by Dave Kellaway
Andrea Arnold has made a brilliant film, still showing in some cinemas called, American Honey about a group of young workers earning only commission selling magazine subscriptions as a crew travelling through the Mid-West. In one scene Star, the lead actress, is brought before Crystal, the tough female manager of the business, because she has not made any money on that day. Star says she does not like the lies they have to tell to get the sales. Crystal replies that this is what selling is all about, telling people the stories they want to hear. If she does not smarten up she will dump her at a truck stop as she had done with other failed sellers. The film shows this graphically; we see the best salesman, Jake, inventing different stories for different customers – that he is selling subs to pay for his education, to raise money for a local college, for charity, because of a family tragedy and so on.
Trump, the reality TV star of the first Apprentice show, defeated Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party machine partly because he was effective at telling people the stories they wanted to hear. He has made his millions selling, negotiating and doing deals. The Apprentice is a paean to capitalist ideals. His message on the campaign trail was not expressed in terms of economic analysis and detailed plans for how he would get people jobs but as a simplistic story that blamed the banks, Washington and its trade deals, the Chinese or other foreign workers. Bits of the truth were smothered in an emotional appeal to the sense of their loss of entitlement as white workers in the American dream.
Key to its effectiveness was the way he could spin the myth, burnished by his TV persona as business guru, of the no nonsense fixer who could get the job done. Indeed he is the centre of the story. If you listen to his speeches or interviews he is always using simple language in the first person where he says he knows how to ‘get the job done’. At the same time he is always praising himself as being successful, knowledgeable and making people happy through doing a’ beautiful’ job.
There is no independent social democratic party in the US, the trade unions are weak and the ideology of business as the only way of producing or allocating resources is dominant. So the attraction of a winning ‘outsider’ businessman doing better that the Washington liberal establishment was strong. Eight years of Obama had not delivered for those working class voters who did swing to Trump.
Reality TV like the Apprentice and the degeneration of TV news into infotainment and complete partisanship as you see with Fox News or the rightwing shock radio jocks meant that the outrageous statements made by Trump were not received by his base as being abnormal in any way. It was all part of a performance that created a gut response from his voters. His team could work the internet to reinforce the filtered bubble that people can build around the Trump world view.
An episode of the Apprentice works through confrontation, shouting matches, bullying and humiliation. The contestants have to pump themselves up the whole time saying how wonderful they are. Many voters do not make a big distinction between watching reality TV or right wing news channels and the Trump campaign either in its rallies or in the media. Calling for crooked Hilary to be locked up one day and then the day after praising her as a public servant and a tough competitor comes right out of the reality TV playbook. Newt Gingrich completely cynically called Trumps outlandish statements ‘campaign devices’ other have dismissed them as ‘campaign schtick’.
Another parallel is the way in which some evangelical church leaders are successful in accumulating large sums out of their often working class membership through an ideology combining finding God’s light with self-improvement and enrichment. So there is no embarrassment about the riches of the leaders. This just proves how successful you can be if you follow this line. This is similar to the motivational ideology that Trump embraces.
Clinton’s campaign based on trusting her experienced leadership and detailed policies just did not compete on same wavelength with Trump who constructed an emotional identity between himself and his base. Despite winning less votes than previous Republican candidates at least he was able to mobilise his base better than Clinton and was able to swing some Democrat voters in the key states. Although the racist ‘whitelash’ was dominant in the Trump campaign there are reports of some of the left-behind voters ‘disregarding’ the misogyny and anti-migrant rhetoric because they were desperate for new jobs to be created.
If we reflect on Brexit there was a similar use of outrageous promises and utter lies – the £350 million for the NHS or the million Turks coming over here. A simplistic national and racist message trumped a less coherent remain campaign which looked like a defence of a slightly reformed EU. It failed to motivate free movement or put forward a plan for defending working people’s interests.
How can we combat right wing populist campaigns of this sort? One option is to argue that the Left has to mimic some sort of progressive nationalism and to tack to the right on free movement and migration. A better way is to defeat these movements through campaigns that mobilise people in their communities and workplaces through concrete policies that respond to their real needs.
Corbyn’s policy of regulating migrant labour on the basis of fair wages and of extra resources for local authorities dealing with increased population is a good starting point. At the same time you need to construct a positive narrative of the benefits of a multi-racial society – one that can emotionally connect in a converse way to the right wing one. Social media and building new left media is an important part of this. It is still a tall order for the left as both the collective consciousness of the workplace and the communities have been considerably weakened. Individual consumerism, self-employment and a binding into the market through pensions and mortgages all make it harder to construct a new collective identity that can contest the narratives spun by the media and the performance of reality TV politics.