Democracy Must Be Sold To People
Storytelling is how fascists gain power. Maybe it's the way they lose power too.
If people want a show, give them a fucking show.
That would be my humble advice to any elected official ready and willing to take on the second Trump administration in all its breathtaking disdain for democracy and checks and balances and truth, things of that nature. Seizing the public’s attention and imagination and support will require a sustained effort to put on a show of conflict with the incoming president and his band of fascist ghouls who plan on using every bad-faith trick in the book to implement their terrifying vision of the United States, which they hate in its current iteration.
Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!
Politics have been haughtily dismissed by many on the left as the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex. So let’s go with that: Politics is nothing but a show for public consumption, there to entertain the masses with WWE-style drama. If that’s the case – and I think it is – elected Democrats need to start playing the game and recognizing the power of conflict-fueled entertainment.
Denny Carter
A lot of the worst Washington Post and New York Times pieces from the summer and fall focused on supposedly undecided voters – people who wanted to be in the newspaper – who said they found Donald Trump funny or entertaining. Trump’s astounding weirdness was sold hard to young men inclined to embrace fascist messaging, and it paid great dividends on Election Day. We now have college and pro football players celebrating their on-field successes by dancing like Trump. Anecdotally, when I wander onto the X platform formerly known as Twitter, I see young guys increasingly referring to Trump like a crazy uncle they love dearly. This was not the case in 2016 or 2020. In an age of dominant nihilism, it seems Americans are open to backing an anti-democracy strongman if the strongman makes them laugh.
There’s also Trump’s constant clashing with his myriad enemies, both real and perceived. He’s going to imprison this or that lawmaker or law enforcement official. He’s going to sue this or that media outlet. He’s going to invade this or that country or crush this or that internal enemy. As nauseated as it makes you feel, you pay attention and follow the unfolding drama of this cursed era because you are human and you like drama. Everyone loves a narrative, and Trump has given us one.
Democrats have not, and nearly ten years into this era, they still largely refuse to play the game, to offer a show for the viewing public. That’s because, as autocracy scholar Balint Magyar has said, “liberal democracy offers moral constraints without problem-solving,” while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Only one of those offerings has mass appeal in the 21st century, and it ain’t the one you want it to be. Selling the latter program – lots of (necessary) rules with slow, incremental change – will require an element of entertainment and, yes, drama, that Democrats and the left have dismissed as unseemly and even beneath them. In doing so, they have ceded the stage to fascists who fully understand the public appetite for easily accessible plot lines and solutions to problems largely invented by the insidious right wing. Trump understands this better than anyone, and always has.
I’ve argued in Bad Faith Times that the American left must embrace WWE politics if we are ever going to effectively push back on the right’s domination of the national discourse, of how people view issues like immigration and abortion rights and economics. I wrote last year about how and why national Democrats desperately needed to watch some goddamn TV to understand the national mood in an era defined by a wealth gap that grows more obscene by the hour. Folks are as furious today with elites as they were in the years after the 2008 economic collapse, from which you could draw a straight line to Trumpism and the potential end of American self governance.
Representative democracy in a perfect world would not have to be sold like a product. But Americans are first and foremost consumers, not citizens, and we lack even the most basic understanding of history and human events. Wishing for an alternate reality in which Americans were more knowledgeable about the long and sordid history of democracies crumbling into fascist hellscapes is a fool’s errand. The left has to work with what we have, and what we have is a populace that only understands the world through entertainment. So entertain we must.
This would require congressional Democrats to put up a real fight against Trump's Cabinet picks and judges and every other effort to establish the far-right fever dream detailed in Project 2025 – a document that dealt in the kind of bad faith that mainstream media cannot handle. When inflation spikes amid Trump's tariffs, make a big fucking deal out of it, just like the right wing did when groceries got pricey in the aftermath of the pandemic. When co-president Elon Musk proposes the elimination of Medicare or public education, shove that in people's faces and create an opposition that dramatizes the effects of such disastrous policies.
Put on a show: Have daily press conferences with histrionics and accusations and strong words, make captivating and overly dramatic online and TV ads, make the public feel as if the stakes are as high as they've ever been (because they are). Create a sense of drama from which people cannot look away. Make them believe the outcome is anything but certain. Make them crave the next episode of democracy vs. fascism.
No more Kabuki theater, no more signaling to the press and the public that you're not actually playing for keeps. This was the original sin of the January 6 commission; in no way were congressional Democrats willing to do what needed to be done with those who had tried and failed to overthrow the U.S. government.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes, a BlueSky poster from way back who has promoted the platform on his show, recently went so far as to say the left should find its own Trump (I would propose California Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems unhinged enough to frighten even the freaks on the far right, but I suppose his background in politics would disqualify him here).
It's an intriguing idea – one I daydreamed about in a Bad Faith Times essay from October 2023. Though a bad-faith, entertainment-centric approach to politics would turn off much of the American left, it might be the only way to compete in the current environment.
This candidate would look and sound exactly like an asshole. He would be everyone you hated in high school, only worse, because the assholes in high school never had any power and weren’t aspiring to the most prominent office on the planet. This candidate would often come off as pompous and cocksure and maybe even reactionary. Folks online would describe this person as "problematic." But can I tell you who loves that shit, who eats it up like manna from heaven? Political normies. It’s these normies who would be the target of said candidate. He would lure them in with the image and the swagger and the psychotic Patrick Bateman smile and he would talk the talk of a radical left-wing politician bound and determined to fundamentally shift the country toward a fairer and freer path – a path we cannot access without systemic, lasting changes to the foundational aspects of our country. This president would call Republicans “enemies of freedom” and ask why they hate hard-working American families, and this president wouldn’t be wrong in that label or that question. For as much bad faith as this experiment requires, the end results would largely be good-faith political discourse about the American right wing, which despises the country in every meaningful way. Infecting normies with this discourse would be key in changing the way we talk about left and right, Democrats and Republicans. Changing the Normie Mind is essential to shifting away from our current path winding toward full blown fascism. You have to change the thinking of folks who call Trump "Mr. Cheeto" or whatever before you achieve anything worthwhile. Image is all that matters in politics. We have been programmed to favor – to desire – stories and people we could imagine on the big screen. Our dreams and aspirations have been inserted into our brains, and they look an awful lot like a big fat blockbuster movie.
Whatever the left's approach is in this second go around of the Trump regime, it needs to be captivating as hell. No longer can we leave bad actors on the right to command the public's attention and create the stories that play in their heads 24 hours a day. People are not going to naturally gravitate toward democracy. It must be aggressively sold to them through nonstop entertainment.
Storytelling is how fascists gain power. Maybe it's the way they lose power too. It's worth finding out.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social
Comments ()