Trump and the rise of the media-industrial complex in American politics.

• Author: Kardas, Tuncay
• Position: ARTICLE - Report

ABSTRACT While controversies and debates proliferate about Trump's Presidency, there is little analysis of the context and factors leading to his rise and politics. The liberal axiom (Trump has won, but Russia swayed the 2016 U.S. elections) often conceals from view a significant episode that involves new players and dynamics shifting the Republican Party and U.S. politics to the radical right, which ultimately contributed to Trump's election. This analysis provides an investigation into the actors and intricacies that enabled Trump's election success and shaped contemporary U.S. politics. It examines structural, cultural and personal dynamics behind Trump's victory. In particular, the study identifies the specific role played by new media platforms and industrial interests (the media-industrial complex) as a new force shaping U.S. politics.

Introduction

Political pundits of all stripes and many political scientists have misread the prospects for Trump's Presidency. Trump's election as the American President was seen almost as an 'impossible' venture on numerous grounds, but most notably, the Republican Party elite stood against his candidacy right from the onset and tried to block him. After all, the motto the 'party decides' is not just the title of a widely read political science book, it is an historical fact. And yet, against all odds, Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential race after a year and a half long, uphill battle becoming, the 45th President of the United States. A neophyte in politics, Trump avoided mainstream ideologies or affiliations, including that of the Republican Party itself. Instead, he appealed to the economic and physical fears of the voters with his politically incorrect messages and white nationalism. Seven months into the presidency, Trump has already deeply shaken the political order and the body politic as he continues the rebellion against the national and international liberal order since the primaries. Violating the norms (and sometimes rules) of democratic government has meanwhile become the order of the day. The growing political reaction to the Trump administration and the emergent showdown between different social forces has become a worrying fiat of American politics.

While controversies and debates abound, there is little analysis of the context and factors leading to his presidency and shaping his politics. The liberal wild card (Trump won, but Russia swayed the 2016 U.S. elections) often conceals from view a significant episode that involves new players and dynamics shifting the Republican Party and U.S. politics to the far right, which significantly contributed to Trump's election. Why did the U.S. electorate radically alter its behavior and choose a candidate outside of the established Washington elite or political-economic order? Why did the preferences of U.S. citizens differ this time? Who will govern now? Admittedly fully addressing such questions would be difficult; nonetheless, it is necessary to pin down the factors, actors and context behind Trump's success. The success is often explained away as stemming from voter bases' revenge, identity, 'white men rage,' 'authoritarian voters,' leadership-charisma and so on. Such views ignore, however, the political-economic structures and the underlying changes that have taken place in American politics. Drawing from the complexity theory and economic elite domination, this analysis investigates the intricacies that helped Trump's electoral success and shape U.S. politics. The paper examines the structural, cultural and personal dynamics behind Trump's success and politics. In particular, it identifies the roles played by the economic elites, their instruments, and the new media (the media-industrial complex), which together pull the Republican Party and American politics to the far right and, potentially, authoritarianism.

The Anatomy of an Impossible Victory

What are the sources of Trump's victory? How should we understand this most unusual case? To begin with, the existence of a rich scholarly tradition studying political parties and the orientations of the politicians provides little guidance to account for spectacular deviations as evinced in the recent case of Trump presidency. For instance, the dominant theory of American politics, namely the 'party decides' theory, (1) does not shed much light due to its failure to explain the candidacy of Trump in the 2016 nomination battle within the Republican Party. While the allure and success of the Trump campaign has analyzed with the help of different theories of American politics such as economic populism, (2) communication skills, (3) or authoritarian voters, (4) many of these theories fail to capture the complexity of the case since, in part, they rely on mono-causal frameworks. To be sure, this is an old problem as actor-based or politician-centered explanations are still influential in the literature. (5) A recent study eschews politician/actor-based analyses and explains Trump's presidency as emanating from the choices of 'authoritarian voters' rather than, say, the party or ideology. However, it relegates actorness from one level to another--this time to the voters--holding that the voters' authoritarianism "arises casually prior to the political attitudes and behavior that it affects." (6) The study does not address the crucial question as to how authoritarianism is itself formed or shaped by factors other than voter characteristics or contemporary events.

To understand the rise of Trump and his politics, it is, therefore, necessary to go beyond focusing exclusively on personal/group traits or the ideology and instead set the Trump presidency in a wider structural context. The challenge is to understand and locate the contemporary politics behind the rise of Trump in a new and non-reductionist approach. A non-reductionist explanation of a social phenomenon is rarely mono-causal; the inquiry should therefore account for a confluence of factors. Specifically, the research becomes more compact and meaningful when it focuses on three levels that make social action possible: agency, culture and structure. (7) Hence the fundamental question of this analysis can be formulated as follows: what are the new political and economic dynamics in U.S. politics that have affected voters' preferences and produced this tectonic shift? In answering this question, the author seeks to present a fuller account of the confluence of factors behind the recent shifts in U.S. politics that eventually produced the Trump Presidency.

Personal Factors

An important factor contributing to Trump's electoral success and the subsequent political rhetoric has been related to his personality. Trump's idiosyncratic ruling and communication style continues to define his Presidency. However, some of Trump's personality traits related to many earlier developments, as in the case of McGovern-Fraser commission's decision in late 1960s. The latter decision changed the Democratic Party's presidential nominating process, gave way to the rise in U.S. politics of well-educated, affluent professional classes. Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, were highly educated, coming from different generational backgrounds and higher echelons of the U.S. education and neither saw the Depression or World War II. (8) The shift in leadership had an unexpected but politically game-changing consequence: Party elites in the professional-managerial position (Democratic and Republican) began to dominate the political scene at the expense of organized interests and the traditional party base. The new leadership showcased the idea that the resolution of political problems necessitated education. It also resulted in both the liberalization of knowledge/status and the emergence of technocratic approach to politics. Another vital outcome of the takeover of the ruling party by the well-educated and professional class was the gradual erosion of politics as negotiations between organized interests. (9) In other words, the new party elites held that different social identity groups and political interest groups could simply be reconciled or that disagreements could easily be resolved by recourse to expertise. (10) In sum, the rather naive belief that the problems and contradictions can simply be erased with the politics of compromise in turn generated disconnect between the rulers and the grassroots.

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Trump was the person to take advantage of this political reality. For Trump and his team, the political is a constant struggle for power taking shape in a friend-enemy relationship or as his chief advisor put it bluntly 'politics is war.' (11) More correctly, it is continuation of war with other means. Furthermore, in place of Clinton's vague 'we,' Trump embodied the hope for white lower and middle-classes that were losing their economic and social status and realized that the Republican Party elites were doing nothing to stop it. Trump sought the support of a clearly demarcated electoral base: white America. For example, in an effort to connect the personal with the political, Trump, in the last five years, kept claiming that Obama was not born in America and implying he could neither legally become the President or represent white Americans. He discovered (probably learning through the example of Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin) that economic and social inequality could be interpreted differently than most politicians would assume. He also saw amidst a growing Republican Party insurgency led by the Tea Party, he could be the preferred candidate thanks to a poll dating back to 2011 (PPP) and one in another (Wall Street Journal/NBC) poll in April 2011 among Republican Presidential candidates just before the 2012 election. The conditions were ripe, but he gave up on it when Bin Laden was killed in a raid under Obama administration.

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