Trump and the post-factual democracy – Part 1

November 9th, 2016 by Stephan | Filed under Blogeintraege

I fought the urge to write about the “phenomenon” Trump for a while and hesitated up until now, because it felt like too much was being said already. There’s an abundance of smart explanations – complex ones and simple ones alike – and, as always when there’s such an ambiguity within the wisdom offered, my instinct tells me that there is no satisfying rational answer, but at best a diffuse emotional one.

Regardless of the outcome, this US presidential election marks the transition into the era of post-factual democracies, if nothing else.

While it feels like everything has been said about the presidential election and more or less fruitful attempts at making sense of the Trump candidacy keep popping up in numbers, I feel like one important point is not being made: A candidate Trump – and more so a president Trump – marks a new stage in the development of modern, globalized capitalism.

Trump’s candidacy accomplished one amazing, defining feat: It broke free completely from the realm of factual importance. It literally doesn’t matter what he says exactly – as long as he’s “on message”, as the phrasing of choice seems to be in the media covering his rise through the ranks of the republicans.

This is new and it is the logical consequence of a progressing, globalized capitalist world. Trump isn’t a presidential candidate in the traditional sense in any shape or form. It is a grave mistake to judge him with the means and measures, which we applied to politicians in the past, by way of embodying absolute capitalism, he has transcended those categories. He exists in a realm beyond, where anyone can project anything into him and he will deliver.

The political candidate becomes a product

Candidate Trump is a product. A product that caters to a certain emotion, something we can acquire and use if we feel a specific urge rising within us. That urge can be as individual as we can imagine, it can take a collective quality as well, but at the very core of it, it is a distraction. A distraction from facing our individual realities and their consequences.

Through years of progress, our consumeristic-capitalistic reality transformed and revolves around the constant creation of artificial needs and their satisfaction through consumption of goods and services. Because actual, physically tangible needs are relatively easily satisfied, we have grown quite adept, as a society, at catering to emotional needs instead and creating new emotional voids in the process. This process gave birth to a whole new, incredibly sophisticated industry which serves only one purpose, namely to link our decisions as consumers to emotions and their fulfillment. In other words, in most cases deciding on purchasing a certain product in 2016 isn’t really a rational decision anymore, but rather an emotional one. When we purchase a product, we purchase an idea, a certain way of life and a positive emotion. And we want the product to not only satisfy our needs, we expect it to be the best possible decision available to us at the time. With an abundance of products available and a massive load of information at our disposal, it has become impossible for us to justify not making the best possible, most informed decision at any given time. Now, in an absurd twist, this disposition also implies that we will be incredibly reluctant to accept criticism, maybe not accept it at all. After all, the imposed gravity of our product decision forces us to not allow any doubt, because what if we were wrong and there was a better product? We’d have to begin to question our decision and possibly lose self-confidence. The more effective strategy is to defend our decision no matter what, after all, we followed the emotions instilled into us through advertising. So instead of saying “well, yeah, I made a crap purchase”, we’ll go “no, this is the perfect decision for me, because… shut up that’s why!” and thus save face. In a world, where, as a customer, we are always right and triggered into overemphasizing our egotistic needs, we are on the brink of forgetting how to recognize when we’re actually wrong.

This process is synonymous with the rise of demagogues like Trump. Because his run is not about him as a politician nor about him as a personality, but about a product and a brand people recognize and can project whatever they feel like into, and he himself will emotionally and aggressively discard any factual opposition, his disposition seems innately justified to us. If nothing else, he acts like we think someone has to act if he’s “onto something” and finds himself with the odds stacked against him.

So in this sense, Trump is the logical consequence to a development in our capitalistic world that replaces substantial criticism with an overly emotional commitment to an identity that we draw from a process of satisfying artificial needs, instead of intellectually and structurally challenging ourselves. And by that token, he’s not a dictator, nor is he going to be the next Hitler and it’s not adequate to call him a symptom either. He is a consequence. And I don’t mean that in the sense of a “necessary evil” at all.

The re-set bar and the democratic society of the future

But is Trump dangerous? What he embodies surely is dangerous because it negates reason. But rationality has given rise to tremendous horrors of human existence as well, if the premises allow for it.

There is nothing calculated about Trump himself. I honestly do not believe he’s running on anything less than his core beliefs. He’s not out to fool people – he may run on autopilot or on instinct, but his utterings are his own. And that is what makes people see him as “authentic”.

Trump – willingly or unwillingly, but most likely unwillingly – set the bar for the political candidate of the near future. And I don’t mean to say he set the bar unbelievably low (because in some aspects, particularly in regards to publicized misogyny and xenophobia, he actually has), as most of the liberal comedians and commentators would have us believe. Actually, he set a pretty high standard in regards to what will be expected of future candidates in regards to their ability to play the media game and their ability to represent almost every thought and desire people may have. Trump has turned himself into the perfect space for projection, a canvas anyone can use to transfer their individual answers into and he embodies those answers. And, in another paradox, by actually not saying anything and not committing to anything, while seemingly making clear (and controversial) statements. So what he has achieved is pretty amazing in the sense that he projects the air of truthfulness, when his utterings actually do not even need to meet any factual pertinence. South Park poked fun at this quite vividly, by showing Mr. Garrison a.k.a. Trump a.k.a. “giant douche” desperately trying to get rid of his voters by saying the most outrageous things he can think of. And yet he is not able to shake his voters, because whatever he says means something entirely different in their minds.

So if facts do not matter anymore within the public space Trump helped to create, what are the consequences?

In a post-factual democracy, one of the major changes we will have to get used to is the constant challenging of the democratic process. If emotions start to undermine reason in a collective sense, the consequence is a public discourse that does not revolve around tangible facts anymore (if that ever was the case), but around publicly accessible sentiments and their consequences. If the public sentiment is a sense of heightened threat through terrorism, that fear needs to be addressed with the same gravity as if there was an actual heightened threat, not discarded through fact-based argumentation, even if there was factual evidence enough to discard such fear. The intellectual/scientific part of the political establishment cannot afford to come off as “arrogant” anymore by merely relying on facts to combat fiction, because, like the US election has shown, the fabric of society has been altered so substantially, that we need to face a world, where the distinction between factual and emotional reality has become all but trivial.

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