There’s no secret to how Donald Trump has come to lead the Republican ticket.
Picture this: everywhere you walk, you have a dozens of bullies circling you every day. You’re too fat, you’re too thin. You aren’t driving the right car. Your job sucks. Your education sucks. You could be a better person if you wore these clothes. You are out of shape. You need a hamburger. You need the latest technology. You are missing out on the newest app. This kid did this thing, and what happened next was amazing. You will be forced to care. You will be forced to shun.
That is the world of modern advertising, folks. Political and otherwise, we have spent billions on psychology, marketing, and political science to find out how you behave and how you will viscerally react to images, words, and ideas.
Consider that in the United States alone, $189bn was spent in 2015 convincing you that you are less of a person than what you are — about $30 billion more than the federal budget for education. Next runner up? The People’s Republic of China at $73bn… do the math. That is $585 for every man, woman, and child in America spent beating you down, whereas 1.2 billion Chinese get by on $60 per capita.
Don’t think for a moment this doesn’t have a tremendous impact on American culture. To be precise, it has ruined it.
There’s a general sense that Americans have become somewhat less educated, less refined, less attuned. Some might point to the rise of social media simply drawing back the curtains and exposing how ultimately crass humanity is at the end of the day. Yet contrary to this, what we have seen is more bacchanalia than symposium. Upwards of 30% of all web traffic? Porn — the great anesthetic of human beings from the Greeks to the modern day.
The list goes on, but let’s not pretend for a moment that all of this access into our private lives, our purchasing decisions, our web searches, our web caches, our little pocket personal trackers, even the private conversations inside our homes is for our own benefit…
…it’s to sell us more stuff, and condition us to buy more of the same.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union killed about 5,000,000 people in an effort called “dekulakization” — middle class Russian and Ukrainian peasants who benefited from Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the early 1920s and then felt the pinch of Stalinization in the early 1930s. These kulaks (literally: tight-fisted) never quite knelt to the power of the Communists. Independent, self-sufficient, and above all distrustful of Bolshevik interference, the Soviets systematically purged them from society as a class.
The reason? The kulaks were independent and far from pliant. While the industrialized workers in the cities could be easily indoctrinated and threatened with unemployment, the self-sufficient kulaks had options. Moreover, they were not uneducated in the slightest… and bitterly resented the overthrow of the old order.
Stalin simply got rid of them in one of his many purges of the intelligentsia. While such purges are frowned upon by-and-large today, the effect of time is a powerful weapon indeed. While the Soviets were looking for a politically malleable populace, in the capital-driven West the powers that be seek something else: consumers who enjoy the things they buy and demand more. To be ostracized is to simply not be able to consume things, to be deprived of popularity (whether on social media or in mass media). Our heroes? Game show hosts.
Enter Trump.
In the 1980s, leadership looked like Ronald Reagan. Today, leadership wears a toupee and makes outlandish claims to fix things without actually describing how. During the Reagan era, we demanded explanations. Today? Just fix it… here’s the cash, can you make my car run again? Can you fix the washing machine? Can you fix the economy?
The impact of mass marketing on the American electorate has been one of the largest mass social experiments ever conducted. We are witnessing the results today. As the mass dekulakization of America continues, we will no longer need gulags. Just time… after all, if one no longer has to burn books and instead just has to get people to stop reading them?
What is 20 years, after all?
The stark realization that is dawning on many of my friends now is that we are effectively witnessing the mass implosion of the conservative movement. After having beat the Soviets, we have no boogeyman to conquer but ourselves, and we failed in the task. The social welfare state bloomed, two expensive wars followed, and a mass bailout of the upper class at the expense of the working class followed. Socialists are now ready to square off against nationalists, and individualists have now discovered they are a fractured minority within their own party.
Individuals are more squeezed than ever, less enabled than ever to take back an America whose values are under attack by the political extremes. Keep the numbers in mind: $189bn on mass marketing alone. Education? $621 billion. Defense? $718 billion. Health care? A staggering $3,800 billion ($3.8tn). Total credit card consumer debt? $712 billion. Mortgages? $8,200 billion ($8.2tn). Auto loans? $1,000 billion. Student debt? $1,210 billion.
What did we spend on TARP? $700 billion. Yet Americans are $11.9 trillion in debt — to themselves. Private debt, folks. Forget the $19 trillion we already owe, and forget the trillions more we are on the hook for to pay for an entitlement system one generation of Americans saddled their grandchildren with.
The answer to what is wrong with America isn’t to resort to the twin evils of nationalism or socialism, but to restore a sense of civic individualism. Paranoia is the refuge of the ungrounded soul; fanaticism is no substitute for faith; and principles are worthless unless there are values to sustain them. Until Americans collectively start looking to themselves for answers rather than to government, we are going to continue to oscillate between the extreme left and extreme right. And until we figure out that the reason why our lives might suck isn’t because of some rich white guy or a Hispanic immigrant, but because of our own choices? We will continue to seek anesthetics, seek strongmen, seek diversions.
The stark realization is this. The American individual is being stomped out as a class, and by our own volition. The more we succumb to the cacophony of noise, the more we surrender of our own autonomy to the state, the more we allow the political extremes to roam unchallenged? The less we shall have. The lift will be heavy, and it will be a generational fight. The a culture of higher expectations in the tradition of Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan deserves a last hurrah — not a whimper, but a bang.
Yet until we expect better of ourselves? We get Trump; we get Sanders; we get Hillary. Don’t think for a moment that there isn’t an entire industry fighting against you, hoping you will lose that fight, telling you to settle back in place, buy more stuff you don’t need, watch “the shows,” read 50 Shades of Grey and lull yourself back to sleep — and call you “tight-fisted” when you resist.
It’s all happened before, comrade. But it’s a fight worth fighting.
UPDATE: Food for thought:
“The rise of idiot America today represents – for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power – the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”
