Politics Is Conspicuous Consumption

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 01, 2021

 

Snuffling around in the dense underbrush of his own resentments and anxieties, Paul Krugman of the New York Times has happened upon a truffle of truth: Politics is consumption.

 

Expounding upon a “Snake Oil Theory of the Modern Right,” Professor Krugman notes that many right-wing media figures who push vaccine kookery and Ivermectin quackery make a fair bit of their money selling questionable dietary supplements and sundry nostrums — not literal snake oil, but literal fish oil, among other products.

 

(N.B.: The Mayo people are pretty friendly toward fish oil — and by Mayo, I mean Mayo Clinic, not the shady lobbyists in the employ of Big Mayonnaise.)

 

The people who fall for political conspiracies, in Professor Krugman’s judgment, “are also the kind of people willing to believe that medical elites are lying to them and that they can solve their health problems by ignoring professional advice and buying patent medicines instead.”

 

The important phrase in that sentence is not “professional advice” or “patent medicines” — it is “the kind of people,” which is, of course, what all of this is really about.

 

Consumption is a form of signaling that is intricately interrelated with other affiliations that are not exclusively economic but are instead social and cultural, and therefore linked to politics. That’s why you can be relatively confident that people who drive Ford F-250s and buy their groceries at a Walmart Super Center don’t vote the same way as people who drive Subarus and buy their groceries at Whole Foods — and don’t pretend that you don’t know how each set votes!

 

You know how.

 

Professor Krugman goes on to note that three dietary-supplement companies are among the largest advertisers on Tucker Carlson’s program, and that much of conspiracy entrepreneur Alex Jones’s advertising income is derived from supplement sellers.

 

It is true that you can tell something about a publication from its advertisers (though Professor Krugman, whose expertise lies elsewhere, misunderstands what that something is). But if ads for fish-oil supplements and doggie vitamins tell us something about Fox News or talk radio, what might we learn from the ads in the publication that brings us the work of Paul Krugman — the New York Times?

 

In Tuesday’s edition, the one in which Professor Krugman’s column appears, the advertising tells an interesting story. For one thing, there isn’t much of it — not in the print newspaper, anyway. That is not a sign that the paper is, as Donald Trump likes to insist, failing. The Times has understood for some time that print advertising, which is in rapid decline, is not where it is going to be paid in the future: It is earning its bread from subscriptions and from a digital-advertising business that it is increasingly bringing in-house in order to better curate what readers see. That’s a very different kind of advertising from the mass-market stuff you see on cable-news shows: Even though there are some pretty high-income people in the cable-news audience, you aren’t going to see Chopard ads there.

 

As does Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, the print edition of the Times contains a great many “house ads,” meaning advertisements for the publication itself, though it is pretty spare beyond those. Even the Tiffany & Co. ad that sat in the top right corner of A3 for more than a century has gone away — but not because the readers of the Times are no longer people who buy middle-market jewelry: Monica Rich Kosann is peddling an “All You Need Is Love” pendant in 18k gold or sterling silver in the old Tiffany spot, and another jeweler has a large ad a few pages earlier. The Times advertises goods for affluent people: Knoll, purveyor of tasteful modern furniture, takes a half page, and Queer Eye personality Jonathan Van Ness takes out a two-page spread for his new line of hair-care products. Angelika Film Center, which will be advertising in the New York Times after Judgment Day, takes out a spot to let you know when you can stop in and see Ma Belle, My Beauty at its Houston Street cinema. The U.S. Open takes a quarter page in sports.

 

I do not think that Professor Krugman is getting memos from his bosses at the New York Times Co. — about half of which is owned by a handful of big financial firms of the sort Professor Krugman likes to complain about: BlackRock, Capital Research, etc. — demanding that he do something to help sell JVN hair-care products or push Knoll sofas. That isn’t how these things work. You don’t see Patek ads in the Economist because that esteemed newspaper is tailoring its content in such a way as to sell high-end Swiss timepieces. Patek advertises in the Economist because that is where its customers already are. Ford advertises on the Super Bowl broadcast, and Rolls Royce doesn’t.

 

There are some complications: Republicans and Democrats who subscribe to any national newspaper or to a publication such as National Review are, socioeconomically, more like one another — despite their political difference — than they are like people who don’t subscribe to newspapers or current-affairs magazines. Talk-radio listeners of radically different political views have a lot in common with other talk-radio listeners, which is why figures as different as Thom Hartmann and Glenn Beck both hawk gold coins. And you’ll see a fair amount of similarity between advertisers on left-wing cable-news shout shows and advertisers on their right-wing equivalents.

 

But you won’t see many of those dodgy-seeming supplement companies advertising in the New York Times. What you can expect to see in the Times and publications with similar readerships, though not as much as you once did, are ads from prestige names — Cartier, Patek, Hermès, etc. — alongside a lot of content surgically targeted at well-off college graduates who live in big, liberal cities and enjoy high-end travel and fine restaurants. It is a very interesting experience to be read enraged anti-capitalist screeds subsidized by people who want to sell you a Rolex.

 

(Did you know that Rolex is owned by a nonprofit? It is: the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation.)

 

Many of those in Tucker Carlson’s audience, to stick with that example, are people who feel condescended to — and failed by — those they call “elites,” snoots and snobs and well-heeled ornaments of the establishment, the “kind of people” who read the New York Times or write for it, who live in Brooklyn or Austin or aspire to, who use American Express Platinum Cards, who make reservations at the French Laundry when Gavin Newsom isn’t hogging all the tables. And the lesson from the advertisements of the New York Times is that they are not entirely wrong: If you are impulse-buying tickets for the U.S. Open or are someone who might plausibly be in the market for a Cartier Tank Louis, then you’re doing all right.

 

Nobody has to tell Professor Krugman to comfort the comfortable — his columns are as comfortable to them as an $11,000 Knoll sofa advertised in the New York Times.

 

A snob, properly understood, is not an aristocrat who looks down his nose at the plebs — it is a commoner who, after getting a little money or some social connections, affects the manners and tastes that he imagines to be aristocratic, and then looks down on his equals. There is a tremendous amount of that kind of snobbery in American life, among people who sneer at others who follow some sport or entertainment they judge to be lowly, who listen to unfashionable music or live in an unfashionable place. (You know: Plano.) And there is an inversion of that, too, among the right-wing talk-radio hosts who pretend to be honky-tonk-lovin’ good-ol’-boys while traveling by private jet, who sneer at Upper West Side culture snobs from their penthouses on the other side of Central Park, etc. Ted Cruz of Princeton and Harvard was the grand champion of the form until J. D. Vance of Yale, the New York Times best-seller list, and Peter Thiel’s venture-capital outfit launched his Senate campaign. Though surely Tucker Carlson himself is the most notable champion of blue-collar populism ever to be expelled from a Swiss boarding school.

 

Consumption is a form of communication. And, in our tawdry little age of carefully constructed social-media identities, all of our signaling must be tailored to say the same thing: That is why we increasingly have only right-wing and left-wing news sources, to say nothing of right-wing coffee companies and right-wing cell-phone companies, left-wing insurance companies and left-wing software companies, etc. It wasn’t all that long ago that anti-vaxx buffoonery was bipartisan, but these are polarized times. There is a reason why Teen Vogue today is to the left of Mother Jones — it is not the elevation of fashion over politics but the unification of fashion with politics . . . and coffee, and cars, and fitness regimens, etc.

 

Dietary supplements, too. Professor Krugman may or may not be aware of this, but there is a very large and dynamic market of risible health-care hoo-haw that thrives in the incense-scented aisles of progressive-leaning retailers in Democrat-voting neighborhoods all around the country, scams and non-performing goods ranging from probiotics to essential oils to activated charcoal and potentially dangerous trends such as coffee enemas and — I’m not making this up — encapsulated human placentas. And this nonsense makes its way into policy, too: The so-called Affordable Care Act offered a sop to the hippie-dippy Left by opening up insurance coverage for pseudoscientific quackery popular among progressives (homeopathic and naturopathic medicine, chiropractic, etc.), which so embarrassed some progressives that the cretins over at PolitiFact felt compelled to lie about it.

 

Professor Krugman believes that Tucker Carlson’s audience is full of plebs and crypto-plebs who fall for patent-medicine hucksters. Tucker Carlson’s audience thinks that Professor Krugman and his New York Times colleagues write for snoots whose progressivism is at most one degree of separation removed from Wall Street money, who check the time on their Patek watches on their way to Angelika, and who look down on hinterland Walmart shoppers if they ever bother to think about them at all.

 

Both sides have it about right.