In a recent analysis published by The dutyFabien Deglise notes that Ron DeSantis was the main “collateral victim of Trump’s legal troubles”.
Indeed, we will add, even if it is to announce lawsuits against Donald Trump, the media mobilization orchestrated by the latter allows him to earn points on this closest rival to the nomination of the Republican Party for the presidential election of 2024.
The thing is now understood: each time Trump seems to have made the blunder too many that will bring him down, it is rather the opposite that occurs. Thus, by a kind of spirit of clan cohesion, even those who would be tempted by the governor of Florida rally to the orange figure of the martyr, perceived as persecuted by “the system”, as the demago-populist strategy wants.
It must be said that with the support, in particular, of the conspiratorial and antivax movement, Trump managed to change the “narrative” within the American political discussion. This famous “culture war”, of which the sociologist James Davison Hunter spoke in the 1990s in his book Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America (1991).
Thus, although we often hear about the doxa woke that would take precedence in the media sphere (we are obviously not talking about Fox News) and campuses, the fact remains that from a structural-legal point of view, it is the conservatives who dominate political life, as evidenced by the series of judgments handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in recent years.
Kafkaesque speech
For its part, the French weekly Maverick notes that some Democrats seem to have taken the seed of it and are also mobilizing the Trumpian approach with regard to the apparently surreal discursive strategy.
The pretender at the helm of the Democratic Party Robert Kennedy Junior, son of Bob Kennedy, does not go “with the back of the dead hand”, as a former sports coach would have said … Fort of symbolic capital linked to his prestigious surname, he affirms not only that “the vaccine against the flu would be 2.4 times as dead than the covid-19”, but also that Daesh was “created by the CIA” , that the “American government has polluted water to make the frogs cheerful”!
Lucubrations? Delusions?
Not so sure. These narrative approaches are fruitful, since the heir gained more than a million subscribers during the health crisis on his asocial networks and, above all, the support of the ultimate guru of the conspiracy sphere, the powerful Alex Jones as well as certain figures of the Republican Party.
Chaos Engineers
But how did we get here? the most rational will ask.
The answer lies in large part in Chaos Engineersthe excellent essay by Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, published in 2019. In this book, the man who made himself known above all for his recent novel The Kremlin Magefinalist of the Goncourt 2022, investigates these technomaniacs who redefine the rules of the political game thanks to their mastery of the bigdata paired with ultra-paying polarization strategies in electoral matters.
“Behind the unbridled appearances of the populist Carnival hides the hard work of dozens of spin doctorsideologues and, more and more often, scientists and experts in bigdata, without which the populist leaders would never have come to power. »
In the dock: Dominic Cummings, the Brexit campaign manager; Steve Bannon, who largely contributed to the election of Trump and who is working to consolidate, as a counter-example to the George Soros model, a populist international in order to fight “the Davos party of global elites”; Milo Yiannopoulos, this English blogger thanks to whom the transgression changed sides; and Arthur Finkelstein, this Jewish homosexual who was close to the ultraconservative and Catholic Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán.
In essence, the strategy is no longer to unite people around the lowest common denominator, “but on the contrary, to ignite the passions of as many small groups as possible and then add them together, even without their knowledge”.
Thus, these political strategists in the shadows were able, before the others, to sniff out the era and seize the changes caused by the arrival of algorithms, thus moving from the margins to the center of the system.
Da Empoli traces the genesis of this brood to the events leading to the creation of the 5-Star Movement in Italy and its pyramidal leadership, which knew how to take advantage of Tangentopoli, the judicial revolution which knocked out the ultra-corrupt Italian political class of the 1990s, by creating a strong feeling of rejection of the elites, allowing the late Berlusconi to impose himself by affirming that only businessmen could produce wealth, and not the political class composed of idlers ants.
Today, the algorithms are so effective that the same party can both be indignant, through publications on Facebook, about violence against animals and, on the other hand, condemn restrictive measures for hunters. This without the sympathizers of one camp or the other knowing it.
“The central promise of the populist revolution, da Empoli tells us, is the humiliation of the powerful, and this is realized the moment they come to power. »
We didn’t leave the inn.