Thomas Lynch. Political Quarterly. Volume 88, Issue 4. October-December 2017.
Throughout 2016’s Republican party nomination fight and the subsequent American presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s political style was unique. Despite saying and doing things that many thought would sink his campaign, he persisted and ultimately won the election as president of the United States.
Apart from Mr Trump’s campaign team, not many political observers or pundits expected him to win. The American documentary producer and Academy Award winner Michael Moore was an exception. His analysis was cogent, precise and correct. Another person who publicly predicted Mr Trump’s win was American political scientist Helmut Norpoth at Stony Brook University. Dr Norpoth used a predictive social science model, while Mr Moore used his intuitive understanding of American politics and his innate empathy for those he grew up with who had been left behind by globalisation. Taking inspiration from both Moore and Norpoth, I began to think more about the Trump phenomenon’s potential for case study analysis. I decided that a conventional social science analysis probably would not capture the truly unique aspects of the Trump victory phenomenon and certainly would not do justice to the two aspects of his political personality captured separately and together by Moore and Norpoth, that is, Trump the entertainer and Trump the relentless power‐seeker. Most often during the campaign and since, Mr Trump has operated as a court jester wearing his red baseball cap, prodding and insulting the powerful, while at other times he has been more the calculating politician—such as when justifying not releasing his tax returns on the grounds that they were in the process of being audited.
Because Mr Trump appeared as such an outrageous outsider, it would have been easy to dismiss him as a complete political anomaly: someone to be endured until the political process was re‐set and more standard politicians re‐emerged. However, what if his success was not an anomaly? What if Donald Trump’s success signalled a new turn in politics and provides as much a paradigm shift for the study of power as Einstein’s equations did for the study of celestial mechanics? What if turning politics topsy‐turvy was the way in which successful elections would now have to be fought? What if provocation and provocative personalities were now going to be ascendant? What if the ability to entertain and use the tools of entertainment has now become a key component for political success? And most worrisome, what if his election foreshadowed a new politics of outrageous entertainment anchored in misanthropy, misogyny, conflict and lies?
I needed a guide to take me through this maelstrom. I chose a theorist considered by many to be an outsider and provocateur—Guy Debord. There is symmetry between Debord and Trump that make this theoretical choice understandable. Just as Mr Trump can be viewed as a disruptive, provocative and idiosyncratic outsider in American politics, Guy Debord has been viewed similarly as a social theorist. A common challenge faced by novel thinkers such as Debord is that social reality rarely throws up cases that match the force of their theoretical and practical critique. Marx had the excesses of the industrial revolution to add force to his theses, and inform his theoretical development, whilst Debord, if he were alive today, would have seen the election of Donald Trump as a case study of spectacular power that could add a similar force and relevance to his critique. I thought that with Mr Trump’s arrival, the timing was right for the social science audience to reconsider Debord.
Overall, Debord’s practical objective is to have his readers cease being spectators and instead choose revolutionary action that breaks through the banal carapace of the status quo. Debord’s critique of power in advanced capitalism can veer between being a post‐Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production, and being an assessment of the modern era as a nefarious and soul‐destroying avatar, possessing a life outside human direction. Debord understood, before most others, that in advanced capitalist societies a politics of stardom based on media manipulation was possible, and that the politics under that sort of regime was likely to be dark, all‐encompassing and threatening. In order to study this politics of darkness, Debord articulated a novel method of analysis, ‘détournement’—the restoration of the subversive quality of science that overturns conventional paradigms. Debord suggested this method in order to study the radical way in which modern capitalism has transformed populations from producers and consumers to spectators. Debord’s method of détournement implies a political commitment to social change that can be challenging for mainstream social science. A methodological commitment to détournement seeks to portray social science as a provocation that turns social science researchers away from ‘normalising’ science.
In what follows, I will offer a détournement in order to analyse the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s election. I will contend that Donald Trump came to high office by riding a wave of political and social transformation characterised by Guy Debord as ‘the spectacle’. The Trump tsunami wave began with some minor disturbances and gradually built into a major force of mostly disruptive—and also perhaps destructive—change.
Debord’s Theoretical Perspective: Power as Spectacle
Within Debord’s framework, discussions of power focus on the ways in which the economy comes to dominate the ethos and purpose of the state. As this happens, a process of ‘spectacularisation’ based on the production and circulation of ceaseless images inverts social realities and transforms citizens into spectators. Early on in his thinking, Debord’s view was that power in spectacular society is organised either by principles of capitalist exploitation—diffuse spectacular control—or by principles of bureaucratic domination—concentrated spectacular control. The nation state was the principal vehicle through which these two power principles operated. Debord pointed to the United States (diffuse spectacle) as the nation state in which commodity capitalism was most advanced as an apparatus of power, control and isolation. The Soviet Union (concentrated spectacle) was Debord’s example of a nation state in which extensive bureaucracy was most advanced as the apparatus of power, control and isolation.
Over time, Debord’s thinking evolved beyond his initial characterisations of a diffuse or concentrated spectacle. These two types were overtaken by a third: the integrated spectacle that is simultaneously concentrated and diffuse. The integrated spectacle was made possible by incessant technological renewal which generates large pools of surplus and underutilised labour, new opportunities for leisure and ‘surrenders everyone to the mercy of specialists, to their calculations and to the judgments which always depend on them’. Politics comes to be characterised by a common, alienated way of being as ‘an image of harmony set amidst desolation and dread, at the still centre of misfortune as social misery and emptiness continued to characterise the integrated spectacle’.
Social reality’s representation via images (or appearance) becomes more salient for the sense of social connectivity than actual social connectivity itself. This notion of the image and the importance of representation as the principal way in which sociability and connectivity occurs via the image becomes Debord’s entry point for insights about the way in which spectacular society, rooted in a succession of images, has inverted reality in the modern era. Debord’s notion that social reality becomes inverted is a key component of his thought. He wrote that ‘The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life and, as such, the autonomous movement of non‐life’. Inversion is life experienced as if viewed through a mirror and lived socially as if sharing photographs taken by a camera. As in a mirror, right is left and left is right. However, mirrors can also be convex or concave and reality can, therefore, appear topsy‐turvy, depending on the mirror being used and the position of the viewer.
People can often be led astray by inverted images of political realities and the interpretation of such images can be prone to perceptual and practical error. Therefore, determining the truth of political objects or events in spectacular societies can be a major challenge from one day to the next—or even contemporaneously from one person to another. Because political appearances can be constructed and political fact manipulated in spectacular society, truth‐making becomes difficult and complicated. People tell the truth as they remember it. Sometimes, people may choose to ‘fudge the truth’ or ‘gloss the truth’ for a variety of reasons, thereby constructing a degree of falsity rather than engaging in conscious, outright deception or lying. In spectacular society, truth becomes elusive.
Moreover, in spectacular society, truth as an outcome of political practice comes under threat from a variety of sources, the greatest threat being the rise of disinformation. For Debord, disinformation is more than just false news, alternative facts or orchestrated lying by authorities. For Debord, disinformation is part of a broader pattern of ‘unanswerable lies’. Debord’s theoretical point was that the quality of ‘unanswerability’ gives what is either true or false an entirely new quality. Under these conditions, truth and falsity are no longer categorical variables reflecting a dichotomy, but rather now become an ordinal variable reflecting two poles of a continuum. This transformation happens because, disinformation exists ‘where there is no room for verification’ and ‘must inevitably contain a degree of truth but one deliberately manipulated by an artful enemy’.
Debord’s concepts of the unanswerable lie and disinformation make the Trump election phenomenon more understandable. Disinformation comes into existence in service of an actor that possesses an agenda. These actors may be individuals but are more often groups, possessing varying degrees of cohesiveness in the pursuit of power. Indeed, various social actors deploy disinformation to beat back truth in struggles, political or otherwise. Ultimately, disinformation contributes to the death of truth as a meaningful arbiter of struggles. Serving both tactical and strategic uses, this sort of disinformation can be used across the political spectrum by either the political left or the right, as each is the artful enemy of the other. In current times, the development and use of ‘alternative facts’ and the proliferation of ‘fake news’ signal a heightened role for disinformation in the Trump presidency.
At this point, an example may be useful. In March 2017, on a weekend, President Trump tweeted that former President Obama had authorised wiretapping of his telephones in Trump Tower, New York City. This charge was not supported by evidence. It later transpired that Trump seemed to have been made aware of a Fox News story about a Breitbart news summary of a vague opinion voiced originally by an American conservative radio host commentator. In fairly rapid succession, the head of the FBI, the former Director of National Intelligence under the Obama administration, various senators and congressmen expressed opinion that this was a dubious claim by President Trump and respectfully called for his evidence. The people expressing doubt generally were aligned in their opinion that checks and balances in the security surveillance system would have led to a definite paper trail if President Obama had authorised such surveillance. President Trump now had the power to summon this paper trail, waive security considerations and then let the paper trail make the case against President Obama. Instead, the way this issue played out in the media involved White House spokespersons reframing Trump’s original tweet as a hypothetical claim by him and calling for the claim to become part of the investigation being conducted by a Congressional Intelligence Committee. Until this investigation was complete, the White House could of course no longer comment. As events unfolded, the president’s defenders were quick to point out that his original tweet had placed the wiretapping claim in quotes, suggesting he did not mean wiretapping specifically, but was rather offering a more general claim to surveillance. According to them, he certainly never intended the tweet to be interpreted as suggesting Mr Obama personally ordered the wiretapping. In this way, President Trump’s claim against President Obama was now moved to Debord’s realm of the unanswerable lie.
For Debord, disinformation in spectacular society is widespread. Disinformation leads to a sense of fear and confusion as the ‘spectacle confines itself to revealing a wearisome world of necessary incomprehensibility’. In spectacular society, this sense of incomprehensibility is never an accidental occurrence. By contributing to a general inability to create and sustain sensible narratives of the way the world works, disinformation creates the conditions in which a general and heightened sense of uncertainty and anxiety comes to permeate not only the thoughts but also the feelings and emotional states of most people. Understandably, disinformation expands ignorance about how the world works and it is within in this expanding bubble of ignorance—ignorance of both past history and present circumstance—that disinformation finds the raw material of half‐truths, alternative facts and lying certainties which makes the success of spectacular society, and its agents, possible.
Under this assault of disinformation, belief becomes as elusive as truth. Who are we to believe? What should we believe? How we come to believe and why we should bother believing become stakes in representational struggles of all sorts. These representational struggles tend to be led by the ‘stars’ of spectacular society. Donald Trump is one such star. We can see that, today, stardom has become even more ubiquitous through the popularity of reality television, and the ways in which new forms of internet media such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter allow anyone either to become a media star or president of the United States. Reality stardom is a contrived and radical new way of being noticed. With internet media, security and confidentiality become valuable new commodities, as does control of that media. The question becomes ‘If anyone can become a “star”, then what is the social value of “stardom”?’. In this inverted world, though, an excess of supply of stardom does not lower the price of entry to stardom. It would seem that as more people acquire stardom, more aspire to it. What becomes crucial in this media age is generating the images that count toward stardom—and that is an activity in which Donald Trump has proved— to borrow some of his language—’outstandingly excellent’.
The Spectacular Election of Donald Trump
In everyday political discussions, the term ‘political star’ references the image of a candidate who is media friendly and well known to the public via magazine articles, newspaper interviews, television programmes and other media images. Through these media resources, a ‘star candidate’ either resonates or not with the public. If resonance is achieved, then the ‘political star’ is judged as gifted with some form of charisma by the voting public and the political media. The first presidential election in which traditional media such as print and radio and the newer medium of television seemed to play a critical role was the 1960 presidential campaign between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy outshone Nixon in the televised debates and this media success was felt to contribute largely to his victory over Nixon.
The other media trend developing at that time was the way in which politics itself became a form of televised entertainment in American society. Beginning in the 1960s with extensive televised coverage of race riots in American cities, the twentieth century black emancipation movement, the coverage of the Vietnam War and protests against that war, and various other political coverages, a growing proportion of televised content in America consisted of politics. One of the major television events of the early 1970s was the extensive coverage of the Nixon impeachment/Watergate hearings. An American and global television watching public was given immediate access to this impeachment process. The impeachment event’s unfolding made stars of journalists Woodward and Bernstein, made a hero of their newspaper The Washington Post and led to a successful major motion picture based on a book by the two journalists. The translation of this political crisis into entertainment signalled a transformation of American politics into media content with entertainment value and significant profit potential. The appetite for this type of coverage and information was established.
From the time of Kennedy’s 1960 victory, the how well presidential candidates played on television became crucial for success. Prior political experience continued to be important, but media success came to be valued perhaps even more highly. Adding force to the term ‘political star’ in American politics and the importance of being media‐friendly, actual ‘movie stars’ began to transition their careers, becoming successful politicians: Clint Eastwood as mayor of Carmel in California, Ronald Reagan as governor of California and later American president, Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota, Al Franken as Minnesota senator, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as California governor, are some of the more notable examples of media stars becoming political success stories.
Entertainers turned politician such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Franken differ from Donald Trump in that they were originally entertainers and not businessmen. Before the arrival of Mr Trump, entertainers turned politician seemed able to maintain boundaries between their celebrity and political selves. Both Mr Schwarzenegger, Mr Franken and the other examples cited above started out their careers as entertainers. Their success in that field depended on their audiences believing in the unreality of what they did as performers. Mr Schwarzenegger wanted us to believe he was ‘The Terminator’ or ‘Conan the Barbarian’ whilst all the time knowing that he was not. People watching either film were complicit in pretending, along with Mr Schwarzenegger, for ninety minutes in a darkened movie theatre, that he was who he pretended to be. However, as a politician, Mr Schwarzenegger wanted a different relationship with his public. He wanted them to take him seriously as a person clearly involved with developing an authentic politics, linked firmly to deeply‐held personal beliefs and values. Entertainers turned politician traditionally strive for a greater degree of gravitas than one might usually expect from neophyte politicians. They deploy strategies of political gravitas to make clear to voting publics that they are serious politicians. It is impossible for them to deny their careers as major movie or television stars and personalities, but they take care not to mix the two elements of personal biography. In sociological terms, they appear to have assiduously avoided role conflict.
What I wish to convey can best be understood by reading the 26 June 2017 Guardian newspaper article describing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent visit with French president Emmanuel Macron. The article contains their ‘selfie’ about climate change, which is accessible by an embedded link in that specific newspaper story. During the Macron visit, Mr Schwarzenegger speaks eloquently and well about climate change being the issue of our time and one that requires nonpartisan solutions. As one reads through the article or listens to Mr Schwarzenegger, the reader is aware of his entertainment star quality. However, it is his political self that is asserted in the video and the interaction with reporters. He speaks with gravitas on the issue of climate change and that is what becomes prominent and is noticed. His star quality is evident, but is not at the forefront of the story. There is a separation between Mr Schwarzenegger’s presentation of self as an entertainer and as a political person.
Over the Obama administration’s eight years, both the office of president and the image of the president were nudged much further into the realm of entertainment. By the time of Mr Obama’s nomination and initial election success in 2008, what may have been less obvious and realised was the way in which the presidential office and the presidential election process had each evolved as a heightened form of entertainment. The consecration of Mr Obama’s initial presidential aspirations by Oprah Winfrey at several junctures over the period 2006–8 marked a high‐point of this evolution. The ‘Oprah‐isation’ of Mr Obama’s first presidential nomination campaign was fulfilled at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, when Oprah appeared on stage, introduced by Michelle Obama. Ms Winfrey spoke in astoundingly eloquent and straightforward terms about her love of country, its challenges and how Mr Obama would be the person to make the difference. There was drama, emotion and connection. The entire event is worth re‐watching, as Ms Winfrey’s oratory style is eerily prescient of the style used by Mr Trump in 2016.
Following President Obama’s initial election in 2008, media immersion figured large in his ongoing transformation and ascendancy as the pre‐eminent star of American politics. During both his presidential terms, Mr Obama frequently appeared on late‐night talk shows as a headliner. He would banter and joke with hosts. He might use these occasions to market policy proposals, explain positions or speak about which basketball team he best thought might become US college champion. It was a new form of political reality television in which Mr Obama was a guest star and was as focused on being entertaining as much as any other guest.
President Obama’s media immersion was probably most realised during his second term, when he appeared as the guest celebrity on Jerry Seinfeld’s YouTube channel comedy show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. This episode presents a blurred version of the presidential identity as that of a very regular guy, just doing a job, and probably just as bored as any of us and willing to be distracted. In Mr Obama’s case, the distraction arrives in the form of Jerry Seinfeld and a classic Corvette sports car. Their interaction took place with Mr Seinfeld driving up to the White House in the Corvette, knocking on the window of the Oval Office, being beckoned in by the president, visiting and chatting with Mr Obama, and then both going to the cafeteria to get a coffee prior to going for a drive on the White House grounds in that vintage, high performance car. They were just a couple of guys in a car, chilling. The point of this episode seemed to be the portrayal of Mr Obama as the ultimate ‘cool’ hipster. The boundary between political reality and entertainment was heavily blurred, if not erased. This entire YouTube Seinfeld episode is as coherent an instance of Debord’s spectacular society as could be constructed.
This use of images blurring entertainment and politics was taken even further on another occasion and in another direction by the Obama presidency. In a very public manner, the Obama administration shared photos from the White House war operations situation room during the raid that led to Osama Bin Laden’s execution. What we see are still photos taken in the operations room. Each image is a fixed photograph and these images were made available after the raid and Bin Laden’s assassination had been carried out. In that chronicling of spectacular power, the American public was shown how an intense and focused President Obama supervised the assassination. In many ways, this particular use of media by Obama was within established canons of the presidential office. Sensitivity to public perception has generally played an important role in successful American presidential politics. During his four terms as president, Franklin Roosevelt was always careful to be photographed in ways that downplayed his polio. Even President Obama’s predecessor, President Bush Jr, used this sort of ‘show’ politics, never more so that when he appeared on an aircraft carrier to declare the Iraq War over and a victory for America. What we had here, though, were still images of the president and his advisers watching televised images from the raid. The photos present power watching itself as serious entertainment. People are unsmiling, mostly male and could just as easily have been watching a team athletic event in which one team was close to scoring the winning points. This singular set of images captures how both the office of president and the image of the president nudged much further into the realm of entertainment over the Obama administration’s eight years. These still images presented a stark contrast to the more benign appearance of Mr Obama on the Seinfeld YouTube broadcast.
This type of blurring of politics and entertainment was a broad trend during the Obama presidency. President Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, in her role as first lady, also extended the ‘spectacularisation’ of the office of president. One of the most interesting examples involved her appearance on the Tonight Show, which was hosted by Jimmy Fallon in a segment called ‘Ew’. Mr Fallon is dressed as a young teenage girl, hosting her own internet programme from the basement of her home. On this occasion, Fallon’s character was paired with a teenage friend played by another male comedian, Will Ferrell. Both comedians were costumed and made up as young female teenagers discussing the importance of physical exercise. Mrs Obama appeared as a guest on this pseudo‐programme. The overall effect is hard to judge: inversion occurs at multiple levels, with the president’s wife appearing as a hybrid public figure/comedienne advocating a real life intervention in a fantasy situation.
This process of inversion, whereby the president as a remote person of power could be a familiar person of fun and zaniness, was something new in American politics. It cleared a path that made a Donald Trump presidency more possible. Prior to being a presidential candidate, Trump was already a celebrity star of American reality television, an author and his own brand. To understand his approach and successes as a politician, we need to consider and appreciate his The Apprentice experience and celebrity status. The premise of this television programme was to present teams of people competing against each other in artificial business challenges. Each team’s performance and each team member were judged on how well an assigned business task was carried out. One team would be declared the winner and proceed to the next level of the competition. The losing team endured an inquisition held in a boardroom. The chief inquisitor and final arbiter was Donald Trump. The losing team was required to inform Mr Trump which member of their team had been the weakest link on the challenge and Mr Trump would interview each of these selected members and decide which one would be fired.
Reality television of this sort is hardly real. The reality television concept purports to take ordinary people, place them in contrived situations and then follow how these real people react to and cope with real life. Its purposes include providing entertainment, capturing audience share and selling advertising. Reality programmes are produced and staged and require both participants and their audience to suspend belief and trust the artificial. The Apprentice modelled business success as a form of Darwinian meritocracy overseen by Mr Trump. The final judgment rendered by Trump was designed to mimic business leadership decisions. The show’s success as an entertainment vehicle required that all performances be convincing and any truth was contrived. The Apprentice relied heavily on a form of play excelled at by children: imaginative role‐playing. With this form of play, truth emerges through pretending to be something you are not. However, what is true or false is not what is at stake in these games. All that matters is that everyone playing the game has fun and delivers an authentic performance. This is fine for children but problematic for adults. I am reasonably confident that Debord would have considered reality television as providing a strong example of inversion.
Candidate Trump parlayed celebrity Trump to become President Trump. Rather than exposing his weaknesses as a candidate, the spectacle of both the Republican party nomination campaign and the presidential campaign transformed Donald Trump’s weaknesses into strengths. In the context of the Republican nomination fight, Mr Trump campaigned with a clear, unorthodox style of messaging that cut through the blandness and sameness of the more obvious and traditional style of the other aspiring nominees. During the debates, he entertained as much as campaigned. The existence of eleven other candidates actually strengthened his star appeal because his style contrasted starkly with the blandness of his rivals. In very public and oft‐repeated ways, candidate Trump reminded Republican voters of how clever and smart he was and how nobody could negotiate on America’s behalf better than he could and would.
Trump’s campaigns depicted him as the outsider using images and events that displayed him in front of, or surrounded by, crowds of normal, everyday folk. His casual style of banter with frequent non‐sequiturs, hand gestures and shoulder shrugs helped solidify his media image as a neophyte politician. Mr Trump’s way of speaking and presenting his positions was perceived as a form of ‘frankness’ and a sort of everyman plain speaking that came to be seen as a virtue by potential voters. The result was that his performance as a politician blended into and merged with his previous performances as an entertainer. This new hybridised version of his identity allowed him to present himself to voters as a non‐standard politician. The truth or falsity of what he ever said became secondary to the style in which it was expressed. Mr Trump ran and won as a new political entity—the first hybrid entertainment celebrity politician, a ‘politainer, riding the wave of a new form of politics, ‘politainment’.
Concluding Comment
Mr Trump’s election represents a developmental progression of America’s electoral system from a political process to an entertainment process. That Trump appears to lack experience in the practice of politics or governing is, therefore, no surprise and certainly not the point. The effect of the office of the president now is to distract and entertain. The absence of any previous political experience as an office holder from Mr Trump’s professional résumé was transformed into a positive attribute: his outsider, non‐political vision to make ‘America great again’. While his selection as the Republican party’s nominee and his subsequent election as president seemed to surprise many, Debord’s framework suggests that his eventual presence as American president is not an anomaly.
Mr Trump’s spectacular narrative showcased and built on his reality television rooted image as a decisive and strong leader, unafraid to make clear judgments and take action based on those judgments. He offered traditional Republican voters and other disaffected voters the spectacular image of a future president unafraid to take politically incorrect decisions that would address their security concerns and deal with their despair at the current state of decision‐making in Washington. One of the lessons of Trump’s nomination and election campaigns is that the content of what was said—regardless of how outrageous or off‐putting it may have been—may not be as important as traditionally thought. What may be more important for the future of American politics is how what is said by a candidate plays as distraction and entertainment.
Donald Trump’s election should be seen as a logical development of the ways in which politics in America has become spectacle. It serves notice that things are now different, with inversion appearing now as the norm. If a person wants to hold the attention of the electorate and motivate his or her volunteer and donor base, then boredom with a long campaign and the explanation of policy positions becomes the new enemy. Boredom needs to be avoided at all costs and inversion now appears to be the new best way to do that. Today, the major development in America is that politics has merged with entertainment. Future political success in presidential campaigns may well be determined by how close future American presidential aspirants can come to being a hybridised ‘politainer’.
Slavoj Žižek, in a February 2017 lecture sponsored by Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University and recorded on YouTube, made a cogent and forceful argument that Donald Trump’s election victory marked a new phenomenon in American politics and one whose impacts should not be underestimated. Žižek’s point is that Mr Trump’s victory is quite unlike anything that has gone before, at least in recent history. Žižek was also critical of the way in which there has been a satirical engagement with Trump. Led by American late night television hosts such as Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and programmes such as Saturday Night Live, the satirisation of the new president risks making the task of analysing the Trump presidency into just another television spectator sport, with the unanticipated consequence of further normalising the practices and processes contributing to his victory. Without citing Debord, Žižek is saying that successful opposition to the Trump presidency requires that we stop being spectators.
Whether or not that will happen remains an open question. Because the question remains open, Guy Debord’s framework on power deserves to be revisited. During the course of preparing this article, evidence emerged that this may be happening. American academic Robert Zaretsky cited Debord extensively in an opinion piece for the New York Times, published on 20 February 2017. Zaretsky concluded that serious opposition to Trump and the Republican party involving national level marches and protests could have an impact on shattering the spectacle of the Trump presidency. I am not sure that I agree with this assessment.
Any shattering of spectacular power will not happen easily. That academics such as Zaretsky consider Debord when developing their understanding of the Trump phenomenon is a useful and encouraging development—if only because by understanding how the spectacle works might its effects be undone. My own view is more sympathetic with that of Žižek, in that civility in political discourse first needs to return, but then I believe more is required. Viewing the election of Donald Trump as an anomaly would be mistaken. His election represents the long‐term outcome of a series of developments going back at least fifty years to those first presidential debates between Mr Nixon and Mr Kennedy. American politics at least, and probably state politics in general, has entered a new age of celebrity.
To illustrate, I draw attention to the following recent news events. Two American media stars of global reach—Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson—indicated separately that they might be interested in launching presidential bids in 2020. Ms Winfrey has subsequently denied any interest, but who knows how her future may beckon? For those unfamiliar with Mr Johnson’s credentials, he is a major movie star who began his career as an American football player in Canada, then had a very successful career as a professional wrestler, followed by his even more successful cinema career. Neither of these people have held elected office, and neither has so far indicated a programme or policy. In fairness to them, I am not aware that either has consciously sought this sort of media attention. Nevertheless, each cited the election of Donald Trump as suggesting the presidency might be possible for them.
However a person emerges to challenge the spectacular politics embodied by President Trump, the political task today will be to move beyond political critique to political movement. For a consistent political critique of the Trump presidency and its impacts, late‐night television hosts such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have provided powerful, ongoing critiques, while the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live are providing wide ranging satirical skewering each week. What has been lacking within this world of images has been a way to move from critique to movement. That may now be changing with the recent news that documentary film maker and Academy Award winner Michael Moore has teamed with film maker and distributor Harvey Weinstein to issue a new documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. In addition, social activist Naomi Klein is writing a book on the Trump presidency and how activism to alter its course could be planned. Both Klein and Moore qualify as spectacular stars. Taken together, Klein’s and Moore’s contributions are unknowingly mimicking Debord’s own personal path of détournement through the creation of cinematic and written tools. While this sort of political work may address the immediate desire of many to have an effective response to the Trump presidency, something more substantial and engaged will probably be required to address the broader changes flowing from ‘spectacularisation’. The next step following this necessary engagement of the spectacular by the spectacular will most likely involve the development of a broad political response that provides an alternative vision to the spectacular politics at work today, one in which civility and generosity figure large.