Donald Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.
By Mytheos Holt - 20, 2016
A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud,
unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly
flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of
contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose
serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the
gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the
debate stage. An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our
rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than
universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other
time in the modern era.
But in Trump’s case, these supposedly disqualifying positions and
attributes have proven to be the basis for unexpected success. Why? In
part, it is because he corrects massive ideological failures by the
Right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the Left,
eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal
order to exist.
For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to
the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the
Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist
domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.
The cause of this is partially a denial of how swiftly the culture
has moved Left, leaving the institutional Right under the false
impression it is still fighting the culture war of the 90’s and early
2000s. The Right’s obsession with 90’s-era battles over sex, drugs, and
rock and roll is more than just an anachronism: it represents a
self-inflicted wound that ignored how the Left used the culture to
repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society. We now
know the Left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.
The culture wars permitted the Right to be taken over by what Jeffrey Hart—Richard Nixon speechwriter, sometime National Review editor,
and all-around conservative giant—described as “young fogies.” Hart
describes the phenomenon in an essay titled “The Intelligent Woman’s
Guide to a Modern American Conservatism,” in which he envisions as a
dialogue between himself and a younger woman of the era. Here is Hart’s
warning:
The Right of the ‘Young Fogies’
A lot of my students are not sold on conservatism.[…] They think conservatives are preppies who are against sex. […] In some visible cases, the main content of ‘conservatism’ seems to be a refusal of experience. We have more than our share of young fogies. I could name some names, but what the hell. In my view, young fogie American conservatives…place an altogether disproportionate emphasis on sex and sex-related moral questions. […] Some conservatives appear to confuse Victorian morality with the Western tradition, and even with Christianity.
Hart wrote those words in 1982, when candidates like Ronald Reagan
were still winning young voters. But the “young fogie-ism” Hart warned
against was already becoming a significant portion of the Republican
brand, one that extended through the anti-video game, anti-rap,
anti-sex, anti-sideboob, anti-violence handwringing that became an
integral part of the Republican persona over the next two decades.
Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not. On the surface, Trump’s
gold-plated lifestyle is nothing like the old Hollywood-style glamour of
the Reagan White House. But for an era where most Americans have moved
far beyond the culture wars of the past, where reality stars are our new
tastemakers and Kim Kardashian is an icon mothers encourage their
daughters to emulate, he offers an aspirational vision of wealth and
accomplishment that appeals to the same combination of glitz and
celebrity.
Hannah Arendt once quipped that the fiercest revolutionary
becomes a devoted conservative after the revolution. This is certainly
true of the Left, which has, since its culture war victories, co-opted
much of the dogma of earlier conservatives and poisoned it. The old Left
cast itself as transgressors against mainstream morality. This Left
enforces and controls mainstream morality. The old Left championed
transgressive free speech. This Left despises it.
The Left Turns the Market Against the Right
Obsessing over the lost culture wars of the past is an error for the
Right. But the real problem is that even if the Right hasn’t moved on
from its previous losses, the Left has moved on from its
previous victories. They remain focused on advancing their vision and
building on their victories, to the point of eradicating any opposition
from the public square. As a result, the character of the Left has
fundamentally changed in a way that today’s Right seems quite incapable
of grasping.
Most importantly, the old Left cast itself as outside of capitalism.
This Left is thoroughly corporatist, and only occasionally pretends
otherwise. As a result, conservatives have stood by, oblivious and
helpless, as the Left began to turn all our best weapons—especially the
free market—against us.
This brings us to a second point: the inadequacy of the institutional
Right at anticipating and explaining free markets. Conservatives and
libertarians have been warning of capitalism cannibalizing itself since
at least 1942, when Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter opened his book
“Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” with disturbing news for his free market-sympathetic peers.
“I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader,
considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical
conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements,” Schumpeter
wrote. Much later on in the book, he observed even more cuttingly that
“capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic its civilization
creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”
Trump’s brazenness in admitting to past acts of cronyism is
another aspect that would, for any other politician, spell his doom.
Instead, it has fostered a greater degree of trust from his supporters.
This is because Trump alone seems to understand that capitalism has
weaknesses at all, having been a capitalist himself. The
greatest of those is the fact that capitalism—and its defenders—assume
it can operate from a position of cultural neutrality. It can’t.
Cultural Neutrality Is Not Possible
Schumpeter was right then, and he is distressingly right now. The cancer
of leftism has spread through capitalism even further than it had in
1942. The general assumption of the American people in the aftermath of
the financial crisis and the collapse and bailouts of Wall Street is
that they were witnessing failures of capitalism, and the Right has done
little to correct this impression.
In the latest season of “South Park,” the titular town is
overrun with advertisements masquerading as human beings: soulless
robots who use gentrification and political correctness (“mental
gentrification,” the show wryly notes) to eliminate actual human
beings from the area. This idea that a certain species of capitalism
might actually drive political correctness is daring and interesting,
and relatively unremarked upon by those on the Right today.
Once someone buys a product, you want them to feel allegiance to
it, a degree of brand loyalty that can sometimes resemble political
tribalism (see Apple). The aim is to make customers believe that someone
who consumes that particular product belongs to a community of other buyers, who just happen to be a particularly desirable community to be a part of!
The Left Treats Race and Sex as Brands
One of the key tactics of advertisers is to make consumers feel their
life is missing something without whatever product the advertiser is
selling. If you look at ads that attempt to showcase the difference
between, say, data packages from different cell phone carriers, you’ll
often see the competition depicted as holding back their customers from
the awesome data package they could have because of greed, technological incompetence, or some other abstraction that, of course, the advertised carrier doesn’t suffer from.
When you distill it down to its essence, the worst forms of modern
leftist politics play on all of these same tactics, playing down the
ramifications of policy agendas to speak to a much deeper and emotional
desire to be a good person. Did you vote for Barack Obama because you
wanted to feel good about yourself, but still feel life’s missing
something? Vote for Bernie Sanders, and he’ll deliver on the promise to
give you everything you need. Not getting the wage you could be getting?
It’s the patriarchy, so switch carriers and join our feminist army for
Hillary instead.
The Left treats race and sex as brands, operating with messaging and
tactics that are more than just organizing techniques: they’re a
brilliant technique to capture someone without the insight to see
through the pitch. The Left has realized it can succeed by creating
cultural turf wars among different demographics as a substitute for a
policy agenda that speaks to their real needs.
The point is that the post-culture war Left has not laid down
their arms. Instead, they have become the political equivalent of
Gawker: a divisive industry seeking cultural flashpoints to exploit and
highlight, devoted to manufacturing mutual hate for their own benefit.
They thrive on the click-war hate that pits groups against each other.
The Political Equivalent of Gawker
In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself
revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives
Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his
approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear
none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM
protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a
cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it
inevitably fell on deaf ears.
It is not enough that women face challenges within a post-feminist
society—they must be told that half the country is participating in a
war on their priorities. In an atomized culture, breaking down people to
the elements of ethnicity, sex, and gender is the Left’s go-to method
of redefining society according to their priorities.
This is a key point that cannot be ignored. Because of the modern
Left’s sophisticated use of advertising techniques, they have done
something with their hatemongering that the Left of the past could only
dream of: they have made it profitable. In so doing, they have turned a
capitalist tactic on the culture that sustains it, and thus, on itself.
Unfortunately, what little of a cultural vision we possess on
the Right is so dated as to be largely hokey and irrelevant to the
experience of Americans today. Because this new Left has become the
dominant culture, the Right is obliged to form a counterculture. But
countercultures are no place for young fogies. Countercultures shoot
sacred cows, scandalize “respectable” norms, and generally wreak havoc
for the sake of breaking down the hypocrisy and weakness of the dominant
culture. By and large, it’s still the young fogies who run the show,
and expecting them to create a counterculture, let alone a
counterculture that produces actual art, is ludicrous.
The Right Needs a New Cultural Vision
The Right must fight back against that. Yes, free markets remain the
best economic system ever created, and a necessary precondition for a
free society, but not a sufficient one. Does this mean the state has to
get involved? Not necessarily. Conservatives could use another weapon to
limit the spread of this kind of poison, and that’s culture.
The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can
and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all,
don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most
powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization
since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking
Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most
video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about
Rousseauistic, universal human goodness? Well, yes—but once again,
Hart’s warning looms large, and fogie-ism rears its head.
An excellent example of this is an article titled “A Counterproductive Alliance,”
discusing the increasing friendliness to right-wing ideas among video
game fans after the #Gamergate controversy. The gist of the article can
be summed up as: “How will we maintain our air of moral superiority if people show up to CPAC in costumes instead of blazers and bowties?”
Never mind that #Gamergate and movements like it were the most
successful backlash against political correctness: for some
“conservatives,” saying yes to potential allies was too much to
bear if it meant hobnobbing with the sorts of people who’ve never read a
Bible or owned a varsity jacket.
What’s a conservative who wants to stop culture, and thus
politics, from being dragged to the far Left do? Answer: He or she has
to hope that some part of mainstream culture co-opts the Right. Pray, in
other words, that some Prometheus comes along who’s willing to steal
fire from his fellow cultural elites to give to the Right’s forgotten
constituencies, even if it annoys their more refined leaders.
Beat Dominant Culture at Its Own Game
This leaves the Right in a vulnerable and very unenviable spot: the most
anachronistic elements of right-wing politics have rendered us too
unimaginative to create a counterculture of our own, and too snobbish to
appropriate the elements of the dominant culture that could serve as
building blocks.
Perhaps, say, some titanic elite figure who knows leftist pop
culture’s weaknesses from the inside, and is willing to lose his cozy
insider status to go at it like a wrecking ball? You know, the sort of
person with enough cultural cachet to turn an episode of “Saturday Night
Life” into an hour-long infomercial for his political vision, rather
than a source of endless sneering gags about Republicans? The kind of
person who can get away with barking orders at MSNBC hosts? That kind of person?
Oh look, it’s Donald Trump. Trump, alone among the 2016 Republican
candidates, has been willing to seize the banner of the Right in the current culture
war, and plant it straight in the backs of his fallen leftist
antagonists. Trump did this the way countercultural warriors are
supposed to win fights: he beat the dominant culture at its own game by
rejecting their assumptions about what was allowed.
If the leaders of the Right are scared of Trump because he will say anything; the Left is scared of Trump precisely because he will
say anything. He does not play by the rules, and that makes him less
predictable and more dangerous. What Ronald Reagan and Trump have in
common is obvious: an incredible capacity to use the media to captivate
the American people. One learned this in Hollywood, the other in reality
TV, but both deployed this skill to great effect.
Hoisted on Their Own Petards
Compared to Trump at his most mocking and satirical, Gawker is tame.
Compared to Trump at his most daring and impetuous, even the most
ruthless of Hollywood’s antiheroes look peevish. Compared to Trump’s
seemingly oblivious moments of benevolence, Upworthy looks mawkish and saccharine. Trump has made destroying the young fogies on the Right and Left the greatest thing on TV.
There is, of course, a big difference, as well: everyone knows Reagan
cast himself as a sunny, heroic figure. Trump, on the other hand, is
taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality, i.e.,
a comically larger-than-life villain. But there’s a neat thing about
villains, or at least well-done ones: they get to show where people’s
ideas of good and evil fall flat. Trump does this brilliantly to the
Left. He has taken the humiliating mockery that the media has trained so
effectively on “hicks,” Christians, and Republicans, and turned it
round to expose the smug, mostly leftist Babbits and young fogies of the
Acela Corridor as no less ridiculous.
That’s a good start for someone who wants to make America great
again, rather than letting America succumb to its eventual,
leftist-driven death by a thousand clicks.
God bless,
JohnnyD
God bless,
JohnnyD
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