It may well be, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter suggests, that Donald Trump represents “the final stage of a dumbed-down America”—a process that seems to have begun, by Carter’s reckoning, with George W. Bush. Trump, writes the novelist Richard Ford in the Times Literary Supplement, is “a gaudy, tarnished symptom of our American disease. . . . I could not have dinner alone with Mr. Trump in my favorite restaurant in Paris.” And Ford may be right as well.
The problem is that Richard Ford and Graydon Carter are not so much prescient as predictable: The dumbing-down of America is one of the oldest laments in the history of the republic, running in a direct line backward from Gore Vidal to H. L. Mencken to Mark Twain and before. When the Irish poet Thomas Moore paid a visit to the White House in 1804 and met the incumbent president, he was gravely disappointed—and suitably horrified by Washington, as well, where naught but woods and Jefferson they see / Where streets should run, and sages ought to be.
The contemporary version of this was neatly packaged in an influential volume entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by a New York University professor named Neil Postman, who chronicled the familiar downward trajectory and blamed the media. Modern means of communication, he believed, were incompatible with serious ideas, and so consumers of mass media—those dumbed-down Americans—craved distraction, not enlightenment. It was no coincidence, he asserted, that the president who happened to be in office when his book was published (Ronald Reagan) was an ex-movie actor.
Postman might well have been on to something. It would be difficult to argue that the president who succeeded Reagan (George H. W. Bush) was the charismatic entertainer-type Postman had predicted would dominate national politics. But when, in 1992, the stodgy 68-year-old World War II veteran Bush was supplanted by the 46-year-old draft-dodging baby boomer Bill Clinton, something like Postman’s vision of the future was realized. Except that the quality represented by Clinton—our first presidential candidate to appear, wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone, on a late-night talk show—was not entertainment but “cool,” that vague combination of celebrity, urban sophistication, and sex appeal largely unseen in American politics.
And whose fault was that? Not the dumbed-down American electorate, which generally resisted the allure of cool, but modern media: Bush was derided in the press for his age, awkward manner, evident estrangement from pop culture, and personification of noblesse oblige. Clinton’s appeal, in that sense, echoed the media embrace in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, another amorous fortysomething whose philistine tastes and gaudy show-biz connections (courtesy of his mildly sinister father) were mistaken for sophistication; and, of course, were favorably compared—are still favorably compared—with his unglamorous predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower’s blunt wisdom and devotion to duty. When the Washington Post followed Bill Clinton and his running mate Albert Gore around the country, it chose a headline adapted from an adolescent buddy film of the day: “Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure.”
Indeed, difficult as it may be in retrospect to realize, there was a time when Jimmy Carter was celebrated in the press as distinctly “cooler” than the earnest, unglamorous Gerald Ford, butt of Saturday Night Live‘s weekly sketches and successor to the dour Richard Nixon. When Carter was elected, in 1976, the transition period featured a months-long series of celebrity pilgrimages to his hometown in Georgia, a swarm of admiring journalists, pop musicians, arbiters of fashion, and Norman Mailer. This critical mass of pseudo-sophistication seems normal today. But 40 years ago, it was a novelty and harbinger. To be sure, the pilgrims misconstrued nearly everything they saw—Carter’s rustic cynicism was regarded as “authentic,” his self-destructive brother was depicted as a wise fool—but in the media, the primacy of cool had been established.
Which has proved beneficial to his Democratic successors. Press reaction to Bill Clinton’s serial sexual misconduct, for example, was revulsion—at critics of Clinton’s behavior. And the media villains of the Clinton sexual scandals were not Clinton and his allies but the women who claimed to have been harassed.
This was partly a function of partisanship, but largely the consequence of a cultural divide where the press is resolutely ranged on one side. And the principal beneficiary of this trend, in our time, has been Barack Obama: Google “Barack Obama” and “cool,” and you get 22 million hits extolling not the president’s intellectual acumen or governing talent but his wardrobe, his manner, his multiple appearances on The View or Stephen Colbert, his fondness for hanging out with athletes and actors, his taste in restaurants, his voice, his favorite pop tunes, innumerable fawning profiles in the Washington Post and New York Times and New Yorker and Vogue, and celebrity endorsements beyond counting.
Poor old John McCain, stoical war hero, and wonky Mormon Mitt Romney clearly had no chance.
Is this the “final stage of a dumbed-down” America? The evidence is not conclusive. Voters have tended to be more discerning than not: They very nearly resisted the appeal of Kennedy against the uncool Nixon, and two years after Watergate, Carter barely managed to squeeze by Ford. Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the vote, and even the supremely cool Obama gained a bare majority of the popular vote in 2008 and 2012.
The candidacy of Donald Trump, and his success in a crowded primary field, may represent a crisis of confidence in the Republican party; but it is difficult to extrapolate very much beyond that. One conclusion, however, may safely be drawn: While the great lumbering mass of Americans remains an enigma to the chattering classes, the media—with their emphasis on politics-as-carnival, prejudice disguised as professional integrity, laser-like emphasis on trivial pursuits, above all their adolescent crush on the virtue of “cool”—might charitably be described as dumbed-down.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.
