Elections made irrelevant-- by the digital age

Competition has long been a feature of politics, but the situation has become crazy. You have seen it, heard it on TV, listened to your friends express intense opinions about politics and wondered where is it all heading? Carl Bernstein appeared on the Sunday morning cable talk shows last weekend and called the extreme divide between right and left a "Cold Civil War." Something has changed. Hard to say exactly and what it is... but the songwriter Bob Dylan saw it coming: "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is-- do you Mr. Jones?" (Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965)

Barack Obama's 2008 election was immediately followed by Mitch McConnell promising to do everything possible to prevent the president's re-election. Sour grapes? Perhaps. But look what's followed Donald Trump's election, albeit by electoral college. More bitterness, resentment, hatred. And George W. Bush did not exactly enter office with a great mandate. That one went to the Supreme Court to be settled in a highly controversial decision-- hanging chads and the whole bit.

The handwriting is on the wall.... elections are becoming irrelevant. The winners no longer gain the support of the opposing party and we have a continual war, a conflict never resolved by election  results. We might blame the bitter partisanship between right and left as the cause of the chaos. Donald Trump's unorthodox victory and pugnacious personality may seem like an exception to the rule. Think again. These changes are not a one-off problem, or something that will never happen again. Gridlock is here to stay, the result of a new, instant electronic environment.

Amazingly, Marshall McLuhan predicted the downfall of the ballot box. He spells out word-for-word in his Playboy interview of 1969. McLuhan correctly anticipated the changes imposed by technology would bring sweeping changes, including an end to representative democracy as we know it. And be prepared for far greater changes:

"We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions."

Marshall McLuhan died in 1980-- long before the bitter animosity of today's political contests had appeared on the scene. He attributes the change to technology, the end of the mechanical age and the rise of the digital age. The electronic world we presently inhabit has no patience for the old system of the ballot box, and the acceptance of election results with a clear outcome delineating winners and losers. The media environment has changed and everything else with it. Here is McLuhan's single paragraph of explanation-- so much more profound and helpful than tonight's discussion on CNN or Fox.

"In our software world of instant electronic communications movement, politics is shifting from the old pattern of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision-making. In a tribal all-at-once culture the idea of the "public" as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by mass society in which everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society."

Playboy interview (March 1969)

Electron Don: Trump taps out the obituary of print media (part 2)

March 1969-- Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan

McLUHAN: The Gutenberg galaxy is being replaced by the constellation of Marconi.

PLAYBOY: You've discussed the constellation in general terms, but what precisely are the electric media that you contend have supplanted the mechanical technology?

McLUHAN: The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense of function as the old mechanical media did-- i.e. the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing a an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye-- but have enhanced and externalized out entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existences. The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break between oral-tribal man and visual man.

Donald Trump's disinterest in print-era structures, including the Constitution, a print document at the heart of the American Republic, makes him an iconoclast and president at the same time. But for how long? He passes up the hallowed document for the latest breaking news from Breitbart or Fox News. Donald's media-dominated worldview announces it's a new world out there baby-- and only the fast survive. Reality changes, new cycles shrink by the day. Today's story disappears before tomorrow, evaporates faster than a Snapchat posting. Somehow we cannot see this world. The electronic world is all around us. We cannot perceive the electronic world, McLuhan states, much like a fish cannot detect the water all around.

Trump as an integral, electronic man-- confident in his own judgement, has shown little respect for the state apparatus-- the bureaucracies with initials like CIA, FBI, NSA-- that are carryovers from the print era. Trump has soundly rejected the expertise of the experts. Those geniuses got us into a mess in Iraq. I don't need no friggin alphabets to tell me what to think... said Trump. He declared war on his opponents-- Low Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, Little Marco and Crooked Hillary-- and won. Nobody came up with a single nickname for Donald Trump. Maybe we should call him Electron Don--

Guglielmo Marconi invented the telegraph around 1890 and started us down the electronic path. McLuhan explains, "The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of  the new electric media."

Donald Trump tapping out his tweets is very reminiscent of Marconi tapping on his telegraph. Trump may be the best marketer, the best brander and the best Madison Ave marketing man to come down the chute. His mastery of the universe of instantaneous, global communication separates him from the competitors but creates a great sense of anxiety. His name is on everybody's lips. Trump is so ubiquitous that he has become the medium, more important than any message. His mere existence dwarfs the policies, malleable beliefs, and ever-changing, tweeted-out opinions.

Trump has Mafia Don tendencies. He placed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner around the table with Angela Merkel, like his kids like were equals to a world leader. Family above everything. La Cosa Nostra...Angela Merkel, sitting on those White House stuffed chairs for a photo op, asked him, "Should we shake hands?" Donald ignored her question. Kind of boorish to ignore a lady. The photographers kept firing away with their cameras. Maybe he was right? Maybe the two leaders shaking hands would make for an awkward pose...

Donald Trump is the master of imagery. He, more than all the rest, understands that politics is no longer policy, but political imagery.  The electronic world is a fast-moving game; brings us all closer together while pushing us into our separate tribal communities-- creating "a crisis of identity," the likes we have not seen since Gutenberg in 1450.

Hang on to your hats, and your cellphones.