David Bell – The Age of Trump and Musk: Reflections on the Election of 2024

Well, the polls were indeed wrong, and Donald Trump won a decisive victory. We must now recognize him as the most important American political figure since, well, probably, Franklin Roosevelt. His impact on world history is less certain. For the moment we can only wait, and worry.

There has been a torrent of commentary already, in the US and abroad, on why Trump won, and I feel ambivalent about adding to it here. But having followed the campaign closely for close to a year, and having written some 21 columns about it, I still feel like I have a few things to say. Once the dust has settled, and the shape of the new Trump administration starts to emerge more clearly, I’ll write something longer and more thorough. But for the moment, here are some thoughts about one aspect of the campaign that struck me with particular power this week.

Twenty years ago, in 2004, an event took place that heralded a radical transformation of American politics. It was not the reelection of George W. Bush. It was not the expansion of NATO to the east. It was not the Battle of Fallujah and the Iraq War stalemate. It was the birth of Facebook.

Even today, most political reporters and analysts still underestimate just how greatly social media has changed American political life. The reason is that most political reporters and analysts are obsessive readers. They read daily newspapers. They read newsmagazines. They also generally try to read news from different sources, providing different points of view. In other words, they operate very much the way they did in 2004.

But most Americans no longer read like this (indeed, many of them barely read at all). A generation ago, they still received their news principally from daily newspapers and network television. Since 1990, daily newspaper circulation has fallen by two thirds, even as the US population has grown by one third, and network television news viewership has dropped by half. Social media, much of it in the form of video clips rather than text, has become Americans’ principal source of information, along with highly partisan radio and cable television. And social media, of course, is designed specifically to feed users more of what they have already been fed, and already seem to like. There has been endless commentary on the way this aspect of social media has contributed to political polarization.

Another aspect of the phenomenon has attracted much less attention: the enormous additional power it has given politicians and a few select media figures to mold the way Americans understand the world around them, and therefore to shape political life as a whole. Twenty or thirty years ago, even if Americans held divergent political opinions, they still mostly developed those opinions in reference to the same basic information, taken from the same professedly neutral and objective media. Today, they no longer see the same information. The facts themselves vary wildly according to the source.

Does this shift matter as much as the underlying economic issues at play in the election? This fall, many commentators have written about the way that Donald Trump so successfully exploited growing class resentment. As David Brooks, the centrist opinion writer for The New York Times put it this week, “Trump jumped into the class war with both feet.” Brooks also unfairly lambasted the Democrats for playing down economics and veering “toward identitarian performance art,” although Kamala Harris herself did nothing of the sort and in fact tried to wrench the economic issue away from Trump. But much of Brooks’s column focused on the unequal effects of neoliberal economic change and could almost have been plagiarized from the far-left journal Jacobin. His premises were, in fact, implicitly Marxian: economic structure determines political and cultural superstructure.

But if the “linguistic turn” of the human sciences should have taught us anything, it is that “underlying” social conditions are wholly inseparable from the mental frameworks—the language—in which we understand them and decide upon our actions. Economic hardship can be understood in many different ways and produce many different reactions, depending on what people know, what people believe, and what information is at their disposal.

As illustration, consider the two issues that were central to Trump’s campaign: inflation and crime, both linked by him to illegal migration. Inflation has had a real bite for Americans over the past four years, in a way that the official numbers do not reflect. Ask anyone who buys groceries, goes to restaurants, or pays for housing. It obviously contributed to Trump’s victory. But US inflation was part of a world-wide phenomenon linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and had little if anything to do with the actions of the Biden administration. Indeed, inflation has come down more quickly in the US than elsewhere. Still, most Americans do not know or understand these facts, which are too complicated to explain in a tweet, or a TikTok video. Moreover, Trump offered what seemed to many a logical explanation for the spike in housing costs, pointing to supposed increased demand as a result of illegal immigration. It wasn’t true, but it sounded plausible. In any case, what has mattered is not simply the underlying condition, but the way it is reported and understood.

Crime offers an even more potent illustration of the point, because relatively few Americans suffer directly from crime. What matters most is therefore not direct experience but subjective fears. As with inflation, the story of the Biden administration with respect to crime has been a success: rates are down, although Biden himself deserves only limited credit. Illegal migrants commit fewer crimes, proportionally, than American citizens. But fear of crime is notoriously easy to provoke. A story listing six gruesome murders, one after the other, suggests the existence of an immense crime wave, even if the crimes in question took place in a community of tens of millions over many years. Trump came back relentlessly to such stories: his rally speeches dwelt on one poor, innocent American girl after another savagely killed by evil illegal aliens. It was mendacious, and demagogic, but it succeeded in generating almost as much fear as if a real crime wave had washed over American communities.

In both cases, in other words, the underlying material conditions mattered less than the meaning Trump managed to attribute to them. And he was able to attribute meaning to them far more easily than anyone could have done twenty years ago, because of the changes in the media environment, and the information divide that has accentuated the opinion divide. It is hardly an accident that the erratic billionaire Elon Musk became such an admirer of Trump and may now be in line for a high position in the second Trump administration (he has also profited enormously from the election, his net worth growing by $26.5 billion just this week). He sees what Trump has done, since the coming of social media, using political language to shape social conditions, in a reversal of the usual Marxian understanding of the relationship between the two.

It is worth here pausing to reflect on why Trump is such a brilliant impresario of social media. On Facebook, X, Instagram, or TikTok, posts from politicians do not come to users in a separate category, but appear alongside those from relatives, friends, and advertisers. Posts from most politicians sound like carefully-prepared statements or soundbites. They have a formal, stilted quality. But Trump, from the start, thanks to his personal lack of inhibition, sounded more like an aged, dyspeptic relative, ranting with poor spelling and worse grammar. To educated liberals it is off-putting, but to most people it makes him sound like people they know. Trump is also a talented natural comedian, and this matters enormously on social media. His posts are funny—perhaps in a dreadfully crude way—but funny nonetheless. I cannot recall a single post by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, and I have probably read thousands of them, that ever made me laugh. Like it or not, the principal political language of 2024 was not an eloquent speech, of the sort that Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama might have delivered, but a social media post or video clip. Trump has mastered these forms like no one else and used them to transform his country. Even after being banned from Twitter after the 2021 insurrection, he created his own social media network to post on, now is back on Musk’s X, and appears in video clips ad nauseam.

To liberal intellectuals, Trump’s rants seem unbearably disgusting, stupid, offensive and dangerous. Trump swears, insults his opponents in crudely sexist and racist terms, and often sounds like a third grader. But over the years, he has inured a large portion of the electorate to this behavior. To them, his behavior is proof that he is willing to break the rules of what he has helped them to view as an entirely corrupt system. The more that the liberals are offended, the better. Liberals who reacted to him with shock, panic and warnings of “fascism,” played directly into his hands.

In 1978, the great French historian François Furet described the French Revolution as a period in which political language came unmoored from the underlying social conditions, and the relationship between the two was temporarily reversed. The argument was overdone, given that political language and social conditions are in fact inseparable from one another. But Furet was right to highlight the French Revolution as a period when political language developed a particular intensity, and had especially far-reaching effects, both creative and destructive. As the critic Jean-François La Harpe later remarked: “les mots, comme les choses, ont été des monstruosités” (“words, like things, have been monstrosities.”). Since 2004, we have plunged again into a period in which political language has had a particular intensity, and remarkably far-reaching effects. And a result, a monstrosity is about to become, yet again, the most powerful man in the world.