Survivors

Here’s (gift) a really fascinating and horrifying essay, by one of the people most responsible for the emergence of reality TV as a cultural force, about how Donald Trump is best understood as a creature of that cultural moment:

Over time, the genre dispensed with any pretense that it was a form of “Real World”-style pop documentary, and leaned into people behaving badly, love-to-hate personalities who let their id run wild, saying and doing things that many viewers wished they could.

This is what the “Real Housewives” eventually became on Bravo; on male-skewing cable networks, meanwhile, bearded barrel-chested men chopped down trees, smuggled moonshine and hunted for gold, superserving a red-state audience with fantasies of a bygone frontier America.

Reality TV soon emerged — hear me out — as a cultural form in its own right. Drawing on such over-acty “lowbrow” genres as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, British panto and professional wrestling, reality flowered into its more mature incarnation: a fully self-referential cinematic universe, artfully levered between the authentic and confected, a winking co-creation among players, producers and audience that gleefully showcased narcissism and other antisocial character traits. Its rules no longer needed to be explained.

I know nothing about Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, or panto, but I do know something about “professional wrestling,” and the connections between it, the metaphysics of reality TV, and Trumpism are clearly deep, so I more than suspect that the author is very much on to something here. The whole thing is worth reading.

Along these lines, I’ve been thinking about magic bullets and hard boards, and what happens over the next 50 days, as the election plays out. (One thing that tends to get forgotten is that, because of the new voting regimes, probably the majority of votes are going to get cast before election day, and often weeks before).

(1) If the Dems get the trifecta as an initial matter.

Trump and his base will never accept this, and Trump will call for civil war rather than accede to a result that could land him in prison, assuming a can opener, a real attorney general, a lawful Supreme Court, etc. I honestly have no ideas about what to do about this, other than try to get people to be prepared for it. The normie centrists who make up at least the plurality of the American public assume at some level that we’re going to Schoolhouse Rock the election somehow, and that if Trump and his cult lose they’ll just accept that eventually, without a lot of violence and the like. I don’t see that happening. If the Dems sweep the election there will be blood between November 5 and January 20.

(2) If the Dems win the presidency and the House but not the Senate. (I think this is the most likely result at the moment, although far from highly likely or anything). The difference between this and (1) is that a lot of powerful GOP actors will have more incentive to keep the whole thing from going completely off the rails, so maybe things won’t be quite as chaotic/violent during the transition period.

(3) If Trump wins. If this happens the Senate is 100% gone, and the least worst case scenario is that the Dems squeak out a majority in the House. If that happens, then maybe there’s a chance to avoid full-on authoritarianism, at least for awhile. If the GOP gets the trifecta then America as we know it is over, probably for good, and the task becomes to overthrow, eventually, the rough beast that has slouched into view over its corpse.

Happy Friday the 13th.