begin quote from:
As
the Republican candidate for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump has
accomplished many things. He engaged in rhetorical tactics unprecedented
in recent American electoral history. He was straightforwardly
misogynistic. He repeatedly endorsed obviously false claims. There were
frequent open discussions of the intentions behind his many odd
comments, retractions, semi-retractions and outright false statements.
On
a certain level, the media lacked the vocabulary to describe what was
happening. Trump was denounced repeatedly for “lying” and at times the
apparently more egregious “bald faced lying.” But that is not a
sufficient description. Neither was the charge by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt
that Trump was in fact a master of “bullshit,” which is distinct from
lying in that the speaker is not just communicating information he knows
to be false, but is unconstrained by any consideration of what may or
may not be true. While this description is technically true, it is at
best terribly misleading. This presidential campaign has revealed that
our academic and media class has insufficiently grappled with the
problem of mass communication.
Liberal
democratic societies by definition have a pluralism of value systems.
This poses a problem for the politician seeking to gain office, just as
it does for the advertiser seeking to gain customers. The total audience
consists of sub-audiences with conflicting value systems. The problem
of mass communication in a liberal democracy is that of creating and
conveying a maximally appealing message to an audience made up of groups
with conflicting value systems.
There
is a familiar way to respond to the problem in United States
presidential politics. It is to convey shared acceptance of a value
system to one specific group of voters, while concealing one’s
commitment to it to other groups in the audience. In the 2012 campaign,
the Republican candidate Mitt Romney repeatedly said that President
Obama was weakening the work requirements on welfare. The claim was
immediately debunked. In an essay for The Stone,
I used Romney’s strategy to explain this familiar response to the
problem of mass communication. The goal was to communicate to a certain
group of white Southern voters that Romney shared their racial
attitudes. But the strategy of communication was sophisticated enough
that it provided plausible deniability to the many Republican and
independent voters who do not share racist ideology.
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Trump has taken an entirely distinct approach to the problem of mass communication.
In “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt writes:
Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
According
to Arendt, the “chief disability” of authoritarian propaganda is that
“it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely
consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously
conflicting with common sense.”
The
goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system
that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously
provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is
openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the
leader’s power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest
strength and greatest weakness.
Donald
Trump is trying to define a simple reality as a means to express his
power. The goal is to define a reality that justifies his value system,
thereby changing the value systems of his audience. Two
questions remain: What is the simple reality that Trump is trying to
convey? And what is the value system to which this simple story is
intended to shift voters to adopt?
Trump
regularly says that America’s “inner cities” are filled with Americans
who are impoverished, and of African-American descent. According to
Trump, these are places of unprecedented horror. In a tweet on Aug. 29,
2016, Trump wrote: “Inner-city crime is reaching record levels.
African-Americans will vote for Trump because they know I will stop the
slaughter going on!”
This
has continued as one of the central themes in his campaign; there is
supposedly an unprecedented wave of violent slaughter. In November 2015,
Trump tweeted an image of the following statistics about race and
murder from 2015, supposedly from a source called the “Crime Statistics
Bureau of San Francisco,” which does not appear to exist. It included
wildly inaccurate figures that indicated that a large majority of white
people killed were being killed by black people.
In
the United States, around 14 percent of the population is of
African-American descent. White Americans make up around 75 percent. If
81 percent of white American citizens who were murdered in 2015 were
murdered by a small minority group of American citizens with some kind
of vaguely generalizable profile, it may be worth addressing in policy.
However, F.B.I. statistics from 2014
tell us that 15 percent of whites are killed by their black fellow
Americans, and 82 percent of white Americans are killed by their white
fellow American citizens. Fact checkers of Trump’s tweet were displeased.
Trump’s
narrative about “inner cities” is so old that young people are
unfamiliar with it. There is no national crime wave. While increases
have occurred in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, violent crime in
the United States remains at historic lows. (A thorough study of this
topic can be found at FactCheck.org.)
The
simple picture Trump is trying to convey is that there is wild
disorder, because of American citizens of African-American descent, and
immigrants. He is doing it as a display of strength, showing he is able
to define reality and lead others to accept his authoritarian value
system.
The
chief authoritarian values are law and order. In Trump’s value system,
nonwhites and non-Christians are the chief threats to law and order.
Trump knows that reality does not call for a value-system like his;
violent crime is at almost historic lows in the United States. Trump is
thundering about a crime wave of historic proportions, because he is an
authoritarian using his speech to define a simple reality that
legitimates his value system, leading voters to adopt it. Its strength
is that it conveys his power to define reality. Its weakness is that it
obviously contradicts it.
Trump is, as Frankfurt asserts, certainly openly insensitive to reality. But he is not carelessly insensitive. To lump Trump’s rhetoric into a category that includes advertising is strange. It is prima facie
bizarre to be satisfied with a description of the rhetoric of a
dictator like Idi Amin’s as “insensitive to truth and falsity.” Why have
we been satisfied with such descriptions of Trump? Perhaps our media,
as well as our academic class, assumes that we are healthy liberal
democracy, and not susceptible to authoritarian rhetoric. We now know
this assumption is false.
Denouncing
Trump as a liar, or describing him as merely entertaining, misses the
point of authoritarian propaganda altogether. Authoritarian
propagandists are attempting to convey power by defining reality. The
reality they offer is very simple. It is offered with the goal of
switching voters’ value systems to the authoritarian value system of the
leader.
This
campaign season has been an indictment of our understanding of mass
communication. Either we lacked the ability or concepts to describe
authoritarian propaganda, or we lacked the will. Either way, we must do
better.
Describing
what Trump has done requires us to talk not just about the importance
of honesty and accuracy, but also about power, value systems and
in-groups vs. out-groups. It also requires us to confront the failures
of elite policy that have led to an erosion of democratic norms,
primarily public trust, that make anti-democratic alternatives suddenly
acceptable.
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