The Power of Spectacle and Campaign Strategy

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No one seems to have said the last word on what makes Trump Trump. But every informed American and all of our mainstream media know he’s something unique in American history.

We’ve had executive demagogues like Huey Long and and George Wallace, but only at the state level, and only in the South. We’ve had menacing national public figures like Father Charles Coughlin and Senator Joe (not Gene!) McCarthy. But none of them had ever made it anywhere near the White House, until now. (With spooky foreshadowing, the Demagogue McCarthy came from Wisconsin, one of Trump’s linchpin states.)

So what got Trump into the White House? What keeps him there? What makes him tick? More to the point, what makes about 40% of us accept his depravity, meanness and scattered brain as normal and civilized, let alone in a supreme leader? What makes his followers see him as their savior? And what, if anything, is the antidote?

There are analogues in human history. But to appreciate them fully, you have to go back a ways and keep an open mind.

The analogue that fits best is Julius Caesar. He was born in 100 BC, when Rome was a thriving democracy. By the time a minority of Roman senators assassinated him in 44 BC, Roman democracy was all but finished.

Like a guttering flame that takes time to die, Rome’s democracy made brief resurgences. But in the nearly five centuries remaining until the “Eternal City” was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 A.D., Rome was mostly an empire. Julius Caesar, one man alone, had given Rome’s democracy the coup de grace. Before a minority killed him, Rome’s senators had made him dictator perpetuo, or “dictator in perpetuity.”

But how did he do it? What was his secret?

History has a way of sharpening focus. Over two millennia the details have vanished, known only to scholar-specialists, if at all. But a single phrase still remains to describe what history best recalls: “bread and circuses.”

We all know what “bread” means. People were hungry in Rome because its great empire had over-extended itself. The senators and Roman elite (who were often one and the same) had arrogated wealth and civil power to themselves. Ordinary people had nowhere to turn but toward a demagogue who claimed to be their champion. Sound familiar?

Neglecting the so-called “lower classes” can be dangerous to a society’s health. The starkest modern proof of this point came over eighteen centuries later, in the French Revolution. The oligarchy literally lost its heads.

There is nothing the least surprising about this basic fact of human nature, except how easy it is to forget. Yet what people today forget even more often is the second word in the phase: “circuses.”

Two millennia later, in today’s Rome, the great Coliseum stands partially restored, a magnificent ruin. Guides will tell you that its arena was filled with sand to absorb all the blood and gore, with voids and catacombs underneath to make cleaning by flooding easier.

The Roman “circuses” were nothing like our recently discontinued Barnum & Bailey’s. They were supremely violent. Individual gladiators fought others to the death. There were mock “wars” with hundreds of participants, real weapons, real blood, and real killing. Sometimes there was fire, sometimes water in mock naval battles. There were starved wild beasts ripping each other apart, and occasionally devouring condemned human criminals. (The throwing of Christians to the lions came long after Caesar: Jesus Christ hadn’t yet been born.)

Imagine yourself a Roman commoner at one of those spectacles. You can’t keep your family fed, and each day brings a new source of worry. But for a couple of hours, the circus distracts you and makes you feel transcendent.

You sense the presence of your fellow citizens, sitting around you far from the Emperor’s box on high. Those close to you are much like you, oppressed, poor, helpless and worried. You sense their presence, their likeness. You smell their sweat and sense their pheromones of fear, anger and despair.

But once the blood begins to flow, you feel something rare for your social class—a sense of power. You hear the crowd’s roar and the rhythmic stamping of its thousands of feet. For all your powerlessness in everyday life, at least you’re not like those buggers being slaughtered on the bloody sand down below. And when the Dictator Perpetuo, who bought you all this distraction and feeling of transcendence, sounds his brief call to rise and follow him, won’t you do just that?

Two millennia later, we’re just a bit more civilized. We don’t kill people or even animals for sport or spectacle. But when you think about it, aren’t Trump’s MAGA-hat rallies just a more modern, less bloody, version of Caesar’s circuses? Don’t the calls to “Lock her up!” or to bang suspected criminals’ heads create the same transient sense of power and vindication in the downtrodden? Don’t they offer them the very same sense of fleeting dominance, magnified by the size, sound and smell of the crowd?

There’s something uniquely powerful, uniquely human, about an angry mob—the smell of sweat, the mutual sense of pheromones, the crowd’s roar and shared laughter, and the stamping of tens of thousands of feet. What Trump has harnessed and brought forward to the twenty-first century is the same power of spectacle that drove Caesar to the pinnacle of ancient Roman power and Rome itself from democracy to empire.

Lest you think this idle speculation, fast-forward your historical memory twenty centuries to the late 1930s and the fields of Nuremberg, Germany. Listen, in your mind’s ear, to the rants of Adolf Hitler and the responsive cheers of tens of thousands of angry young men, all shouting in unison “Sieg Heil!” (“Hail Victory!”).

Hear Hitler blame foreigners and the Jews for all of your and Germany’s troubles. Then listen to the crowd’s thunderous answer: a call to vengeance and to war.

This is not speculation. It’s recent reality. It’s just as real as the fifty million graves made by the war that Hitler started. Only a tiny fraction of those graves lies in the fields of Normandy, in seemingly endless rows, which our surviving troops and pols visit and remember every June.

Equally real are the infamous rallies of our own native Ku Klux Klan, with their white robes (for anonymity), burning crosses, and the pogroms and lynchings that often followed their rallies. Those ultimately lethal rallies, too, occurred in just the last century.

The truth of our new century and its horrible beginning is that our democracies and global civilization are suffering a two-pronged attack. The first and most discussed is a creature of novelty: the propaganda, disinformation and fake news made possible by the Internet and modern social media.

But the second attack—a much older one—is equally important. It’s the open secret of Caesar and Hitler: summoning the power of the crowd and the mob with huge rallies in the flesh.

Demagogues as diverse as Trump, Hungary’s Orban, Israel’s Netanyahu, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro have rediscovered this power. So has Narendra Modi, in his more subtle but similar series of mass rallies partly aimed at Hindu supremacy. So has Fox, which duplicates (as much as possible) the power of the mob by electronic means, faking “news” over TV screens with stand-up comics posing as pundits and offering the audience entertainment masquerading as news, which amplifies the crowd’s basest prejudices.

Yes, social media are dangerous. Yes, it’s a tough world today, in which anyone, anywhere can make things up out of whole cloth and incite demonstrations, division, and even violence from a continent away.

But it’s also dangerous for pols to forget that voters are flesh and blood. There’s some “magical” power in a crowd, let alone a mob, that no electronic device can feign or duplicate. To think otherwise is to confuse the attraction of a bright and shiny iPhone screen—a mere toy—with the power that has driven human civilizations to downfall and destruction for two millennia, most recently in the memory of some still living.

The lesson is simple. Spectacles matter. Crowds matter. Personal appearances matter. And because our nation is so large and diverse, so does stamina on the part of aspirants to supreme leadership. Demagogues like Trump, Caesar and Hitler are driven by the fires of ambition and ego; those who lack that fire must have real stamina. And those who forget these lessons of history beg to repeat the still-tragic loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016, not to mention the downfall of Rome.

The necessary stamina need not be superhuman if a campaign is smart. All that’s required is a campaign focused relentlessly on the 80/20 Rule, and on Trump’s rediscovery that policy and politics sell best if diluted, with entertaining mass rallies.

Unfortunately, modern mainstream media are still living in the past, when TV had three consistent national channels and Walter Cronkite was “the news.” The venerable British weekly The Economist, for example, lauded Joe Biden early last month for “continu[ing] to lead the Democratic primary field in national polls.”

This is deeply flawed thinking. National polls are not going to predict the presidential race in 2020 any more than they did in 2016. The very best “national poll” available—the actual 2016 general election—gave Hillary Clinton a popular plurality of some two million votes. Yet she lost in the Electoral College.

As I outlined in my last post, the 2020 presidential election won’t be won or lost nationally. It’ll be won or lost in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and three smaller Democratic-leaning states.

Why is this so?

As has become cliché, the most salient political characteristic of the United States at this moment is its division. Our states have divided themselves into red ones loyal to Trump, as summarized in this spreadsheet, and blue states seeking anyone else, as summarized in this one. In every case, the states in the respective teams each went blue or red by five or more percentage points in 2016, with a single exception analyzed in this footnote.

Has the division decreased since 2016? Not hardly. It has only gotten worse. The populations in the most polarized states have sorted themselves into ideological silos, down to what they credit as “facts” and where they get their “news.” Pundit David Brooks accurately describes the process as voters acquiring a “sociological identity” as strong as their demographic one. The process makes it highly unlikely, if not impossible, for California or New York to vote for Trump in 2020, for example, or for North Dakota or South Carolina to vote for any Democrat.

The consequences of these facts for candidates are both good and bad. Neither general-election candidate need spend much time pressing the flesh in the hugely polarized states that his or her party owns. A well-managed media campaign, coupled with a very few appearances in key cities, ought to do the trick there.

The bad news is that each nominee, her or his staff, and the pollsters will have to learn to focus relentlessly on the seven decisive states summarized in this table. The good news is that it’ll be much easier for any Democratic nominee to offer a solid campaign of spectacle and entertainment to rival Trump’s own in those seven states than in the whole of our huge nation.

So the 2020 general election won’t turn on politics, policy or ideology, if only because wearing a red or blue jersey is far more important to most voters than what a candidate thinks or says. Most likely, the election will turn on campaign strategy and tactics.

With his Rhodes-Scholar’s mind, combat experience and business consulting at McKinsey, Pete Buttigieg seems to understand this brave new world better than other leading Democrats. Already he’s applied business people’s practical 80/20 Rule to bank his ground game and personal appearances on Iowa, the first and most important contest in the Democratic-primary marathon.

The big question is whether and when the other Democratic candidates and their teams will catch on. Those who can read the writing on the wall ought to be starting to soften up the seven crucial general-election states even now, during the primary campaign. Pundits and pollsters also ought to be focusing on those states in evaluating primary candidates, because they’re where the general-election battle will be won or lost. Chasing the illusion of a decisive national trend in a bitterly divided nation is a fool’s errand.

If Buttigieg wins the nomination, he’ll presumably continue doing much the same, going toe to toe with Donald Trump, in person and with spectacle, in all seven of the key decision-making states. It remains to be seen whether any other Dem has the stamina, flexibility, situational awareness, and rubber-meets-the-road sense to do as well, let alone any better. The very first executive test of a primary candidate with legislative but little or no executive experience is how well and how decisively she or he can run a primary campaign.

Like the lethal mock battles in the ancient Roman Coliseum, this general-election campaign will bear an eerie resemblance to war. Rallying and organizing the troops in the right battlegrounds will make the winner.

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