"I like to watch." Converting citizens into spectators.

The greatest threat to democracy.

Feb 14, 2025

Hi everyone,

Ah, the immortal words of Chance the Gardener in Being There.

In the film, Chance’s naive and idiotic comments were taken as offering a profound insight into modern political discourse.

This was satire.

Let me repeat that.

This was satire.

…at the time.

Not any more.

Let me turn away from satire for a moment and refocus attention on Christopher Rufo and his gang of what, during the Watergate Era, would’ve been called Ratf*ckcres: dirty tricksters masquerading as uber-patriots.

During the last Trump administration, desperate to keep us all continually distracted from what Trump was trying to do — whatever that was — these boys and their fellow RF’ers got busy ginning up bogeymen to scare (okay, scar) American consumers into voting for them. They tried lots of stuff — “Lookout! Marxists!” (which seems to be back now); and “Drag Queens in the Library!!” (still popular); and “OMG! Penises in the Women’s Bathroom!” (paired with transphobic propaganda in an ironic rainbow of accompanying trans-horrors) — before settling on their scarecrow version of CRT.

You probably remember most of that. But there were a couple of trial balloons (if by “trial balloons” we mean Freddy Kruger Macy’s Day version of Pikachu sort of thing) that really caught my professional, philosophical, attention.

At one point, while scrambling to create arguments that looked more coherent than the usual logorrhea drizzling from their media sites, Rufo took the trouble to check into the intellectual history he was distorting to see if there wasn’t a more secure footing lurking beneath the shifting desert sand of his generally twisted intuitions — and he found a startling foundation for The Sum of All His Fears, one set firmly in the concrete of the Western Intellectual Tradition: Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School.

Wait, what?

Yeah, I know, really? He thought the Frankfurt School would scare everybody? Nobody’s even heard of these these guys. Well, almost nobody.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

These are spectacularly weird choices, let’s face it, but for two reasons:

The work of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School can be terrifically difficult to understand — to put it mildly — so the likelihood that Rufo, or any of his followers, have even read any of that material seems remote
And
he got this exactly right.

You read that correctly.

He’s right: the ideas Marcuse and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School cooked up actually pose a clear and present danger to the Right Wing’s control of the Digital Herd.

Now, I have no reason to believe that Rufo and his fellow rats understand the threat that the Frankfurt School’s analysis of contemporary culture poses to their control of the Herd … I mean, even this sentence is too long for most of them to read. But here’s the idea in a nutshell:

The creation of mass media, beginning with radio and then film, TV, and now the ever present view screens of social media, has changed the way people understand their relation to the world. Typically we’d say something like “the mass media is better than ever at advertising certain kind of ideologies in ways never imagined before!” — that it’s simply better at spreading the ideology du jour than previous mechanisms.

But that’s not the real danger. The real danger to Rufo, and the current Herd Management team, is noticing that media in the 20th century changed our understanding of ourselves from participants in the world to mere spectators.

Think about it — that’s your job when you watch a movie or doom scroll through endless cat videos: passively watching. The Frankfurt crowd argues that the posture of being a passively spectating consumer of images carries over into how we understand our relation to the world. Reading takes physical effort, like moving our eyes, but it also requires cognitive effort to understand and interpret what we’re reading. None of that is required, or expected, when the medium itself becomes the message. What happens then? We reposition ourselves, physically and cognitively, into the kind of passive receptivity required for comfortably consuming media. What the media presents is nothing nearly as bad as the adjustment the media itself requires from viewers.

You can hear an echo of this, by the way, in the fact that voters are no longer described as “citizens” but as “consumers.”

So circling back to how the Frankfurt School poses a threat to Rufo and his ilk?Simple: pointing out that we’ve become spectators rather than participants in our self-governance, and suggesting we need to become participants again? That’s the single greatest threat to Rufo’s worldview — and to the power structure of those currently herding America’s viewing obsessed spectators toward a world, or a cliff, in which their power is even more diminished.

Here’s what I’m saying: we’re all turning into Chauncey Gardener.

We ALL like to watch T.V.

Cue Kendrick Lamar.

Turn your “tv off”

And here we are.