The Apprentice and Low Information Voters
The Brave New World of Reality TV
In Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future — Brave New World — the government keeps control by the infernal mix of drugs and entertainment. No need for the boot on the neck and constant surveillance of Orwell’s 1984. The people are blissfully submitting to plutocracy. All of this came to mind reading the thoughts of an attendee at a Trump rally, a truck driver named Ray Lewie.
Mr. Lewie became a solo driver of an 18-wheeler, a job that has given him a front-seat view of global economic forces at work. For years, one of his regular assignments was hauling disassembled textile mills to container ports in Charleston, where they were floated to Mexico.
“Before the equipment was taken apart,” Mr. Lewie said, “the companies would bring people up from Mexico up to South Carolina to learn the jobs. Everyone knew they were being replaced, but they needed the paycheck, and they’d teach the Mexicans until the place closed down.”
Perhaps this narrative drew Lewie (an fan of The Apprentice)to Trump and yet the basic lessons of the last 20 years have not seemed to penetrate his world view. Could it be that Reality TV and Fox news are his sole source of “information”?
Mr. Lewie says he is pocketing the same annual income that he did right before the recession. None of this makes him the least bit interested in Bernie Sanders, the candidate who, at least on paper, seems to speak most directly about what ails Mr. Lewie. There’s no way he would vote for someone who calls himself a socialist, Mr. Lewie said. Nor did Mr. Sanders’s policies appeal to him, not even raising the minimum wage. Mr. Lewie’s hauls come from large corporations, and he worries about their financial health more than any frontline employee’s.
“For me to prosper, the economy has to prosper,” Mr. Lewie said, “and it’s the rich people that produce jobs.”
When asked to assign blame for stagnating wages, he and his wife pointed to the federal government. Regulations and high taxes, he said, not lower wages abroad, led those textile mill companies to move to Mexico.
So here is a man caught in the maw of globalized capitalism and he blames it on government regulation, that hurts “the rich people that produce jobs.” He has seen those rich people ship the local factories to Mexico and never questions the possibility that Mexican factory workers earning $2 an hour might be the reason for the move. This is the definition of a low information voter.
So why would I blame this on reality TV? Well, it took a New York Times TV critic to really unpack the Donald Trump campaign.
Traditional presidential politics is like television in Ed Sullivan’s day, when the big three networks developed the idea of “least objectionable programming” — broad, inoffensive, something-for-everyone shows intended to keep anyone from changing the channel.
Reality TV, like Mr. Trump’s campaign, is a product of a fractious time of niche audiences. When there are hundreds of entertainment outlets, “least objectionable” is death: You need to stand out.
And he does. Like reality TV itself, Mr. Trump is a love-or-hate proposition. In a general election, true, you need much more than 23 percent of the vote (which is Mr. Trump’s number in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll of the Republican field). But in today’s television, a 23 share is a landslide — and in a crowded primary in an ideologically fragmented party, it is large enough for first place.
I think that as long as there are at least six primary candidates, a 23 share, still wins. Which is to say that the more anarchistic and discordant the Republican party, the higher possibility for the Reality TV Candidate — Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Cruz — to finish in first place for delegates — debunking “the Party Decides” conventional wisdom.
But for the Democrats, an equally revolutionary outcome could occur. What we are winessing in public on the Republican side is the overthrow of the establishment of the Party. I believe the same could happen on the Democratic side. It’s obvious that the party establishment chose Hillary as the candidate months ago, and portrays little sense of anxiety in the face of email problems or “I am not a robot” TV appearances. But if, for example Joe Biden entered the race in a ticket with Elizabeth Warren and pledged to only serve four years, where would that leave the Party Establishment? My guess is we would see a battle between the Clinton team and the Obama team for the soul of the party.
But ultimately to reach out to citizens like the trucker, Ray Lewie, with a Democratic solution, it should probably look more like Bernie Sanders platform, than Hillary Clinton’s. But Bernie is probably the wrong messenger, as Gallup has pointed out the 50% of American voters would “never vote for a socialist.” But if you look at the Discretionary Budget — what Congress fights over — you realize that Sanders is right about the big things like having to radically cut the Defense Budget. That is not something Hillary is going to support.
The money we spend on the knowledge — Education, Health, Science, Transportation, Energy — that could keep us in the global game, is a mere fraction on what we spend to be the world’s unpaid cop. Perhaps this is why we seem to be getting more pessimistic, as this chart demonstrates.
Republicans were much more pessimistic on the topics of education, diversity, population aging, and Washington. Democrats more pessimistic on “the decisions being made by the leaders of major corporations.” But the two places there was optimism on both sides of the aisle was on the power of the local versus the power of Washington and on the power of Media/Tech to help us solve problems. According to the survey, “69% of Americans say new ideas and solutions are more likely to come from state and local government, businesses and non-profits.”
What I am missing from progressives is a solution to governance that embraces both of these solutions — a local based, technology enhanced set of solutions to American Gridlock. Both Hillary and Bernie still believe the answers to our problems are going to flow from Washington DC. But only 26% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) believe this. In February of 2007, before the Great Recession, I gave a speech called “The New Federalism” in which I suggested that we follow Justice Brandeis’ advice about the brilliance of our Federal System.
Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
So I think progressives have to rethink their ideas to focus on local solutions enabled by technology. And in that sense, I agree with many conservatives that the role of the federal government should shrink. It could start by simply doling out very large block grants to every state based on their population without strings attached. I wrestled with this in 2011 and continue to think this may be the only solution to our frozen political system.
Tonight will be the first Democratic Debate. I’m not optimistic that new ideas are going to emerge. As for the Reality Show that is Republican politics, it is clear that the alternative universe they are operating in — worship of illusory business success (Trump and Fiorina) — will keep the show on the air at least through February.
