The New New Normal
So, we built a website, 2016 GOP Implosion. It began as a bet.
The whole thing was intended to test the then-insane thesis that Trump could possibly win the Republican primary. We created our site in early 2016 in order to track those establishment Republican figures that were endorsing and denouncing Donald Trump, purely because we thought that this was a funny thing to do. At the time, we didn’t expect to be right on the merits. Now, here we sit.
Some people have been asking us since then what we think the site means, and while we honestly think that the question is kind of goofy, it’s also given us an opportunity for some somber reflection. On a surface level, it’s been totally hilarious to watch the Republicans implode their party in real time, as individual members have been forced to choose between allegiance to the GOP platform as written and their possible futures under a President Trump.
However, we also think that the ongoing implosion of the GOP raises some questions about the future of the electorate, not all of them comfortable. Nate Silver has taken a lot of shit in public for his total and complete airball this election cycle, and although we definitely think that is hilarious, we also believe that there is no possible way for anybody to have predicted what has happened this past year based on a data-driven approach. Not really.
In fact, we think that the entire mission of trying to quantify politics is a little bit silly, oftentimes amounting to what a prior coworker of ours once referred to, with merciless precision, as “the veneer of rigor.” You can use data to inform your take, we grant, but there are always assumptions that go into what you measure and how you interpret your data that you have to be aware of. It is a dark art, and this year has been a very dark one indeed.
But, if it ever was possible to use data to reliably predict the future, we think that’s probably going to be much harder to do going forward. Partly that’s because our political system has the ability to relentlessly incorporate attempts to observe and to measure it (which is a fancy way of saying that politicians love to co-opt the media). But it’s also partly because what’s changing isn’t just the media. What’s changing is the rate of change itself.
We know that sounds like a total stoner thing to say, but we really think that the deeper implication behind our project is that this past year, as utterly batshit as it has been, shouldn’t be seen as an outlier or as an aberration.
If you will permit a sweeping generalization without any evidence (which is a totally hot look in 2016), Americans value rulebreakers. Like Obama. Like Bill Clinton in 1998. And like George W. Bush.
In 2012, Mitt Romney did not exactly fit this mold.
We as a nation like politicians who promote change, even (especially) if it’s not “change” in the way we’re accustomed to. And we like those politicians more and more. Our need for what’s new, genuinely new, is accelerating.
This is in part basically because we really, really hate being bored. We have the collective national attention span of a hummingbird on cocaine, and all of the media-delivery systems that are intentionally designed to dry-hump the reward centers of our brains so that we stay on the Internet 24/7 are just making this problem worse.
Now, this is also basically the year that the rules of crack-cocaine content media delivery systems overtook the rules of established political etiquette.
Reader, we ask: how can you not love this exchange, with hapless, mores-clinging Jeb! stammering on about how much he loves his good old ma and pa while Trump just fucking demolishes him like an Atlantic City casino?
What Trump has understood, really understood, isn’t just that there is no such thing as bad publicity for him in 2016, which has also been true. It’s that mobilization for this election has partly been conducted on Twitter, with its peculiar rules of engagement.
You, reader, we know more or less why you are here. If you are reading this, you probably live in New York City, Washington D.C., or San Francisco. You are probably age 21 to 45. You probably don’t like Trump. You are also overwhelmingly, soul-crushingly likely to be male. It looks like you are probably reading this around lunchtime. Like the creators of this site, your brain is likely to have been permanently ruined by the Internet.
We know all this because we get extremely, unnervingly detailed feedback from the social media accounts that we have used to promote our site. Digital marketing is the single strongest force in the known universe at the moment, besides whatever is managing to hold Ted Cruz’s face together.
Ben Thompson basically nailed how we have been feeling in this regard, with a thing on how we are increasingly being divided up into epistemologically-sealed sociopolitical tribes.
In politics, this has allowed more and more “extreme” candidates to use the asymmetrical tools of social media to promote their movements while traditional media, with their antiquated signifiers of authority and adherence to outdated hierarchies, continue to wither and die on the vine.
Additionally, by the rules of social media and of political marketing, we increasingly value candidates with a clear message to back up their “rule-breaking.” Nobody remembers what Bob Dole’s loser campaign theme was in 1996, probably something about the rising price of sweaters.
“It’s The Economy, Stupid.”
“Compassionate Conservatism.”
“Yes We Can.”
These are all winning messages. They are clear. They grab your attention. They force you to think within their own frame of political reference.
So far, there is one hat that does all of these things in this election cycle.
Given the economy of inattention that defines us in 2016, a bored, disunified population is the perfect canvas for Trump to operate on. And yes, “Feel the Bern” is leagues better than whatever Hillary’s terrible, focus-grouped slogan is, but if you are “feeling the Bern” this year, chances are that you probably already live in Portland, wear this slogan proudly on some sort of reclaimed canvas garment, and are planning to vote for him anyway.
Meanwhile, to the wide mass of the general public, Trump feels antagonistic, perhaps — but never boring. In fact, even (especially) if you hate the insane shit that he says, he is highly, highly engaging:
Objectively, he is the presidential candidate who is best at social media, which is also, depressingly, how you seem to mobilize voters best in 2016.
Trump’s media reach is not just on the Internet, though it is amplified there. He is also playing a stock character from reality television: the filterless, cunning rogue, who is endlessly quotable.
We at 2K16GOPI actually watched the last season of Celebrity Apprentice (we can explain why later), and came away with two impressions. One, however objectively “bad” and “fake” the show was, it was fun to watch. Two, we were legit sorry to see Geraldo lose, given his arc, although in the end it was nigh impossible for us to root against Leeza Gibbons.
What Trump understands, deeply, over two dozen seasons of doing this shit, is that it was totally within the realm of possibility for Geraldo to have won that round with a good narrative backing him up.
Trump is actively working to build that same narrative for himself, and is presenting it to a public that is already primed for his story by the kind of TV that is central to his own brand. His audience isn’t just the KKK, it is anybody who responds to the opportunistic rules of reality branding.
Jeb! made a lot of entertainingly terrible mistakes in this election cycle, but the one that we thought was perhaps the most hilarious was calling Trump a CHAOS CANDIDATE, which, yes we know, is supposed to sound unnerving and scary, but in fact sounds pretty sick and sort of metal and is also something that we would vote for. It also plays into Trump’s brand 100%.
No, if Team Jeb! had any marketing bearings whatsoever they would have called Trump the Clickbait Candidate instead.
There have also been a lot of complex, operational background factors going on in 2016, which we might feel like digging into later (like what a savvy move it was by Trump to pick immigration as his wedge issue to cleave the Republican base away from its hapless D.C. masters). But this article is about what’s changed this year and why we are in the state that we’re in.
Given that his poll numbers are recently declining, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s relentless bullshit may have a half-life for effect. Hillary’s foreign policy speech on June 2, with its series of tweetable zingers, at least signals that she is willing to compete in this contest on its actual terms. But if this election has taught us anything, it’s that the old rules of politics are ripe for destruction. November is a long, long way off, and it is entirely possible that CHAOS CANDIDATE Donald Trump can gain, lose, and regain control of this election between now and then.
To the degree that we actually want to make a quasi-political statement with this thing, it’s that technology is making power diffuse and rapidly changing our norms in directions that are likely to run against our assumptions. Change is always frightening, particularly when it seems to come out of nowhere and also to be accelerating us into a ditch filled with alligators. That is why this election has generally felt like a two-year-long bad acid trip.
We may have some deeper thoughts later, on the structural factors behind Trump’s success, on the general media landscape, on the dangers to Hillary’s campaign, and on the surprising ways that Trump might be vulnerable, in part because of how he mobilizes the reaction against himself. But no promises here, because we’ve also got Dark Souls III to play.
Namaste,
