Carlybot vs Trumpnado

POSTMODERN CONSERVATIVE REFLECTIONS ON POLITICS, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION. 

By  FORFARE DAVIS August 7, 2015 3:16 PM Fox’s Republican Debate as Neil Postmanian Theater Like any good first act a political thriller needs to introduce it’s characters, the foremost of whom are going to be the eventual rivals in the final act. Last night’s Republican Presidential debate told us a lot about the two year drama we are about to undergo, the main takeaway of which is that it will be an exchange occurring at the lowest possible level of cultural discourse. While the Republican debate was dominated by a colorful reality show cum P.T. Barnum-ian populist, the Democratic presidential favorite tweeted a picture of herself with a woman whose claim to fame is yet another successful reality show and a famous attempt to “break the internet” with a  burlesque Vanity Fair photo of her overly lubricated physique. Behold, the future is here. Some time ago I posted a blog article titled Politics in the Age of Soma wherein I used Neil Postman’s prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death as a prism for understanding the radically debased form our politics have been moving toward as the culture of amusement has quickly displaced the discourse of reason and intelligibility. Last night’s debate has possibly revealed just how quickly that trend has continued to advance. As if to illustrate the point, in the debate the ‘establishment candidate’,  Jeb Bush, looked disoriented, like he hadn’t yet processed just how much the political stage had changed since his years in Florida. As he tried to awkwardly shoehorn in his prepared comments into the form of an answer, figures like Trump, Christie and Paul were releasing their Id on stage. Of all the candidates, only Mr. Carson and Mr. Kasich seemed to find a properly modulated calm counter note to the Sturm and Drang. Meanwhile on the undercard, Carly Fiorina managed to deliver the most effective attacks on the Republican’s future presidential rival demonstrating, in contrast to the alpha male contest that followed, that the greatest damage can be delivered with precision and clear rhetoric. Fiorina’s best moment occurred after the debate in an interview with Chris Mathews who found himself un-characteristically silent when his usual attempts at disorienting his interviewee by peppering them with questions seemed to bounce harmlessly away as Fiorina continued to peel the bark off of candidate Hillary. But the key question for Carly is: can she set her phasers down from ‘Kill’ to ‘Stun’? The point is an important one because the natural tendency for a party that has been out of power for two terms is to want a Terminator that can enter the field and destroy the Democratic rival. But as we learned in 2012, political victory isn’t as simple as vanquishing. Barack Obama was a successful candidate because, like all excellent candidates in our politics of theater, he can seamlessly glide from therapeutic empathy mode to search and destroy mode and back without the typical viewer realizing the discontinuity. This talent was on display in his recent speech at American University wherein he managed to skillfully shift between modes of humor, gravity and strawman-building without the audience ever caring to notice the slight-of-hand. The good news for Republicans is that they will be running against a candidate with the theatrical talents of neither President Obama nor Bill Clinton. The bad news for Republicans is that the Democratic Party has mastered the aesthetics of empathetic atmospherics. Hillary is a poor actress but she is going to have the equivalent of Steven Spielberg orchestrating the lighting, photoshop, musical score, CGI, promotional campaign and social networking strategy. But all this is really just window dressing to the deeper issue. Our politics is entering an era where the logistics of political success are becoming almost entirely entwined with cinematic aesthetics and decoupled from any language capable of discussing policy or coherent vision. This was Neil Postman’s ultimate point. It’s worth reminding conservatives that Postman was writing in the midst of the Reagan administration and much of his book was dedicated to exploring the implications of an actor as president. While we conservatives often argue that Reagan was far more than a mere actor this does not diminish the fact that his ability to get elected depended greatly on his instincts as an actor. Reagan himself admitted as much. Neil Postman understood this and wrote a book explaining why this trend, if it is not curtailed, will not end well. But, as Mark Leibovich noted in his book This Town, what followed in the 90’s was not a diminishing of the influence of show business but a convergence. When candidate Bill Clinton went on stage to the Arsenio Hall Show with sax in hand it was the first flirtation in a relationship that would eventually be consummated between DC and Hollywood in President Clinton’s subsequent two terms as president. Which brings us back to the phenomena that was the first Republican debate on Fox, or what I refer to as Trumpnado. According to the latest, the ratings of the debate were uncharacteristically high. On Twitter it became evident that much of the attention was the WWF/Sharknado entertainment value the debate had promised, and it seems, delivered. We have Mr. Trump to thank (or to blame) for that. In a post debate interview, Mr. Krauthammer was asked about how the candidates did. His answer suggested just how behind the curve our experts may be with respect to this dawning future before us. Krauthammer essentially suggested that Trump’s bellicosity didn’t thrive under the constraints of a disciplined debate, that if anything he hurt himself. The next day an informal poll on the Drudge Report indicated that among its red-meating eating readership a majority believed Trump dominated. It remains to be seen if this represents a real trend, but we may soon need to recognize that the paradigm may have indeed been shifting and new rules may have yet to reveal themselves to our expert class. The Donald is banking on it. If candidate Obama’s success was based largely on an awareness of the emerging new age and a skillful talent of exploiting it, then whomever wins the presidency in 2016 will no doubt be the one who advances and exploits that understanding. The question Mr. Postman has for us is: will there be a political process worthy of the name left remaining? 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/422245/carlybot-vs-trumpnado-forfare-davis