Editor, The Beacon:
Halloween continues into November. You’ve probably heard the saying “life imitates art.” It goes back to 1891, when British writer and keen observer of the human condition Oscar Wilde noticed that beautiful and compelling art shapes how we see and what we believe. The astute phrase could be updated for our media-influenced times to the notion that people’s beliefs imitate the impulses of the powerful, the wealthy or famous.
Most people want the styles and thinking of those who seize their attention. Each era has its norms, from art, from entertainment, or from other traditions.
The theme of the past few months has been “America the Scary,” with each party choosing their own path to inspiring fear. Life imitates Halloween — 76 percent of American voters think democracy is under threat, but as with the variety of costumes, people’s worries vary.
President-elect Donald Trump centered his campaign on fear — fear of immigrants, fear of big cities, and fear of Democrats in general. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke more calmly, but she also raised fears about Trump’s own quest for power. They both used fear to seize attention.
Trump did this more than Harris; his great political skill, ever since he achieved national fame with a tough-guy persona on The Apprentice. In that arena, being tough works best if you can show that things are in bad shape. He filled the same bill as a politician, like when he boldly declared, “I alone can fix” America.
Trump has a nose for identifying the sore spots in American society and among big swaths of American voters. He is an American original, even as the politics of fear he engages in so well has prior examples. Just as Halloween translates the fearful into the fun, this brand of politics has used ways to accent scary messages in engaging and even fun ways.
The founders were so worried about the role of entertainment in politics that, for example, John Adams refused public promotion of his own candidacy. In the Civil War era, Abraham Lincoln leaped past the written page by talking with citizens in thoughtful and engaging ways. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt used the new medium of radio to talk with people in their own homes with Fireside Chats.
These trends used the tools of entertainment — the popular press, live theater and mass media — to communicate with the public even as these politicians remained largely on-script with political talk. The boundary remained between the fun stuff of entertainment and the serious stuff of politics.
But then, the boundary blurred with John Kennedy, with the glamorous charm that gave him the look and feel of a Hollywood celebrity, and Ronald Reagan, who began in Hollywood.
Reagan relied on his acting talents to prepare for politics, noticing “I don’t understand how anyone could do this job without having been an actor.” Trump shows political savvy in campaigning even more explicitly as an entertainer.
Trump’s script is that the U.S. in the past four years has become a “nation in decline.” It’s like the scene in a Halloween haunted mansion — yeah, the house is big, but it’s falling apart! Not just fear of immigrants, but fear that “they’re eating [your] pets.” Not just fear of cities, but saying that his opponent “destroyed” San Francisco, Milwaukee is “horrible,” and Baltimore is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Corrections and fact-checking never gained as much attention as the dramatics.
Like him or not, Trump speaks in the language of Halloween. As with that holiday night, the scares are creepy, even though they aren’t real. But scares appeal to real fears. Leading with the drama, even if with fake news, appeals to real fears. That’s the substance in his over-the-top messages. Many of his constituents have been dissatisfied with elites benefiting from mainstream policies that have been leaving many working Americans feeling abandoned and slipping in status. Surfing the rising tide of entertainment in politics, Trump has been adept at using his dramatic speeches to gain attention.
Expect, my fellow Americans, more drama ahead!
Paul Croce, DeLand
Croce, newly retired, taught history at Stetson University beginning in 1988, and directed the American Studies Program. With retirement, he is applying his teaching and research to The Public Classroom at https://publicclassroom.substack.com/about.
