Politics of Fear in the Social Media Age: the rise of Donald Trump

The last thing I wanted to devout time and attention to on this blog was Donald Trump, but it seems now almost inevitable - and therefore necessary - to understand and assess the threat of a rising Trump. With the Republican and Democratic National Conventions coming to an end and a now secure knowledge of the official nominees for each party, the reality of Trump as a potential American President is no longer a practical joke or internet meme we should laugh at, it’s a danger we need to react very wisely to. There are more than enough sources looking at Trump’s inadequacy for one of the most important roles of the world, but I’d like to look at the rise of this nationalistic business-man as an opportunity to understand what is meant by a politics of fear and how it thrives within an intense social media environment. Not only do I want to understand how Trump’s campaign strategy - one plagued by offensive and divisive rhetoric - has become so successful in 2016 America, I also want to understand the way new media platforms like Twitter or Facebook play a role in the polarisation of politics and the intensification of a discourse of fear and nationalistic division.

Whilst the use of fear as a tool for political control is far from historically unprecedented, it appears that in our current global political climate that it has become one of the most powerful - and dangerous - tools used to gather uncritical support. For Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent Frank Furedi, the aim of such rhetoric is “to transform fear into a cultural perspective through which society makes sense of itself. […] The culture of fear is underpinned by a profound sense of powerlessness, a diminished sense of agency that leads people to turn themselves into passive subjects who can only complain that ‘we are frightened’.”. In a similar way that terrorism employs gratuitous violence and the consequent fear it creates as a political strategy, politicians draw on collective fear as an emotion-based tool of power in which people are willing to give up their agency faced with the idea of an imminent threat to their existence. In The Politics of Fear: What Ring-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, linguist Ruth Wodak defines two key features of right-wing populist discourses; The first key feature of those that employ a politics of fear is the idea of a clearly constructed threat, a foreign ‘Other’ whose mere existence endangers the national wellbeing and whose exclusion must be prioritised at all costs. The second key-feature Wodak describes as the ‘arrogance of ignorance’, a nostalgia-infused appeal to anti-intellectualism and common-instinct that mobilises against all new developments. In every aspect imaginable and to a scale that few could have expected, former Apprentice presenter and business-man Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign has exemplified politics of fear in the contemporary internet-age era.

From the day he descended on an escalator, announced his presidency, and called Mexicans ‘rapists’ to his announcement as the 2016 Republican candidate at the R.N.C, Trump has played the politics-of-fear game better than perhaps any recent modern politician (if one can even call him that…) prior to him. Unlike traditional right-wing populist movements who have the tendency to choose one particular scapegoat, Trump’s campaign has decided to ‘Other’ practically all non-white American fragments of global society, creating not only the sense of one sole identifiable threat but rather a cocktail of minorities and foreign nations who are all collectively causing the demise of a ‘once Great’ America. Trump also demonstrates the arrogance of ignorance at perhaps its most brutal and simple-minded state; with ‘political correctness’ representing the discursive enemy, Trump’s rhetoric is based on simple, impulsive and often provocative statements (and often, the least void of thought and fact the more popular for Trump). In this way, Trump’s campaign draws almost exclusively on the ignorance, dissatisfaction, and fearful/hateful perspectives of right-wing Americans to gather political support - regardless of whom the scapegoat actually is.

Whilst the link between the reality-tv genre and Trump’s political campaign is often pointed out, it’s important to understand Trump’s background and rise to fame when assessing his rapid success in the 2016 Elections and what this tells us about ourselves as a global society. We all know Trump’s success - beyond the (often-failed) business ventures that begun with an exorbitant loan from his billionaire father - can mainly be accredited to his ability to value and export his name (and face) to a variety of products and markets from towers to universities to steaks and so forth… Similarly to the ways the Kardashians can attribute their success to their ability to appear everywhere and market everything and anything to their adoring fan-base (and even to those who dislike them), Trump’s approach to marketing politics follows this Reality-TV star model. His time spent as the face of The Apprentice TV series only served to solidify his constantly-appearing public character, a character very much based on the personification of capitalist values. Whilst the idea Trump personifies the American Dream is as fictitious as the dream itself, he has though come to personify the brutal, profit-crazy, and humanistically-void character of contemporary Capitalism. Beyond creating a polarising personality that feeds easily into the daily conversations (regardless of whether its positive or negative), Trump has most importantly understood how to market and sell his particular brand of contemporary right-wing populism on a scale that no one had previously expected from the often-mocked Apprentice presenter.

What the strategists behind Trump’s campaign have understood and applied to his race for the 2016 U.S presidency is the power of a social media culture that values the ‘viral’. In social theory, many academics have linked the idea of media events as not only ‘viral’ events, but actual viruses themselves. For American media theorist Rushkoff, “media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But, instead of travelling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace […] Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the form of ideological code..”. In this way, viral media does not necessarily assess the quality or importance of the content it spreads but rather focuses on its potential to spread exponentially on a global media-scale. Similarly to the arrogance of ignorance that characterises a politics of fear, a culture of viral media often discredits thought and intellectualism in the name of global spreadability. It is within this context of constant (often ridiculous) internet content that Reality-Tv’s cultural standards flourish into success and whilst usually this point has applied to stars like the Kardashians, Trump has made this a standard of U.S political reality. In fact, Trump's campaign relies almost solely on the power of his rhetoric or actions to go viral; in a world where all publicity is good (political) publicity, Trump's success can in part be attributed to his ability to remain constantly in the public eye from the screen of our iPhones, to our Facebook pages, to the constant cover of mainstream newspapers (and how better to do this than to feed from the controversial, rude, and racist?). According to the New York Times, by May 2016 Trump had managed to gather over 2 billion US dollars worth of free press/coverage (in certain months earning as much free press as Hilary Clinton and Ted Cruz combined). Whilst mainstream media will often chastise Trump for his words or actions, their constant upkeep of his image on their front-page covers is as responsible for his rise as the man's campaign strategists themselves. What is perhaps most terrifying about Trump's rise to American political success is not only his outspoken bigotry and fear-mongering, but the ways in which he has exposed us as a civil society who equates its approach to politics to its approach to Reality-TV and viral media culture and who, in the face of a constructed ideological threat, is willing to sacrifice its own humanity.

As we slowly approach the November 2016 U.S Elections - a process the whole world sits and observes nervously - the fear that many express is whether Trump's Democratic opponent Hilary Clinton will demonstrate the necessary charisma (and somewhat tech-savy political approach) to defeat the clearly unqualified businessman. The different sectors of U.S society that had showed tremendous excitement for the socialist-leaning policies of Bernie Sanders have lacked the equivalent support and enthusiasm for Hilary - some even going so far they claim they would vote for Trump instead. It is always a sad reality when a supposedly-democratic system leaves us with nothing but "the lesser of two evils" options - but it unfortunately appears this is the state of the current U.S Election. What needs to be understood about Trump's rise is his dangerous potential for right-wing extremism and his constant prioritisation of capital over humanity (a trait that whilst positive for business moguls, terrifying for government representatives). Beyond being extremely unqualified and lacking perhaps all of the necessary historical and political knowledge to succeed in any form of peaceful foreign policy, Trump represents our own cult of 'arrogance of ignorance' where we prioritise fear, impulse, and extremity over any form of critical thought. We need to approach Trump for what he is, a virus of our polarised global media culture that only grows stronger with the more clicks we give his name. Only when we go back to treating our politics as social policies, of which we must always remain critical and thoroughly-informed, and not the same way we treat our episodes of Reality-TV shows and stars, then we can create governments whom are based not on the mindless accumulation of capital but rather the improvement of humanity's condition. While many in this upcoming elections may feel uninspired to vote facing the two polarising choices they are presented with, it is essential to remember that without a base of well-thought-out voters to back the voices of democracy, social policy, and human rights, we might be saluting President Donald J. Trump in November 2016...

Sources

Frank Furedi - Politics of Fear - First published on spiked, 28 October 2004 - http://www.frankfuredi.com/articles/politicsFear-20041028.shtml

Ruth Wodak - The Politics of Fear: What Ring-Wing Populist Discourses Mean - 2015 - SAGE Publications

Douglas Rushkoff - Media Virus!:Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture - 1996 - Ballantine Books

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