SATURDAY: It's the sheer stupidity, Stupid!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2024

As the social order turns: Believe it or not, we're going to have a debate next week!

More likely, we're going to pretend to have a debate. Or perhaps it should be stated this way:

We're going to have what poses as a debate.

We're going to have something presented as a debate—but it seems there will be only one. Back in 1960, Candidates Kennedy and Nixon held four. Initially, the Kennedy camp had suggested five.

Such as it was at the time, nationwide polling switched after those famous debates, with Candidate Kennedy taking the lead away from Candidate Nixon. By the end of the fourth debate, Gallup had Kennedy leading Nixon by three points, 49-46. 

There's no way to know if those figures were accurate. In the end, the nationwide popular vote was a virtual tie, with Kennedy at 49.72 percent, Nixon at 49.55.

In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White assessed the performances of the two candidates in their famous debates. When it came to the value of these debates as a way to educate the public, he offered a gloomy assessment, built around a complaint which seems almost quaint today.

By what rules did those debates proceed? By mutual agreement, opening statements by the candidates were eight minutes long, White noted. 

No one would tolerate that today! Grumpily, he offered this larger assessment: 

WHITE (page 291): It is much more difficult to measure the debates in terms of issues, of education of the American people to the tasks and problems before them. For there certainly were real differences of philosophy and ideas between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—yet rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less.

The TV debates, in retrospect, were the greatest opportunity ever for such discussion, but it was an opportunity missed. It is difficult to blame the form of the debates for this entirely; yet the form and the compulsions of the medium must certainly have been contributory. The nature of both TV and radio is that they abhor silence and “dead time.” All TV and radio discussion programs are compelled to snap question and answer back and forth as if the contestants were adversaries in an intellectual tennis match. Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable. Thus, snapping their two-and-a-half-minute answers back and forth, both candidates could only react for the cameras and the people, they could not think. And, since two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts, both candidates, whenever caught out on a limb with a thought too heavy for two-minute exploration, a thought seemingly too bold or fresh to be accepted by the conditioned American mind, hastily scuttled back toward center as soon as they had enunciated the thought. 

Their opening statements were eight minutes long! After that, the candidates were restricted to a mere two and a half minutes in their answers to the questions they were asked to address.

This time limit "permitted only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts," White complained. As an exploration of the day's major issues, the debates thereby turned out to be "an opportunity lost."

So said the famous journalist in his iconic book. It's safe to say that he had never seen anything like the sheer stupidity, joined to undisguised propaganda, which defines our public discourse today.

When it comes to our current White House campaign, only one summary captures the state of the culture:

It's the stupidity, Stupid!

We refer to the sheer stupidity put on display by "interviews" like the one we discussed in the course of this past week. Also, by the "interviews" described by Helen Lewis in her recent painful essay for The Atlantic.

Lewis writes from across the pond. Under current arrangements, this frees her to jettison the blinders which are widely maintained Over Here.

In her painful essay. Lewis describes the broader array of "interviews" in which one current nominee has been participating. We can't repost every word, but Lewis starts like this:

Trump’s Red-Pill Podcast Tour

One weirdness of listening to Donald Trump talk for any length of time is that, amid the syllable minestrone, he occasionally says something that is both intelligible and honest.

One such moment came during his appearance on the popular podcast hosted by the computer scientist Lex Fridman this week. “To get the word out,” Trump said, is important in politics, and television was becoming “a little bit older and maybe less significant.” The online sphere—podcasts and forums such as Spaces, on X—has usurped its importance. “I just see that these platforms are starting to dominate; they’re getting very big numbers,” Trump added.

Way back when, White complained about the way the TV debates failed to educate the public. 

Speaking with a computer scientist, Candidate Trump has now said that television itself has been losing importance—is being overtaken by the newer medium known as the podcast.

Trump said this to a computer scientist living in Texas. A bit later in her essay, Lewis describes the sheer stupidity which define the types of "interviews" in question:

...[I]n the past few months, Trump has become a fully fledged podcast bro, talking with the livestreamer Adin Ross about the prosecution of the rapper Young Thug, shooting the breeze with the YouTuber turned wrestler Logan Paul about German shepherds, and interrogating the former stand-up comedian Theo Von about cocaine. His running mate, J. D. Vance, meanwhile, sat down with the Nelk Boys, where he manspread luxuriantly between cases of their hard seltzer, Happy Dad. (Product placement is a big feature of interviews on popular bro influencers’ shows: A proprietary energy drink or iced tea, or a copy of their book, is usually floating around in the back of the shot.)

In this presidential election, both candidates are mostly avoiding set-piece interviews with traditional outlets—but only one can rely on a ready-made alternative media ecosystem. Kamala Harris finally did her first full-length sit-down last week, bringing Tim Walz along as a wingman. Instead of submitting Harris to adversarial accountability interviews, her team is wildly outspending the Trump campaign on digital ads, taking the Democrats’ message directly to voters. The Republicans have a cheaper, punkier strategy: hang out with all the boys.

“The funniest component of the Trump campaign’s media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach,” the Substacker Max Read wrote last month. The constellation of influencers with whom Trump has become enmeshed does not yet have a widely accepted name. “Manosphere” comes close, because it links together the graduates of YouTube prank channels, the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White’s sprawling empire, shitposters on Elon Musk’s X, and the male-dominated stand-up comedy scene. This is a subset of the podcast world with its own distinct political tang; it is suffused with the idea that society has become too feminized and cautious, and the antidote is spaces dedicated to energy drinks, combat sports, and saying stupid things about Hitler. Think of this as Trump’s red-pill podcast tour.

These podcasts are often self-consciously anti-intellectual, marketing themselves as the home of deliberately dumb acts, edgy jokes, and rambling conversations about UFOs and sports statistics. Their spiritual daddy is Joe Rogan, but whereas he presents himself as a disaffected liberal, the new generation is happy to back right-wing causes and candidates: The Nelk Boys danced the YMCA with Trump at a rally in 2020, and Ross has explicitly endorsed Trump for president.

In his famous book, White described a presidential campaign which was presented to the public by "forty or fifty men, all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling."

According to White, these men—and at the time, they probably were all men—were "the finest in the profession of American journalism." They were "men of seniority and experience, some of them men of deep scholarship and wisdom."

That was White's assessment. Today, those journalists have been replaced by the assortment of flyweights and clowns to whom Trump turns for his interview sessions.

That includes the fellow who pretended to interview Trump for two hours on the Fox News Channel last weekend.

On that same "cable news" channel, the propaganda flows smoothly all day and all night, with D-list comedians and former professional wrestlers invited on the air to pretend to analyze the events of the day. For better or worse, the jugglers and clowns have replaced the proud professional journalists, with ranking journalists at organizations like the New York Times refusing to notice, report or discuss this remarkable cultural phenomenon.

For better or worse, this is the classic revolt from below. In classic fashion, the elites who still sit at the top of the heap avert their gaze as it happens. 

Across the pond, Lewis takes notice.

It's the stupidity, Stupid! The sheer stupidity of the "shitposting" which happens on Fox, joined to the sheer stupidity of the way the finer elements agree to avert their gaze, as they once did at Versailles.

Within this context, we're going to have a debate next week. No one knows what's going to happen—but we're scheduled for only one, not the traditional three, and surely not four or five.

In her essay, Lewis describes the sheer stupidity which now defines the cultural context. We tried to do the same thing with respect to the recent imitation of journalism performed on Fox by Mark Levin, AKA The Man Who Screams.

Our high priests today are screamers and clowns. In the finer precincts of Blue America, the stars avert their gaze.

This includes the stars of MSNBC—the overpaid "beloved colleagues" in whom we who live in Blue America been told to believe.