AMUSING OUR DEMOCRACY TO DEATH
In his new book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that unrestricted access to social media and over-protective parenting have left an entire generation of youth damaged and unable to cope with the vicissitudes of everyday life. Not surprisingly, the results of this “mental rewiring” have led to an epidemic of mental illness, malaise, and disorientation.
Haidt may well make a strong, if not a compelling, argument for what has gone wrong with this social-media generation. But what about the generations that precede this one? What about Gen X and even Millenials? And what, especially, about the Boomers? Although there is no book attributing, say, Boomer mental illness to social media, there is a concern that something has gone wrong in the mental wiring of those who support Donald Trump.
Among many eyebrow- and hair-raising developments, the presumptive Republican nominee for president faces 88 indictments; has been convicted of sexual assault and has bragged that, as a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants to women; has proposed through Schedule F ridding our civil service of those not loyal to him; has vowed to use the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents; has proposed using the military to deport 15–20 million migrants; and has suggested terminating the Constitution.
Regardless, or perhaps in many instances because of, all of this, people flock to his rallies like “Dead Heads” following Jerry Garcia. What attracts Boomers and Gen X to this bronzed hype-machine? Part of it is his celebrity — a fixture for decades in New York’s tabloids as a real-estate mogul, playboy, and the host of television’s “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” Another part is that he is entertaining. Trump is brash, crude, funny, vain, pompous, and without self-awareness.
Trump is the product of our culture’s obsession with fame and celebrity and its triumph of money and power over all other values. He is the equivalent for Boomers and Gen X of Haidt’s Gen Z love of Instagram photos of their lunch or a TikTok video of their dancing to Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.”
In short, culture has supplanted political policy. Advice to political strategists and advisors going forward: Focus your candidates on entertaining their audiences and constituents. Stop listing policy achievements or policy targets. Those are deadly dull and will bore your constituents.
What do the media and attendees recall from Trump rallies? They recall slogans and catchphrases: “Lock her up!” “I’ll build the wall, and Mexico will pay for it.” “I’d like to punch him in the face.” “Stop admitting people from shithole countries.” And, perhaps his most famous and oft-repeated line from the 2016 election: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Trump’s power lies in his ability to entertain an audience. Trump’s kryptonite isn’t being convicted of his various felonies. His kryptonite is being boring.
As he breaks down mentally more and more, he may well lose that ability. Certainly his crowds have dwindled, as seen in his attempts to inflate the crowd sizes at his rallies in the Bronx and Wildwood, NJ. His speeches are now repetitive and increasingly incoherent. Can his audiences be content with nothing new but only his greatest hits?
It isn’t really odd for a generation to be captured by TikTok and Instagram, when electronic media have captured every generation since the Baby Boomers. The culprit behind this phenomenon is the same — the cultural focus on entertainment.
So, what is the solution to Gen Z’s anxiety, depression, and fragility? Haidt suggests limiting access to social media until that access is age appropriate. Another is to stop being clueless in thinking that it is protective parenting to prevent your child from walking to the public park, because dangers lurk in the tall grass and on street corners, but that it’s prudent parenting to leave your children to do whatever they want in their rooms on their phones and the Internet because they are safe within the house.
That might work for Gen Z, but it won’t work for Boomers or Gen X who are years, if not decades, beyond needing parental guidance. Of course, some Boomers have become like children and could use some eldercare guidance, but that’s a different matter.
What could work for Boomers and Gen X? Well, what could work is to continue having the media focus on Trump. The media are after eyeballs and clicks. They don’t much care about revealing Trump to be an authoritarian who wants to destroy liberal democracy. Fine. Just keep showing him deteriorating before our eyes. The hope is that viewers and listeners will see the decline. Some will find him dangerous, but most won’t. But most might come to see him as boring, and, like many at his rallies, they will drift away.
His mental decline itself is what could doom him and save our democracy. His talk of choosing between electrocution and shark attack might be amusing, but it is also incoherent and sadly crazy. More and more his speeches drift into the bizarre and the inane. We can hope for a beginning of the end if we can get the media off Biden and back onto Trump.
This might be all we need to preserve democracy. Once the fun of Trump is over, the Republican movement toward autocracy is over, too. Trump is a cult leader; this is why none of his Republican sycophants can gain any traction as prospective leaders. Watch how Trump impersonators like Elise Stefanik, J. D. Vance, Tim Scott, and his sons Eric and Don, Junior try to imitate the master, but fail to move the crowd. The only sycophant who comes close in the imitation is Kari Lake, but she is too humorless and charmless ever to match or top Trump. They are all politicians first and boring from the start. Once Trump is gone, their movement is dead.
Although this view on taking down Trump might itself be amusing, the possible toll of his reelection isn’t. Trump has plans to kill democracy. Trump seems originally to have run for president in 2016 simply to monetize his brand. For that reason, any publicity was good publicity, as he learned through his opening riff on Mexico sending us rapists and murderers and in the presidential debates with “Low-Energy” Jeb and “Little” Marco. The more outrageous his pronouncements on the campaign trail, the better he seemed to do.
Once in office, nuking hurricanes and drinking bleach didn’t hold him down or back, but old-style Republicans like Mark Esper and John F. Kelly wouldn’t follow through on his views that protestors should be shot or that the transfer of power should be held up to keep Trump in office.
Once in office again, only his loyal true believers will surround him, and they have an agenda to end democracy. At that point, these toadies, parasites, suck-ups, and zealots will wield the power. Trump’s presence or absence will then be irrelevant.
Of course, what I propose is high risk. The stakes in this election are enormous, and if Trump wins, the toll on our democracy will be catastrophic. But much of the electorate is currently either indifferent or swept up in the entertainment. I say, take the entertainment to the extreme and show Trump nonstop as he descends down the cognitive escalator into senescent senility.
Is it cruel to use a person’s dementia as a form of entertainment? Trump is a unique case, and his desire and need to be center stage are his own doing. So let’s give him what he wants and hope that his continuing meltdown moves his followers from being entertained and amused to being alarmed. The stakes are that high.
And here might be a ironic twist, speculative but plausible, given the current political climate: Joe Biden steps aside and declines to run. Then we might have an open convention that would rivet media and voters alike as the Democrats seek their new nominee. The bonus of such a convention is that it would be not only entertaining, but also edifying. Such a convention would teach all of us, but especially Gen Z, lessons about how our government is structured and how politics operates. The Democratic convention would be one of the great reality television shows of the decade. Then, in the ironic twist, Trump, the empty-headed “Apprentice” star, could lose out to a Democrat who was a bigger reality television star than he was. We citizens could thereby learn about and save democracy as we amuse ourselves.
