Making America more stupider again.
Postman first settled on his argument while working on an essay about two different dystopian visions of the future that had been offered in the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Postman’s insight was that these two books, though often grouped together, portray very different dystopias. In Orwell’s vision, all information is tightly controlled by the state, and people have access only to the narrow, bludgeoning propaganda that is force-fed to them. Huxley’s vision was the opposite. In Brave New World, the problem isn’t too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. “What Orwell feared,” Postman writes, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The key insight that propels Postman’s now-classic work is that Huxley described the future much better than Orwell
There was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs. Here’s a concrete example: in 2016, polling tended to show that Republicans were more trusted on the issue of immigration than Democrats. Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic. In the first few minutes of his very first speech, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and other criminals to the US, an accusation both ludicrous and offensive enough that it immediately led several businesses and organisations (including NBC, which aired The Apprentice) to cut ties with him. But that was just the beginning. As a standard part of his stump speech, he infamously promised to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile expanse of the US-Mexico border and, even more absurdly, claimed he would make Mexico pay for it. In June of that year, a Gallup poll found 66% of Americans were opposed to building a wall along the whole southern border.
You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue. But his continued insistence on the policy reliably attracted attention to the issue of immigration, in which, as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats. When he attacked the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit, it was despicable and bigoted, but also another opportunity to attract attention to immigration.
Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds – with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response – Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails”, while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience.
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