Since I was too upset to sleep much last night, I read a lot of comments in the Live Blog threads. A lot of folks were arguing whether or not it should have been Bernie leading the charge against Trump instead of Hilary, and I finally fell asleep thinking about that. When I woke this morning, I had an idea that I hadn’t seen under discussion, and it’s straightforward enough that it makes me think it’s a contributing factor to last night’s outcome. I think it can be called “the celebrity hypothesis.”
Ronald Reagan. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sonny Bono. Jesse Ventura. Fred Thompson. Each of these individuals launched into politics as celebrities in either movies or television. Often they “fought above their weight class”; that is, they entered politics and went straight to top positions with no or minimal prior experience. Now Donald Trump (retch). Why? Maybe the familiarity of their television personas was the ticket that made so many citizens willing to vote for them. Re Donald, they “knew him” from TV, at an emotional level, and that’s how they decided that he would “be okay”, regardless of what he did or said. From this point of view, maybe neither Bernie nor Hilary would be able to compete effectively, regardless of their policy positions; the Trump voters weren’t thinking about their choice cerebrally as much as feeling it intuitively.
When I was in high school, I read a book that strongly influenced me, titled “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” by Jerry Mander (real name!). This book was published in 1978 and investigated the role of TV in undermining democracy, among other topics. A link on Amazon is: www.amazon.com/... This book focuses on the power of the medium of television to reach viewers at an emotional level, and the significance of this.
It would follow that the best candidate to compete against a television celebrity would be another television or movie celebrity. In the title above, I put down Matt Damon, since he’s a left-leaning movie star, but maybe it could also be a pop music star (Katy Perry?). It’s something to consider going forward; if team blue didn’t weigh the importance of TV/video viewer familiarity this time, it was like bringing the proverbial “knife to a gun fight”. I also wonder whether reality TV and Trump’s show somehow caused the some members of the public to view the election as a big reality TV program, although I’m not sure how that would have affected voting.
I’m an infrequent diary writer, although I love to read the posts, rec them and make comments from time to time. Thanks to all you Kossacks; your writings deepen my understanding of what’s going on, and I love knowing you’re out there. Please share your comments about this hypothesis.
