A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany! A sense of Eureka! It just came to me out of the blue! I found the explanation of how Trump had become Trump. And not only that, I could use the same explanation for other monstrosities and abominations. The fact is that Trump is not alone, he is a member of a “kind”. There are other people of his kind even in our Sweden. The more satisfying aspect of this explanation is that I have someone to blame: MEDIA. I don’t know about you, but I feel content if I can curse at someone. And who deserves more cursing than media? No one! Absolutely, no one else!
The explanation is very simple:
I think you agree with me that the reasons for being “newsworthy” can be quite different. In other words, there are many kinds of “news value”, and everyone, potentially, has several sorts of “news value”. For example, there was a time that Trump had some “Business news value”. And there was a time that he had some “Entertainment value”. The “problem” starts when the media allows the “news value” of a person to be carried over from one area to another area.
In case of Trump, he gradually started to acquire other sorts of “news value”. Can you suggest other sorts of “news value” for him? Maybe “outrageous claims”, “scandal”, “womanizer”, “tax evasion”, “buffoon”, “bully”, “pathological liar”, and so on and so forth. Media’s mistake was that they allowed these “news value” to gradually diffuse into the area of “politics news value”.
The same explanation can be used for Jean-Mare Le Pen, Viktor Urban, Jimme Åkesson, and many other “politicians”. The media finds someone who can help them to increase the “sales”, and then the media “overuse” them. At first it might even be as an object of ridicule. But, sooner or later, one of these ridiculous figures start to make havoc.
Why is this wrong? Why is this a problem?
Because, it is against “our liberal principles”.
[Oh! No. That’s not the case. I am not a liberal. Not at all. However, I believe modern models of democracy should be built upon the foundations raised by liberalism.]
And what is liberalism?
Well, liberalism means building walls in the society so that no one can transfer his/her “capital” from one area to another area. This definition is a crude simplification of what Michael Walzer has said in 1984. Don’t let me spoil the pleasure of reading this 16-page article for you. Read it once now, and read it once again after a couple of years.
Walzer, M. (1984). Liberalism and the Art of Separation. Political Theory, 12, 315–330. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110815764.265
Summary of Walzer (1984):
You may not have access to Walzer’s paper, or you may not have time to read it. So, I reluctantly have copied parts of his paper in here. These are the parts that have a direct relevance to the points that I raised above. As such, you should not consider the excerpts as “representative”. OK. Here is what Walzer has written
“I suggest that we think of liberalism as a certain way of drawing the map of the social and political world. The old, pre-liberal map showed a largely undifferentiated land mass, with rivers and mountains, cities and towns, but no borders. “Every man is a piece of the continent,” as John Donne wrote-and the continent was all of a piece. Society was conceived as an organic and integrated whole. It might be viewed under the aspect of religion, or politics, or economy, or family, but all these interpenetrated one another and constituted a single reality. Church and state, church-state and university, civil society and political community, dynasty and government, office and property, public life and private life, home and shop: each pair was, mysteriously or un-mysteriously, two-in-one, inseparable. Confronting this world, liberal theorists preached and practiced an art of separation. They drew lines, marked off different realms, and created the sociopolitical map with which we are still familiar. The most famous line is the “wall” between church and state, but there are many others. Liberalism is a world of walls, and each one creates a new liberty.”
“The art of separation is not an illusory or fantastic enterprise; it is a morally and politically necessary adaptation to the complexities of modern life.”
“I want instead to pursue the alternative criticism that liberals have not been serious enough about their own art.”
“The art of separation doesn’t make only for liberty but also for equality. Consider again, one by one, the examples with which I began. Religious liberty annuls the coercive power of political and ecclesiastical officials. Hence it creates, in principle, the priesthood of all believers, that is, it leaves all believers equally free to seek their own salvation; and it tends to create, in practice, churches dominated by laymen rather than by priests. Academic freedom provides theoretical, if not always practical, protection for autonomous universities, within which it is difficult to sustain the privileged position of rich or aristocratic children.”
“Under the aegis of the art of separation, liberty and equality go together. Indeed, they invite a single definition: we can say that a (modern, complex, and differentiated) society enjoys both freedom and equality when success in one institutional setting isn’t convertible into success in another, that is, when the separations hold, when political power doesn’t shape the church or religious zeal the state, and so on.”
“Market success overrides the limits of the (free) market in three closely related ways. First of all, radical inequalities of wealth generate their own coerciveness, so that many exchanges are only formally free. Second, certain sorts of market power, organized, say, in corporate structures, generate patterns of command and obedience in which even the formalities of exchange give way to something that looks very much like government. And third, vast wealth and ownership or control of productive forces convert readily into government in the strict sense: capital regularly and successfully calls upon the coercive power of the state.”
“In addition, unlimited wealth threatens all the institutions and practices of civil society-academic freedom, the career open to talents, the equality of “homes” and “castles.” It is less overt, more insidious than state coercion, but no one can doubt the ready convertibility of wealth into power, privilege, and position.”
“And then we are likely to conclude that, just as there are things the state cannot do, so there must be things that money cannot buy: votes, offices, jury decisions, university places – these are relatively easy – and also the various sorts of national influence and local domination that go along with the control of capital.”
“But if we turn from individuals to institutions, it is clear that political power itself requires protection-not only against foreign conquest but also against domestic seizure. The state is unfree when power is seized and held by a set of family members, or clergymen, or office-holders, or wealthy citizens.”
Hossein Jorjani 