Frank's Musings

A friend of mine recently lunched at a hotel restaurant that largely included a number of local supporters of the electorally defeated former President Donald J. Trump.  They had just attended a rally that anticipated the next mid-term election and was a warm-up for the 2024 presidential election.  The supporters loudly professed their enthusiasm for an additional rally before discussing their other plans for visiting a new wine-growing area that had been profiled in a report on NPR.

Immediately, my friend scratched her head in wonder that Trump’s followers could have shared her interest in the kind of issues and activities that commonly engage NPR listeners.  It’s enough to challenge a thinking person’s concept of the segment of the population that had awarded a term in the White House to Mr. Trump, and to beg a revolutionary strategy for preventing the election of another intellectually lazy and narcissistic autocrat as the leader of the most envied nation in the world.

Much of Trump’s “base” has been created by the explosion of communications ties between like-minded voters.  They have become increasingly dependent on social media through the internet for views that reinforce their resentment of the compromises they must make in order to navigate today’s interdependent society.  They have provided an easily exploitable, although thankfully not majoritarian, audience for political demagogues like Trump.

This is in part a consequence of the broad and penetrating influence on our society that the internet has had over the last twenty years,  What was so proudly proclaimed as an enhancement of information exchange between professional, scientific, political, academic, social, industrial and other geographically separated groups also soon became subject to malicious abuse.  The frequent use of ransomware to extract tribute from entities that are overly dependent on the internet for management of their critical functions is one illustration of how vulnerable modern society has become to undesirable or harmful agents.

Have the convenience and benefits of advanced communications technology unwittingly seduced our society to be helpless prey for self-serving predators?  A series of limits have worked their way over time into our body of libel and liability laws.  Would the development of similar controls to cover the internet be accepted by those who believe they have been neglected by government and social media?  Or is there a need to instruct the public on how individual welfare depends on the general welfare?

Apparently it is not enough to rely on the national education system to instill broad knowledge of the interaction of members of modern society.  America has shown its excellence in entertaining its own and the whole world’s leisure class.  It is time to devote that skill to enticing those who resent being told what is good for them to treasure the value of acting in everyone’s best interest.  This is particularly true when science tells us that the surest way to defeat a deadly viral threat to life on the planet is to elicit a cooperative effort like universal vaccination.

The genius of Donald Trump was to harness the tendency of a large segment of the public to dismiss the advantages of allowing experts and organizations to perform some tasks for them.  Even ants know better than that.  Trump’s successor in the White House, Joe Biden, seems to believe that by demonstrating a broad improvement in economic and social welfare from energetic central government programs he will win the public’s allegiance to participatory democracy. 

In the end, his success will depend on creating meaningful incentives that reinforce the altruistic instincts of society.  These measures include, for example,

• promising a better life for their progeny than that experienced by themselves, and
• adapting the nation’s infrastructure to diminish the deleterious effects of climate change, and
• reducing, halting, or even reversing the deterioration of the planet’s livability caused by human activity.

Trump did not create the disaffected coterie of voters that elected him in 2016.  That was accomplished by the media and the entertainment industry driven by the imperatives of the marketplace.  Assuring a lasting majority in favor of the equitable distribution of our society’s benefits requires a campaign to reach the people who distrust government with the voices they pay attention to—high visual production values, rhythmic music, and convenient access. 

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out years ago, the medium ­­is the message.  Widespread belief in the general benefit of America’s democratic system of government depends on getting the word out to the public in the language they understand.