I don’t think that Peggy Noonan really appreciates what is happening in American politics and, indeed, in American culture more broadly. From her most recent Wall Street Journal column:
Politics is part theater, part showbiz, it’s always been emotional, but we’ve gotten too emotional, both parties. It’s too much about feelings and how moved you are. The balance is off. We have been electing magic ponies in our presidential contests, and we have done this while slighting qualities like experience, hard and concrete political accomplishment, even personal maturity. Barack Obama, whatever else he was, was a magic pony. Donald Trump too. Beto O’Rourke, who is so electrifying Democrats, also appears to be a magic pony.
Messrs. Obama and Trump represented a mood. They didn’t ask for or elicit rigorous judgment, they excited voters. Mr. Trump’s election was driven by a feeling of indignation and pushback: You elites treat me like a nobody in my own country, I’m about to show you who’s boss. His supporters didn’t consider it disqualifying that he’d never held office. They saw it as proof he wasn’t in the club and could turn things around. His ignorance was taken as authenticity. In this he was like Sarah Palin, another magic pony.
After two wars and an economic crisis, Mr. Obama gleamed with hope and differentness. This shining 47-year-old intellectual—surely he’ll turn things around. He’d been an obscure and indifferent state legislator who was only two years in the U.S. Senate when the move to make him president began. It was all—a feeling. He was The One. Mr. O’Rourke, who’s shooting up in the polls as a possible Democratic contender, is sunny, friendly, even-keeled. He reminds some Democrats of Bobby Kennedy—soulful, able to see and summon the things you like best in yourself. He even looks like a son of Bobby Kennedy. He is 46, has served only six years in the House, and before that was on the City Council of El Paso, Texas.
Our public political culture has given in too much to emotionalism. Last week at the George H.W. Bush funeral, which functioned as a two-hour portal into the old America, something was unsatisfying. Bush’s political life spanned 30 years. He had a way of seeing the world, thoughts and assumptions about it, a point of view, and these things had an impact on history. But most everyone speaking, and most in the pews, spoke not of the meaning of these things but of his personal qualities. That has its place, but we are talking history here, and the thoughts that produce it. The same was true at John McCain’s funeral.
We are highlighting emotions in our public life at the expense of meaning. And again, emotions are part of life and part of us, but only part, not the whole.
Communication through tempered speech and reason are artifacts of literacy. As we increasingly enter a post-literate world, emotion and visual imagery become ever more significant. As I have said before and will say again: turn off the sound when you watch a political speech. The words aren’t important at least not any more.
I don’t believe that our new mode of communication is compatible with liberal democracy and it certainly isn’t conducive to solving the real world problems that face us. But that’s another subject. I don’t want post-democracy but it appears that’s what we’re going to get. The caravan has moved on.
“Turn off the sound”
Or, turn off the video and read the transcript of the speech. The sheer emptiness of Obama and the sheer indecipherable speech of Trump becomes apparent.
“Communication through tempered speech and reason are artifacts of literacy.”
Perhaps. But they are also simply a comfort zone for those not willing or able to understand or play the game as it is, not as they wish it were. I think we can all wish that tempered speech and reasoned facts were so, but in politics I do not believe it has ever really been, and certainly not during my lifetime. With the elevated power and capacity for manipulative generation of wealth increasingly bestowed upon government it has only become less so; so its a self inflicted wound.
But that is a lament and an admonistion – it doesn’t change the fact that playing by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules is a dead bang loser today. I use a sports analogy. In golf, players call penalties on themselves. Its an ethic in the game. In basketball or football – like politics – its a badge of honor to get away with cheating. High art. To quote that great statesman, Harry Reid, about his lies concerning Romney’s taxes – “it worked didn’t it?”
All one has to do today is open a newspaper or turn on the TV, and not be comatose. How long, long, loooong ago was all the concern over Russian collusion? Is there anyone today who doesn’t realize the investigation is just a bald faced attempt to find anything (please god anything!!!!) on Trump, even if its just petty, novel or stretch theory fodder for dirtying him up in the court of public opinion. After all, there is power to be regained, the sins of others to cover up.
I obviously don’t share your concern over coarse political or cultural communication (although I share the disappointment). I believe it has come with the territory from day one. However, I do have concerns when the fact, or even notion of, a press that might fairly illuminate the issues of the day has devolved into pure and unabashed propaganda. That, I believe, is a relatively new and dangerous phenomenon in the US. I take heart in the belief, though, that the unwashed masses, “deplorables” in elite literate circles, understand that the old guard were best suited for the glue factory, and were not in fact magic ponies.