By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, January 8, 2018
Here is an error I will confess: Having long expected a
celebrity-driven personality-cult presidential campaign to emerge among
Democrats, I did not fully appreciate how much more powerful a celebrity-driven
personality-cult presidential campaign would be among Republicans.
The origins of my error are obvious in retrospect:
Because Democrats have a much cozier relationship with Hollywood and the other
foundries of celebrity, it seemed natural that a celebrity–political alliance
would take root on the left. But I failed to account for the fact that
Republicans are no less vulnerable to celebrity than are Democrats — and that
Republicans are starved for
celebrity. Imagine a Scott Baio–level has-been speaking before a rapt audience
at the Democratic National Convention or a celebrity on the order of Ted Nugent
leaving Democrats overawed. Sure, Republicans have a few big stars: Clint
Eastwood and . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . . ?
As a cultural force, authentic celebrity of the kind
enjoyed by Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey is orders of magnitude more powerful
than the ersatz celebrity of politics, journalism, and cable news. Sean
Hannity’s Fox News program was the most popular thing on cable news in 2017,
with an audience about 5 percent the size of that of The Big Bang Theory or Thursday
Night Football, neither of which is currently at the top of its ratings
game. Even with wall-to-wall broadcasting, the State of the Union address typically
gets an audience far less than half the size of the Super Bowl’s.
MSNBC is for obvious reasons riding high in the Trump
era, but more than ten times as many people tuned in to watch Oprah interview
Michelle Obama as watch an entire day’s worth of MSNBC programming. That’s what
happens when real celebrity meets politics.
Presidents come and go. Oprah is as fixed as the stars.
Of course she is categorically unqualified for the
office. But have fun imagining Republicans making that case in the shadow of
Donald J. Trump, Very Stable Genius™. Oprah’s formal educational attainments
are modest, whatever political ideas she has seem to be largely undeveloped,
and she has an obvious and regrettable weakness for quacks and cranks of sundry
sorts: anti-vaccine nuts, Dr. Oz, doctors who use Tarot cards to diagnose
thyroid problems, etc. She is a one-woman public-health menace.
At the same time, she more than embodies the virtues
attributed to President Trump: She’s a real billionaire, a self-made one at that,
a woman who started with nothing and became wildly successful with bupkis to go
on but her own grit and shrewdness. President Trump loves to talk about
ratings. You want ratings? Oprah has ratings.
The Democrats would do worse — a great deal worse — if
they decide they need a celebrity: Sean Penn, Ashley Judd, Jerry Springer. (In
the case of Jerry Springer, they did do worse: He was the mayor of Cincinnati.)
And Oprah would have some potential celebrity contenders of some substance:
Mark Cuban for one, Mark Zuckerberg for another.
But the Democrats don’t really need a celebrity. They
have a great talent for making celebrities out of ordinary politicians,
converting a clan of low-rent grifters and halfwits such as the Kennedys into
an ersatz royal family and making the lightly accomplished Barack Obama into a
kind of rock-star messiah for the Davos set. The Democrats have a more fruitful
relationship with celebrity because, unlike most Republicans, they understand
the transactional nature of the celebrity-politician relationship. Movie stars
get into political activism for the same reason they sometimes take six months
off to do serious theater: They want to feel smart, maybe even a little
profound, and, more important, they want to be perceived as that, as intellectually serious. Democratic
politicians connect with celebrities because they want to be seen as cool.
Smart and cool is a very powerful combination for public-relations purposes,
and it’s not what you get when you pair up Mike Pence with the Duck Dynasty guys. Republicans have a
poor handle on the uses of glamour.
But presidential politics in the post-party era — or,
more precisely, in the era of strong partisanship and weak parties, in Julia
Azari’s useful formulation — is quickly devolving into pure tribalism, a form
of cultural totem-jockeying. And that means that old-fashioned things such as
public-policy analysis, party platforms, and even ideology are growing ever
more attenuated. The question isn’t whether you belong to the free-trade party
or to the anti-trade party — I defy you to say convincingly which is which —
but whether you are a Bernie person or a Cruz person, whether you are Team
Oprah or Team Trump.
And if it comes down to Oprah vs. Trump, Republicans
should keep a wary eye on the ratings.
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