Public policy in the age of Celebrity Apprentice
Recent weeks have seen the emergence of a truly astounding narrative in American political culture, one to which I have been lamentably susceptible. That narrative is the emergence of a kind of perverse nostalgia for the George W. Bush administration. It comprises a wide range of possible expressions: there is the grudging acknowledgement that, however incompetent, amoral, or unhinged their actions were in the Bush era itself, their recent statements have verged on the sane, reasonable, or even eloquent. (Exhibit A, in that respect, is the surprisingly poignant speech that Bush delivered as part of the ceremonies dedicating the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Another potential expression — perhaps a more common one — is to gratefully acknowledge the ways in which numerous former administration officials have articulated horror at the prospect of a Trump Presidency: here, we might point to Michael Chertoff’s recent statement that Donald Trump would be the "most reckless" President in U.S. history.
There are a variety of ways to respond to such interventions. One is to look at these moments through the rose-tinted lenses of history, to give oneself over to that strange alchemy through which the flaws of earlier historical figures are sanded down by the pressure of time: in this way, the comportment of Bush comes to seem polished and assured on matters of policy, when considered in relation to the jaw-dropping egregiousness of anything uttered by Trump on a given day of the week. (Another example here is Reagan — the bane of contemporaneous Democrats, progressives, and the left — who has become frequently held up by current Dems/progressives as a useful reference point for modern conservatism: “Reagan wouldn’t recognize the Republican party of the Tea Party/Donald Trump era,” we are repeatedly told. We forget to attend to the ways that Reaganism was horrifying and unprecedented at the time.)
Another possible way to respond to these moments is, to my mind, the more sensible one: to resist, as one Rec List diarist has seen fit to do, the normalization of the Bush administration in light of recent events. We cannot give ourselves over to the temptation to belatedly pardon the administration responsible for the unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation; for the widespread suspension of civil liberties; for the criminally negligent mishandling of the calamity of Hurricane Katrina; for the massive expansion of the surveillance state; for the treasonous outing of a key state intelligence asset; for a structurally calamitous set of tax cuts; for failures of financial sector oversight in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis; for ethical and legal transgressions too numerous to mention.
My point here isn’t so much to engage in a revisionist assessment of this Bush/Trump comparison; to catalog the ways in which Bush’s administration is one that can’t and shouldn’t be normalized. Rather, my aim here is to point out that in many ways, Trump 2016 is a product of the culture of the Bush era, that the egregious and dangerous rhetoric that Trump engages in at present, his swaggering misogyny, his ruthless and callous business practices and mode of public address, his Hobbesian view of the state, and of his public role — all these things were anticipated in the culture of the Bush era, where Trump — though not a political actor at the time — was nevertheless an active and important interlocutor. I’m referring, of course, to the emergence of Reality TV as a cultural phenomenon.
In retrospect, one of the things that is most striking about the Bush era was that, at the very moment where the calamity of 9/11 was leading to calls for unity, for a culture of solidarity, to communitarian appeals to a public frightened by the events and looking for a way forward — at this precise moment, we begin to see the emergence of a cultural form that specifically celebrated the erosion of common fellow-feeling, of cooperation, of togetherness, of solidarity.
“Reality television” didn’t necessarily emerge as a format because of any conscious effort on the networks’ part to create this new culture; rather, reality TV shows solved an important practical problem for networks at the time: how to offer copious programming that was entertaining, cheap, and easily produced. One advantage for the networks was that they now didn’t need to pay name actors, as they would in dramatic series — though the “ordinary people” who were casted in these shows, and who became celebrities in their own right, would really become indistinguishable from actors, in that their actions would be played up for drama, and they would learn (like Trump has learned) to adjust their public statements for maximum conflict and sensationalism.
This latter point is important to understanding the medium of reality television. Shows like The Apprentice, Survivor, Big Brother and the like were structured in many cases around the premise of a steady elimination of contestants from the starting pool: in the end, there could be only one singer worthy of the ultimate praise from Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell, one contestant to emerge victorious from the petty spats of Big Brother, one aspiring business mogul ready to take their rightful place in the Donald Trump organization. This leads to a kind of atmosphere of intense competition, with all that this implies: civility is an early casualty of the form, with the most obnoxious contestants becoming, perversely, fan favorites, and kept in the running by virtue of an attempt to maximize interpersonal friction as a dramatic device. The format itself would allow many “private” interviews with contestants, whose backbiting snippiness could be put on full display.
This is not to say that cooperation did not figure in at all. Periodically, it would be necessary for contestants to form alliances of convenience, whether in the fulfillment of a given (stupid) project for The Apprentice, or to create little voting compacts or cliques for the purpose of getting through particular rounds of Big Brother. But these moments of cooperation do not contradict the prevailing narrative of competition: if anything, they only reinforce it, demonstrating that the key to success in these programs is for each atomized, isolated actor to maximize their individual social capital, forming insincere connections that can be jettisoned or reevaluated as events warrant. The disposability of personal relationships is a central lesson of the form.
Keep in mind, too, that the traces of reality television as a cultural form have also made their presence felt across the spectrum of TV dramas since the early 2000s: Lost was nothing if not a drama made in the mold of reality TV, with its constant twists of fate and sudden reversals, its frequent redefinition of shifting allegiances. (Ben Linus, just to cite one example, is the menacing antagonist of the early seasons, but later on, he’s thrown into weird side collaborations with the likes of Sayid Jarrah — together, they’re an indestructible team of assassins, and their relationship is dissolved as soon as the last target is taken out.) Battlestar Galactica was a drama in which the prospect of undetectable Cylon infiltration has divergent groups maneuvering for position and challenging one another for dominance. The whole cultural fabric of the “aughts” was shaped by precisely this kind of cultural atomization, and its effects are still with us.
All of this is, of course, an almost perfect microcosm for the broader social compact envisioned by celebrants of neoliberalism, as described (for instance) in the work of the cultural theorist Michel Foucault. In the works of Hayek, Milton Friedman, Von Mises and others, the subject of human capital is best understood as an “enterprise-of-one,” an entrepreneurial self whose job it is to navigate market turbulence on their own. For celebrants of neoliberalism — to cite an example — there is no such thing as “unemployment”; neoliberal theorists believe that an unemployed person is merely a person in transition between a less profitable and more profitable activity. All that time on the job market is thought of as if the individual had simply withdrawn their labor from one company, and was carefully choosing where to go next. The prospect of layoffs, of structural unemployment, of entire labor sectors being made redundant or obsolescent, doesn’t figure into the worldview of neoliberal theorists at all. Moreover, by this reckoning, any state effort to intervene in this market of widespread precarity — through social programs or the welfare state — was a dangerous distortion and manipulation of market-based incentives.
Seen against this broader context, it becomes clear how neatly Donald Trump fit into the culture of George W.’s America: in an environment of massive tax cuts for the rich, of financial deregulation, of administrative contempt for the have-nots in an economy of ever-widening wealth polarization, the pagent of the reality show — particularly the business-centered reality show of The Apprentice — becomes a site where these things can be played out. The dynamics of the show almost require that viewers cheer on the most ruthless, and jeer at those earnest souls who are shunted aside by others’ opportunistic actions. They require that any solidarity is piecemeal, provisional, and temporary, and that in the end, contestants are structurally played against one another. Among other things, it models a certain distorted model of the postmodern corporation, one in which the CEO’s role is less to create an environment of creative interaction for employees than to deliberately foster a corporate culture of social Darwinism, in which isolated monads are pitted in opposition to one another. Trump is the CEO-god-king of the show’s hyperreal Trump Organization, whose downsizing of workers is a moment of ritualized pleasure. We might recall here Joe Biden’s comments on this point from the Democratic Convention:
"His cynicism is unbounded," Biden said of Trump. "His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in a phrase I suspect he's most proud of having made famous: 'You're fired.' I'm not joking; think about that."
Moments such as this one make clear that Trump is not a sudden product of a later political moment, one that only became conceivable in the wake of the Tea Party’s distortion of political and economic reality after the 2008 financial crisis. Rather, he is famous today because of his central position in the culture of the Bush era, an environment in which the prevailing cultural form of the time — represented in the backstabby ethic of the reality television program — anticipated the worst dimensions of everything that the Trump campaign would come to stand for.
Trump models a vision of America in which people are made to feel that their advancement can only be secured through the marginalizing of others. It is a vision of America in which vendors and employees are seen as chumps if they believe that the Trump Organization will make good on its contractual obligations. It is a vision of America in which only a single strongman can be permitted to succeed, a hypercompetent CEO-god-president who plays divergent interests off one another, in a kind of perpetual Manichean struggle. It is a vision of America in which the nasty personal epithet — the kind of thing that would have been a stage-whispered “aside,” uttered by small, self-interested contestants, on the likes of Big Brother or Survivor — is an instrument of state.
In this, Trump’s America and Bush’s America are not indistinguishable, but they are mutually affirming. We can look to the one for clues about the emergence of the other. Remember: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it may often rhyme.
