In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Murray Skees about his article “Grab Them by the Public: Trump, Twitter, and the Affective Politics of Our Fragmented Democracy,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Grab Them by the Public: Trump, Twitter, and the Affective Politics of Our Fragmented Democracy
Murray Skees
In his essay “Democracy in the Age of Trump,” Daniel Innerarity writes of unexpected things that are taking place for those who, in principle, ought to be in the best position to figure it out. Scholars of politics who have dedicated their entire lives to the study of politics as well as the political pundits who have made careers out of gauging the winds of social and political change are scratching their heads over everything from bewildering elections (and now an incomprehensible presidency) to lost referendums. Innerarity’s hypothesis is that all of this has “its origins in the fragmentation of our societies, urban segregation, exclusion, and the dualism of labor.” Fragmentation within the cultural, social, and economic spheres of society are fueling these unexpected political developments. He observes that “the media, traditional and new, have accelerated this fragmentation of cultural and political identities; the social networks especially allow the creation of abstract and homogeneous communities in certain enclaves of opinion where the psychic self-segregation of the ideological communities is reflected.”
Innerarity focuses on three processes that are particularly visible in American society that exacerbate this fragmentation: (1) a politics that is thought of not as a way of developing public virtues but instead as an exercise on the part of political elites to further their self-interest; (2) a model of “accelerated virtual capitalism,” in which opportunities abound for a few yet seem destructive and “incomprehensible” to most; and (3) a divide regarding multiculturalism that is both blissfully celebrated by those who experience its benefits and yet lamented by those who live in “more confrontational situations.”
I agree with Innerarity’s assessment and would like to further develop a line of thought that was only briefly touched upon in his essay: the relationship between the media (both old and new) and the fragmentation resulting from the “degraded politics” that is peculiar and particularly worrisome in the United States. After detailing the fragmentation of the American political landscape by focusing on two concepts of politics, “civic republicanism and liberal/conservative elitism,” Innerarity suggests—in passing—the importance of the media, specifically social media, in developing and sustaining this fragmentation. He writes that “those who are successful in this world of telegenic or tweeted oversimplification are not, of course, those who best represent that civic culture [i.e., a culture of degraded politics that cultivates political confrontation] but those who best take advantage of its decadence.”
Yet this relationship needs to be further interrogated. Using Adrian Pabst’s way of framing the issue, how is it possible to have a “collusive convergence of liberal ideology” with a “politics of sophistry and even neo-fascist ideas,” specifically as it is occurring in the United States? What mediations of communication tend to exacerbate sophistic dialogue, while undermining deliberative debate? Why is it the case that many people see Donald J. Trump’s political rhetoric as specious sophistry, and how is this related to the fact that many political pundits thought it was important during the last election to point out that Trump was the first “brand candidate” (and now the first “brand president,” it seems)?
In the following analysis, I will explain first why it is that we can consider Trump’s rhetoric a form of sophistry and then why we can consider him a “brand president.” Lastly, I will discuss why the notion of a “brand public” can help us to see how false claims and hyperbolic sentiment drove Trump’s message in the age of social media and in a political era heavily invested in political branding, effectively circumventing the critical discourse that we assume would stave off such a threat.
Sophistry and “Bullshit”
In ancient Greece, a sophist was basically a teacher. The term was originally associated with the notion of a “sage,” but during the fifth century BCE it came to denote a particular type of person who was paid for imparting knowledge or displaying rhetorical eloquence. Though it is not possible to articulate the basic tenets of the Sophists in order to arrive at anything like a “school of thought,” the Sophists did have one common pedagogical commitment: they were all concerned with practicing and teaching effectively the art of rhetoric. The Sophists also had one common philosophical attitude with regard to knowledge and reality: they were all in one way or another opposed to Parmenidean monism and its esoteric rationalism. Sophists were thoroughgoing empirical skeptics who advanced the notion that knowledge was always relative to the perceiving subject. Our inadequate cognitive faculties coupled with the absence of a stable universal reality beyond those faculties made the search for absolute or objective knowledge not only unwise but also impossible.
The Sophists, however, did think that “virtue” could be taught and cultivated alongside the most powerful tool in a person’s political arsenal—namely, rhetoric. With it, power and influence could be wielded. For Aristotle, on the other hand, politics involved not just the need to persuade the polis in order to get your policies supported but also a commitment to the fact that there was a way that a political community ought to work together to establish productive social organization, leading to social flourishing and individual well-being. Sophists, consequently, could be very influential and very dangerous. Sophists were men of words, not action, according Xenophon. Today, the term “sophist” has come to mean a person who uses argumentation and language to put forth positions that sound correct but in fact are not. Trump appears to espouse some of the Sophists’ world outlook, yet I do not think he embraces anything like an epistemological or ontological relativism.
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