Having gotten back up onto the saddle last week, in our first TRP post since my July 24 surgery, we now continue with a two-part essay: first a summary news analysis of just one item, then a review, in as brief a manner as I can manage, of what the essential Age of Spectacle argument is (since it’s been so long since the manuscript rollout was completed and so many new subscribers have joined up since….).
Worse Than a Thousand Words
Two days ago the freely and fairly elected President of the United States, using his own much-followed social media platform Truth Social, basically threatened to make war on the City of Chicago. “Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” along with an AI-generated image of Trump as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the 1979 dystopian Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.
The image—which I decline to reproduce because sometimes a picture is worse than a thousand words—shows Trump/Kilgore squatting down with the Chicago skyline as backdrop, with Army cavalry helicopters leaving the scene of a napalm strike above the words “Chipocalypse Now.” In Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Kilgore memorably says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Trump’s social media post read, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” A viewer of this shitpost had to be pretty young, pretty forgetful, or pretty weird to miss the intimation.
We have to be surprised by wildly inappropriate presidential behavior like this because we all still remember what proper presidential behavior looks like. And that’s the point: Trump excels at getting attention in all the wrong but, to his way of sort of thinking, necessary ways. He excels at keeping himself atop the news cycle because he knows where the lizard brains of human beings are located—at the very nexus of spectacle, of astounding complexes (see below)—and he knows how to jab into them. Everything about the latest shitpost is theatrical, is all about managing impressions through shockbar techniques that render this episode something of a mash-up between a WWF farce and the Idiocracy movie.
This, not governing, is what he does. And it works: His attention ratings soar above his approval ratings. He doesn’t care if he gets roundly booed at the U.S. Open as long as it makes a headline, makes the broadcast media. In that mode he’s playing a WWF “heel.” He knows what he’s doing. And while everyone is captivated by the latest two-headed calf he trots out, to the side and under the table some real bad shit is happening that hardly anyone has bandwidth left to notice.
Now who is surprised by this? After LA? Does anyone still think that what the Los Angeles Times described, more aptly than its reporters and editors may have realized, as a “movie-set staging” in MacArthur Park on July 7, 2025, was off key? Look, a theme-park version of Federal policing agencies, accompanied by 90 members of the California National Guard to protect them, descended on a children’s summer camp there in a maudlin but apparently feckless show of force with tanks and horses and armored cars. Bad movie, sure; but what else did it look like?
After Washington? What happened in Los Angeles in July looks to have been just a warm-up for the bigger show acted out in Washington in August. Some normal people might have been taken in at first, supposing that Donald Trump really cared about lowering crime, extirpating ugly homeless encampments, and seeing to the re-beautification of the capital city. None of that was remotely true. The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger hit the nail nearly square on the head as he validated the core of The Age of Spectacle argument:
As he takes over D.C., Trump isn’t acting like a politician so much as a film producer. The goal isn’t quiet on the D.C. streets. It’s making something new for the content beast: video of clashes between masked cops and D.C. residents.
Proof of Egger’s analysis resided in the obvious fact that the National Guard deployment in Washington was concentrated in the parts of town where tourists tend to roam about with characteristic tourist garb and gear, especially in August—and the Guardsmen, moreover, were not authorized to make arrests. So instead they decided to be useful by collecting litter and mulching some trees—since the workers who usually did that were all fired by the DOGE. The deployment was not noticeable at all in parts of the city where crime actually exists in regular clumps. According to the peerless Helene Cooper writing in the August 19, 2025 New York Times, “The National Guard presence, with desert sand-colored vehicles parked near the capital’s most visited tourist spots, is now showing up regularly on social media feeds in posts by visitors to Washington.” That was always the purpose and point; it was all for show. It was a show. It still is, however lame it also is. In my more dour moments I can’t help but recall possibly the worst movie ever made as the closest analog to what Trump & Co. have been doing: Killer Klowns from Outer Space, an almost impossibly bad film from 1988. (If you’ve seen it, Lord bless you, you know what I mean.)
And after Connor Spring, writing in the June 1, 2025 Telegraph, reported that, as the headline put it, “White House may ‘jazz up’ Trump’s briefings as he ‘doesn’t like reading’.” The idea, Spring explained, was to stage the President’s briefings so they imitated Fox News broadcasts.
And after a report by Adrian Carrasquillo [“Inside Trump World’s Plans to Gloss Up Mass Deportations,” The Bulwark, February 5, 2025] described how, in preparation for the inevitable searing images of mass deportations, the Trump Administration was turning to cinematic propaganda to allay opposition?
Anyone out there who still believes that DOGE was about governmental efficiency, who believes that only gang members and felons are being deported without due process, who believes that crime rather than flamboyant intimidation of opposition politicians and their supporters in advance of the intimidations being prepared for the midterms is the real motive for deploying the National Guard in “blue” but not “red” cities with comparable crime rates, who believes that Scott Bessent is a more reliable source on American economic reality than the pre-castrated Bureau of Labor Statistics, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, please get in touch with me because yes, you lucky dog, I do still own a bridge in Brooklyn that I might let you have at a bargain price.
Oh, I’m sorry; was that a Dad Joke?
The Gist
The basic AoS argument is that American culture today exhibits a mentality that qualitatively differs from the one most educated, literate people—like all those reading this essay—suppose is still operative or, at any rate, can be restored as operative if only the clowns with flamethrowers currently running amok in Washington can be deposed and replaced with normal leaders.
Alas, educated literate people, when it comes to basic assumptions about politics, oftentimes resembled fish who have a lot of trouble discovering water, easily presuming that not-so-well educated people who do not read basically think the same way they do about the world, just maybe not as well. This is a generous attitude, as befits people with a meliorist sensibility and, in our culture, an easy universalist presumption about human nature. Generous but wrong. Or sometimes not generous so much as dismissive, as in “those people” don’t matter much politically; elites actually run things, as they should, and elites, since they are educated and rational, think pretty much the same except for some marginal disagreements and deviations over mere details. (Anyone living in the MAGA-mangled United States today who still confidently thinks this is so needs psychiatric help, possibly.)
No, the combination of the sharp erosion of deep literacy, coupled with the affluence-enabled wallowing in shallow shockbar high-graphic entertainment—and supercharged by the addiction-prone overlay of the digital revolution (the cyberlution)—has triggered a state-change cognitive regression in the culture, and since politics is downstream of culture, in our politics, as well. We the People, as a politically salient plurality, have ridden the New Orality back into a increasingly dominant social mindset—and social mindsets are collectively produced and sustained, remember—that most closely resembles not the modern, rationalist mentality of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras wherein all of our political institutions were wombed, but to pre-mass literate mythic consciousness….to a time before mass literacy arose in the West, at the least some four centuries ago, and at most—for some it seems—all the way back to the very portal of literacy and proto-scientific thought about six thousand years ago.
The mythic consciousness operates according to two basic laws: the law of consanguinity and the law of metamorphosis. The law of consanguinity privileges unity of feeling, emotional resonance, and communal solidarity, so it resonates with the pre-eminent subjectivism of postmodernism….but which is almost identical to premodernism save for the decorative language that gives postmodernism away as a mystical romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The law of metamorphosis stipulates that anything can change into anything else, change back again, change in some other way, and that there is no solid before or after. Everything that happens happens now; memory both personal and otherwise is fluid and extrinsically suggestible. The causal mode within the metamorphic mentality is not the scientific or rational causal reality we all grew up with, but magical efficacy.
That is why the real and the fictive tend to blur for those regressed into the mythic consciousness. The fact that virtually all that post-deep-literate American adults—I estimate that number now at at least 55-65 percent of the whole and rising fast—get all their information (image-heavy impressions is really a better descriptor than information) about politics, society, and the real world at large from an array of two-dimensional screens, not just coincidentally the very same screens that are the source of all their fictive entertainment fare. This is not a trivial observation: The medium is the message, remember? Whatever Marshall McLuhan’s interpretive and predictive errors may have been he was solid square right about that one, and so were his direct mentors and more removed precursors who tried their best to teach us that new communications media always have revolutionary social effects not just or mainly because of their content, but because of their very nature as regards the scale of audiences they engender and the manner in which the technology interfaces with the sensory apparata of the human central nervous system.
The erosion of deep-literacy has multiple socio-cognitive effects. It truncates the development of a mature theory of mind, and that in turn limits the development of empathy to concrete objects, either real people or personalities (including fictive ones) encountered in entertainment modes on screens. The perceptive potential of non-deep-literate people thus becomes schizophrenic in the sense that they glom onto the very concrete on the one hand and the surrealist on the other, but lack facility with and comprehension of abstract or conceptual language in between. So, a choice: price of eggs or democracy? Non-deep readers will choose the price of eggs almost every time, because they cannot define the word democracy, let along the conjugate liberal democracy since these are concepts, and hence they never coherently discuss such ideas or concepts among themselves. Barstool conservatives, so called, get deep into bottles, not concepts.
One key result is that non-deep-literate people tend to default to two kinds of storylines, both of which are zero-sum in structure and thus simple at base even when ornate in articulation. One such storyline is Protean—stories of heroes and/or martyrs; the other is conspiratorial—stories of enemies and/or devils. And this, in turn, is why the form of authority that makes best sense to sub-deep-literate people is charismatic authority of Max Weber’s justly famous triad, and not traditional or formal rule-of-law authority….which of course must be written down (and read, obviously) to function at all. This is why, back in 2017, I dubbed Donald Trump the Shaman-in-Chief, not because he is any sort of wizard, but because the MAGA screenheads who idolize him, quite literally in many cases, are not capable of internalizing the conceptual tools that enable them to grasp what formal, rule-of-law authority even is.
The impulse to credit the concrete over the abstract also explains much of the appeal of burgeoning Christian Nationalism, so called. The insistence of people like J.D. Vance and others that America never was about a proposition or an idea, but is based like other nations on blood-and-soil ethnicity, fits the concrete mode of reasoning, not one based on facility wth abstractions.
When a human mind is exposed to the same or similar kinds of sensory stimulation, whether in nature or from a largely man-made environment, a kind of routinization to expectation takes place—something like a structural evoked set, for those who understand the terminology of cognitive psychology. When that happens, humans engage in what we casually call glancing. But we should be careful with how we use that word, not casual.
Glancing is not a superficial activity, but a deep penetration of the environment designed to seek out anomalies from the ordinary. It is a change detector. We do it because we have evolved what cognitive scientists call a novelty bias. Concentrating attention requires a shift in our brainwave modality, and shifting attention triggers memory retention regarding the focus we are about to give up. We do a lot, in other words, just being awake with our senses working in normal form, and what we do is quite energy intensive.
Now, in a natural setting, the three-dimensional setting in which humans evolved, the novelty bias tended to focus on occasional threats and opportunities equally natural and three-dimensional. We have enough energy for that, usually. In the sort of man-made environment most Americans inhabit now, the massive increase in the frequency and attention-pulling power of distractions, and the advent of technological innovations that are extensions of the human brain rather than of human muscle, are calling into question our biological coping capacity. This has caused our novelty bias to go haywire from fatiguing overuse in what Herbert Simon prophetically referred to as “an attention economy.” This is where what I mean specifically by spectacle comes into play.
I mean spectacle not as relatively rare splotches of escapist magic in otherwise workaday lives, as has been its niche for millennia. I mean it as a cognitive default setting that has become so ubiquitous, because deliberately manufactured for purposes of fun and especially profit, as to have become a habituated mental frame for a great many of us. Everything seems to demand our attention; how do we choose? We choose, based on how our novelty bias is primed to work, on that which strikes us as the most spectacular.
A spectacle is best defined as an attention-arresting display that depends for achieving its intended effect on the sudden perception of the improbable in the target. To work it must evoke what some cognitive psychologists call an astounding complex. We do not mean by that special effects that induce perceptions we know are fabricated, but rather what used to make circus freak shows so captivating: displays that induce a “wow, you don’t see that every day” reaction. Does that calf really have two heads, or is it a fabricated illusion of some sort? Did Donald Trump really pimp Apocalypse Now into a threat against the City of Chicago? See what I mean?
The key to all kinds of astounding complexes is that they structure uncertainty in such a way that only two possibilities are perceived in the moment of our arrested attention: It’s either entirely A or it is entirely not-A, and no third in-between possibility can exist. The longer the uncertainty dilemma lasts, the more engrossing and alluring the astonishment. That means, too, that the less clear any extant contextual evidence necessary to resolve the uncertainty quickly is, the better from the perspective of the circus master who wishes to entertain for the sake of future ticket sales……or the political manipulator who plots to exploit and manipulate the momentarily stunned viewer.
Now, astounding complexes inhere in technical events of the sort we near ceaselessly see on our screens large, medium, and small. Rapid scene cuts when the video takes our senses places our unaided bodies cannot go are the main form of technical events on screen. When we watch television, for example, our senses can take us from the street to the roof of a building across the street in less than a second; we cannot do that literally, and we did not evolve being able to do that except in dreamworlds and the childlike magical-efficacy worlds of free imagination. When we experience cognitive astounding complexes via reality-mimicking mediated images endorphin squirts spit from our endocrine system despite the experience having become so common that we no longer even notice let alone remark about it.
It is now possible—indeed, it has become so common as to be ubiquitous—to use technology to burrow down to the brainstems of millions of people simultaneously or nearly so by use of algorithmic targeting so as to sell people whatever may be sold: ideas and prejudices as well as goods and services. Great is the advantage to the gigantic in this, and that is what we have called generically the phenomenon of the Net Effect, which can be captured essentially in three related observations:
An inherent characteristic of digital information technology is to aggregate a wide range of human transactions that were formerly more dispersed.
Unlike older Kondratieff cycles, digital technology conduces inherently to oligopolistic, potentially even monopolistic, conditions. Big data magnifies inequality of both opportunity and outcomes by its nature, not by any management decisions.
Digital information technology sizes its own business dimensionality in a way that may be unprecedented: The algorithms that the companies use to actually do their business reflect exactly the exponential relationship between their scale and their profits. Network size matters.
The Net Effect is important, for it is an integral part of what is now congealing around us as a form of political and socio-economic reality in the United States: the intersection of post-liberal attitudes in politics, techno-acceleration, and the creeping privatization of formerly state functions (public speech monitoring and IT management in the U.S. Army, for just two disparate examples out of dozens I could list) by the corporate masters of said techno-acceleration who have managed to get inside the U.S. Government to create a new form of the oldest relationship between wealth and power: corporatism, which is de facto anti-liberalism.
Now, finally for our admittedly clipped summary, conspiracy theories are extended astounding complexes, made more appealing by the communal affinity they promise and cement in a diffracted and isolated age. So Protean stories of improbable bravery and heroism meant resemble an ensemble of astounding complexes, although these days hatred of others seems a more powerful energizer of emotion than admiration for one’s own heroes. The result of inundation in fictive media feeds has resulted in a plain majority of Americans, to one extent or another, having lost track of social (not concrete) reality—that is to say, of social facticity itself, for the social world obliges its participants to be able to move seamlessly among different laminations of the Lebenswelt and then to return, when necessary, to the real thing. Non-readers with truncated theories of mind, with foreshortened empathy capabilities, who are not facile with abstractions and conceptual language, who are in short adult bodies trapped in adolescent minds, are increasingly at pains to do that. And many do not even know that they are supposed to be able to do that.
One result is that such people tend to see the real world as though it were a reality-TV, or just a plain fictional skein of episodes of some television show. Wrote Bruno Maçães some five years ago: “American life continuously emphasizes its own artificiality in a way that leads participants to believe that they are living a fantasy. . . . Americans no longer ask whether a book or television series would work in real life, they ask whether real life would work in a movie or television series.” Donald Trump is no intellectual; on that I think we can all agree. But this he understands. He knows his core target audience the way a pickpocket knows his mark.
Think back to where the American body politic has been lately in order to get some purchase on where it is likely headed. It reads like a horror story because it occurred in a horror story-like mesmerization of the real political world. It is as though one day We the People were living in a recognizably real social and political world and then, of a sudden, we felt the coalescence of a seismic Necker Cube flip and, looking around, were momentarily stunned to find that what was real had melted into dreams, and what had been an obsessive bad dream—the one about the twinned Big Lies concerning November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021 actually carrying the day this past November 5—had become our dominant reality.
That wasn’t supposed to happen, or even be possible. But we let it happen, and some of us anyway had an inkling of its arrival. So on December 4, 2016 Edgar Maddison Welch rolls into town here from North Carolina, walks into a Connecticut Avenue pizza place with an assault rifle, agitatedly says some very weird things—and so Comet Pizza/Frazzledrip hit the media mainstream, and another nugget of madness squeezed itself into American reality. It wasn’t the first sort of nuttiness to do so and it certainly has not been the last, but even before Donald Trump’s first Inaugural the nation had begun its rapid slide into surrealism. It happens one bizarre episode at a time, and although they are all a little different, all are structured as A/not-A astounding complexes. They happen, they are spectacular, they astonish, and they frighten us if we have any feel for reality at all—but only momentarily. The fear subsides, our rubberband normality reflex kicks in, and on we go, until so much accumulates that the very ground shifts beneath us.
If indeed a conspiracy theory is a spectacle protracted, it is also an extended astounding complex brought under control for shared use. In every recent case a spectacle protracted into a conspiracy theory need have the aura of the emotionally intense, near apocalyptical timbre about it to congeal. It resembles, to those captive to the normalization of political mystification, feeling like being a part of the “good guy” army in a horror or zombie movie, except that after the flip it is the movie that is real to those locked in its cognitive prisms.
We have a perfect literary description of precisely this kind of Necker Cube flip, in this case one both triggered and shadowed by the onset of intense emotional focus. Indeed, we have the ur-literary example, so perfect for the sake of illustration that it has escaped nearly all of us. In this example a man, a man of science and learning no less, finds himself overwhelmed with rage and self-reproach such that to save what remains of his friends and loved ones he resolves to dedicate himself to his
. . . most abhorred task. The prospect of such an occupation made every other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.
This is how we find Dr. Frankenstein at the end of Chapter 17 of young Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. And this, pretty much exactly, is what it has been like inside the heads of people like Jacob Chansley, Ashli Babbit, and the hordes of MAGA true-believers lately calling for the release of truth from the Epstein Files.
The insanity has become so normal, so routinized for so many non-deep-literate American screenheads, that many of us no longer retain a capacity to stand back and look at the manifest whole picture for what it really is. The result has been the normalization over time of political mystification, and far too many non-MAGA Americans have been complicit by default for letting this normalization happen. We, many of us, just don’t credit the possibility that whole seemingly sophisticated societies can entirely lose their shit, despite ample evidence from history that, oh, yes they certainly can, and have.
Be clear, however: None of the shift in cultural mentality described in brief just above means that contemporary American populism’s grievances are all illusory. It does not mean that all of even most MAGA true believer are necessarily stupid, necessarily bigots, or necessarily moral monsters, as some have called them. Very relatedly, it does not mean that recent American elites, of all types and political allegiances, have not been as mentally gated, venal, self-dealing, and intellectually mediocre as a skein of books over many years by the likes of Christopher Lasch (The Revolt of the Elites [1985]), Charles Murray (Coming Apart [2012]), Stephen Brill (Tailspin [2018]), and several others have claimed they have been…..and now we learn that J.P. Morgan, not to exclude Jamie Dimon himself, knowingly abetted and profited from the business machinations of arguably the most outrageous and depraved pimp in modern history. [See David Enrich, “Epstein’s bankers,” New York Times, September 8, 2025] Who is surprised at this, really? Not me, boys and girls.
And none of this means, as related last time, that the fundamental environment upon which America’s liberal democratic institutions were built in economics and governance has not changed so dramatically over time as to undermine their residual alignment with contemporary reality. The idea that our problems today are really just some bad people who got elected by some kind of freakish error, and that when we beat them at the polls all will return to fine and normal….. I’m sorry, but do all of you have Pollyanna for a middle name?
The larger take-away here is that there is no point in the first decade and a half of the current century that we as an American demos should want to go back to, and there is no point before that we can go back to for all the major changes in the socio-technical environment that have since transpired. The only way to a better America is forward, through and beyond the thicket of trouble we can all espy.
What we are describing in The Age of Spectacle argument is not premised on a verdict about where virtue lies in the broad plains of American life. We are rather describing a mentality shift that has so deranged the way we see the world, and see each other, that nearly everything—even viewpoints and exertions that may be praiseworthy in their essence—has become too distorted to manage toward any kind of functional endpoint. Conventional politics, such as they are, are too wildly dysfunctional to promise redemption. In an Age of Spectacle politics mirrors the functionally fictive memes that dominate the culture, and these memes are shaping political narratives into apocalyptical fears and hopes. Everything gets exaggerated, becomes limitless, in a cognitive world dominated by a spectacle mentality.
Extremism by nature lacks normal time horizons. Those seized by one form of leftist extremism or another are certain the world will end unless dramatic and politically improbable change happens immediately. Rightwing conspiratorialists who parrot “replacement theory” are similarly apocalyptical: The only world they credit and claim to belong in is, they are sure, coming to an end. There is no time horizon here either. And when politics turns apocalyptical in tone, what people are for melts away into a turbulent roiling sewer of what they are against. It stinks of zero-sum, only winners and losers, only knaves and fools, and so abets no concept of a loyal opposition, only authoritarian exertions to seize and maintain a hold on power BAMN—by any means necessary.
Sources and Methods
To conclude this section a short bibliographical note is in order. This—all of this—isn’t or shouldn’t be entirely new news to anyone who has been paying attention these past several decades. But it sort of is, I have found, to many. Why is that?
Mainly because while every element of explanation was out there all along, just waiting for reality to send the lightning bolt that fused them together, the pieces were in no single academic discipline, or even arose in the same time periods. So few put them together into a kind of unified field theory of the case to really understand what has been going on in American culture and politics these past five or six decades, coming to a frothing head in the past two of them. All I have done is try to put the pieces together, and so began making this argument, including in early publication forms, in 2019.
But I soon found company. Consider these titles noted below, all of which got a reasonably firm grip on what was happening, and in some cases on why it was happening, even if almost all of these seers managed to miss the significance of deep-literacy erosion—just as so many before them, not least the remarkable big-think global culture master Karl Jaspers himself, managed to do: Bruno Maçães, “How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics,” The Intelligencer, September 9, 2020; Megan Garber, “We’ve Lost the Plot,” The Atlantic, January 30, 2023; and most recently, as cited last week, Neal Gabler, “The Little Discussed Secret to Trump’s Ruination of America,” August 22, 2025, Farewell, America (Substack). Gabler was reprising his own luminous book, Life: The Movie (Vintage, 1998), and he in turn benefitted from the prophetic book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Random House, 1985). As to the role of literacy in culture and politics, and the recent debauching of the reading brain in our culture, again, nothing new here. Key sources include Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen & Co., 1982) and, much more recently, Maryanne Wolf, especially Reader, Come Home (Harper, 2018). Understanding the mythic consciousness is the province of the great anthropologists and philosophers of the past, and many may be paid their due—Durkheim, Eliade, Frazier, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss of course. But to me the best of all on this is Ernst Cassirer, and he is the one I follow most closely in The Age of Spectacle expedition.
Next week…..well, stay with TRP and you’ll be surprised to meet, up close, the remarkable Leopold Kohr. Who?! Well, you’ll see.