Politics increasingly resembles entertainment. Donald Trump’s affective performances as a showman often compensate for his lack of coherence (at least for his supporters). In that sense, affective performance becomes its own rhetoric, as he has proven to be irresistible for many. Still, it is hard to pinpoint how his rambling speeches and obsession with shark attacks, for example, bolster his appeal.
Perhaps it is entertainment all the way down. Some of it would be humorous if he wasn’t also leading the country toward fascism and extremism. Considering his legal troubles, one wonders why he did not just go from The Apprentice to hosting a talk show where his performance skills could thrive and pose no threat to democracy (and keep him out of jail). Instead, he turned his celebrity appeal toward politics, with grave consequences. The spectacle is now making ruins of democratic institutions, showing its destructive potential.
Even in the immediate aftermath of the grotesque assassination attempt at his rally in Pennsylvania, he was thinking of his audience and the camera. As his body pumped blood, he pumped his fist toward the crowd as he was rushed away and mouthed the words “fight”, sparking chants of “USA!” that drowned out the horrifying screams. Even in the heat of that dangerous moment, his instinct was, amazingly, to perform.
Now in the days following the shooting, those images have energised his campaign, now able to work with the grist of political violence. In the hours following the shooting, J. D. Vance, then still a Vice-Presidential hopeful, argued that the Biden campaign was responsible because they had sounded the alarm that Trump is a threat to democracy. Other conservatives like Scott Jennings made the same case the next day on CNN. What was a clear pathway for Democrats to win the election – by highlighting the stark differences between the candidates – is now potentially deflated.
This argument reveals a deeper dishonesty of Trumpism. Not only is Trump a compulsive liar, but he inverts the truth. The irony of Jennings’s and Vance’s claims is that Trumpism has already shown itself willing to use political violence on 6 January 2021, when the pro-Trump mob smashed its way into the Capitol and briefly halted the peaceful transfer of power, injuring scores of police officers in the process. That bloody attack was only possible because of a conspiracy theory that the election was ‘rigged’, a claim rejected by multiple courts for lack of evidence, including by Trump-appointed judges. The conspiracy theory inverts the truth because the evidence does point to election interference, led by Trump and his enablers.
How this all relates to consumerism is not always obvious at first glance. What I argued in Spectacle and Trumpism is that dishonesty is embedded in the commodity itself. Commodities enact a kind of dissimulation, insofar as they aim to convince us that they do not contain what they do, in fact, contain, and what makes them possible: the exploitation of the workers who manufactured them, and damage done to the environment both in their production and disposal. Instead, marketing fills commodities with so many mythologies about what they offer, such as power, status, happiness, etc.
Politicians like Trump exploit our willingness to inhabit lies and bring them into the political sphere. Importantly, Trumpism fuses this irrationality with other irrational logics such as white supremacy and misogyny, thereby bringing fascism from the fringe to the mainstream.
Consumerist spectacle informs not only right-wing politics but has changed politics at large. Take the aftermath of the first Presidential debate, for instance. Debates are presented as high-stakes sporting competitions with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. As politics become more about entertainment and less about facts, candidates like Trump gain the advantage. As Biden clearly faltered on live television, Democrats panicked over his fitness to lead, notwithstanding his policy accomplishments.
My initial frustration with the situation was that live, televised debates are not accurate portrayals of what governing is all about. Scepticism of the spectacle led me towards frustration that a single debate could derail a winning strategy in a time of danger; that we now expect our politicians to be as charismatic as pop stars; that the debate format had created a false and absurd equivalency between the two candidates; and that we were succumbing to the widespread behaviour of consumers who easily dispose of goods once they are no longer needed.
However, there is another angle to consider. Now that he has stepped aside, Biden may have also shown how political leaders can resist another dangerous tendency of the spectacle, which is for delusional leaders to egotistically cling to power. Guy Debord, one of the original theorists of the spectacle, identified that as the ‘concentrated spectacle’, often displayed by autocrats. Faced with alarming polling data, warnings from big donors and mounting concern from leaders (and voters), Biden just might have done the right thing by putting the party and his country first, not himself.
Even if the spectacle has created the conditions in which Biden was disadvantaged, by stepping aside he showed how to avoid its worst tendencies. As worrying as it is, Democrats must also compete in a political arena transformed by the spectacle. They must find winning candidates who, even as they perform for the spectacle, reject the authoritarian tendencies that the right is pulling us towards. Barack Obama showed that it is possible, as media- and camera-savvy as he was. Democrats need to rediscover that formula.
Trump and Trumpism do pose a threat to democracy, obvious to anyone living in the fact-based world. Arguing that is not at all the same as promoting political violence. The assassination attempt is to be condemned, full stop. Stopping a second Trump term through institutional means – not violence – is the way to avoid further political violence in the future. Democrats may be on the way to rediscovering a winning formula, but with outstandingly poor timing and planning. For now, we hold our breath as they regroup and hopefully restrict the spectacle from dragging us further toward its ‘concentrated’ manifestation.
Jacob C. Miller is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Northumbria University.
Spectacle and Trumpism by Jacob C. Miller is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £42.99.
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