by Denise Baumann
The forgotten remain forgotten even after the election - why is that?
You could have seen it coming - in hindsight. Ex-post analyses are always easier. The tenor of the American media after Trump's election victory: "The nation is divided." This should have been an opportunity to search for the lines of demarcation and conflict in this division and look for ways to unite. Instead, people quickly indulged in ritual self-castigation and the identification of "bubbles" in which they, but mainly the others, felt trapped.
In the first week after Trump, the division had already disappeared from the narratives. People of all countries, unite against Trump! That is now the motto. Unified fronts against Trump nationally and internationally. The Women's March was a colossal success in demonstrating unity. Apart from the fact that the discussion about the inclusion or exclusion of pro-life organisations as partner organisations of the protest revealed a certain lack of unity and tendencies towards exclusion. There was also an interesting differentiation in the reporting on the inauguration. At the centre of interest, white areas and uncertain but in any case smaller crowds than at Barack Obama's swearing-in. However, the fact that there were still people on the lawn, and in numbers that qualify as a crowd, was lost in the numbers dispute between press spokesman Sean Spicer and the media. Trump supporters also experience a similar exclusion when analysing the new president's approval ratings. Trump has the lowest approval rating among the population that a president has ever had. Somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent. So not even 50 per cent of Americans. But still almost 50 per cent of Americans. The divide is still there, but it is only named, it is not addressed further or only one side is fixed. This is particularly blatant in the entertainment media.
Since the election campaign, the majority of American late-night show hosts have been trying their hand at a collective and penetrating daily show-esque production and are reminiscent of German cabaret artists in their arguments with those who voted for Trump. The only thing they can think of to say about AfD voters is that they are people with completely despicable attitudes. Too stupid to learn from history, the eternal yesterday. Accordingly, there is no need to take a closer look at them and their motives. Sounds morally superior, but explains little.
Disregard is a form of contempt. In the new unity narrative, "Trump voters" are the unteachable and above all uninstructed bigots, racists and misogynists of democracy that they were before the election. Nobody really cares about the "flyover states" and who voted for Trump in them and for what reason. Why should they, now it's all about resistance! From traditional mass media to social media, there are formats everywhere that have declared war on the new US government. Even "GQ" is proclaiming "The Resistance" on YouTube and sports and political journalist Keith Olbermann can at least have the magnanimity to dedicate a video to Trump supporters ("Still Supporting Donald Trump? This Message Is For You"). In it, he conciliatingly announces that he will not shout at those addressed, much like a father who does not respond to his children's naughtiness with anger, but with a great deal of didactically motivated understanding. What follows is a clumsy attempt at ingratiation, pointing out that people have already been wrong about politicians and that Trump supporters really need to realise that something is not quite right with their election. "There is something really, really wrong with him". "He's not well", delivered in an emphatic tone of dismay and conviction, feigns an understanding for the inhabitants of "Trump country" that cannot exist due to a lack of engagement with them. Trump supporters are unlikely to have much interest in looking at media content that uses #resistance and #notmypresident to make their position very clear towards the democratically elected president and therefore also his voters. Given that one of the biggest criticisms of Trump shortly before the election was his refusal to promise to recognise the election result, regardless of the outcome, the boycott stance of the "election losers" must seem like bitter irony to Trump supporters. First they were predicted that their candidate could not win, must not win, then he surprisingly wins and everyone pretends that the election is not legitimate. Between the election and the assumption of office, a picture is mainly painted of the unpredictability of the future incumbent, only to realise that, by and large, he is implementing or at least ordering exactly the things he promised during the election campaign. Less environmental protection, a wall on the border with Mexico, deregulation of the economy, immigration restrictions, withdrawal from trade agreements and their renegotiation. In just over two weeks, the new government has turned pretty much all valid political conventions on their head. The behaviour is certainly not "normal", it is different, different in exactly the way that Trump voters had hoped for. Actionism is the order of the day, the strong man is taking action for the time being, and it remains to be seen what will be legally or diplomatically cancelled later. The stock market has reacted positively to this, with the Dow Jones rising above 20,000 points for the first time. This also confirms exactly what Trump voters were hoping for. An economic upward trend in which they might be able to participate for once. Closing the gap will also be difficult because the two sides are talking past each other. One side is concerned about human rights, freedom of the press and basic democratic values, while the other is worried about insurance premiums, tax rates and jobs. The idea that it is only possible to support Trump for selective reasons and not because you share the entire breadth of his autocratic and inhumane attitudes is only slowly finding its way into the collective media echo.
The pretence of understanding for even-now-Trump-supporters therefore usually does not even reach the depth of Donald Trump's swearing-in speech. After all, he has once again drawn attention to the forgotten men and women whose president he sees himself as. The media response: he did not address those who did not vote for him. So for the time being, the forgotten remain forgotten, at least in the media's reappraisal of the events. A reconstruction from the perspective of the "forgotten men and women" therefore seems appropriate and necessary.
As a rule, democratic elections thrive on the fact that people are given a choice and that this choice is considered legitimate. This cannot be said of the 2016 US presidential election. In the pre-election campaign, Donald Trump was the exotic clown whose candidacy was welcomed in terms of ratings and entertainment, but who was not seen as having any chance. All the "experts" agreed that he couldn't become the Republican presidential candidate because he couldn't be a politician. The focus was on every faux pas regarding political correctness, his limited vocabulary, his style of dress, his hairstyle, his small hands and his skin tone. Classic othering. Otherness is negatively charged and stereotyped. Good for a laugh, but not a solid strategy for excluding someone from political office. After all, the jokes about Angela Merkel's Prince Ironheart hairstyle, her trouser suits and drooping mouth didn't keep her out of the chancellery either. However, the majority of the American media made it very clear from the outset that there was really only one right choice for an American, namely Hillary Clinton. As a result, the gloating over the inadequate behaviour of candidate Trump became all the more entangled with his supporters. They know this kind of gloating only too well themselves. The white, uneducated working class, preferably from the southern states, and their lifestyle between truck stops, talk radio, McDonalds and canned beer are often used as "comic relief" in film and television. Television also wanted to use Donald Trump in a similar way, as a political clown whose missteps could be made fun of. It went down well with the elites, but quite differently with the rest of the population. Suddenly there was a candidate who did not come from their midst, but who spoke like them and for them, simply and directly. Who entertainingly and spectacularly subverted norms dictated by the opinion and political elite. Suddenly Fox News' slogan "Fair & Balanced" somehow rang true, not because the arch-conservative channel could boast of fair and balanced reporting on its own, but because, compared to the rest of the media, it did not immediately dismiss Donald Trump's otherness as generally disqualifying. Like candidate Donald Trump and his supporters, the coverage was different compared to the mainstream as a result. Being different together can have a community-building effect and it probably did here.
Apart from the media, however, it was also Hillary Clinton herself who created a rift between herself and Trump sympathisers. Pigeonholing potential Trump voters into a "basket of deplorables" early on is short-sighted in a de facto two-party system, in which the aim is to siphon off voters from the other side and pull "swing votes" into one's own camp - and shows disgust towards large sections of the population. Comedian Jon Stewart told CNN after the election: "Republicans, conservatives love America. They just hate like 50 per cent of the people living in it." After an election campaign that was stylised as choosing the lesser of two evils, it can be assumed that these resentments continue to exist on both sides of the political spectrum. The only difference is that one side, including its resentments, was clearly favoured by the media, and it was not the conservatives.
It is hardly surprising that the instruments of quantitative political and social research have also failed in this dichotomous us-versus-them climate. Surveys that do not take into account the aspect of social desirability are doomed to deliver falsified results. What was special in this case was that it was not the statisticians and survey designers who messed up the survey, but the media. All the mainstream outlets - except for Fox News (which is not without a certain irony) - painted a clear black and white scenario and portrayed potential Trump voters as borderline moronic, drooling rednecks. At every opportunity, the Trump supporter shouting "Lock her up" the loudest, preferably as unattractively as possible, was shown as a pars pro toto specimen. It is therefore no wonder that this stereotyped and stigmatised group of people begin to distrust "the media" and look for alternative information channels. If being a Trump supporter per se means being bigoted, stupid or crazy and thus being labelled as generally socially undesirable, the incentive to answer pollsters honestly with regard to one's own voting behaviour is rather low. The resulting failure of demoscopy deepens the rift between science and the general public. The debate on environmental protection and climate change is a good example of this. What is unquestionable and self-evident from the point of view of the educated opinion makers is ultimately based on special knowledge that is acquired in a knowledge system whose access is economically regulated and limited. Anyone who has had access to the university system, an access which in the USA is regulated not least by financial means, has been given the necessary tools during their studies to conduct scientific research and to find, evaluate and weigh up the results of studies. Those who do not have the time, leisure or other resources to do this can at least rely on their knowledge of university research to ensure that the data conveyed by the mass media is the result of independent research and is therefore trustworthy. The rest, who lack this know-how, have to deal with a black box in the climate change debate and can ultimately only decide to trust authorities. The only question then is which one.
This unequal distribution of knowledge is also at the root of the misunderstanding surrounding the concept of the elite. The elite that Trump established as the enemy during the election campaign is not the economic elite to which he himself belongs. It is the opinion and cultural elite that determines or, from the perspective of those who feel left behind, appears to determine what is politically correct, culturally fashionable and socially desirable. An elite that is incredibly good at recognising bias in others, but not in itself. In her speech at the Golden Globes, which was supposed to be a criticism of Donald Trump's political style, Meryl Streep couldn't resist including a dig at football and mixed martial arts as culturally inferior to the film industry. Madonna fantasised about acts of terrorism against the White House at the Women's March. Everyone laughs at Stephen Bannon's appearance and style of dress, Kellyanne Conway's Inauguration outfit is dismissed as a ridiculous Nutcracker costume, she herself is labelled a Barbie. Trump doesn't know what the maximum length of his tie should be, his wife Melanie is a foreign-controlled model who barely speaks English and was imported from Eastern Europe. The list of insults and their obvious superficiality reveal a classism that is culturally motivated and that is not only directed at those who have suddenly become powerful, but above all at those who have made Trump and co. powerful, presumably also because they feel culturally disempowered. Those who regularly eat at fast food chains, belong to the NRA, shop at Walmart, watch pro wrestling, listen to country music, love NASCAR races and monster truck shows. The white working class and their lifestyle must be held up as the cultural other from which one can distinguish oneself. Typically American, yes, but somehow ridiculous and inferior. There was - rightly - much ado about Trump's impersonation of a physically disabled reporter. On the other hand, hardly anyone was bothered by the fact that every comedy show stereotyped fictional Trump supporters as weak-minded airheads with "Make America Great Again" baseball caps, whose uninformedness and naivety were amusing.
There is a definition of humour in English: "Comedy is tragedy plus time". In the case of Trump, however, nobody took this to heart. Everyone started laughing before the tragedy struck and it may have been precisely this laughter that made it real. Now the tragedy is here - and yet the laughter doesn't get stuck in anyone's throat. People continue to laugh. At Trump and therefore also at his voters. Differences cannot be bridged in this way and resistance is generally more effective when it takes its opponent seriously. In eight years of the Obama administration, very little has been learnt from Fox News. The channel has managed to stylise discussions about dark-skinned Santas and the religiously neutral greeting "Happy Holidays" as bitter battles over cultural heritage and national identity. In contrast, the media's reaction to Trump seems strangely torn in the tone of its coverage. Is the Trump administration now the super-GAU for Western democracy or even the beginning of its end or rather an entertaining show of incompetent clowns? Because people are too busy making fun of spelling mistakes and misused inverted commas in their tweets, they sometimes miss the more important global political news stories. The dilemma of the press can be seen in Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi's attempt to describe the Trump phenomenon. "Insane Clown President" is the title of his book, which traces the conditions and rise of Trump in essays and columns. The title is an allusion to the "Insane Clown Posse", a rap duo that has established its own cult of personality and unites a numerically impressive community, the so-called "Juggalos", around itself. Derided by the mainstream media as weirdos and idiots and sometimes categorised as a gang by the authorities, the community sees itself as a family community. The Juggalos come mainly from the white working class, number in the tens of thousands and meet for an annual festival called the "Gathering of the Juggalos", with live music, comedy and pro wrestling. The duo's lyrics revolve around anarchy and violence, they are anything but politically correct and reveal a negative attitude towards socially established opinions, values and norms. The song "Miracles" describes the world as a collection of big and small miracles in which science has no place as an authority and only stands in the way of one's own subjective experience. "And I don't wanna talk to a scientist, you motherfuckers are lying and getting me pissed." People refer to their own reality and lifeworld, which is not that of the cultural elites. This kind of subculture, in which a different approach to facts and norms is cultivated, can probably only be understood as a reaction to the social exclusion of large sections of the American working class. If science and politics do not act in their own interests and on their own behalf anyway, and practice a language and habitus of exclusion and marginalisation of all those who do not belong to the elite or are oriented towards the elite, what value do they have as points of orientation for their own actions and their own understanding of the world for those who are excluded? The fact that those excluded in this way create their own sphere, including systems of knowledge and norms, from which the elites are in turn excluded, may understandably be disliked, but it must be understood if we do not want to continue to exclude those who see themselves as marginalised.
Despite all the fears and anxieties about the consequences of the Trump presidency, the urge to culturally distinguish oneself remains omnipresent. At the moment, culture war means the battle between the currently disempowered elite, with the right attitudes and hip outfits, against the ridiculous scruffy kids without manners in the centre of power. Culture war can also look different. You can fight for political culture, for the respectful treatment of those who live and think differently. It will be necessary to separate the disgust with Trump and his undemocratic tendencies from the analysis of his voters and their motives for voting and to drive this analysis forward more strongly. This is the only way to bridge the existing divide and form a broad front against Bannon and Trump's anti-democratic endeavours.
Denis Baumann, Dr phil., is a fellow at the DFG Research Training Group "Self-Formations" at the University of Oldenburg.
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