more than an ideology or a set of positions. It speaks of a battle of good against evil, demanding simple answers to difficult problems. (Trump: “Trade? We’re gonna fix it. Health care? We’re gonna fix it.”) It’s suspicious of the normal bargaining and compromise that constitute democratic governance. (On the stump, Sanders seldom touts his bipartisan successes as chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.) Populism can have a conspiratorial and apocalyptic bent—the belief that the country, or at least its decent majority, is facing imminent ruin at the hands of a particular group of malefactors (Mexicans, billionaires, Jews, politicians).
Above all, populism seeks and thrills to the authentic voice of the people. Followers of both Sanders and Trump prize their man’s willingness to articulate what ordinary people feel but politicians fear to say. “I might not agree with Bernie on everything, but I believe he has values, and he’s going to stick to those and he will not lie to us,” a supporter named Liam Dewey told ABC News. The fact that Sanders has a tendency to drone on like a speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference circa 1986—one who happens to have an audience of twenty-seven thousand—only enhances his bona fides. He’s the improbable beneficiary of a deeply disenchanted public. As for Trump, his rhetoric is so crude and from-the-hip that his fans are continually reassured about its authenticity.
Responding to the same political moment, the phenomena of Trump and Sanders bear a superficial resemblance. Both men have no history of party loyalty, which only enhances their street cred—their authority comes from a direct bond with their supporters, free of institutional interference. They both rail against foreign-trade deals, decry the unofficial jobless rate, and express disdain for the political class and the dirty money it raises to stay in office. Last week, Trump even denounced the carried-interest tax loophole for investment managers (a favorite target of the left). “These hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder,” he told CBS News. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
And so on. Even the words "despicable" and "invidious" do not quite capture the evil I've described here.
That's why I never write about politics. I held my nose and did it today because there are lessons to be learned. So I hope you learned them.
In any sufficiently large human society, politics is never about changing the core status-quo behaviors, but always about which group of elites is benefitting from them and to what degree. Any threat to the actual status-quo behaviors themselves is to be feared by all elites, grouped together with other such threats, mocked, derived, marginalized and rejected. The status-quo (read, "my happy place") must be maintained. Naturally.
Posted by: Brian | 09/10/2015 at 10:45 AM