Trump 2.0 and Spectacle
If Trump 2.0 is theater, then what kind of theater is it?
In a recent conversation with a long-time friend, a Republican, I was recounting some of Trump’s comments and expressing what I am sure my friend considered to be the liberal version of teenage angst.
My friend told me I would be okay, which I appreciate. He also said that I was interpreting Trump’s comments too literally. He explained that Trump doesn’t mean most of what he says. Trump makes outrageous statements as the starting point of a negotiation.
Bloggers on the Left have made similar comments. Jonathan V. Last, on the Bulwark platform, often refers to the Kabuki theater of the Trump administration. I would argue that Trump’s approach to theater is more like Spectacle—a form of theater with lavish sets and costumes, a lot of parading around and gesturing, but not much dialogue. It’s not meant to inform or even entertain. It is meant to awe—to overwhelm us with images.
Spectacle is well suited to our current media landscape. For example, consider the popularity of films made from Marvel comics, which are packed with special effects, CGI images, simple story lines, and short testosterone-fueled bursts of dialogue. As an audience, we are meant to skim across the surface of these films as images wash over us.
As we move further into Trump 2.0, those of us who want to counter his presidential proclamations certainly need to understand its spectacle. I do agree that Trump will not act on much of what he says (I doubt he will try to take over Gaza and turn it into the Rivera of the Middle East), and much of what he acts on will be reduced to mere gesture. This doesn’t mean that he is harmless.
We certainly need to figure out when we are being diverted by mere image and when we need to engage. We need to learn how to act without reacting reflexively.
As we view the spectacle of Trump 2.0, we should also examine our own place in media. Yes, there is the spectacle of Trump. There is also the liberal version of spectacle.
The Liberal Spectacle is not entirely a creation of the Dems, the Left, or Wokers. The MAGA movement does its best to shape it, but it is also shaped by movies, television shows, music, social media influencers, and mimes. This means that the Left is not entirely in control of the Liberal Spectacle. Rebranding—to use a term suited to the subject—the Democratic Party is not going to be easy.
I don’t have all the answers, maybe not any good answers, but I do think we need to stop trying to fight the digital Trump spectacle with late-nineteenth century strategies. The search for new strategies begins with an examination of the Liberal Spectacle and the ways in which we are not just viewing spectacle but are also living it.
In 1967, long before the Internet or social media, Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle. Fair warning: readers new to Debord might feel that he writes more like a poet than a political theorist. Hang in there. Even if only phrases make sense, these nuggets will help us to look at our world in a new way. Here, Debord describes his view of spectacle:
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separated pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of automized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
I am going to pull out some nuggets, but, first, I wanted to point out what is not in this passage—material reality, what we used to call the real world. Spectacle is a world of images, and the images are detached from a world we can move through with our bodies. It is a world of the “nonliving.” Think of the world of the living as embodied consciousness. Spectacle, as Debord describes it, is a world without bodies—without life.
The images create a “pseudo-world” where the replication—the cloning—of images is automatic, that is, the images seem to appear on their own. To update this comment, we could say the images create a cyber reality, or a series of endlessly generating cyber worlds.
The images seem automatic because they go viral. No one person controls the images, which means they circle back on us, again and again, until they are accepted as the real reality. At this point, even “the deceivers are deceived.” Part of Trump’s power is that he has come to believe his own fabrications because his fabrications have mutated in mass media and come back to him as the truth.
This is the kind of spectacle that is creating our world. How do we step out of it? Long ago, John Prine advised us to blow up the TV, throw away the paper, move to the country, build a home, plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and try to find Jesus, on our own. Now, New Media pundits say, “Unplug your devices.” If Prine were still alive, he would probably be saying, “Naw, that ain’t gonna work.”
Here’s the thing—the reach of the spectacle is even beyond digital devices. Like Sartre’s hell, it’s other people, and they’re all wearing MAGA hats.
Debord says that the sole message of the spectacle is: “What appears is good, and what is good appears.” We swim in it; we drown in it. And, like David Foster Wallace’s fishies, we don’t even realize we are swimming in it. So, we’re going to have to find a way to bring it out into the open and deal with it.
Here is a problem we will have to face: Changing the spectacle is easier if we don’t care about ethics, truth, or democracy. That’s one of the reasons that spectacle comes so natural to Trump. He embraces it without reservation. He swims in it as he watches us drown.
So, what do we do?
We should do our best to understand the Liberal Spectacle. If you do a Google search for liberal mimes, you will find certain themes: liberals are weak, incompetent, and stupid. They lack common sense. If you watch the emergence of mimes in real time, you will see that a good message or a beneficial act can be transformed into multiple and often hateful iterations quickly—often in seconds. Pepe the Frog mimes are a good example of how quickly the creator of an image, like the Pepe cartoon, can lose control of his intellectual property and how quickly images can be coopted.
The changes are unpredictable and generated by an unmanageable swarm. If crowdsourcing is a good use of a swarm—a collection of individuals who solve a problem as if they were one mind—then the generation of mimes is its evil twin.
We should recognize that a similar process happens within institutions—although the pace is slower and the path more predictable.
In the mid-1980s, I served on a committee, at the university where I was then teaching, to develop a policy on sexual harassment. It is hard to imagine, but, at that time, only a handful of universities had an established sexual harassment policy. The committee’s primary concern was protecting students and staff, but we also discussed how the policy needed to education professors and administrators. We were attempting to change the culture of the university, and, I believe, the policies we developed and the DEI programs that implemented those policies did effect much needed change. DEI programs also brought needed diversity to both the student population and the roster of faculty. All of this should be celebrated.
But have these programs also had some role in creating what I am calling the Liberal Spectacle?
At this point, I want to move into what Hegel called the “inverted world.” In short, this means shifting our perspective to see if our truth might be obscuring a different truth, maybe even the truth of those other guys we find so annoying.
Thinking skill: Exploring the Inverted World. I will leave it to others to explain the history and context of this idea. It can become complex quickly, but we can begin to understand the inverted world by asking a few basic questions. What if the other guys are right? Could the opposite be true? Even if the opposite is not true, would exploring it modify my view? What would happen if I took one of my most cherished beliefs and turned it upside down?
A good example of exploring the inverted world occurs in Carl Jung’s Psychological Type, a book that explains his theory of personality differences, such as the difference between extraversion and introversion. You might know this theory from taking The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Late in this big, fat book of about 600 pages, Jung says, “I base my judgment on what the individual feels to be his conscious psychology. But I am willing to grant that one could equally well conceive and present such a psychology from precisely the opposite angle.” In other words, this model of conscious psychology could be developed from the opposite perspective of the unconscious. In two sentences, Jung qualifies everything else he says in this 600 page book. He invites us to explore an alternative world.
The word “deconstruction” is often thrown around these days, with a variety of meanings. Chefs even talk about deconstructing traditional recipes. Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that, in the Western tradition, the spoken word is more highly valued than the written word. Consider, for example, that a witness in a trial cannot submit written testimony. Derrida said that we can deconstruct this view by inverting it. We can explore the world as if the written word were more valued. With this move, Derrida began to deconstruct the entire history of Western metaphysics.
Exploring the inverted world means, in part, challenging and critiquing cherished beliefs and values. For this reason, it is likely to make some people uncomfortable or even angry. I would argue that, when we become angry because someone is exploring beliefs opposite to our own, we need to ask ourselves, “Should I linger with the negative?” In other words, if my beliefs are solid and true, why wouldn’t I be willing to examine them?
With that background, I am going into the inverted world of DEI programs.
If DEI programs have brought about much important and good change in the culture of our institutions, have they also done some harm to the cause? Is there something about the criticism of DEI programs that deserves our attention?
Over the course of about thirty years, I have witnessed, as I worked at several different universities, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion evolve from (1) a dialogue about values, (2) to a written policy, (3) to a bureaucracy (a DEI officer, hiring regulations, mandatory training, etc,), (4) to accounting (goals and quotas). I have also witnessed a progression from (1) a policy that protected students, (2) to elaborate procedures that protect the institution (that is, avoid lawsuits), (3) to a method for disciplining professors (for example, administrators filing Affirmative Action complaints against professors, as if they were characters in Kafka’s The Trial). I am not saying that these transformations happened at every institution, but they happened, to some degree, at some.
As the best of intentions are translated into SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), empathy and compassion, the desire to transform a culture, can easily be lost in what is often referred to as “best practices.”
Let me illustrate with a personal example. In the late 1990s, about a dozen of my colleagues, from across the campus, and I were in a mandatory training session. The stated purpose of the session was to explain sexual harassment policies, but the workshop was also, to some extent, about protecting the university from lawsuits. For example, the trainer told us that, when working with a student one-on-one, we should always close our office doors. The faculty in the session came as close to an open revolt as I have ever seen. We all began talking about examples where it would be necessary, in our view, to close the door: consoling a student about the death of a parent, helping a student through a personal crisis, or directing a student to campus resources for substance abuse. We all had experiences like this. We all believed that, in these kinds of situations, our office door should be closed. For the student’s benefit.
Here is the central point I want to raise: In the coming years, as more DEI offices are closed, and this is already happening, I hope that we will defend, first and foremost, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, rather than the institution of DEI offices. If we attempt to defend institutions instead of values, we will lose.
I am deeply concerned about the closing of DEI offices, but I understand why people could be upset about how some—not all—DEI offices operate. I also understand how fundamental values, like equity, can easily become distorted or lost in complicated regulations.
I will fight to the death to defend diversity, equity, and inclusion. I am less willing, however, to defend bureaucracies, accounting, and the transformation of democratic values into something I no longer recognize.
Considering the progress that DEI programs have made, I am hopeful that many institutions will continue to seek diversity in recruiting students, that they will continue to promote equity in hiring, that they will support other values that brought DEI programs into being.
Even with DEI offices closed, we can continue to value diversity, equity, and inclusion. We can write about these values, teach them, and practice them. In my career, I have witnessed administrations attempt to shape the curriculum in directions that were, in my view, in the view of most of my colleagues, at odds with democracy. The faculty always resisted, often in very innovative ways. I am hopeful that teachers, at all levels, will continue to teach the aspirational values of our founding documents.