Create a need, then offer a way to meet it. That approach is at least 2000 years old. Only the methods for accomplishing it are different.
In recent years, advertisers and politicians have found new, highly effective ways to convince us that our lives are not acceptable as is. Only if we accept their worldview, buy their products, empower their policies, can we hope to have the life we aspire to.
Advertisers look back over a hundred years to when Kodak began selling a lifestyle rather than advertising the qualities of specific products. In the post-World War II, the explosion of TV access led to rapid advances in using lifestyle, emotions, and story-telling to sell products.
JFK was the best known politician to tap into the power of television. Polls after his debate with Nixon indicated that those who listened to the debate on radio thought Nixon had won, but those who watched it on TV gave Kennedy the win. It was about the visuals. Nixon sweated.
But the basic approach is nothing new. A foundation of Christianity is that each of us is born with original sin, that we’re deeply flawed, pretty hopeless without God’s intervention. But of course, the form that intervention takes is through the rules and rituals of the church. The church creates shame, then offers a pathway to overcome it. Oh, and by the way, we’ll take a 10% commission.
It worked quite well for a long time.
But with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, people began to want more freedom and material goods. That, of course, led to many wars, church splits, and intellectual debates. By the 1990s, it appeared that representative democracy had won out. It put the wealth-generation of planned economies (like the Soviets) to shame, and it offered a lot of freedom, too.
But something went wrong. Humans don’t actually like too much freedom, too many choices. Dostoevsky wrote about this a long time ago in The Brothers Karamazov. But an easier to understand example happens every time you go to the grocery store. In previous times, when you went to the small local store and wanted a product, you took what they had. If you didn’t like it, well, the store was to blame. But if you go now and there are 15 similar products of varying prices and styles, you pick one, go home, and if it isn’t satisfying, you blame your own choice.
And with the internet (Amazon and company), you have no excuse for not picking something you’ll like. Didn’t you read the reviews?
Unfortunately, politics has followed these models. Trump has mastered creating a sense that your life is crap and only he can help you meet your aspirations. He creates the need—immigrants are taking your job, other politicians are weak, other countries are taking advantage at us, even laughing at us!—and then offers himself as the solution. And enough people either believe he is the solution or at least believe all the other politicians are crap that they voted him into office.
I grew up Baptist, and one of the hardest things about Trump support is accepting that Evangelical Christians overwhelming not only like his policies but think he is a great man. How could that be?
But their business model is the same. You are flawed. Shamefully so. We offer the solution. And those churches are not democratic. They are authoritarian, more so now than even 50 years ago.
The mastery of TV and the internet has allowed the Evangelicals to spread their message. In turn, they have bought into the opportunity for political power, and Trump has offered it to them. But I’m pretty sure that Jesus himself turned down the opportunity for worldly power. (See, for example, Matthew 20:25-28)
All that said, those on the left have often used a similar model: Shame people for behaviors, with the way to feel better being the adoption of language and behavior conforming to a particular worldview.
Is there a solution? I hope so: Reject the shame and the shaming, the blame and the blaming.
