Like it or not, here’s one thing Donald Trump has going for him: being a culture maker. His appeal is based on being able to stand for something in the eyes of his supporters, to help them put things together, to tell a story in a way that lets them tell their own, to make sense of their lives. That’s what culture makers do, whether we’re talking about Trump, Taylor Swift, or whoever else. But it hasn’t been what Joe Biden’s done so far, and it hasn’t been a focus for Democrats for a while.
At The Ink, we’ve been exploring this question of culture- and meaning-making throughout the year, and it came into sharp focus when we talked to author and policy expert Heather McGhee, who pointed out that, despite his decency and steady hand, Biden’s lack of culture making, his absence from that arena, his lack of presence in people’s lives, was worse than any caricatures his right-wing critics could draw.
But the campaign did a smart thing this week, bringing in actor Robert De Niro to tell the better story and take the fight to Trump.
Anand was on “Morning Joe” today, talking about what DeNiro’s appearance really means, and how it can help the Democrats make meaning. We think you’re going to want to watch. And after you do, check out the links below for some of our explorations of the meaning-making theme this election year.
[S]tories like these are not self-forming. They take work. They take meaning making. They require storytellers — candidates themselves, campaign ads, surrogates, commentators, artists — to organize the fragments into some whole.
Enter Robert De Niro, a very fine storyteller.
On behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign, De Niro was making meaning out of the narrative fragments of the Trump trial, telling a story that people might tell themselves, the kind of story about Trump the penny-ante grifter that New Yorkers certainly know in their bones.
By putting De Niro out there, the Biden campaign is acknowledging publicly what it presumably knows privately: that it has not participated adequately in the cultural process that a modern campaign demands
So Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story.
Donald Trump actually does all those things for his people. Frankly, Donald Trump may do those things for us, too, just in opposition. We are a celebrity culture. We are a culture where individuals use cultural icons to fill in the gaps in their lives and knit together a sense of identity, and Obama did that for us.
You would wear Obama gear, and you would signify to people who you were and who you were with and what your version of America was, and it made you feel better about it. You went to the rallies and it was a religious experience, and that’s just at the basic level of comparing different presidential candidates.
But there’s also something deeper, of course, that Trump and Trumpism does, which is that he’s more than a presidential candidate. Because he’s been a figure in reality TV — our other big significant institution in this country — he really offers to those who identify with him a way to understand to whom they belong, who is Other, who’s against them, who’s with them, and what any individual phenomenon that comes through the news or through their lives — whether the closing of a factory, the war in the Middle East, or Taylor Swift — means to them.
Young people are very into Biden when he’s stood up and stuck it to someone. Think of when he joined the picket line, which, by the way, no sitting president has ever done during a strike. When he says “Pharma, bring it on,” when he is Dark Brandon, that works. I’ll bet you Dark Brandon’s approval ratings are higher than Joe Biden’s. I understand he’s a mythical figure, but American politics is all mythical, in a way.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.