The Selling of the President<\/a>,<\/em> and it lays bare how the Presidency shifted from an institution to a \u201cproduct.\u201d The subject is Richard Nixon \u2013 a man who, in 1960, was a sweat-covered pig grunting on TV and showing his ass but, eight years later, was a sleek and infinitely desirable candidate who was even outpacing the Kennedy powerhouse in terms of charisma.<\/p>\nSo\u2026it\u2019s 1968 and the world is on fire. Vietnam is our first Living Room War, and the streets back home have erupted into what was, effectively, a massive and potentially cataclysmic social civil war. The high water mark of the \u201860s had been reached in the fury against social injustices at home and a pointless war that would eventually destroy the American psyche. But that water was rolling back by 1968, leaving a splintered leftist rebellion frustrated by the fact that they\u2019d been throwing themselves against a wall of armored cops and had very little to show for it. For every integrated school, there was an incident like the one in Mississippi where entire towns conspired to murder and disappear civil rights workers. For every victory at the lunch counter, there were fire hoses and dogs let loose on children in the streets. For every opinion turned against Vietnam, there was escalation and expansion of our strikes against not only that country but the surrounding countries. The Left \u2013 which had, nominally, attempted to pursue a nonviolent protest \u2013 fell apart. The students and the NAACP had been battling for a decade and had little to show for it but unenforceable presidential Acts and lots of blood. So they splintered. Where once there was Martin Luther King, now there was Malcolm X. Where once there was the SDS and the Port Huron Statement (\u201ca radical vision for a better future\u201d), now there were The Weathermen (\u201ca white fighting force\u2026to achieve the destruction of US imperialism\u201d). <\/p>\n
When the splintered factions met and battled each other and the establishment on the doorstep of the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, enough was enough. <\/p>\n
And Team Nixon had understood this several years before. The \u201chigh water mark\u201d of the 60s that I\u2019ve been referencing comes from a Hunter Thompson quote. He pegged it as sometime in the mid-60s (in the Depp movie, it was 1965). It was before the Left splintered. Leading up to the \u201868 riots, it seemed like something good was happening. LBJ caved on Civil Rights, the Democrats talked the talk, folks started to realize that Bobby Kennedy was the first (and last) Kennedy with a brain, a heart, and courage. It felt good. It felt like, maybe, we could turn back what we\u2019d been doing. But impatience took over. The weak gave way to the screwheads who thrived on violence, and the Left became the monster that would rise up in the streets and try to claw the world to pieces. The writing was on the wall, even during the glorious days of the revolution. Nixon the failure, Nixon the idiot, Nixon the sweaty pig was just about the only surviving voice from the Right. Everyone else was (literally) having panic attacks in the middle of campaign speeches. The only viable Republican candidate besides Nixon was a fucking actor who\u2019d been accidentally elected governor of California. Ronald something or other. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Democrats were in a free for all even before LBJ refused to run again and Bobby got killed. The time was ripe\u2026 But with someone like Nixon, you had to play a carefully orchestrated game.<\/p>\n
So, while the Democratic Convention burned, the Powers Behind the Throne of the GOP started to reshape the party. Nothing dramatic here. Nothing for the history books. No defections or splinter groups or internal strife. Just, on Tuesday, the GOP was the party of Teddy Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover and, on Wednesday, it was the party of Richard Nixon. And it was saying something different. Teddy talked about bullying and vigilantism, his successors talked about integrity and temperance. Nixon talked about law and order. Something suburban America craved since every news cycle was showing explosions and strafing runs and machine gun fire\u2026and that was just the local news.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t as simple as crafting a \u201claw and order\u201d presidency. The sense of a deep-rooted and stable establishment had to follow, and so the \u201cselling of the president\u201d extended beyond rhetoric from the podium. The corporations had to buy in. Law and order could only be maintained if, yes, that \u201cgreat silent majority\u201d remained happy. And what makes us happy? Our microwave ovens, our two car garages, fewer homemade pipe bombs in our air conditioning vents.<\/p>\n
In many ways, the \u201968 Republican convention was the beginning of the \u201cfake news\u201d phenomenon. (Thompson again, written in 1968: \u201cHistory is hard to know because of all the hired bullshit.\u201d) America, in the middle of riots, tear gas, and horror, latched on to a version of Nixon that had been carefully crafted by Big Money People out of whole cloth. The way he dressed, the way he acted, and even the cadence of his speech did not exist prior to the campaign trail leading up to \u201968. He would be the answer to the shattered world around us all. And the convention was able to ride on this, in large part thanks to the debacle in Chicago.<\/p>\n
By \u201972, both conventions had adopted the techniques that were laid out to first sell Nixon to us. The Democrats immediately sized up their enemy and aped his technique. George McGovern drove the message home. He was half loosey-goosey and appealing to the Left, and half polished politician. And his loosey-goosey half meant that he went down in flames and ushered Nixon in on one of the most astounding landslides in history. The people had spoken. The Democrats, from then on, would be as \u201csafe\u201d as possible. What you see, after McGovern\u2019s failure, is the homogenization of politics. In the 1960s, it was daring for a Democratic candidate to run up onto a soapbox and shout their heart out about working with the rebels against the establishment and then throw themselves into the audience. By 1992, the only daring element in Democratic candidates was that they might have an accent.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Republicans followed a cookie cutter plan. Spin the names and the pull-quotes round and round \u2013 Nixon, Reagan, Mondale, Dukakis, the Bush dynasty, Dole, McCain, all those who won or failed and it\u2019ll be hard telling them apart. All different toys made by the same company.<\/p>\n
I know \u2013 duh, right? Same thing for the Democrats. And that\u2019s what gets us to 2017. Trump won because he\u2019s the first candidate since the world caught on fire who was truly crazy. And we loved it. That\u2019s the real point here. Even if we feared him, even if he disgusted us, we loved the show. We tuned in.<\/p>\n
The point here is that our political system was ruthlessly homogenized by a generation that\u2019s now dead or in the nursing home. It was created especially to avoid conflict, to distract us, to co-opt every form of revolution with corporate greed. In our youth, the Beatles sold sneakers and the ghost of MLK sold cell phones:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BCkPBO-sywg<\/p>\n
There is the fate of our revolution. Co-opted, bastardized, and fucking raped to death by those same Big Money Men who crafted the political America we know and despise today for one purpose: To keep us fat and stable and in their debt, addicted to their products. <\/p>\n
Trump, amusingly, is one of these men. But he\u2019s also working against them (seemingly). <\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s hard to tell when it\u2019s happening, but history will show us that one of two things is happening right now. Trump either broke the system (in which case, in the long run, if we survive, we will be eventually grateful), or he\u2019s a carefully crafted product of some new twist by the same system that\u2019s been orchestrating our lives since the initial \u201cselling of the president.\u201d<\/p>\n
Either possibility is likely, in my opinion. And I secretly hope for the former scenario. As I watch Trump\u2019s first few weeks in office spin wildly out of control, I keep wondering how far he\u2019ll go, what he\u2019ll do next. I\u2019ve shifted from horror to fascination. Not because I\u2019m watching a monster, or because I\u2019m heartbroken. I\u2019m fascinated because I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019m watching someone not only rock the boat but also set it on fire. I\u2019m pretty sure that I\u2019m watching the death of American politics as I knew it. And that\u2019s a good thing. Because it\u2019s not some orangutan, in the end, who\u2019ll get us killed. It\u2019s the androids that the political machine shits out. And Hillary was one of those androids. They all have been! Obama was, Bush was, Clinton was. All the way back to Nixon \u2013 these are individuals crafted to cash in on charisma and corporate sponsored revolution. They are designed for one thing only: To maintain the status quo, to keep us in our place, to keep us shopping online, to maintain the illusion of an America frozen in the middle of the 20th Century. Ward and June Cleaver Forever!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fascinating that the same people who embrace that idealistic dream of a bygone era are also the ones who supported Trump. This is why some may think my second scenario is more likely, but I simply think Trump read The Selling of the President<\/em>. The template is all right there. How to get to the White House without really trying. So if he is a Change Agent, then the people who\u2019ll be hardest hit are the people we need the most to reach out to and shake awake: The old ways are dead. And now\u2019s our chance, for better or worse, to avenge the failed revolution of the \u201860s. And it might just be Trump who does that for us, whether he fully understands that or not. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All this talk about resisting and waking up and taking action is great, but I\u2019d like to take a moment to indulge my strange love for history and poli-sci. Let’s remove ourselves a bit from the screaming chaos of the …<\/p>\n
But, in the end, isn\u2019t it kinda funny?<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,5],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-4101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bangs-whimpers","category-rants","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4101"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4105,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions\/4105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}