Votaries of the US presidential debate – including many of our senior politicians – may want to hold their horses. The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, after all, has not turned out to be the symposium of policy and polity ideas that some hoped it would be. It certainly was massively entertaining. Nobody still knows who will be the next president of the United States in November or what their plan of action will be at home and in the world. One is forced to examine, therefore, whether the purpose of these presidential debates is entertainment – poli-tainment.
The Post-9/11 Television
Interestingly, the Trump-Harris debate was telecast live on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – an event that set a new tone for decades to come for not just the US establishment but the media as well. Let’s rewind to 2001. The television ably aided the military-industrial complex of the United States in the project of what Noam Chomsky calls manufacturing consent. This consent was built not just around military action on foreign land but also heightened security measures within. This was done via ‘militainment’ – cultural products revolving around the military. Think in terms of all the war films Hollywood churned out each time the US soldiers engaged in military action on foreign soil. Post-9/11, the television brought all the fighting to the American living rooms with a renewed vigour. Heightened awareness of the enemies of the United States meant a better chance of convincing Americans about their government’s decision to continue fighting them. And it was being done ostensibly under the garb of entertainment.
Politainment, on the other hand, aims to serve entertainment in the name of politics. Entertainment often equals commercialism, and there seems to be no other form of entertainment bigger than the presidential polls in the US at the moment. The biggest names in the entertainment world have joined the fray, the latest being Taylor Swift, the biggest artist in the world of 2023, with her endorsement of Kamala Harris. Like TV, with a small hiatus in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, jumped right back into commercial programming and labelled it “public service,” presidential polls become the public service events for artists and platforms every four years.
Is It Time To Retire The Debate?
The televised US presidential debate, initiated by the most showman-like of all American presidents, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon, also turns sixty-four this month. Is it now time to retire it? The supporters uphold it as the democratisation of political information. But what does it really mean in terms of electoral participation and outcome? Scholars like Markus Prior have demonstrated that “Cable TV and the Internet increase gaps in knowledge and turnout between people who prefer news and people who prefer entertainment”.
Political scientists have already analysed the Trump-Harris debate threadbare. Precious little has emerged about the policy direction that the most powerful country in the world will take in the next four years under a new president. Instead, it spawned industrial supplies of highly imaginative entertainment products like memes, parodies, and social media videos. Multimedia content creators are likely to have generated substantial wealth thanks to this debate, which was pretty low on political information. Even if it were high, there is no evidence that this debate would have elevated the average levels of political knowledge in the American population. Sure, Kennedy won the election after his super successful maiden debate with Nixon, but was it not owing more to his personality cult than any of his policy positions?
Demagoguery 101
These days, one almost feels sorry for the poor television. It tries to do a tightrope walk between public service and entertainment. In the US, television is constantly trying to reprieve its respectable status as a regulated private industry originally thought to operate for the general welfare. It is also torn in the opposite direction by capitalist motives of profit maximisation. Events like the presidential debates allow television to make the two ends meet.
Scholars like Roland Barthes have argued how history and memory create and further national narratives. Television serves as not just a creator but also an observer and a repository of both history and memory. At present, the national psyche of the US-bifurcated along party lines – lends itself to being exploited by television for the creation of a national narrative of fractured solidarities and policy chaos. There are deep disagreements among both Republican and Democrat supporters. Ongoing foreign wars have distilled these disagreements.
The fact that both Trump and Harris were unable to offer any policy framework during the debate and mounted only personal attacks against each other leaves a discerning audience with a sense of impending doom. Politics of issues has been firmly pushed into the background while emotionally charged demagoguery takes centre stage.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
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