#despite being corporally nonexistent can still affect the brain

[metalshea]

The New American Nihilism

In the wee hours of the morning on 11/9/16, I joined the entire world as I sat in shock staring at my TV: Donald Trump had just won the election for President of the United States. For someone that usually has something to say about everything, I was completely dumbfounded. I couldn’t rationalize what I saw on the TV with my worldview. I had seen the signs of disillusionment with the government. I had witnessed as people began utilizing moral licensing–the phenomenon where individuals back the inclusion of an outsider only to use it to justify behavior and ideas 180 degrees different from their support of that outsider (to put it simply, electing Barack Obama and then claiming racism is dead because we elected a black president). I KNEW that was all there. But still, the moment was surreal.

It took me hours to fall asleep afterwards because my brain simply would not shut off. I wasn’t angry as many Americans were. I felt more detached and intellectually I could not connect the pieces. In the days following the election, I tried to keep my social media posts more middle of the road by focusing instead on the disruption of Trump’s election rather than directly attacking the man. I avoided reading apocalyptic liberal news sources that predicted that destruction of the fabric of American culture; and I simply refused to read “Conservative” sources that tried to rub liberals nose in it.

I have never been one to accept the root causes of action as promulgated by the press. The news media seems to oversimplify matters or sensationalize them. I have spent enough time working alongside law enforcement, engaging with movement intellectuals, and have had enough experience in the world to know that the news media—both right and left—prefers to attach a narrative to an event to make it more digestible for consumers; narratives that often are incomplete or lack substantive analysis, even if they are more or less true.

The position of the mass media on the rise of Donald Trump has once again been caught in the trap of trying to provide such a narrative… and they are failing at being able to really construct a clear reason for his win. They have presented the notion that Trump’s election was a direct reaction to the Obama administration. That it arose out of a new wave of racism, sexism, and xenophobia among white voters. That Obama’s expansion of executive power allowed for the unchecked implementation of the liberal agenda. That Hillary Clinton was unjustly targeted and victimized because of her sex by a resurrected chauvinism long held at bay by the societal pressures of political correctness.

And all this is true. But, there’s always to me been a feeling that somehow all of this is too disjointed, or feels more like an excuse for the loss of the election than a reason for why Donald Trump won. Quite simply: for all the talk of racism, sexism, xenophobia, white disillusionment, and the rise of “fake news” there’s been little talk in the media about why these things seem to be happening all at once and why the world seems to be devolving into a period of political nihilism.

…maybe it wouldn’t sell? And that’s kind of the point.

Back in 2009, if you had asked me if the Tea Party movement in the United States was inexorably tied to white discomfort surrounding a black president, I would have answered: “Yes, but…”. While the Tea Party movement itself was certainly triggered by the election of Barack Obama in 2008, it was the manifestation of a whole host of insecurities that had been brewing for some time and would have eventually come to fruition even if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won their respective elections. A similar thing can be said about the Occupy Movement on the Left. Instead, we could probably trace back the fundamental anxieties at the root of both movements to Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s with the birth of neoliberal capitalism as an economic policy of the United States.

n full disclosure, neoliberalism is something that I’m still wrapping my head around, and it seems to be poorly defined as compared to other economic models. But the crux of the ideology seems to be that market solutions and personal freedoms are the cure to fixing society’s ills and providing economic growth. As a result, everything becomes marketable in neoliberal capitalism. However, by relying on the market to address societal issues, neoliberalism ends up relying on “market cooptation” of issues to inform our ideas of correct and ethical behavior. In other words, if an action or idea can become marketable for mass consumption, it is inherently good. Ideas that are unable to be coopted sit outside of market culture and are inherently dangerous.

Neolibralism exists beyond a simple right/left divide and instead permeates all of American society regardless of a person’s individual politics. On the left is the “Whole Foods” culture, whereby a place exists that sells the ideas of promoting local business, charity, naturopathy, and food sourcing transparency, all while arguably doing very little to accomplish any of projects. Instead we as Whole Foods shoppers are left with the impression that we have somehow contributed to a larger societal project, but in reality we are only accomplishing those goals within the carefully marketed and structured confines of a nationally-run business empire. The TV show South Park did a particularly effective job of attacking this notion in their 19th season (for a breakdown of what the show’s creators did, see Wisecrack’s excellent mini-doc, “The Philosophy of South Park” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG7y8J0DXhU). Another way to look at how neoliberal cooptation works is to go online to buy your “We Are the 99%!” or “Don’t Tread on Me!” T-shirts. Congratulations, your political statement has filled the coffers of a savvy businessperson.

When combined with the rise of globalism and free trade in the 1990’s, neoliberal capitalism really dug its claws into Western society, and particularly the United States which has always abhorred the imposition of government in society. The result was an environment where business gained freedom of movement and capital, and where the individual worker subsequently became commoditized. In my line of work, we frequently refer to the need to invest in and retain workers through benefits and corporate culture, but this is far from the norm (and I am truly and eternally grateful for that!). Many businesses, especially large manufacturing, view human capital as an expensive commodity that affects the bottom line. As people in the United States grew more expensive through a combination of market forces, government regulation, and unionization, many large companies instead either moved their manufacturing off shore or developed task automation, leaving a number of Americans out of work. A similar problem occurred in Europe through the creation of the single market, the Eurozone, and the Schengen plan: companies located in richer parts of Western Europe were able to relocate operations to cheaper locations in Eastern Europe or instead hire migrant workers willing to be paid less than local ones.

Back in the United States, the situation was complicated by divestment in public education and the rise of business-to-business sales (as opposed to direct-to-consumer sales). As companies became less invested in selling directly to individual consumers, there was less impetus to pay those workers higher wages since those workers were not the ones buying the company’s products. The famous story of Henry Ford increasing worker’s wages so they could all buy Model T’s is no longer relevant since many of the companies that sell directly to American consumers have relocated their manufacturing to outside of the United States.

The result of all this has been a perfect storm: you have a populace with less access to education and with stagnant or nonexistent wages, while the stock market had reached its highest levels of investment in history. Wealth inequality is rampant and workers who formerly had good paying, meaningful jobs with well-funded pensions and retirement have been hung out to dry; reliant on a social safety net that they see as unethical and unable to provide them the dignity of work.

But there’s more… Flash forward to the 2016 Democratic Primary and the DNC leaks:

Bernie Sanders is in the end stages of a contentious primary bout with Hillary Clinton and it appears all but done save for Hillary’s coronation at the Democratic Convention. Suddenly the news breaks: The Democratic National Committee, which was supposedly non-biased, had actively worked against Bernie’s nomination and potentially engaged in political maneuvering—that some would call fraudulent—in attempt to undermine his ability to become the Democratic nominee. The entire primary process was outed as a shameful, undemocratic exercise that seemed to solely exist to legitimize the party pick rather than reflect the will of the people.

Several months later, Hillary Clinton would lose the general election despite winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. No other candidate in history has lost the general election while commanding such a large percentage of the popular vote. Democrats were stunned as they were suddenly hit with the realization, once again, that they had little to no effect whatsoever over the political process.

Shortly after the general election, in December 2016, the State of North Carolina is ranked as one of the most undemocratic governments on the planet (http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html), further underscoring for many the dire state of American Democracy.

While Democrats and Democracy watchdogs were stunned by political disillusionment, many Trump supporters responded by saying: “we’ve been disillusioned for years. Welcome to our hell”. Many on the right pointed to the complex economic situation wrought by globalism and neoliberalism that had devastated communities in the Rust Belt and across rural America. Despite their economic difficulties, the people hit hardest by the economic shift born in 1980’s had seen little in the way of support come from Washington. To them, the feelings of liberals in the wake of the 2016 general election were schadenfreude as they got to witness the left come to terms with its own political disenfranchisement.

Welcome, dear reader, to the age of political nihilism, where the people have realized their inability to affect real change in their governments.

There’s more to the story though. Specifically: the media and the rise of the society of spectacle.

The mass media in the United States has forever been a capitalist project. Not that this is inherently a good or a bad thing: the media remains a separate institution from the government of the United States and is granted Constitutionally-provided independence. This is a right afforded to the American people that we often take for granted. However, the media in the US is dependent on streams of outside revenue, mostly from advertisers and paid subscriptions, to remain solvent. In the digital age, media is becoming more and more dependent on ad dollars as more and more people shun paid subscriptions and instead seek out “free” cable news or internet news. This desire for readership has always pushed the media towards investing their resources in stories that will gain people’s attention. Without the reader’s or viewer’s attention, media companies failed because they were unable to attract ad dollars. However, this model has occasionally served the corporate interest more than the public interests; sometimes with disastrous results. In the Golden Age of Journalism at the turn of the 20th Century, media outlets were able to steer public policy in such a way as to significantly contribute to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Newspapers reporting on Spanish atrocities committed against the Cubans became the de jour stories of the day led to calls for military intervention by an outraged public. While the Spanish-American War was very successful, it also resulted the American colonization of Philippines: a bloody conflict that in many ways was America’s first “Vietnam”. The news media played similar back in 2003, just prior to the start of the Iraq War. Media outlets spent huge amounts of time highlighting the inhuman actions of Saddam Hussein, helping to prepare the way for war and again precipitating a military quagmire.

In the late 20th Century, the media landscape in the United States began to change dramatically in two really clear ways: (1) The rise of 24 hour cable news networks encouraged editorialism to permeate across all forms of media and (2) the desire to market to certain audiences led to a greater balkanization of the public discourse. These might require some unpacking…

The first part is a bit more cut and dry and was summed up nicely by Jon Stewart who once said, and I’m paraphrasing, that CNN and other 24 hour cable news networks didn’t lead to more analysis, they instead focus on whomever is the loudest. I remember reading a book some time ago written by a former correspondent who had worked, I believe, for NBC (or one of the major news networks). He lamented the shift away from foreign affairs in current reporting to an over-reporting of domestic affairs. I think he was half right. Instead of focusing on the multitudinous world issues that affect us and spending the time analyzing them in depth, national news outlets have instead opted for the coverage of national partisanship in order to drive viewership. Why? Its more entertaining. Talking heads such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow provide little in the way of true news analysis. But they are all charismatic, erudite, articulate, and entertaining. They keep you glued to the TV as they launch diatribes, some better informed than others, and resultantly increase partisanship. All while the newscreep at the bottom of the screen seemingly keeps the viewer informed of major events occurring elsewhere in the world. This is shameful and dishonest, and it has failed to effectively inform the American people of substantive facts surrounding major stories. Instead, it has allowed for political commentators to masquerade as journalists and inform public opinion in a way that is both cynical and dismissive of the other side. In short, it led to point #2: the rise of the echo chamber and the division of public discourse.

We may or may not actually be more politically divided than at any time since the American Civil War; but even if we aren’t, it certainly feels like we are. As news media outlets have stepped into editorialism and away from analysis they have helped shaped the discourse of the public at large. I remember turning on Fox and Friends one morning to see a discussion about a terrorist suicide bombing (where it was escapes me but it was somewhere in the Middle East). One of the show’s hosts at the end of the segment then made a snide remark about Islam, saying something to the effect of “some religion of peace, huh?”. That remark is a shameful one for a news outlet to make. Not only because it is disrespectful, cynical, and clearly Islamophobic, but because it injects opinion in a way that prevents the audience from developing their own informed opinion. Instead, what lasts in our mind is not the story itself or how it is relevant to the geopolitical situation of the Middle East, but the scoffing remark at the very end of the segment. Forget that the comment is a gross oversimplification of a complicated and tragic political situation; all Muslims are terrorists.

As local media dies its slow death from decreased readership, we’ve become more reliant on national media… and the national media continues to compete for our attention. I’m reminded of the words of the President of CBS regarding Donald Trump’s antics in the Republican Primary: “He’s bad for America but great for CBS”. People paid attention to Trump because he was entertaining. I admittedly watched the presidential debates with the hope of seeing a train wreck. I kind of lied to myself saying that I was hoping to be a more informed voter, but really it was secondary to my desire to see a Trumpster Fire. The media outlets for their part cultivated my desire for drama. They used imagery similar to a UFC fight or NFL promo to advertise the debates, playing off our need to see conflict; to be entertained (https://youtu.be/YlptgqP_PEA).

Place this media editorialism and the need for entertainment into the context of neoliberal capitalism, political disenfranchisement, and globalism, and a very odd thing starts to happen. A form of tribalism–fueled in part by the complex logarithms that social media sites like Facebook use determine an individual’s newsfeed–has formed in reaction to our political nihilism. The desire for humans to find like-minded individuals with which to associate has allowed for the proliferation of alternative news sites, including the now infamous tabloid journalism of “fake news” outlets as well as the seemingly inexplicable disregard of facts. A recent report on NPR stated that fact-checking articles received little attention from their intended audience and were generally viewed as buzzkills. In other words, the sense of belonging to the tribe was more important than the actual veracity of the information being presented by tribal members.

Ouch.

While the right seems to be more affected by this than the left, there are certainly more than a few left leaning outlets the engage in the same sensationalism. My only thought for why the left is so comparatively unaffected is that the message on the right has been more singular and transmitted by fewer outlets. I would guess that having only Fox News as a major national news outlet allows for a more targeted message to get pushed through to the public, and simultaneously allows for smaller outlets to piggy back off that message and go off into the weeds. The left, with its many more numerous major outlets, seems better equipped to present thought diversity in a way that stays mainstream, if not more diluted. Weep for the right, they deserve more–and better–than Fox News. In writing all this, I don’t believe that I’ve even begun to scratch the surface of how we got to where we are: Donald Trump’s America. The vitriol, the hate, the hyperbole, the distrust—in short the nihilism of our political situation—is all complex and multifactorial. While there is certainly a degree of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and moral licensing at work, there is so much more to what is happening nationally and internationally. Complex social anxieties, economic and political disenfranchisement, the failure of the mass media, and social media-fueled echo chambers have all contributed to the rise of Trumpism. There’s no simple solution to get us back to civilized discourse, in fact, if there are lessons to be learned from 2016, we should probably try to avoid using nostalgia as a guiding principle. But awareness of the moving parts can breed at least some level of understanding.

Hopefully.

#politics #neoliberalism #trump #newsmedia #globalism