One British shop owner’s reaction after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. London Evening Standard
We may no longer have the patience to read ourselves into the implicit contracts we must make to meld the private with the public.
I was in high school in April of 1962 when an angry President Kennedy delivered remarks to the nation, expressing his displeasure with the steel industry for raising prices that he thought would prolong a recession. Who remembers presidential comments while running the chaotic maze of high school? For many of us the landscape of national life was different then. Kennedy’s criticism of the steel industry caught our attention because presidents typically did not make disparaging comments about core businesses. With unexpected fury as he noted that “simultaneous actions of United States Steel and other steel corporations, increasing steel prices by some 6 dollars a ton, constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the publicinterest.” As was his habit, he talked about the national values. Hence, the rhetorical blow against “big steel,” which still supplied most of the American carmakers. “Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country, and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.” The famous Kennedy style of understated affability had been momentarily wiped away by his revulsion. The chill was consequential even for a high schooler. At the time it seemed as if the nation fell silent for just a moment to ponder the weight of his words.
I offer this example in representative contrast to what has unraveled in the years since then. In 1962 Americans noticed a President’s atypical displeasure. How times have changed, with the words of Donald Trump falling like so many lit matches in a dry and empty forest. The pulse quickens from the spectacle, but fewer seem shocked by a national figure who has constructed his persona around daily taunts and obscene asides. Forget a major American industry like steel, no person has been too small to be picked off in a shooting gallery of rhetorical assaults.
The use of presidential rhetoric for incitement and harassment was rare in 1962. Kennedy and his 1960 presidential campaign opponent, Richard Nixon, kept their comments to each other and their supporters civil. Neither sought to use the plentiful indecencies of rhetorical attack to impugn the character of the other. In the end, the steel price hikes were rescinded, and the nation moved on.
Now, it seems, words from former president Donald Trump seem to rush into the vacuum of what passes for civil discourse. We no longer pay much attention because the nonstop roar of hortatory language in the digital world is more distanced and transactional. In a culture of professional shouters we have apparently come to believe that we don’t have time to care. It seems not to matter that a candidate for the Presidency of the United States can suggest that a heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her,” or that he would deploy the military to handle the “enemy from within,” meaning “radical-left lunatics” like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No wonder former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, has recently noted that the President he served under is “fascist to the core.” And we should remember that in 2016 Trump indicted himself and the nation even more in the comment that he could “shoot somebody and not lose voters.” As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently wrote, he “has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.” He has made language a disposable afterthought.
As a rhetorician I have a professional distaste for his sloppy indifference to the advantages of a tempered response. As for his brazen palaver, the acceptance of it by a sizable portion of the county is its own national crisis: maybe less than Kennedy’s confrontation over Cuban Missiles, but certainly more than JFK’s showdown with big steel.
Because government reaches further into our lives, its rules and stipulations provoke in some a barely dormant impulse to celebrate chaos.
It follows that his conviction for multiple felonies and an assault on at least one woman seems not to be disqualifying. A discouraging number of Americans have dismissed the details of the former President’s crimes of rebellion against the rule of law. It is no coincidence that the British chose a hasty exit from the EU at about the same time Americans first elected Trump. Both societies behaved like bored middle-schoolers searching for a sense of identity in a confusing world.
The influential conservative writer David Brooks has noted that the United States is “a democracy in decline,” in part because more Americans with lives shrunken to the size of their personal devices are ill suited to deal with pages and paragraphs that are needed to make sense of a complex society. Primary sources have been overwhelmed by influencers and interpreters. With news readership and viewership at record lows, too many distracted owners no longer feel compelled to confront the stressed political environment. It is easy to get comfortable with the realization that no one is really paying much attention.
There are also other forces at work. Speaking in broad strokes, because government reaches further into our lives, its rules and stipulations provoke in some a barely dormant impulse to feed a backlash that celebrates chaos. Many no longer have the patience to read themselves into the implicit contracts with civil institutions such as schools and libraries that meld the private with the public. The ubiquitous use of film violence targeting men offers a clue. It seems to function as an opportunity for vicarious release from the work of living in an interdependent and culturally diverse society. To self-identify as dispossessed is reason enough not to care.
We should not assume that a group asking for “feedback” is really listening. Listening is a cultivated and individual skill. Feedback is typically less refined and subject to organizational filters.
Recently I noticed that the New York Times seems to have stopped publishing letters in its Sunday Magazine and Book Review. Not an earthshaking change maybe. But it began to strike me that this deletion of reader’s opinions was odd when juxtaposed with the paper’s fall-over-backwards requests for feedback after doing something as simple as reporting a missing paper. The single checkmark notification is a nano-second act, yet it provoked a request to know how satisfying or difficult the experience was. It seemed that their priorities were upside down. Why dismiss reader’s comments while keeping a useless exercise about a simple matter? I suspect this is a kind of irrationality that grows out of an automated system which doesn’t know what matters. We are on the midst of similar requests for feedback from CX (Customer Service) teams responsible for designing the “customer journey” in retail. They can satisfy themselves by signaling concern for customers without setting up the tools needed to fully follow through. Listening is a demanding intellectual exercise; responding to an set of a-priori questions is not.
It’s worth remembering that the term “feedback” arose as a name for noise or interference produced by an electrical circuit back onto itself. The deafening growl of a public address system is an example. We get a double dose of aural unpleasantness if Uncle Fred gets his karaoke microphone too close to the speakers.
To be sure, I’m an outlier for still expecting a newspaper to be in the driveway each morning. But this simple example suggests a growing trend in how we are asked to interact with agencies, businesses and organizations. Our communications with these entities seems less about the specifics of a response, and more about creating a running tally of stock complements, complaints, or experiences that can be processed into data-driven marketing. “How did we do?” asks the online store. “Did we answer your question?” a tech website wants to know. The answers will only need a simulacrum of listening, without anyone knowing enough to learn much from the answer.
With some exceptions the idea of “customer care” now amounts to the creation of a digital interface between an increasingly impatient live body on one end, and a digital “bot” with a set of closed-option questions on the other. Companies like Bizrate specialize in setting up such systems for clients. But rarely do organizations allow a customer with a specific question to frame their issue in their own way. Speaking broadly, as a culture we are under the paradoxical impression that we need to appear consumer-driven, but we don’t need to hear that much. Surely customer comments can do some good. But we are already so overtaxed with incoming messages that these pre-formed exchanges seem like they hardly matter.
More often than not, the organizations repertoire of a group’s “answers” cannot easily match the particular variables embedded in a question. Hence, no one is really “chatting.” We have all ended up at the top of a phone tree when none of the options seem good. To change metaphors, more than I can count I’ve ended an exchange with a chatbot feeling like I got pushed onto the wrong train. Try dealing with your cable supplier, and you will likely conclude the experience feeling like you ended up going to Duluth rather Dallas.
What is both ingenious and perverse in these end-of-transaction questions is seemingly how much an organization pretends that it is listening. The problem, of course, is that prompts generated by algorithms cost practically nothing to produce. And they may actually yield some data that can satisfy the performance expectations of management. It seems like the marketing department is growing, but the service department has been hollowed out. Odds are that an organization really doesn’t want to hear you on your terms.
interest.” As was his habit, he talked about the national values. Hence, the rhetorical blow against “big steel,” which still supplied most of the American carmakers. “Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country, and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.” The famous Kennedy style of understated affability had been momentarily wiped away by his revulsion. The chill was consequential even for a high schooler. At the time it seemed as if the nation fell silent for just a moment to ponder the weight of his words.
