In early 2016, I wrote a blog for Bioethics Today (formerly bioethics.net) that examined the rise of the Trump movement as a testament to the work of cultural critic Neil Postman. Specifically, Postman’s work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business predicted that our screen culture, with its obsession with superficial entertainment, would create the ecosystem that would allow someone like Trump to become a dominant force in US politics. Since then, others have weighed in on this phenomenon, ranging from his son Andrew Postman to more recent commentators such as Michael Rosenblum, who boldly (and correctly) predicted just a few days before the election that Trump would win. Why? Because, in Rosenblum’s words, Trump “is endlessly entertaining” (this wasn’t an endorsement but rather a candid assessment). Postman’s son acknowledged his father’s prescience as early as 2017: “So, yes, my dad nailed it. Did he also predict that the leader we would pick for such an age, when we had become perhaps terminally enamored of our technologies and amusements, would almost certainly possess fascistic tendencies? I believe he called this, too.” Our digital technologies, which routinely spew misinformation and disinformation, have undermined our trust in traditional institutions, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than with experts in medicine and public health. At no time was this more evident than during the Covid pandemic.
Although much of what I wrote over 8 years ago also seems eerily prescient, my call for old-fashioned Oxford–style debates for presidential candidates now seems woefully anachronistic and even quaint. Coming from the world of wrestling and reality TV, Trump knows better than any other political actor that decorum and rules are for suckers and chumps. What matters is creating a spectacle that attracts viewers. Trump connects with a post-literate society that gets much of its information from social media and influencers. Harris, a lawyer by training and someone who is steeped in the written word was no match for his bombastic sensationalism. Facts mattered little. Rather, what mattered was “vibes” and how a candidate connected on a visceral level with voters.
In a world committed to the written word, political messaging was focused on carefully crafted speeches. In a post-literate screen culture, we are bombarded with electronic messaging. The more spontaneous and unscripted, the better. And Trump deeply understood that entertaining people with incoherent messages on social media platforms or during rallies was not a liability but rather enhanced his standing. As Vox journalist Ezra Klein stated in 2018:
President Obama, like Presidents Bush and Clinton before him, put endless time into painstakingly crafted speeches in carefully chosen locales, laying out energy policy and tax ideas and defenses of his record. They didn’t get a tenth of the coverage that Trump’s rallies got. Sometimes they got no coverage at all — particularly on cable news, where entertainment value reigns supreme.
And entertainment values have only accelerated in the years since Klein wrote this piece. Mainstream media has readily embraced entertainment values to increase viewership. Social media’s raison d’etre is engaging users with content that exemplifies the values of entertainment—brief, shallow, and even outlandish. As scholar Yuval Noah Harari has stated, striving for the truth is much harder than creating appealing fictions. As he stated in 2018: “humans prefer power to truth.”
Other scholars such as Tom Nichols (perhaps naively) thought that the election of Joe Biden would somehow counter the toxic effects of entertainment values and put us on a track toward greater dedication to civic virtues. He believed that this signaled a return to serious civic-mindedness and a respect for “prudence, engagement, respect, tolerance.” Unfortunately, the technologies that we readily embrace do not enhance these civic virtues but actually may undermine them. In bioethics, we focus greatly on the four principles of Beauchamp and Childress but often ignore the fact that they devote a whole chapter on the virtues in their venerable book Principles of Biomedical Ethics. A commitment to the virtues broadly and to civic virtues specifically is essential for a healthy, well-functioning liberal democracy. In response, some have called for a greater investment in civic education, helping people (especially young people) to be better thinkers and not just doers. This ties to a commitment to greater health literacy to combat rampant misinformation. These are steps in the right direction, but it’s not clear that this is enough for us to revitalize civic virtues in the aftermath of the recent election, where a disproportionate number of young people voted for Trump.
Some have interpreted the election results as a failure of elites to acknowledge the real pain many people are experiencing. This is a serious critique that has been leveled not just by right-wing politicians but by progressive leaders such as Bernie Sanders. Progressive comedians such as Jon Stewart have also harnessed entertainment values in trying to connect with viewers with a similar critique but with the understanding that they are often simply preaching to the choir. Even the satirical media outlet the Onion recently announced that it bought the now-defunct Infowars which routinely peddled in conspiracy theories. And with the election of Trump, conspiracy theorists such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can now play an outsized role in shaping health policy as the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. His clear lack of expertise in matters of health have been well documented. And his views on many matters ranging from vaccinations to fluoridation will result in greatly undermining public health.
The reality is that half of our country believes the next four years will be a dystopia while the other half believes it will be a utopia. It’s incumbent upon all of us to break our addiction to the onslaught of digital content that is geared toward enraging, enthralling, or misinforming us. Democracy demands more from all of us. Ultimately, do we want a world that Aldous Huxley created in Brave New World where our technology diminishes our ability to think critically and creatively? Or do we want a world that is committed to honesty, facts, and greater connectedness?
Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD, HEC-C is a Professor of Bioethics & Health Policy at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics, Loyola University Chicago.