The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Forgive my Trump news burnout.
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Americans feel worn out by the amount of crazy news there is these days thanks in large part to the Trump Twitter storms and the way news outlets cover them.
To use a science analogy, Trump’s tweets are like solar flares that send out coronal mass ejections and significant releases of plasma that disrupt the magnetic field of the corona.
“The portion expressing feelings of information overload is in line with how Americans felt during the 2016 presidential election, when a majority expressed feelings of exhaustion from election coverage,” according to the survey research.
While I’m in the news business and a political news junkie myself like many of my regular readers, I am not immune to feeling burnout. So rather than trying to keep up by cranking out one useless news story after another about every little thing that happens, I try to focus on the big picture stories that actually matter. I can’t cover every solar flare up, in other words. I try to use my intellectual instruments to detect the one’s that matter.
I’m also trying to come up with explanatory stories that help readers understand what’s really going on in the world. That would seem to hold a useful purpose for journalism these days as the press is under nearly constant assault from this administration and Trump’s loyal followers.
So for the past week, I’ve been taking the time to think about a useful analogy to explain elections like the long-shot victory of Doug Jones in Alabama last year and Trump’s unlikely election victory in 2016. There are many examples worth talking about, but first let me explain the theory I’m working on for a book chapter on the Jones campaign. It’s not even close to being finished yet, but I figured I would let loyal readers in on my thinking today in this Sunday column.
You may will recall that I often look to hard science for theories to apply in the social sciences. So I’ve been looking into wormholes.
According to the simplest encyclopedia definitions, a wormhole, also known as an Einstein–Rosen bridge, is a concept that represents a potential solution to Einstein field equations. Often employed in popular science fiction shows such as Star Trek, a wormhole is depicted as two separate points in spacetime and is visualized as a tunnel with two ends.
Scientists say wormholes are consistent with the general theory of relativity, but there is no definitive proof yet that actual wormholes really exist. If they did, it might be possible to connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years or more, short distances such as a few meters, different universes, or different points in time.
It might be the answer to time travel, but since that does not appear possible now, let me suggest using the analogy in political science or at least political journalism.
Political Wormholes
Anyone who follows political news is familiar with the concept of “tossing ones hat into the ring.” That’s a phrase from the sport of boxing, but it has come to mean jumping into a political campaign to see if something sticks or catches on.
There are lots of political candidates tossing their hats into the ring these days, especially Democrats who are fired up to run in response to the perceived damage to American democracy by Trump in the wake of his surprise victory.
By many accounts, Trump never really expected to get elected president in 2016. He was just “throwing his hat into the ring” to get even more famous and rich. So how can we explain his win? Maybe it would help to think of a political wormhole. Somehow his Twitter storm of key words and phrases that appealed to all manner of angry and disgruntled voters were like solar flares that created a rift in the space-time continuum and he was able to slip through to become president.
The same could be said for U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.
In response to Trump’s election and what was going on in the country and in his life, in May of 2017 Jones made the decision to toss his hat into the political ring. He also seemed to slip through a political wormhole and come out the other end on top in December, 2017 — if only by 1.5 percent.
See all of our original coverage of that campaign here.
But getting a political wormhole to open up and then exiting at the proper place and time takes a lot of maneuvering. It doesn’t happen automatically, and contrary to the religious view of the world, god doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. There is no evidence for predestination. It would be hard to imagine any god who would submit the world to the pain of a Donald Trump.
No, there must be another calculus at work. Since I’m not a mathematician, I can’t exactly quantify what it will take, for example, for Democrats to create a Blue Wave in November to take back the House and maybe the Senate.
The New York Times and other newspapers are still sending reporters out into the field to try to find out what it takes for candidates to win, it seems, although they don’t seem to have the theoretical framework to figure it out.
So individual candidates will just have to put the time and effort in to study some of these races where wormholes seemed to open up and close at the right place and time.
Take the recent case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s startling primary victory in New York, where a 28-year-old hard-left-leaning political upstart who had never run for office before unexpectedly upset Congressman Joe Crowley, who was seen as a rising star who had a chance to be the next Speaker of the House if Democrats were to take a majority in November.
There are Democrats all over the country tossing their hats into the ring. But most of those campaigns will fail, especially in red states such as Alabama, where conservative Christian Republicans will win many races by default.
To open up a wormhole there, it will take spending money to raise money in a way that also generates enough press and media coverage to shock the normal forces at work in the political universe to open up a wormhole. I don’t think playing it safe on Facebook will get it.
In this crazy new political world, politics as usual will not work. Candidates will have to take some chances to create a rift in the electorate. Having played a key role in shaking up the universe in the Doug Jones campaign, we know a little something about how to do that. There are no guarantees here, but using new media effectively has to be part of the equation.
I don’t know if new media solar flares can create wormholes, but I think ignoring the possibility is guaranteed to fail.
