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The Culture of Trump Through the Lens of the Frankfurt School

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The Culture of Trump Through the Lens of the Frankfurt School Mourouzis 1 Jack Mourouzis Professor McGillen German 85 30 May 2017 God Emperor: The Culture of Trump through the Lens of the Frankfurt School Throughout the 2016 Presidential Election, it became clear that Donald Trump was not an ordinary political actor, as he continually realized success despite allegations of racism, sexism, ableism, treason, and even sexual assault. Many have mourned his ascension to office as a death knell for America; in connection with this, scholars have drawn links between Trump’s political tendencies and the writings of the Frankfurt School, particularly with regards to Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.1 However, when exploring the other writings of the Frankfurt School, it becomes clear that their writings on cultural criticism and the nature of capitalist culture in modernity also help to explain the Trump phenomenon. The 2016 election forsook politics and policy issues in a unique way; culture was what paved the way for Trump’s victory, as he ultimately became “as much of a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.”2 Indeed, many of the Frankfurt School’s writings discuss the integral role that culture plays in the development of fascism; clear parallels can be drawn between the Frankfurt School writings and issues such as proliferation of memes, fake news, and even Trump’s own persona – all pillars of the alternative right subculture, which revolves around Donald Trump in a cult-like fashion. The Frankfurt School’s writings on mass culture, its industry, art in modernity, and 1 Peter Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” boundary2, 15 June 2016, https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-revisited-reading- adorno-in-the-age-of-trump/. 2 Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming,” The New Yorker, 5 December 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming. Mourouzis 2 historical perspectives help to explain the effective proliferation of pro-Trump, alt-right culture, which played an invaluable role in his victory in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Susan Buck-Morss, in a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” defines fascism (with the help of Benjamin’s writing) as “a “violation of the technical apparatus” that parallels fascism’s violent “attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses” – not by giving them their due, but by “allowing them to express themselves.” The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”3 Her logic regarding aesthetics also holds true with regards to what can only be described as the antics of Donald Trump on the campaign trail. The aesthetics of Donald Trump’s campaign have taken the form of internet and general media memes, which helped to shape the cultural phenomenon of Trump and the alt-right. The term meme was coined by notable scholar Richard Dawkins and derived from the same Greek root as mimesis4, a concept of cultural representation which was a common focus of the Frankfurt School. The term is currently defined primarily as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture” and secondarily as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.”5 Both definitions are of note here; indeed, the dissemination and proliferation of humorous, captioned pictures and videos by the alt-right and its affiliates helped achieve the spread of Trump’s ideas, behavior, and style within and across American society. Their accessibility is highlighted by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of the development of art in modernity when he claims that “the distinction between 3 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3. 4 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192. 5 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2003. Also available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/. Mourouzis 3 author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character… At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer.”6 This accurately describes the proliferation of memes, as their creation and subsequent dissemination is accessible to anyone with a computer, basic photo manipulation software, and a social media account. The development of the meme as utilized by Trump’s supporters is explained further by Buck-Morss, who notes that “Urban-industrial populations began to be perceived as themselves a “mass” – undifferentiated, potentially dangerous, a collective body that needed to be controlled and shaped into a meaningful form. In one sense, this was a continuation of the autotelic myth of creation ex nihilo, wherein “man” transforms material nature by shaping it to his will.”7 In this parallel, urban-industrial populations are akin to the amalgamation of disillusioned right-leaning individuals who fell behind Trump’s platform; their manipulation of “material” (in the modern age, digital) nature was indirectly transformed by Trump himself. The nature of these digital creations is also reflected by Theodor Adorno, who writes that “works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality.”8 Furthermore, they also exist almost purely as a form of attack against any anti-Trump community or sentiment; they serve to alienate those not involved in the culture by nature of their “Mimetic capacities,” which “rather than incorporating the outside world as a form of empowerment… are used as a deflection against it.”9 Furthermore, memes by nature are unprofessionally and quickly produced, which comes as a result of their reflection of up-to-the-minute current news and events and rapid dissemination on social media. 6 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 114. 7 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 28. 8 Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981-1982): 199. 9 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 17. Mourouzis 4 In this sense, they also relate to Kracauer’s discussion of photography in the sense that they “must be essentially associated with the moment in time at which it came into existence.”10 Memes do not enjoy the benefit of the memory image; they reflect only an immediate current idea and present it in a humorous fashion, conveying the simple message to the viewer as he scrolls past it on his Twitter feed. Perhaps the most tangible center of the alt-right, pro-Trump contingent is the online message board “r/The_Donald,” a forum of over 400,000 members on the popular social media website Reddit. The influence of r/The_Donald on the election is indeed quite significant, to the point that “Mr. Trump owes some degree of his success to an online mob of rabid, self-organized supporters… The_Donald is something different. Its memes and slang serve as passwords to an internet speakeasy, a secret club whose rules one moderator justified as existing to create a “safe space” for Trump supporters.”11 This sentiment is echoed by Adorno in his thoughts on the collective in Sur l’Eau, where he claims that “It is not man’s lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.”12 The collective that is the alt-right, in its blind fury, spreads its so-called truth across the internet with a cult-like devotion to the figure that is Donald Trump. This also connects with Karl Marx’s thoughts on the phantasmagoria; when memes are considered parallel to commodities, it becomes clear that “They veil the production process, and… encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams.”13 Memes constructed a humorous, entertaining narrative surrounding the Trump campaign which, 10 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 54. 11 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Reddit and the God Emperor of the Internet,” The New York Times, 19 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/reddit-and-the-god-emperor-of-the-internet.html?_r=0. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), 156. 13 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetic and Anaesthetic,” 25. Mourouzis 5 although not always factual, had tangible effects made clear by how Trump supporters “relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics—like conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health—that they would otherwise ignore.”14 Those who participate in such a culture and contribute to the success of the r/The_Donald community seem to do so due to motivations explained by Adorno, who claims that they “would prefer to get rid of that obligation of autonomy, which they suspect cannot be a model for their lives, and prefer to throw themselves into the melting pot of the collective ego.”15 He also offers more on this idea, describing how “The individual’s narcissistic
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