The Great Unifier?

I figure we’ll probably spend the rest of human history¹ arguing about the historical and cultural conditions that led to the election of Donald Trump, and so I feel like I can throw a theory out there with some confidence that, while it certainly won’t be the smartest one², it also won’t turn out to be the dumbest. The theory is this:

Pictured: a pair of headphones. You decide if that's
a metaphor.

Donald Trump is our way of coping with the increased fragmentation of our culture.

Plenty of people (myself included) have already noted that the way we interact with media has become increasingly choice-driven. Each of us goes through the days with headphones on, metaphorically speaking. Podcasts instead of broadcasts; Netflix and Hulu instead of cable TV - so on and so forth. But I don’t think we have fully grasped the extent to which that has impacted us.

There is no social consequence for not watching, reading, listening to, or hearing about something anymore. Life in 2018 is just a bunch of people asking each other, “Hey, have you seen Show X” and getting back, “Nah, I’ve been watching Show Y.” And that exchange doesn’t lead to all that  interesting of a conversation, it turns out.

And even when someone has seen Show X, the chances are extremely slim that they happened to watch it around the same time that you did. I listened to the third season of Serial over my Thanksgiving break. I mentioned this to a group of people recently, and one of them had actually listened to it. But it was three or four weeks before, so she wasn’t super eager to discuss it; it wasn’t fresh in her mind like it was in mine. We touched on a few of the most salient cases, but the conversation fizzled out pretty quickly.

Or this: last week, I decided on a whim⁴ to start watching the fourth season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which came out, like, six months ago or something. I guess the fact that I don’t know exactly when kind of proves the point here. But this was a show that I had enjoyed the first few seasons of, and yet when I saw that the newest season came out, I felt no sense that I ought to watch it. I’m not even talking about desire, really. I’m talking about that gentle pressure, the little feeling of obligation that gets us to brush our teeth or stop at a red light. But even “obligation” is too strong a word for what I mean. It’s more like: “Oh, all right, why not?”

Serial has convinced me that, in fact, Cleveland does
not rock.

I didn’t watch it when it came out and absolutely nothing happened as a result.

I watched it some-amount-of-months later and absolutely nothing will happen as a result.

A few episodes in, I texted a friend who I knew had also seen and enjoyed the first couple of seasons, and recommended that he watch the latest one. He probably won’t. And I don’t blame him. I would do the exact same thing. In fact, I am doing the same thing right now, with that exact same friend, with regards to several pieces of media that he has recommended to me.

It goes beyond specific pieces of media. There is hardly any mass culture anymore.⁷ The people that kids consider to be “huge celebrities” are people that adults have never even heard of, and vice-versa. (Ask someone under fifteen who their favorite musician is. I bet they’ll either say a random noun - “Logic,” “Offset,” “Marshmello”⁹ - or something that sounds like a Playstation cheat code.) There have always been generational (and other) divides, but I would argue that they used to take place on the level of answers and now they take place on the level of questions. Of topics. That is, we used to disagree about whether the Backstreet Boys⁸ were good or bad, but now we don’t even have a Backstreet Boys to disagree about.

But we do have Donald Trump. Everybody in America knows who Trump is, whether they are young, old, black, white, rich, poor, male, or female. He is the one thing we all have in common, our one common source of entertainment. We may disagree (and disagree vehemently, passionately) regarding what to think about him, but the fact is: we are all thinking about him.¹⁰

Even when we’re not talking about him - say, at Thanksgiving dinner, if we follow the how-to guides (a hilarious and slightly alarming invention, by the way) - we are deliberately, consciously not talking about him. He is the elephant in every room, the unmentioned presence in virtually every conversation.

And so maybe we all somehow, unconsciously, recognized that we needed someone like Trump to keep our culture from becoming completely fragmented. To keep us from becoming a total confederacy, an archipelago of individual, isolated islands.¹¹ We needed someone to divide us - in order to bring us together.

¹ i.e., the next twenty years or so

² That will probably come from, like, Chomsky or something

³ That will almost definitely come from Trump himself

⁴ The spark that got me to watch it, for what it’s worth, was that one day I was walking around with the name “Coriolanus Burt”⁵ stuck in my head, couldn’t recall what it was from, put in a little bit of time trying to remember without looking it up, but then gave in and searched the name, and found out it was the name of Titus’s nemesis from UKS

⁵ “Coriolanus Burt” came into my consciousness because last weekend, I spent what was probably a fruitless hour or so slogging my way through T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”⁶ which alludes to his namesake (along with practically everything else in history and literature)

⁶ I decided to read “The Waste Land” because it was mentioned in a New York Times crossword puzzle clue at some point, and it seemed bizarre that I had made it through a whole English major without being compelled to read something so famous

⁷ Somewhere, Theodor Adorno is probably dancing in his grave

⁸ Or Eminem. Or Elvis. Or jazz.

⁹ No W, because otherwise he’d get sued by Big Sugar.

¹⁰ Which, by the way, is I’m pretty sure is all he wants, anyway

¹¹ Now it’s John Donne who’s dancing