Gaming Ourselves Into Oblivion: The Trivialization of Politics and the Tyranny of Lowered Expectations
A month into the Democratic Primary and the word “electability” is already the shibboleth. Everywhere you turn there are debates about who is electable, who is most likely to beat President Donald Trump, who fares the best in this poll or that poll. It’s enough to drive a person to the brink of insanity. And, what’s worse, is that none of it means anything.
The sad truth of modern politics is that it has been turned into an anxiety machine that links its profits to the uncertainty of the electorate. This is the main focus of corporate cable news and has, unfortunately, come to be the driver of reputable news as well. What we have learned, from mass consumerism and our current tech trends, is that humans make better consumers and are glued to their devices more when they are in a state of fear. In the case of Trump, he is a perpetual fear creator, an existential threat who delves out unhealthy levels of chaos every single day and requires constant attention. In this way, he has come to be a symbiotic being with our media.
Addiction requires constant novelty though. And a presidential primary is a perfect recipe for the new chaotic ecosystem. Each new contest brings new worry. Every day is stuffed with stories of emerging frontrunners and new exclusives about what that frontrunner did or said in the past that might affect their candidacy. It’s perpetual motion, the ups and downs, the polls that depict an everchanging horserace. It’s catnip for the reptilian brain, particularly while a dangerous president resides in the White House.
As a result of this development, and decades of cable news treating politics as a hobby or game to be dissected, analyzed, predicted, and managed, we have arrived at a moment where Americans plugged into the political culture now behave as pundits and analysts, all of them playing amateur campaign strategists trying to dissect “the electorate,” an anonymous mass of people who are both unknowable and unpredictable. What we have learned is that there isn’t much in the way of forecasting what “the electorate” wants until after an election, at which time the analysts, who were mostly wrong, can pick through the remains and divine the knowledge that failed them.
Enter Mike Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire oligarch who served as the mayor of New York City and is now, somehow, becoming a frontrunner within the Democratic Party. Bloomberg is big tech personified, a technologist manager who has shown little interest in humans, social causes, or movements, and more a predilection for technocratic rule. We’ve seen this for decades. It’s the essence of why our society doesn’t work and feels so inhuman. It’s because it has never actually worked and it is inhuman. Numbers and figures lies. Technologist strategies fail.
Bloomberg is the antithesis of what Democratic voters profess to want - he has no interest in making our economy fairer and has wielded policies that are inherently racist and fascist in his tenure as executive of New York - but he has managed to hotwire the system to his benefit by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads that have flooded the country. These ads are expectedly slick and well-produced. Bloomberg is a media maven, after all. But they’re meaningless. They engage in the type of talk that makes pundits and analysts drool in front of their prime time cable audiences because the pundits and analysts are unconcerned with actual change.
The point of politics in this era, after all, isn’t to change things. It’s to win.
The gameification of American politics has left us stranded in a world with no way out. There isn’t room for anything even approaching major change because “the electorate” would never accept major change. The anonymous, nonexistent voter bloc that no one actually understands and no one can actually predict keeps us from trying anything that approaches our ideals or dreams or even requirements for a fairer, more humane society, so we must vote for someone like Bloomberg, so we can sate some nonexistent group.
Unfortunately, there’s a history of this in the Democratic Party. It goes back to the late 1980’s when Ronald Reagan had just won a landslide reelection campaign and elders within the party felt there was no way to ever recover unless Democrats embraced Reaganism and offered their own brand of top-down conservatism, a brand that focused on white voters, especially white male voters. That movement was helmed by a strategist named Al From, who founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that took over the party, all but expelled its liberal members, and welcomed, with open arms, the support and guidance of America’s major corporations. The Democratic Party shifted from relying on labor and repressed minorities to seeking the guidance of Coca-Cola, AT&T, and others with massive profits.
The avatar for this movement was Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, who From approached as becoming the standard bearer. Clinton and From presented Democrats with what they called “a reality check” that showed them polls and focus group testing that Reagan and people like him could never be beat and that only electability matter, electability being shorthand for appeal to white voters. They were right that they could elect Bill Clinton president, but in that position Clinton cut down benefits as a sign to conservatives they could trust him, tempered any and all programs designed to help Americans, and poured gasoline on Reagan’s neoliberal vision of our economy, creating a world where Americans could never get ahead and would suffer lower wages and terrifying insecurity in their careers.
We are living in the wake of that decision, and we simply do not have to continue on this path. The Clinton Years were a result of lowered expectations and the embrace of technocrats obsessed with making the world work as it is as opposed to changing it in any concrete way. Bloomberg is the epitome of this philosophy and end-result of a generation of wanna-be pundits plying their hobby as prognosticators, a hobby that has trivialized politics and changed it from the process of bettering societies and lives to picking which side of the quarter will show on the next flip.
The reality check is this: we can either live and die in an era where we expect nothing more than to possibly guess what happens next and be miserable, or we can reignite politics as a means of striving for better things. We tell ourselves constantly that’s what we’re doing. We express ourselves in memes and advertisements and public relations releases that we are a nation that attempts to do better, that is brave and progressive, and yet we are reduced to accepting an oligarch with endless money because we’ve been trained to expect nothing better.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Most recently he is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. You can follow him on Twitter @jysexton.com