I was cleaning up my desk the other day and came across a 2019 synopsis of the work of French philosopher and social theorist, Jean Baudrillard, that I’d printed from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an excellent source, something like Cliff notes on steroids). I read it again.
Baudrillard was an idiosyncratic thinker on the fringe of the large group of post-WWII continental European intellectuals who had lived in the heart of that conflict and who struggled with the question of how the center, and most advanced area, of the intellectual universe, i.e., continental Europe, could have spawned something as evil as the Nazi movement, with its notions of white supremacy, world conquest, and death camps as the means to eradicate “inferior” races. Even worse, it was the US, a land of uncultured babes in the woods, who effected their rescue.
It was in the US, though, that Baudrillard thought he saw the essence of what went so badly wrong in Europe. Disneyland. Not just the fact of the theme park, but that the media-created fantasy of Disneyland is, in his view, more real for most Americans than the actuality of things in the US. No need to visit the historic sites of America’s past, go to Frontierland instead. No need to see the length and breadth of California when there’s the California Experience, that’s all in one place and contains the essence of the Golden State.
More broadly stated, the media-created cultural fantasy of what the US is, according to Baudrillard more real for most people than actual country itself. And most Americans live cognitively in the fantasy rather than in the real world.
I’m writing about this because it strikes me that Trump World is a very similar fantasy construct.
The real Trump is the aging personality with weird hair who played the the role of a successful businessman on TV reality show, who now paints himself orange every day, and who seems to be in serious cognitive decline. A recent public apology from one of the show’s creators indicates that Trump was the only business person down on his luck enough to take the reality show job.
The Disneyland version of Trump is of a savvy, successful, glamorous, wealthy entrepreneur, however, not the creator of a litany of failed businesses ranging from Trump University to Trump Steaks, who has also been convicted of cooking the company books.
One might argue that there isn’t much difference between choosing Disneyland over a drive down the California coast vs. voting for an empty shell portraying itself as a successful businessman. I don’t think that’s right, however. Trump has a social and economic agenda that reads like a compendium of the worst economic and social mistakes the US has made since the end of the Civil War.