INTRODUCTION
In
an attempt to make sense out of the election 2016 results that saw the rise of
Donald J. Trump into the position of President-Elect; the last few entries in
this blog has been a critical analysis of his popularity (through what I have
coined “reality politics”) and the immediate aftermath of his election with an
analysis of a few of his cabinet nominees and appointments[1]. This article, the last in the Trump analysis
trilogy, takes a look at the role of popular culture, particularly nostalgia,
and its contribution to and as a barometer for a Trump win.
“GREAT AMERICA”
There
is an interesting correlation between a Donald Trump presidential campaign and
nostalgic popular culture. They both look to the past as answers to, and
satisfaction of, the current social problems of today. The common denominator
is the feelings that both Trump and nostalgic popular culture invoke
and the simplistic beliefs and solutions that they can present. Nostalgic
popular culture is designed to reaffirm our perception of the past as easier,
simpler and therefore better. So too, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make
America Great Again.”, is a nostalgic throwback saying to his supporters that
there was a time when the US was something to behold, to be proud of, and the promise of "a bid time return". The reasons why both Trump’s slogan and Nostalgic
marketing are successful is both Cognitive
and Social.
Cognitive
Which
is more impactful, bad memories[2]
or good memories[3]?
While there is competing research on this issue (see footnotes), in general, we
want to look back on our past with
“rose colored glasses”; meaning we want to be positively engaged with our past.
One of the reasons we have this desire is to validate our
self-concept. In fact, nostalgia which is defined as “a sentimental longing and
wistful affection for the past”, contributes to producing a positive self-concept. In short,
how we think about the past, especially the way that we look at our own past,
shapes how we see ourselves in the present. According to Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, and Routledge
(2006), we typically see ourselves as the protagonist of our own stories. Further, we
often engage in nostalgia to
create a positive affect or redeem negative life experiences[4].
In fact, the authors state that nostalgia is often a tool to achieve and protect a
positive self-concept. Therefore, it is not that difficult to convince an
individual, or a group of people for that matter, to desire an affable past for their own gain.
This affirmative perception of our
own history is further compounded through hindsight. The basic premise being twofold: since we
have lived through the experiences of our past, they by the simple activity of
being achieved (if the experience was positive) or overcome (if the experience
was negative), makes them seem less cumbersome, threatening, and/or rewarding. The importance and power of that experience diminishes in our mind because we were able to
achieve/endure it. Secondly, the human
mind is unreliable (a fact that will become more important in the next section). The more time passes between experiences the less emotionally resonant those
experiences become. Positive
accomplishments lose their luster and negative experiences “don’t seem that
bad” as they once did. For example: If
an adult would think about their major troubles as a teenager, and would
compare them to the troubles they face today, most would say that
their troubles of their youth often pale in comparison to their current
troubles. Many of them may even use
their rhetoric that they “long to go back to that time where life was
simpler.”
For many people, this desire to
“turn the clock back” is easily understood. Of course we want to return to a previous time period in our past because, on a micro level, all of our biographies were easier and
simpler when we were children. This is because children in our culture (especially
those of us who are upper class, white, heterosexual and/or male) have less
responsibilities, with less complicated lives than adults. So, part of nostalgia's power, and the
effectiveness of the throwback message of Donald Trump is because it promises a
less complicated, easy-going past that appeals to the “kid” in us; regardless
of the social truth of its actual existence.
Social
A common claim many (conservative) people often make is to “return to a simpler time” A similar phrase was used during the 2010
Tea Party takeover of Congress (ala "take our country back.") and during the 2016 election (in the parlance of Donald
Trump, “Make America Great Again") However, it is quite vague as to which time period these people want to return to. When pressed to give a specific year on which to return they can not provide one [5] .This lack of an answer has one of two implications. Firstly, they may not
have a particular time period in mind because they only want to “feel” like their life is
easier and simpler…like when they were children. Such a desire may account for the subtle forms of
racism such as the backlash against progressive policies and political
correctness in recent years (e.g. stating that we have become “ too sensitive”[6]). On that note, it is important to understand that in recent years, propelled by the election
of our first black president, we have been able to combat the more subtle forms of racism and sexism which became more
apparent and visible after the civil rights movement. Now, with the
election of Donald Trump, it is plausible that these vaguer forms of
discrimination and micro-aggressions will, one again, become invisible. Compared to the blatant, overt forms of racism (we may soon be experiencing) subtle racism and sexism seem quaint and inconsequential e.g: No one is worried about equality of media representation if they are facing physical violence in their daily lives.
The second implication is far more
nefarious, and has its origins in the election of Barrack Obama. According to
anti-racism author Tim Wise, the election of Barrack Obama made whiteness
visible to many white people for the first time. This caused many white people
to feel uncomfortable at best and revulsion at worst[7]
It was at this moment, according to Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva (see link
about the civil rights movement above), that white people knew that they needed
to minimize their use of overt racism, and avoid being labeled a racist. The
result was an increase in the ideology of colorblindness and the transformation
of racist language through using “Race Talk”. The other outcome of white people being aware
that their once blatantly open (and unabashed) racism having negative
consequences is that they witnessed their privilege. While the recognition and
understanding of one’s privilege is generally a good thing, and can lead to
white people taking steps to fight against white supremacy and ally themselves
with activists, authors and academics of color; it can also be used for the
opposite.
Those who understand their own privilege
(race, gender, ability, sex, class etc), can also work hard to make it
invisible. By having an understanding of white privilege, whether people are
self-described racists (think Neo-Nazi, the Klan etc.), or a product of a
racist system (a majority of whites and people of color growing up in the US), a person can actively try to avoid (through word or by deed) being labeled a racist; thereby consciously minimizing the public perception of our own white privilege;
which inevitably reinforces and compounds the privileges that we (white people) have. Therefore, the reason why many people
cannot (or will not) give a date on which they wish to return, is because they
are consciously aware that any time period they choose is historically only
going to benefit white people. This identifies the desire to go back to a specific
time period as ultimately racist, a label most people want to avoid.
This is satirized in this clip from Louis
CK:
Additionally, the human ability to recall events is unreliable and can be subject to manipulation. Much of the
manipulation can be done by nostalgic popular culture and advertising. Due to our less than perfect memories, and
the inundation of advertising and media we receive. Much of our perception of
what the past looked like, felt like, and its corresponding history, is
blurred.
This intentional blurring of the past was
first acknowledged in the sub-field of Sociology known as Marriage and
Family. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz states that our perception of the traditional
family, and traditional family norms have been manipulated by the media we
consume. The public perception of the 1950’s family is not the reality the
families of the 1950’s experienced.[9]
Instead, the reality we remember is one that was fabricated by television shows
like I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and
Harriet, Father Knows Best and their
subsequent advertisements. This same manipulation is playing out today with the
cycle of Nostalgia.
THE CYCLE OF
NOSTALGIC POPULAR CULTURE
While the use of nostalgia to sell products
is certainly nothing new, it seems as though the use of this marketing technique
has, in recent years increased in speed and become more acute. Previously, it
seems, that nostalgia marketing was present in creating a general feeling
of a nondescript past. Such as a feeling of innocence, or of childhood, without any specific reproduction of a particular form of pop culture. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker talks about “The
Forty-Year-Itch” describing a piece of pop culture's affinity for a certain time period; the
way that films of one era can call back to, and have a similar flavor to those
of the past.[10] Yet,
ironically we have begun to see an increase in remakes and a re-imagining of the
popular culture of the last 40 years[11].
Here
is a brief list of some of the forthcoming or recent film and television
remakes, or those heavily relying on Nostalgia:[12]
Power
Rangers (2017)
Jurassic
World (2015)
Star
Wars Episode VII (2015) Rogue One ( 2016) Episode VII (2017) Episode IX (2019)
Ghost
in the Shell (2017)
Pokemon Go (2016)
Stranger
Things (2016)
Jumanji
(2017)
Creed
(2015)
Indians
Jones 5 (2019)
Blade
Runner 2049 (2017)
Baywatch
(2017)
Samurai
Jack (2018)
Magnificent
Seven (2016)
Vacation
(2015)
Beauty
and the Beast (2017)
Voltron:
Legendary Defender (2016)
The
Jungle Book (2016)
Fantastic
Beasts (2016) and The Sequel (2018) 3 more are planned.
Rambo
TV series (2018)
Fuller House (2016)
In
this list, one can see a clear difference from what Gopnik speaks to. Unlike
the pop culture cycle of the past, which had certain time periods invoke the
zeitgeist of another time period; now we’ve moved on to specific remakes,
looking at a reproduction of something every 25-30 years. This process was noticeable starting in the
early 2010’s mining the childhood of now 30-35 year olds. And in the last 5-6
years, the industry has moved to mining the childhood of 20-29 year olds. This
tactic is often easily dismissed as being motivated chiefly by Capitalism and
the Profit Motive[13];
that the studio is just looking for an easy “cash grab” (industry term J ).
While this approach has proven profitable, partly because the adults
that the studios use nostalgic marketing on to will likely take their children;
it also creates a yearning for a time
that never existed, at the same time masking the socio-political realities of
the specific historical context.
The problem comes when the (unsuccessful) attempt to separate the pop
cultural product from that context in which it was created, leaves us both
hollow and susceptible.
Escapism and
Cherry-picking (of History)
Much
of the appeal of Nostalgia, and nostalgic marketing in general is due to just
how removed from our current social issues it takes us. The nostalgic movies, TV shows and abundant
advertising often act as a distraction, a form of escapism, where we can retreat
from the world and our current social and personal problems. To just...forget. This distraction inevitably
leads to complacency.
"Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the
people".
Yet,
today it is the media and advertising
that is our opiate, and it has signified and contributed to the apathy
of Americans. The Average American consumes 15hrs of media per person per
day[15] and with only 55.4% of people voting
in the 2016 Presidential Election[16],
the power of Escapism and its correlation with apathy is significant; significant effects like the Election of Donald Trump.
If we add to this calculated apathy
the constant attempt to cherry-pick our history by ignoring the social and
cultural context in which our beloved nostalgia was produced. The result is a practice that obscures the cultural realities of Racism, Sexism, ableism etc. that were
inherent at the time. Thus through the affection for and embracing of pop cultural products of
the past, we are leaving ourselves venerable to the social, cultural, political
and historical context in which those products were produced.
CONCLUSION
Thus,
a contributing factor to the rise Donald Trump is that many of us were so
anesthetized by the false promises of pop cultural nostalgia that we did not
vote. The more troubling supposition is that Donald Trump paralleled his
campaign with nostalgic marketing so well that people believed that a vote for
him, is a vote for nostalgia; specifically, White Nostalgia[18]: where whites don’t have to be politically correct[19],
or fear being labeled a racist; while people of color (and their white supporters)
will be physically[20],
socially and economically suppressed, oppressed and annihilated.
This
is a window into the future:
Trump supporter rant videos:
[1]
The Most recent, as of this writing is Dr.
Ben Carson as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Planning
[6] This
narrative often has a gendered component to it. People often spouting about a “pussification”
of America decrying about a
manufactured “boy crisis.”
[10]
The movies of the 70’s invoke the spirit of films from the 1930’s etc.
[13]
Karl Marx Das Capital
