Our politics is catching up to a cultural transformation.
Our politics is catching up to a cultural transformation.
A t the New York Times, Ross Douthat takes note of one of the signal features of the 2024 election cycle:
In 2024, the media future . . . [is] embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.” . . . The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.
For older voters who remember Barack Obama “slow-jamming the news” with Jimmy Fallon, or Bill Clinton playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, Douthat observes that these new appearances are of a different genus. The candidates, Trump especially, have recognized that many voters are accessible mainly through “a vast terra incognita of YouTube stars, podcasters and social media communities, across which algorithmic waves sweep back and forth mysteriously.” The share of Americans tied to more traditional media — Face the Nation, Meet the Press, or the New York Times — is shrinking. As that demographic reduces further, Douthat writes, “it will become more and more of a niche in its own right, a small constellation in the larger, weirder panoply.”
What Douthat identifies is another symptom of what is arguably the fundamental shift in American cultural life over the past generation: We are moving from an essentially televisual to an essentially digital age. The convulsions of the last several years have much to do with the disintegration of a set of structures, rules, and incentives that have shaped America’s information economy for more than half a century.
Television maintains certain presuppositions about authority, expertise, and credibility. Anthony Fauci’s Covid pronouncements, “51 former intelligence officials” declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian dupe, and “fact-checking” debate moderators are all natural products of a televisual culture. They assume certain things about the way information is produced, verified, delivered, and defended.
If televisual forces (network executives and anchors, newspaper editorial boards, etc.) seem more and more defensive, it is because they are now in the position of conducting rearguard actions against the digital culture that has overtaken them — and that operates on altogether different premises. Joe Rogan and Walter Cronkite occupy entirely different roles in their respective information economies. If the basic question of television news is: Who said it? Do I trust them?, the basic question of digital news is: How does it map onto my prior beliefs? How does it make me feel? Indeed, what constitutes “news” in each economy will be different. The salacious rumor is digital. Proclaiming it bunk is televisual.
Part of the surpassing strangeness of the past decade (“It’s, like, surreal!”) is that our politics has lagged behind our manifest communications revolution.
For all that was made of Barack Obama’s digital wizardry in 2008 and again in 2012, Obama was in fact the last president of the televisual age. Handsome, eloquent, and charismatic, Obama embodied and embraced the televisual symbolism of the Baby Boomer generation. The massive events and awestruck crowds were Woodstock-style spectacles. Every rally was a March on Washington, every speech was “I Have a Dream.”
By contrast, Donald Trump, who by every reckoning is a creature of television, has in fact been the first president of the burgeoning digital age. He was the first national politician to recognize that digital media function differently from televisual media. Much of our “post-truth politics” panic has been a failure to recognize that the information economy of the digital world is simply different from what has gone before it, and that individual malefactors are often reacting to structural changes. Facts behave differently online. Donald Trump, in his animal way, understood and exploited that.
Joe Biden’s success in 2020 was the revenge of the televisual. The oldest candidate to run for president, the knownest of known quantities, Biden was the electorate’s retreat in the face of the digital mayhem of the Trump years. But because there was no possibility of reversing underlying technological conditions, Biden’s promised “return to normalcy” was always a pipe dream. Even before his physical and mental unfitness was exposed, Biden was a relic of a bygone media culture.
As of this writing, Kamala Harris is in talks to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, a belated recognition that her electoral prospects likely depend on voters who are not paying attention to traditional broadcast media. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s rallies, which were prime-time-television events in 2016, have become primarily internet spectacles, bursts of Paolo Sorrentino–esque performance art.
Politics often reflects and refracts what is happening at a deeper, pre-political level. The 2024 campaign is one more sign that our politics is moving inexorably out of the televisual era — one way or another, and for better or for worse.