US Politics a Descending Spectacle

Washington descends into spectacle. Hear our politicos loudly uttering utterly spurious causes for inflation.

Government spending! Corporate greed!

The “Ten Most Wanted” (of inflation perps) is populated with imposters. Milton Friedman nailed it: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Case closed.

Now, compound the capital’s Tower of Babel with Capitol Hill’s show trials. I get the outrage.

Yet these hearings, full of sound and fury, are not changing opinions about Donald Trump’s alleged culpability. Exercise in futility.

Those who abhor Trump are so saturated with loathing that they are pre-suffused. Those who adore him are unphased by his reported conduct after election day 2020.

Some of my friends adore Trump. Some of my friends abhor him.

As for me? I, loyal soul, stand by my friends!

Trump, a relentlessly self-promoting pop culture icon and “Reality” TV star, descended the escalator and instantly proved himself far more capable than his many rivals of tuning in to the mood of – and how to pander to – the electorate. Trump thusly won the 2016 nomination and general election.

Politics, in general, and Congress, in particular, then descended to Spectacle. Then, confronted by pandemic and the attendant recession, and confounded by miscellaneous infelicities, Trump lost.

Now – intermittently, like Godzilla appearing in Tokyo Harbor – Trump dominates national attention. I, a columnist, take some of the blame for intermittently paying him the attention on which he thrives.

Writing at Forbes, Fortune, Newsmax and The Journal of Hypnotism…. I’ve exposed Trump’s mass hypnotic powers. To no discernible impact.

Then, I repeatedly observed how Trump fulfills the popular fascination with what cultural critics call “noir” – or anti-hero – status. Kayfabe!

Now? The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

Political cognoscenti now fixate upon the superpowers of the “populists.” What superpowers? The ability to discern, abetted by the uninhibited willingness to channel, America’s id.

Tim Miller is a black ops operative for moderate Republicans whose forthcoming memoir, Why We Did It: a Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell, is gaining marquee media attention. From Vanity Fair, How A Marriage of Convenience With Steve Bannon Exploded in my Face:

“Caring what one’s readers think might not seem like that brilliant an insight, but it was a vast departure from how business had been done in the past. There is this haughty truism among political operatives and media types that went generally unchallenged … : ‘Never Read The Comments.’ The comments underneath a political article always contain the wheels-off views of the bridge-and-tunnel political obsessives. Conspiracy theories and verboten stances and mindless takes and fangirling and anti-Semitism and Godwin’s law and weird porn and ad hominem and all of the things that eventually turn every unmoderated web forum into the dregs of interpersonal communication. It was widely accepted that spending time worrying about this flimflammery was a fool’s errand. However, those who challenge the unchallenged truths sometimes stumble on different or more powerful ones. Bannon posited something so horrifying and so outlandish to the political elites that none of us dared contemplate it: What if you not only read the comments but listen to them and let their pathologies guide you? Using that principle as his north star, Bannon would enlist the hobbit army to overthrow the established order.”

Or as Holman Jenkins wrote recently at The Wall Street Journal in Voters Elected the Jan. 6 Donald Trump:

“Mr. Trump was the most known, understood, advertised personality ever to be elected president, a four-decade American prodigy of Barnumesque branding. The true wonderment was the Trump voter. Yes, some were ignoramuses, but many knew exactly what they were getting (and let me know they did). … But we don’t live in a Manichaean world. We live in a Darwinian world. When reckless mendacity, cynicism and demagoguery paid off so handsomely … Democrats adopted them wholesale…. To me, this is still the most eye-opening revelation of the strange Trump interlude.”

The French post-Marxist philosopher Guy Debord foresaw all this in his 1967 cult classic, The Society of the Spectacle, described by Hyperallergic.com as “a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the ‘Spectacle,’ Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.”

Smile when you say that podner! I’m the lead co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto, chairman of the Capitalist League, and I refute Debord’s naive indictment of capitalism thusly. Debord, although his missive was slightly misguided, was on to something important.

Debord saw and rightly deplored mercantilism. Not capitalism.

Mercantilism is deplorable. Rest in peace, Guy.

Is resistance to the Spectacle futile?

Will we be assimilated?

Or will the classical liberal, as in liberty, small r republican, political DNA of America reassert itself?

Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.