Well. Thank goodness that's over.
If the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate was the beginning of our barbarian invasion, as Neil Postman suggests in Amusing Ourselves to Death, then electing a TV game show host president was surely the end. The American equivalent to Odoacer chasing Romulus Augustulus out of Rome. If Postman were alive to write a sequel to AOtD, he would probably title it something like: I Hate It When I'm Right.
Postman warned of the damage television is doing to America's social fabric. His argument is not hurr durr teevee dum, but rather that television is harmful because it pretends to be serious. The medium is inherently incapable of presenting material in any meaningful way. When its producers claim otherwise, and the audience believes otherwise, television poisons every institution it touches: education, religion, news, and -- most of all -- politics. Always a dirty business, yes, but there once was a possibility bad behavior would be checked by an electorate interested in solutions not spectacle. Television turned politics into burlesque, and politicians became entertainment. Any failing or lie or crime can be overlooked; the only sin is looking bad on TV.
Postman feared a terrible end was coming, but he did not know what form the end would take or whether disaster could be averted.
Today, we can see the answer to both of those questions is Donald Trump.
The Trump administration may be gone, but it is far from over.
We're told Trump got 74 million votes in 2020 -- several million more than in the 2016 election. Red State voters looked around at the chaos of the last four years and said: four more of that, please. Trump's lust, or Trump's gluttony, or Trump's greed, or Trump's sloth, or Trump's wrath, or Trump's envy, or Trump's pride -- none of it mattered. None of the incompetence mattered. None of the corruption mattered.
America now has a significant polity having no connection to reality. For these voters, anything the television man says is true. They cannot be reached through reason, they cannot be convinced by debate. The usual platitude of democracy proofed in a vigorous marketplace of competing ideas no longer applies. It's opinions supported by facts versus certainty supported by nothing.
This is something we should think about.
Some would have us believe simple explanations. Trump voters are racist. Trump voters are sexist. Trump voters are homophobic. Or it was economics. Chris Hedges' America: A Farewell Tour supplies a glimpse into the bleak landscape of America's rotting middle class, rural wasteland and urban ghetto two sides of the same rigged coin. An undercurrent of rage ripe for exploitation.
Others claim Trump's election was the dying gasp of American apathy. A painful but necessary course correction, a wakeup call to rouse the voting public into future civic duty. Trump will be remembered as political chemotherapy: a grueling, exhausting, arduous, crippling treatment in service of an ultimate greater good. After the vincristine IV is disconnected and our skin color returns to normal, America will be reinvigorated. Self-improvement incarnate.
No.
The 2016 election may have been some of these things, but it was also something more. Electing Trump signaled a corner has been turned. It's the kind of transgression that confirms the DNA of a nation has mutated. A positive test result. The cancer has been spreading for years, but the pain has finally become impossible to rationalize away.
As many have noted, Trump is the symptom not the disease. Some ask: What is the disease? But the real question is: What comes next? To answer that question, we need to put the last four years into a larger context.
Plato in The Republic, and Aristotle in Politics, describe the anacyclosis. According to this view, political systems move in cycles. Polybius later identified the stages as monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy. The transitions are driven from within, each stage succumbing to a swelling social current that eventually turns fatal. A great Figured Wheel, Robert Pinsky would call it, rolling through shopping malls and prisons and farms and downtowns, grinding the remains of the dead in cemeteries and unmarked graves and oceans. Self-destruction incarnate.
Recognizing the anacyclosis in present day can be challenging. First, definitions have changed since Polybius. For example, democracy meant mob rule in ancient times, not a Norman Rockwell painting of happy citizens at the voting booth. Tyranny didn't mean Nazis, it meant a strong ruler who was popular. The differences between monarchy and kingship and aristocracy and oligarchy are lost on me. But ochlocracy sounds eerily familiar: The people of the state will become corrupted, and will develop a sense of entitlement and will be conditioned to accept the pandering of demagogues.
Furthermore, the transitions are not necessarily a succession, nor does the cycle necessarily repeat. The anacyclosis comes at a price. Its movement is accompanied by ferment, the kind that makes heads on pikes appear or your 401(k) vanish. The chaos translates into lost potential. The next rise tends not to be as lofty as the last. Often there is no rise at all. "Transition" doesn't only mean change, it can also mean collapse.
Thus a civilization's Golden Age is transitory, fated to be destroyed by the very civic machinery it creates. The Romans famously, but the Romans were not the first example nor the last. Indeed, all empires end. The Soviets. Great Britain. The Ottomans. The Angevins. The Franks. The Romans. The Carthaginians. The Macedonians. The Athenians. The Athenians the previous time. The Persians. The Assyrians. The Phoenicians. The Egyptians. In Rus, in the Steppes and all points farther east, warring states and Warring States recycled dynasty after dynasty. In Africa, hundreds of kingdoms came and went before colonization in the south and the caliphate in the north also came and went. In the New World, Inca and Mayan and Aztec regimes failed to endure as if their gods had become inured to sacrifice. Collapse seems to be written into the human condition. Your meridian at once the darkening and the evening of your day.
It would seem America's turn has come.
Everyone from Michael Moore to Robert Bork has bemoaned our current trajectory as unsustainable. Charles Pierce frames the conundrum with some levity. Chris Hedges less-so. The signs are there for anyone with eyes to see. Crumbling infrastructure. Failing public education. A dysfunctional healthcare system. Unchecked military expansion. Record budget deficits. Religious radicalization. Loss of government accountability. Legalized bribery. Epic fraud. Abuse of pardons. Cronyism. Gutted US manufacturing. Cataclysmic financial speculation. Wage stagnation. Wealth concentration. Environmental destruction. Generational poverty. Regulatory capture. Although the Republic has faced challenges before, what's different this time is so many systems are failing all at the same time. It signals collapse is approaching. A collapse that can't be stopped.
The rise of these unprecedented difficulties coincides with an unprecedented decline in American governance, itself a reflection of an unprecedented decline in the American electorate. That is why the collapse can't be stopped. It can't be stopped because -- as Postman recognized -- we have destroyed the rational thinking required to do so. Television lobotomized public discourse. Any threat is trivialized, any proposed solution ridiculed. Any meaningful analysis is met with a sea of blank stares or raised fists. Any failing or lie or crime can be overlooked; the only sin is looking bad on TV.
Social media has since joined the fray to poison the water in ways cable news makers never dreamed possible. Our crackpots no longer skulk in the wings; they force their way onto center stage or into Congress and demand their demented rantings be given sway. And they are. All it required was a sufficiently large fawning mass in search of an idol, and an American idol willing to exploit them for personal gain. A social current that has turned fatal. Self-destruction incarnate.
Thirty years ago, Postman believed us in a race between education and disaster. Thirty years on, it's clear education lost. Truth drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Progress is impossible in such a climate, where any effort to implement real change will be sabotaged by a relentless noise machine. Those who know better, those who don't.
We won't survive this tragic vaudeville loosed by technology. But the decline did not begin with Trump, and it will not end with him. He is only the latest signpost. A herald. A sounding. There will be another Trump. And another. A time will come when Trump's depravity will seem quaint. Right up until the moment it doesn't. If something cannot continue, Herbert Stein famously warned, it will stop. And that will be our end. The next empire will arrive -- China by all indications -- to sit in the Big Chair and the US will become just another failed experiment. One more cautionary tale. Novus ordo seclorum the chorus sings, and the anacyclosis spins on.
It won't happen today, and maybe not tomorrow, but America's coming collapse can no longer be denied. The Trump administration accomplished little, but it accomplished at least that much.
If the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate was the beginning of our barbarian invasion, as Neil Postman suggests in Amusing Ourselves to Death, then electing a TV game show host president was surely the end. The American equivalent to Odoacer chasing Romulus Augustulus out of Rome. If Postman were alive to write a sequel to AOtD, he would probably title it something like: I Hate It When I'm Right.
Postman warned of the damage television is doing to America's social fabric. His argument is not hurr durr teevee dum, but rather that television is harmful because it pretends to be serious. The medium is inherently incapable of presenting material in any meaningful way. When its producers claim otherwise, and the audience believes otherwise, television poisons every institution it touches: education, religion, news, and -- most of all -- politics. Always a dirty business, yes, but there once was a possibility bad behavior would be checked by an electorate interested in solutions not spectacle. Television turned politics into burlesque, and politicians became entertainment. Any failing or lie or crime can be overlooked; the only sin is looking bad on TV.
Postman feared a terrible end was coming, but he did not know what form the end would take or whether disaster could be averted.
Today, we can see the answer to both of those questions is Donald Trump.
The Trump administration may be gone, but it is far from over.
We're told Trump got 74 million votes in 2020 -- several million more than in the 2016 election. Red State voters looked around at the chaos of the last four years and said: four more of that, please. Trump's lust, or Trump's gluttony, or Trump's greed, or Trump's sloth, or Trump's wrath, or Trump's envy, or Trump's pride -- none of it mattered. None of the incompetence mattered. None of the corruption mattered.
America now has a significant polity having no connection to reality. For these voters, anything the television man says is true. They cannot be reached through reason, they cannot be convinced by debate. The usual platitude of democracy proofed in a vigorous marketplace of competing ideas no longer applies. It's opinions supported by facts versus certainty supported by nothing.
This is something we should think about.
Some would have us believe simple explanations. Trump voters are racist. Trump voters are sexist. Trump voters are homophobic. Or it was economics. Chris Hedges' America: A Farewell Tour supplies a glimpse into the bleak landscape of America's rotting middle class, rural wasteland and urban ghetto two sides of the same rigged coin. An undercurrent of rage ripe for exploitation.
Others claim Trump's election was the dying gasp of American apathy. A painful but necessary course correction, a wakeup call to rouse the voting public into future civic duty. Trump will be remembered as political chemotherapy: a grueling, exhausting, arduous, crippling treatment in service of an ultimate greater good. After the vincristine IV is disconnected and our skin color returns to normal, America will be reinvigorated. Self-improvement incarnate.
No.
The 2016 election may have been some of these things, but it was also something more. Electing Trump signaled a corner has been turned. It's the kind of transgression that confirms the DNA of a nation has mutated. A positive test result. The cancer has been spreading for years, but the pain has finally become impossible to rationalize away.
As many have noted, Trump is the symptom not the disease. Some ask: What is the disease? But the real question is: What comes next? To answer that question, we need to put the last four years into a larger context.
Plato in The Republic, and Aristotle in Politics, describe the anacyclosis. According to this view, political systems move in cycles. Polybius later identified the stages as monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy. The transitions are driven from within, each stage succumbing to a swelling social current that eventually turns fatal. A great Figured Wheel, Robert Pinsky would call it, rolling through shopping malls and prisons and farms and downtowns, grinding the remains of the dead in cemeteries and unmarked graves and oceans. Self-destruction incarnate.
Recognizing the anacyclosis in present day can be challenging. First, definitions have changed since Polybius. For example, democracy meant mob rule in ancient times, not a Norman Rockwell painting of happy citizens at the voting booth. Tyranny didn't mean Nazis, it meant a strong ruler who was popular. The differences between monarchy and kingship and aristocracy and oligarchy are lost on me. But ochlocracy sounds eerily familiar: The people of the state will become corrupted, and will develop a sense of entitlement and will be conditioned to accept the pandering of demagogues.
Furthermore, the transitions are not necessarily a succession, nor does the cycle necessarily repeat. The anacyclosis comes at a price. Its movement is accompanied by ferment, the kind that makes heads on pikes appear or your 401(k) vanish. The chaos translates into lost potential. The next rise tends not to be as lofty as the last. Often there is no rise at all. "Transition" doesn't only mean change, it can also mean collapse.
Thus a civilization's Golden Age is transitory, fated to be destroyed by the very civic machinery it creates. The Romans famously, but the Romans were not the first example nor the last. Indeed, all empires end. The Soviets. Great Britain. The Ottomans. The Angevins. The Franks. The Romans. The Carthaginians. The Macedonians. The Athenians. The Athenians the previous time. The Persians. The Assyrians. The Phoenicians. The Egyptians. In Rus, in the Steppes and all points farther east, warring states and Warring States recycled dynasty after dynasty. In Africa, hundreds of kingdoms came and went before colonization in the south and the caliphate in the north also came and went. In the New World, Inca and Mayan and Aztec regimes failed to endure as if their gods had become inured to sacrifice. Collapse seems to be written into the human condition. Your meridian at once the darkening and the evening of your day.
It would seem America's turn has come.
Everyone from Michael Moore to Robert Bork has bemoaned our current trajectory as unsustainable. Charles Pierce frames the conundrum with some levity. Chris Hedges less-so. The signs are there for anyone with eyes to see. Crumbling infrastructure. Failing public education. A dysfunctional healthcare system. Unchecked military expansion. Record budget deficits. Religious radicalization. Loss of government accountability. Legalized bribery. Epic fraud. Abuse of pardons. Cronyism. Gutted US manufacturing. Cataclysmic financial speculation. Wage stagnation. Wealth concentration. Environmental destruction. Generational poverty. Regulatory capture. Although the Republic has faced challenges before, what's different this time is so many systems are failing all at the same time. It signals collapse is approaching. A collapse that can't be stopped.
The rise of these unprecedented difficulties coincides with an unprecedented decline in American governance, itself a reflection of an unprecedented decline in the American electorate. That is why the collapse can't be stopped. It can't be stopped because -- as Postman recognized -- we have destroyed the rational thinking required to do so. Television lobotomized public discourse. Any threat is trivialized, any proposed solution ridiculed. Any meaningful analysis is met with a sea of blank stares or raised fists. Any failing or lie or crime can be overlooked; the only sin is looking bad on TV.
Social media has since joined the fray to poison the water in ways cable news makers never dreamed possible. Our crackpots no longer skulk in the wings; they force their way onto center stage or into Congress and demand their demented rantings be given sway. And they are. All it required was a sufficiently large fawning mass in search of an idol, and an American idol willing to exploit them for personal gain. A social current that has turned fatal. Self-destruction incarnate.
Thirty years ago, Postman believed us in a race between education and disaster. Thirty years on, it's clear education lost. Truth drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Progress is impossible in such a climate, where any effort to implement real change will be sabotaged by a relentless noise machine. Those who know better, those who don't.
We won't survive this tragic vaudeville loosed by technology. But the decline did not begin with Trump, and it will not end with him. He is only the latest signpost. A herald. A sounding. There will be another Trump. And another. A time will come when Trump's depravity will seem quaint. Right up until the moment it doesn't. If something cannot continue, Herbert Stein famously warned, it will stop. And that will be our end. The next empire will arrive -- China by all indications -- to sit in the Big Chair and the US will become just another failed experiment. One more cautionary tale. Novus ordo seclorum the chorus sings, and the anacyclosis spins on.
It won't happen today, and maybe not tomorrow, but America's coming collapse can no longer be denied. The Trump administration accomplished little, but it accomplished at least that much.
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