The Political-Entertainment Complex

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images

The Republican National Convention, which concluded last night, provided a glimpse into the reality of the political-entertainment complex as it exists today. I just want to highlight two figures from it, and what they represent.

First, consider J.D. Vance, whose potential path to the White House has been almost amusingly cynical. Vance burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s with his book, Hillbilly Elegy. As far as memoirs go, it was a pretty good one: well written, sketching out a place and a time and a people, and highlighting a real problem in, and with, the general population. I want to highlight a passage from that book that is representative of why it became a smash hit, leading to his anointment as the Hillbilly whisperer for outlets like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and others desperate to understand Trump’s appeal. Writing about a young man with a pregnant girlfriend who couldn’t hold down a job—constantly late, taking hour-long pee breaks, etc.—Vance lays out his thesis:

Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. . . . I worry about those things too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. . . . The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work . . . carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something been done to him.

Emphasis in the original—which is important, because the audience for Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t the people living in industrial Ohio or Kentucky or Pennsylvania experiencing the ravages of the opioid crisis and outsourcing. It was written for people in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It was sociological political entertainment at its finest, the sort of thing that allowed a certain class of commentators to craft grand theories and feel close to a problem without having to experience it.

What was fascinating about Vance’s speech at the RNC is how that message was almost inverted. He spoke of coming from “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington,” complained that “America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” and praised impoverished “hardworking people” who would “give you the shirt off their back” but are spit on by a “media [that] calls them privileged.”

I hate to accuse people of naked cynicism—people change, sometimes for good reasons!—but it really does feel like Vance learned, all-too-quickly, that you can make money by selling an idea to one set of people and gain power by selling a different idea to a different set of people. Voters don’t want to be told they’re to blame for their problems. They want a scapegoat. And Vance was happy to give it to them. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote, “One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.”

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There’s a second element to this story, one that’s supposedly prompting some soul-searching in Hollywood. Vance’s book was turned into a film by the folks at Imagine. Produced by Brian Grazer and directed by Ron Howard, the picture, released in late 2020, was positioned as an Oscar-season showcase for stars Amy Adams (who played Vance’s drug-addicted mother) and Glenn Close (who played his foul-mouthed grandmother with a heart of gold). The film was savaged by critics, at least in part because of Vance’s own turn to Trump apologia in the ensuing years, though it wound up earning a couple of Oscar nominations in the weird, COVID-distorted year it was eligible.

Peter Debruge, writing in Variety, suggested Hollywood is responsible for helping Vance become Trump’s “ultimate celebrity apprentice.” “By treating the book the way they had Cinderella Man and American Gangster, the Imagine Entertainment duo contributed to the mythmaking that got Vance elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022,” Debruge writes. Over at the Ankler, Andy Lewis highlighted “the world’s biggest streamer’s unintentional supporting role, along with a beloved director, in casting Vance as a classic American fable,” and asked, “Why wouldn’t people, increasingly consuming less news, believe the cinematic gauze around J.D. Vance?”

I’ll just say I’m . . . skeptical that Netflix’s awards-bait treatment of Vance’s life benefitted Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in any real way. I’m sure more people saw the movie than read the book. But the number of people who a) saw that movie and then b) decided to vote for Vance because of it had to be exceptionally small. And not just because the movie itself wasn’t that good—as Lewis notes, the film completely jettisoned anything political at all. Indeed, Vance is a bit of a cipher in the film. He’s mostly just presented as a victim who has a guardian angel looking out for him.

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Let’s set Vance aside and move on to the final night of the convention. I’m not that interested in Trump’s speech, which started solidly and veered into languor as he droned on, and on, and on. But the lead up to the speech was pretty fascinating as a microcosm of how politics feels at the moment.

Preceding Trump were three speakers who have transcended the world of simple politics. First up was Tucker Carlson, whose work on Crossfire did more to turn politics into showbiz than anyone this side of the McLaughlin Group. The whole “talking heads shouting buzzwords at each other” format goes a long way toward explaining how we find ourselves in our current mess, as did Carlson’s vaguely authoritarian invocations of Trump as the leader and the father who is brave, so brave, and thus destined to, you know, grease the wheels of history with the blood of the unbelievers. Something along those lines, anyway, I blacked out for a bit.

Dana White, the founder and head of the UFC, also spoke, and his speech was refreshingly old-fashioned: He sounded like a Reagan Republican, someone who praised the idea of America as a place folks immigrate to, who railed against the evils of over-regulation. It’s a message that would have fit in nicely with any previous GOP nominee; what’s interesting is that White is a celebrity entrepreneur, a guy whose status as the ringleader of dudes who punch each other in the face for money highlights Trump’s appeal to a certain sort of person.

And then there was Hulk Hogan, who came on stage in between these two. I know this will sound insane, but I think this was the key moment of the entire convention for Trump.

Two things worth keeping in mind, before we get to Hogan. Thing one: Gen X, which the Pew Research Center defines as those born between 1965 and 1980, has made something of a rightward turn in recent years; whether or not they are the “Trumpiest generation,” as Politico suggested in 2022, is open to debate, but they have gotten older and more conservative. It happens. Thing Two: In a newsletter earlier this week, Marc Caputo noted that the Trump campaign believes running up huge margins with white men is the key to recapturing the White House. Yes, yes, picking up black men and Hispanic voters at the margins is good, but the base is white guys, and this is likely to be a base election, particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Here's what Trump skeptics see in Hogan’s speech: “Why is this clown up there? This is Idiocracy. Don’t they know he’s a racist? Don’t these so-called conservatives understand he made a sex tape? Don’t the free speech warriors know he killed Gawker with Peter Thiel’s help? Won’t someone please think of the hypocrisy!” The Biden team is clipping his speech and sharing it on social media for dunks. They clearly think it’s good for them to show Hogan up there, over and over, amping up the crowd.

Here’s what your average low-education white voter in the Gen X cohort sees: “Hahaha, yeah, it’s Hulkamania, remember take your vitamins, say your prayers, the 48-inch pythons? I remember that. I remember being young, and having fun. Things were better then, right? When I was 13? I would very much like things to be better again.”

You can mock it all you want, but it’s a vibes play, and vibes matter more to politics than a lot of people seem willing to admit. It may have been dumb, it may have felt low-class, but Hogan up there, ripping off his shirt like the Hulkster of old, giving that old carny razzle dazzle to an amped-up crowd: It’s a winning, nostalgic moment, and one specifically designed to activate feelings of warmth in the voters Trump’s team is targeting. And sneering at that moment only reinforces the resentment centers primed by Vance’s ascendancy.

This is the ultimate result of the political entertainment complex: The sociologist-memoirist with the Oscar-nominated biopic slapping a veneer of intellectual sophistication on a ticket whose real draw is a flag-waving, Iron Sheik-punching, shirt-ripping avatar of 1980s American popular culture, all at the behest of a star of Home Alone 2.