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Analysis
Why No One Can Beat Donald Trump In TV Debates
After the chaotic first television debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the corruption of the debate culture is lamented. Trump has deeply undermined this in America. Silicon Valley provided you with the tools to do this.
According to polls, American viewers proclaimed Democrat Joe Biden the winner of the first major television debate against Donald Trump.
But Biden didn’t win. Biden already missed the moment he accepted the show. Because Donald Trump is the archetype of the political troll. And as such, it is not debatable at all.
The debate itself also turned out to be as chaotic as expected. The only interesting thing was that challenger Biden was explicitly more insulting than Trump, calling him a “clown” and a “Putin puppy.” The latter simply ignored the setup of the “television debate” entirely.
Following the event, commentators were stunned and concerned by the culture of debate in the country. This first presidential debate was the logical preliminary climax of a development that first brought Donald Trump to power, then destroyed any culture of debate, and thus turned America into a failed state.
Other countries and democracies will fare the same when people like Donald Trump enter the political arena.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, there was extensive discussion and research on how the Russians, Cambridge Analytica, or other groups influenced the elections with fake news and manipulative mobilization strategies on Facebook.
Scratched the surface. If any. The damage that large Internet corporations inflict on political operations with their social media platforms is far more extensive than the selective misuse of data by individual political actors.
In the last ten years, political discourse has increasingly shifted from the hierarchically organized and regulated arenas of linear radio, television, and print media, as well as party and association events, to social media.
At first, this meant that many more people were able to participate. Then, two things very quickly led to a polarization and radicalization of the political base that went very far in the psychotic field: on the one hand, the absence of control functions on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. On the other hand, its participation algorithms.
In social networks there are no editors, journalists, courts or other institutions that define the limits of what is acceptable, what can be said and what can be tolerated. Instead, the algorithms first isolate users in a bubble or echo chamber, where other opinions that are perceived as annoying no longer appear. Then they gradually lead to increasingly explicit content to reliably keep the audience engaged.
In such extreme and unstructured environments, soon only those who express the most extreme opinions, the most shocking abuses, the most exaggerated exaggerations are seen, heard and liked.
Ultimately, this atavistic perpetual motion machine has resulted in politically motivated people going berserk and recently started broadcasting their attacks live via social media. More is (hopefully) impossible.
Donald Trump is just the most prominent and talented example of a political troll who has understood these mechanisms, internalized them, and successfully turned them into institutional policy. A Matteo Salvini in Italy or a Roger Köppel in Switzerland also carry out the troll transfer from the digital bubble to real politics. Just a little less virtuous.
The radicalism translated from the internet is incompatible with the concept of debate. By definition, it excludes the possibility of perceiving and understanding the concerns or points of view of those who think differently and, if necessary, want to respond to them. Politics as a democratic process to agree rules that are binding on everyone becomes impossible.
In the past four years, the United States has come a long way toward this end of democracy. The two political camps are irreconcilably facing each other in parliament and on the streets and are unable to find a joint solution. So incapable that even with a shrug, he can’t recover to fight a deadly pandemic.
There is a legitimate fear that Donald Trump will not evacuate the White House in the event of an electoral defeat. The credibility of checks and balances, democratic institutions such as the constitution, the judiciary and the media, which he wanted to trust at the beginning of his term, have already been bombarded by Trump’s arsenal of trolls.
The GOP institution, the Grand Old Party, has also failed to capture Trump and bring him back to a solution-oriented discourse. Because Trump is much closer and more familiar with the party bases and the personality of the Internet trolls than the institution of the party with its program and establishment.
What if that applies to more than half the American population? What institution should capture him and his absolutely destructive political style?
The fact that Biden did not slip up, insulted his adversary Trump during a debate on national television and criticized him according to all the rules of the art, Trump’s opponents may now be happy to steal.
But you shouldn’t declare Biden a winner for that. Because he simply followed Trump in his troll logic, which destroys political debate and democratic institutions quite thoroughly from within.
