Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

*This blog post is part of the Jean Monnet Chair of European Media Governance and Integration series

By Ed McLuskie*

As Barack Obama bid farewell to a Berlin that cheered his candidacy eight years earlier, a New Yorker correspondent captured the nature of the government we face in the USA: “kakistocracy.” Greek for “government by the worst people,” the term describes an electoral result where deep racial, misogynist, nationalist, and anti-civil libertarian sentiments are and have been expressed in statements and deeds by Trump and, underlining homo- and trans-phobia, his VP pick. A now-famous video showing a white Trump supporter striking a black protester still underlines worries that post-election tolerance is a fantasy as the country is offered weak assurance by the victors that governing will be for all the people. Competing for the worst in his White House cabinet and inner-circle advisors are those already selected for White House Chief Strategist, National Security Advisor, Attorney General, and CIA Director — the latter a proponent of unbridled domestic and global surveillance. We might add the current FBI Director and his overwhelmingly white male special agents to the list for politicizing investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails, but we are forced, now, to look ahead as an incoming government that lost the popular vote moves to take power. Still, looking back beyond those actually joining the kakistocracy is in order, with the health of the public sphere in mind.

The election result was assisted by more tweets and internet outlets than ever. Laced daily with fake news circulating “clickbait headlines,” dark-money connected, alt-right movements deployed well-oiled operations long under the radar of a voting population’s institutions of cultural cultivation.^[1] As its ideology moved through local media, local school boards, and state legislatures during and before Obama’s presidency, public education, churches, universities and think tanks made room for and encouraged right-wing legitimacy.

In her book, Stupidity, Ronell^[2] finds in the history of nation-states the recurring image of a country that “resembles a ship of fools” tossed about enough that collective stupidity “breaks and enters the political body.” After years of real and perceived oppression, they “offer stupor in lieu of responsiveness,” “the capital gains of the ruling classes.” It is a forced condition, not an innate limitation. In his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank put stupidity into the context of another election, portraying a population continuing to vote against its own interests. Stupor passes for the public will when it expresses frustration of the will instead. Systematically suppressed communication does not, as the common expression goes, “send a message”; it vents ambiguously, especially in a media society that has lost its “epistemic dimension.” The outrage that erupted for Trump was produced by what Jürgen Habermas saw coming in liberal democracies as they bent toward the past: the “cynical acceptance of an unjust world,” taken to be normal in its “repression for so many people,” underlining not only “a deficit in knowledge but [also] a corruption of the will. The human beings who could [my emphasis] know better do not want to understand.”^[3] Indeed, Trump voters do not seem to want to understand those who voted otherwise, and neither do many in the other parties that organizationally mimic the will of the people. In this is a profound failure of how we grow up together that cannot simply be fixed by staying present-minded. Notions about “communicating better,” too, are insufficient when English is, after all, a few alien languages whose speakers are aliens in their own land, no visas required. As a result, othering is as normal as gated communities in the United States — many geographic though not all — where one learns who “belongs,” where the lifeworld differentiates and turns inward. In this respect, the country is already stupidified. The technical means to “cut in” to other worlds, widespread as mobile devices are, generally still connect the already converted who have similar tastes. Thus, while entertainment, popular culture, what still remains “standard” in public education frequently hint at common interests; while consumption as a lifestyle cuts through the lifeworld’s gates; knowledge deficits function like GoPro’s that never leave one’s own head, or at least one’s remote control app. The gates are merely extended with the locks intact.

Journalism and journalism-light helped fuel this stupidification. The event orientation of American-style journalism carves history into smaller slices of already fragmented moments for  sped-up reads and views. Few outlets have the resources to unpack them into actual analysis. More things qualify as events, however. Verbal bombast now has the event-status of opinions equaling facts as though a society’s reasoned discourse were happening. The equation has long been in America’s ground, though, pipelined as anti-intellectualism against “elitism” in our politics.^[4] This well-worn charge of “elitism” misses history’s political strains from the American Midwest and Coastal America, where progressive movements built infrastructures to cultivate intellectual growth alongside economic growth for all members of society undergoing first-wave urbanization during the 1920s.  Growth, though, threatened established values and dogmas, part of the backlash that just happened. Just as capitalism literally kept many down on the farm dawn to dusk until the farms had to be auctioned off to corporate food giants, so did factories close in the interest of stockholder profits. Once, domestic policies supported, but now undermine education and journalism for a changing world. The election speaks for systemic, generationally reproduced racism, misogyny, greed, class conflict, with the culture wars under way with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, institutions are quick to the salve of a “civil” consumer society, when forced, as a deliberate agenda, or, in the most naive of pronouncements, with alleged  fait accompli of “exceptional” campuses, cities, and towns — most at least 70% white — where diversity is claimed to thrive. Meanwhile, the humanities — where journalism bridged into the social sciences — shrink at democracies’ peril in the university, where university and college presidents grapple now with hate speech and assault. Universities contributed, too, as willing wearers of “chains”^[5] on research, corporate funding. Moreover, right-wing spin doctors created and transformed entire law and business schools pushing market ideology, politicizing without appearing to do so the vetting of research as well as the selection of university professors. As rightist professors mentored their PhD’s, a generation of young professors moved where most of the university populations live, legitimizing through education the reduction of the political, even in the name of the public. It is thus acceptable today to work under the cover of politically induced “inevitabilities” that education at all levels should be “entrepreneurial” and accept public-private funding and partnerships. The same partnerships were applied through charter school movements for primary and secondary education, but as a private takeover of a slice of already weakened public funding.

In research, this private takeover of universities affects the very questions asked and the curricula experienced, including the vital curricula that teach teachers for public school employment. The influence of dark money and administrative research in universities thus extends into the cultural cultivation of the young, with pressures that fail to provide literacy for political and public discourse in the lifeworld of socialization and cultural consciousness, displacing the public in the corporate colonization of the lifeworld.^[6] Privatized lives vote less, and alt-right and conservative assaults on voting rights aim to keep that so, giving the advantage this voting round to the disaffected white working class venting its dormant anger. Does this represent a resurgence of the public sphere?

Not at all. It represents the failure of the public sphere in American life, a failure paved long before Trumpism became a thing. At the cusp of the 21^st century, “the end of journalism”^[7] already had become a thing. Now in the midst of a media watch hoping against skepticism that a moderating Trump will emerge with balanced advisors, the watch goes on just as the election did: who or what “wins?” Who is “fired?” This is as much as bare-bones-staffed local media can get into, regularly recycling more moneyed news outlets while turfing readers and viewers to Facebook for “more information.” The people cannot even leave their own comments on local media sites without joining Facebook as well, that still-ascending source of what is the American news diet. Now, Facebook appears to scramble with Google to generate algorithms to catch hate speech and fake news, unlikely to obviate its contributions alongside cable news to “post-truth” as the word of the year.

The fruits of “old media” layoffs during the twentieth century repeat in “new media,” now with software engineers unschooled in journalism or the general humanities while taking on the task of vetting what is news. Signs that an engineering consciousness would take over important information resources for democracy came last May, with the closing of a “trending news team” at Facebook that found itself having to vet content every day — an expensive operation not apparently worth it just as perceptions were mounting that Trump should be taken to be a real contender for the White House.

Established media institutions since the last century already had normalized the blurring of lines between journalism and spin, leading a famous American satirist to charge CNN on its own network with “hurting America.” Despite the best efforts of a shrinking quality press, attention- and eyeball-grabbing headlines twist American journalism’s event orientation toward tweeting-events and the like, fast-fact-checking in the spirit of fast capitalism’s^[8] penchant for the fleeting spectacle that provided cost-free visibility for Trump.

For now, the meaning of informed opinion and analysis is at stake, from lifeworlds to professions. This election happened over a longer run than the election season that capitalized on the already heavy prices paid by a depoliticized population that could hurt no more or could not abide following a black president with a woman. Or both. There is always more to this story, but the focus on this election as a surprise wasn’t, at the very least, listening to documentarian Michael Moore, who warned that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio were about to burst. Instead, the currency of fragmenting and chattering substitutions for public discussion, deliberation, and debate prevailed to set the stage for the “electoral surprise.”

Nothing less than all institutions of cultural cultivation are required for a truly democratic polity to emerge, and support for that (re?)building of an infrastructure, already thin, is not on the radar of the coming kakistocracy. Meanwhile, a founder of encryption-based texting recommends doing counter-tech with our social media. He writes, “Donald Trump is about to be in control of the most powerful, invasive and least accountable surveillance apparatus in the world.” Apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, he suggests, should be in our phones. Perhaps. But that will not fix whitelash where it happens, corporatized institutions of cultural cultivation, or the corporatized health care systems that, together with the information diet, suppress in existential ways participation of the people for a democracy beyond pent-up suppressions.

*Prof. Dr. Ed McLuskie, Graduate Professor Emeritus of Critical Theory & Communication Boise State University, USA

[1] Mayer, Jane. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.  New York: Doubleday.

[2] Ronell, Avital. 2002. Stupidity.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 58.

[3] Habermas, Jürgen. 2004. The Moral and the Ethical: A Reconsideration of the Issue of the Priority of the Right over the Good. In Seyla Benhabib & Nancy Fraser (Eds.), Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein  (29-43). Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 36.

[4] Hofstadter, Richard. 1962. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  New York: Random House.

[5] Giroux, Henry A. 2007. The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.  Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

[6] Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns 2.  Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

[7] Hardt, Hanno. 1998. The End of Journalism: Media and Newswork at the Close of the Century. In Interactions: Critical Studies in Communication, Media, and Journalism  (191-212).  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

[8] Agger, Ben. 1989. Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance.  Chicago: University of Illinois Press.