Bass Fishing In Ameria
An argument for a very long term strategy.
People are perplexed. At times, Trump seems to be an idiot. At other times, people notice that he has pulled off a messaging coup indicating that he must be a genius. Sometimes we hear commentators caught in such a conundrum give up to say “or maybe people around him are really smart,” and this is why his messaging can be really good.
I have an entirely different take on the Donald Trump secret sauce to success.
Trump is a bass fisherman. Allow me to ‘splain.
Bass are angry fish, and hungry fish. To catch a bass, you toss a lure to within a few feet of the bass, and it will either ignore it completely (and continue to ignore lures for the rest of the day) or it will grab the lure and you catch the fish. So you cast a few time, and either catch the bass or move quickly on to the next spot.
Trout are different. Trout are wiley.* They eat only certain foods, and are wary about biting. They like to see several hundred similar flies or larvae before they try to eat one, then they eat only one that looks like all the others. So, a trout fisher has to create an identical replica of a specific species of fly, and present it just right to the trout on the end of a very difficult to handle invisible string.
Bass locate themselves near the shores of placid lakes, usually near an object or feature that is visible from the surface. A bass fisher can arrive at a lake they’ve never seen before and with zero effort locate most of the spots where there should be a bass. Trout live in rushing water amidst slippery rocks. A trout fisher must have special gear, special boots, excellent balance, and the ability to identify invisible subsurface features that might hold a trout. One does not merely walk into a stream and catch a trout.
The way you catch more bass is to wear spandex and have a large motor on a small boat. The spandex reduces wind resistance as you rush as fast as possible from one likely bass location to another, casting only a few times at each (the bass either bites indiscriminately or not at all). The way you catch more trout is — well, you don’t. You are lucky to spend several hours catching one.
MAGA people are bass. Normal people are trout.
In order for a politician to “catch” voters who are normal, they have to have a set of good policies, a certain amount of consistency, be reasonably well groomed (though this is not critical), and most of all, they need an excellent messaging strategy.
For a politician to “catch” MAGA, all you need to be is disgusting. Being a sexual abuser or rapist is a plus. Having only stupid ideas and describing them in stupid terms is a big win. Being an ignorant hateful mean clown will get you the most votes.
In our society today, we are not really seeing Trump do better than any given Democrat at messaging or self presentation. We are seeing a society go bad. There are a lot of reasons our society has gone bad, including the breaking up of certain institutions, the capture of religious institutions by con artists and maniacs, the disruption caused by a major pandemic, the isolation of wealth in the hands of a few so we can’t even do basic education, and so on. We have become cynicaler, stupider, and more distrusting. Conspiracy theories and other whacked out beliefs are common now even among the educated. We are a drunk audience at a three ring circus instead of the audience at a play by Arthur Miller or Lillian Hellman.
Trump has not inculcated our society with deplorable practices and beliefs. Nor has he identified the deplorable element and figured out a way of speaking to them. The situation is much simpler than that. Our society has a growing deplorable underbelly and Trump happens to stick to that underbelly like a wad of burs on the back leg of a stray dog.
How do we fix this? Not easily. I noted education above, and this may suggest that I think that if only bla bla bla education bla bla bla than things would be better. But no, I do not intend to blame either our system of education or our teachers. And, I swear to you, almost all fixes I’ve seen or heard of that involve adjusting our system of education to make society better are either stupid or don’t work. We can have that conversation another time, but the short version is this: Most of the suggestions people make for adding something to our K-12 curriculum are about things that have been part of that curriculum for decades. So please don’t suggest that “if only they taught civics in school,” because “they” have been doing that for over a century.
I think there is something to shame. Deplorable behavior and idiotic believes should be shamed, not rewarded. As an avoider of popular culture, I’m not an expert on popular culture, but I wonder if there are aspects of our popular culture that reward deplorable or stupid behavior. Give me information about this in the comments, if you like!
I think we need to reframe normalcy in our institutions. The way we do it now is this: We have institutions and they work under normal conditions, and normal conditions are conditions in which our institutions are operating normally. That is a tautology that breaks when individuals or groups with power step outside the institutions. We see this happening now. Right now, there is no Congress. There are no Senators, and there are no Representatives. There are only people who think they are Senators or Representatives. Those people need to take off their Congressperson Hats and put on a black beret and join the resistance. There is no longer normally in institutions. Institutions now only serve to slow down the process of counteracting MAGA. (I’m not suggesting that I know what to do instead.)
The Trump administration appears to be a dumpster fire. And it is. But what progressives need to understand is that being a dumpster fire is a feature, not a bug, from the point of view of MAGA. And the dumpster fire was there before Trump, and the dumpster has been growing over time. Trump and his people have simply brought the marshmallows to the dumpster fire.
Somehow, we have to ensmallen the dumpster, make institutions much less fragile, normalize normalcy, and denormalize shameful behavior and policy.
Whatever we do, it is not going to be based on a simple fix (though we should also do all the simple fixes we can!). It is going to take time. Dumpster fires don’t shrink themselves; rather, they tend to become landfill fires and go on forever.
For now, that’s all I’ve got.
*Except newly stocked brookies, of course.
We are it for the long haul. What other choice do we have?