The Trump presidency should not be shocking. It’s a symptom of our cultural malaise

It’s a mistake to see Trump as unique or his success as something that could only occur in America.
Pete Marovich/Pool/EPA

Brendon O’Connor, University of Sydney

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, people around the world were regularly reassured by election experts that Donald Trump was too outrageous to be elected president.

Reflecting this conventional wisdom, Hilary Clinton campaign’s central message seemed to be: “seriously?”.

In other words, we were constantly told that Trump was too offensive, ignorant and dangerous to be chosen to lead the US. But this political interpretation tended to miss how American popular culture had created the conditions for a character like Trump to upend the mannered and formulaic presidential selection process.

In many ways, the Trump campaign was politics catching up with popular culture.

Trump told a rally in Dallas last week: ‘It’s much easier being presidential … All you have to do is act like a stiff.’
Larry W. Smith/EPA

Trump’s embrace of the worst parts of pop culture

In my new book, Anti-Americanism and American Exceptionalism, I argue that it is a mistake to see Trump as unique or his success as something that could only occur in America.

Trump-like behaviour is all around us. His narcissism, bullying, misogyny, racism, populism and tendency to play the victim is all too commonplace – and these are certainly not just American problems.

What is exceptional is that American politics tends to be more pretentious and has a greater sense of self-importance than politics elsewhere.

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Trump snubbed the pretentiousness and faux politeness of the US political system with a devil-may-care attitude, and in so doing made presidential politics more like Westminster parliamentary politics with its name-calling and bravado.

Trump has also taken the worst lessons from popular culture and used them to his advantage.

He turned the second presidential debate, for instance, into a version of The Jerry Springer Show by inviting three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to sit in the audience.

Trump attempted to deflect attention from the Access Hollywood tapes with an attention-grabbing stunt at his second debate with Hillary Clinton.
Andrew Gombert/EPA

Over 4,000 episodes, Springer had used traumatic cases like these to entertain and distract daytime television viewers. This is far from just an American ploy as radio shock-jocks like Alan Jones in Australia are well-practised at using victims for their own purposes.

In the wake of the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump drew from Springer’s playbook and turned one of the most important testing grounds in American politics into a crass reality television drama. By inviting Clinton’s accusers, his intention was to make this claim: Hillary’s husband is worse than I am.

Hardly caring to answer the serious questions posed during the debate, Trump also ventured that Hillary Clinton “would be in jail” if he was president, echoing the notorious “lock her up” chants at his rallies.

This mocking campaign style – which has continued throughout his presidency – has had real and grave consequences. However, it was far more in touch with the spirit of the times than is usually admitted.

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A symptom of widespread cultural malaise

Trump’s constant self-promotion and trolling of opponents is not only utterly familiar, it’s emblematic of narcissistic 21st century culture. He is certainly more culturally familiar than Hillary Clinton with her lifelong dedication to public service and understanding of complex public policy issues.

The Trump phenomenon is politics subsumed by popular culture. During the 2016 campaign, he lived by the entertainment industry maxim that you can get away with almost anything as long as you’re not boring.

Part of the media’s watchdog role relies on accountability, ethics and the law being central to politics. However, this understanding is undermined when politics is reduced to a popularity contest and increasingly resembles the anything-goes ethos of popular culture.

If we view Trump as a product of popular culture, then he is clearly a symptom of a cultural malaise rather than a radical departure from it.

Given this, it has been intriguing to watch The New York Times, CNN and other traditional media outlets react with endless shock and horror to Trump, as if they had never seen anything like him.

One of the other many curiosities of the Trump era is that the oldest person ever to be elected US president quickly mastered the dark arts of Twitter and has strong appeal with a tech-savvy male youth subculture, which has made shock, conspiracies, misogyny, racism, trolling and bullying supposedly funny and transgressive.

New information technologies haven’t just fuelled greater understanding in the world – as some of the utopian founders of the internet had hoped – they have also given more power to the obnoxious and ill-informed.

Once you engage with this online culture, it is clear that Trump is part of a disturbingly widespread cultural backlash rather than being a unique phenomenon.

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One sign of this is how much less critical Trump has been of white nationalists than any president in the post-civil rights era. By delaying and obfuscating his criticisms, he has encouraged those on the alt-right to believe their voices are being heard.

How we got to this sorry place is that the shock culture that pervades right-wing talk radio hosts, Fox News and 4Chan all made Trump’s alt-right presidency possible.

With the next presidential election looming, it is time to take these popular but often insensitive cultural and political developments that helped Trump come to power very seriously. These cultural trends are on the rise and require resistance as they degrade our personal lives and political culture.

Brendon O’Connor, Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hostilities Flare in BJP-Run Madhya Pradesh, India

Anti-Christian violence, efforts to tarnish church increase in past five years.

NEW DELHI, October 14 (CDN) — Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Madhya Pradesh in December 2003, Christians in the state have suffered increased attacks and concerted efforts to tarnish their image, church leaders said.

Before the BJP took office the state recorded two or three attacks against Christians per year, they said, whereas Jabalpur Archbishop Gerald Almeida said that in the past five years 65 baseless charges of forceful conversion – commonly accompanied by mob violence – have been registered in his diocese alone.

“There are some groups who are closely monitoring the Christian movement, and these people are bent on creating problems for the Christians for the past five years,” Almeida told Compass.

The state is not able to control these groups, he added. Indeed, police routinely working with Hindu extremist groups filed an average of more than three unsubstantiated complaints of “coerced” conversions each month in the past five years, according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Madhya Pradesh (see sidebar below).

In the first eight months of this year, Madhya Pradesh saw the third highest number of attacks against Christians and Christian institutions in the country with 11, behind Karnataka with 43 and Andhra Pradesh with 14, according to Christian advocacy organizations.

The Rev. Anand Muttungal, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Madhya Pradesh, said growing attacks on Christians were a symptom of fear among Hindu extremists that the Catholic Church’s influence is spreading.

“The Church as an organization is doing very well in many fields,” Muttungal said. “It causes those fundamentalists to worry. It could be one of the main reasons for the continuous attacks on Christians.”

Madhya Pradesh has a Christian population of 170,381, only 0.3 percent of the total in the state, according to the 2001 census. The state’s history of religious intolerance runs deep, with an “anti-conversion” law passed in 1968 that has serves as a pretext for harassing Christians.

Igniting anti-Christian violence shortly after the BJP came to power was an incident in Jhabua district, where the body of a 9-year-old girl called Sujata was found in one of the Christian schools on Jan. 11, 2004. Although a non-Christian confessed to the crime, Hindu extremists used the event to justify various attacks against the Christian community.

Abuses became so rampant in 2005 and 2006 that the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) sent a fact-finding team to Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in June 2006. Investigators found that Hindu extremists had frequently invoked the state’s anti-conversion law as a means to incite mobs against Christians and to get Christians arrested without evidence.

Jabalpur Archbishop Almeida cited cases chronicled by the NCM such as the arrest under the anti-conversion law of two local women who were merely distributing gospel tracts in March 2006. Almeida also cited the NCM report on the jailing of four pastors in January 2006 for alleged “forceful conversion” after Hindu extremists from the Bajrang Dal dragged them to a Hindu temple and forced them to deny Christ.

Catholic Church records show that in 2007, a 70-year-old woman identified only as Mrs. Godwin was arrested along with another woman on charges of forceful conversion; they too were only distributing religious literature, a right they had under the nation’s constitution.

Christian leaders said one aim of such abuses of the state’s anti-conversion law is to tarnish the image of Christians by showing them as lawbreakers. Hate propaganda and spurious allegations against Christians continue unabated in the state, church leaders said.

The customary practice in India and especially in Madhya Pradesh, they said, is for Hindu extremists to raise false allegations on the slimmest of pretexts and get police to make hurried arrests.

Political Machinery

After the NCM report in 2006 first documented the violence, the Madhya Pradesh political machinery’s influence became evident when State Minorities Commission Chairman Anwar Mohammed Khan asserted that reports of Hindu extremists attacking Christians in the state were “baseless.”

Khan told Frontline magazine that extremists had not targeted Christians. The magazine also quoted state Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan as saying the BJP government was greatly concerned about “unethical conversions” – presumably of Hindus to Christianity.

The magazine criticized the state Minorities Commission for speaking “the same language as the Bajrang Dal and the state chief minister,” thereby failing its mandate to defend minorities.

This year the commission tried to increase state control over church activities, unofficially recommending that the government enact a law to set up a board to manage church properties such as schools, colleges, hospitals and charities. The Christian community strongly protested, and the state withdrew the proposal.

Leo Cornelio, archbishop of Bhopal, said the Minorities Commission recommendation “shows beyond doubt that it is disloyal to minorities” and “loyal to the government,” according to the Indian Catholic.

The battle over state control of church properties is not over. Muttungal told Compass that the Minorities Commission has started to collect details of church properties through the Education Department. It is certain, he said, that this will lead to a legal battle involving the Education Department, Minorities Commission and the Catholic Church.

SIDEBAR

Police Collusion Seen in ‘Forced Conversion’ Complaints

NEW DELHI, October 14 (Compass Direct News) – Hindu extremist groups in collusion with the state police filed an average of more than three baseless complaints of “coerced” conversions per month in the past five years – shortly after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power – according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Madhya Pradesh.

“I have gathered information from all the districts of the state, according to which the number of [forced or fraudulent] conversion complaints against Christians in the last five years is over 180,” the Rev. Anand Muttungal, spokesman for the state’s Catholic body, told Compass.

Muttungal said he asked the Madhya Pradesh State Crime Records Bureau, a body under the state interior ministry that monitors criminal complaints, about the number of forced conversion complaints in the last five years, and the state agency put the number wrongly at fewer than 35.

Muttungal also said most of the complaints were filed by third parties – not the supposed “victims” – who were unable to produce any unlawfully converted people to support their allegations. He added that the complainants were mainly members of the Hindu extremist Bajrang Dal, youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council or VHP).

“In Jabalpur, the complaints were lodged mainly by the Hindu Dharam Sena [Hindu Religion Army],” he said.

Most recently, the leader of the Hindu Dharam Sena on Sept. 27 got police to interrogate, without cause, a Catholic group traveling through Jabalpur. The Rev. Anto Mundamany of the Carmelite of Mary Immaculate order said the inspector-in-charge of the Civil Lines police station and four other policemen came to the Carmel Niketan center, where the group had stopped for dinner. Police interrogated him and the 45 Catholic visitors about their religious identity, he said, to determine whether the visitors were Hindus whom the priests and nuns at the center might be forcibly trying to convert.

Journalists accompanied the police, and the following day local newspapers reported on the incident, portraying the Christians as inherently suspect.

“Although the police left after making sure that all the participants who had arrived for an inter-parish tour were Christians, the newspapers made no mention of that fact,” Mundamany said.

The local daily Dainik Bhaskar reported that Yogesh Agarwal, head of the Hindu Dharam Sena, had informed police about a supposed “conversion plot” by the Catholic order.

“There can be little doubt that the police are party to this disturbing trend,” Muttungal said.

The incidence of anti-Christian attacks is the highest in the state in Jabalpur – local Christians say the city witnessed at least three attacks every month until recently, mainly by Agarwal and his cohorts. Although numerous criminal complaints are pending against Agarwal, he remains at large.

A Christian requesting anonymity said police officers personally act on his complaints against Christian workers.

A June 2006 report by the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) found that Hindu nationalist groups in Madhya Pradesh had frequently invoked the state’s anti-conversion law as a pretext to incite mobs against Christians. The NCM report also pointed at police collusion in the attacks.

“The life of Christians has become miserable at the hands of miscreants in connivance with the police,” the NCM said in its report. “There are allegations that when atrocities were committed on Christians, the police remained mere spectators, and in certain cases they did not even register their complaints.”

The NCM is an independent body created by Parliament in 1993 to monitor and safeguard the rights of minorities.

Muttungal said the Catholic Bishops’ Conference would approach the state high court with the facts it has gathered to prove police involvement in complaints against Christians.

Most complaints against Christians are registered under Section 3 of the Madhya Pradesh “Freedom of Religion Act” of 1968, popularly known as an anti-conversion law. The section states, “No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any person from one religious faith to another by the use of force or by inducement or by any fraudulent means nor shall any person abet any such conversion.”

Offenses under the anti-conversion law are “cognizable,” meaning police are empowered to register a complaint, investigate and arrest for up to 24 hours, without a warrant, anyone accused of forced conversion.

Police also use Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to arrest Christians. Section 153A refers to “promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony.” Section 295A concerns “deliberate and malicious acts to outrage religious feelings.” These IPC crimes are also cognizable.

Report from Compass Direct News