Why Does Trump Get So Much Attention? Totalitarian Techniques | Tim Wu | Big Think

Why Does Trump Get So Much Attention? Totalitarian Techniques

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If Donald Trump's political strategies look familiar, says Tim Wu, it's because we've seen them before. Where? In the totalitarian regimes of China, North Korea, and Germany.On November 2nd, Columbia law professor Tim Wu tweeted: "What is the political press going to do for ratings after this blockbuster election winds down?" It’s a funny question, but a serious reflection on the disturbing amount of coverage the Republican candidate has enjoyed. The U.S. has a private media, but the coverage has been skewed one way, and even in his most controversial moments Trump has mostly profited from the millions of dollars of free advertising he has received. Every time you turn on the TV or head to a website’s home page you see one person. Wu draws an interesting parallel between this phenomenon and totalitarian regimes, like North Korea where everywhere you look you see the Great Leader, or China in the ‘60s, where Mao’s face was omnipresent. Trump is inescapable.

It’s just one of the strategies the candidate shares with fascist regimes – and before we go any further, Wu is clear that he is not comparing Trump’s views to those of fascist leaders; he is highlighting the similarity of their methods.

Wu’s latest book The Attention Merchants is an ethnography of advertising culture, examining the way external forces and agendas creep into our minds and influence us – a practice politics is also deeply tied into. Trump is, as Wu says, a "master attention merchant", and upon breaking down his strategy it turns out he understands something many fascist leaders in the past have also understood: the best way to attract attention and inspire intensity in your audience is to make them afraid. Trump has tapped into the unconscious fears and hatreds of his supporters by overstating the danger the United States is in, and creating enemies much greater than reality supports. "If you study carefully the rise of the Third Reich, it is fascinating how well the speakers of the Third Reich targeted unconscious, unspoken but truly present fears, hatreds, powerful emotions, you know, far beyond the thinking mind," says Wu. "And I think that those techniques whether or not you’re a Nazi or Hitler, whatever you are, are effective for anyone who wants to captivate their audience and inspire an angry rally."

Tim Wu’s most recent book is The Attention Merchants The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.

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TIM WU :

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, professor at Columbia Law School, and director of the Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues at Columbia Journalism School. Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he also writes about private power, free speech, copyright, and antitrust.

In 2014, he ran as the progressive Democrat candidate for lieutenant governor of New York. His book The Master Switch (2010) has won wide recognition and various awards. Wu is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He formerly wrote for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism. Wu worked at the Federal Trade Commission during the first term of the Obama administration, and has also worked as Chair of the media reform group Free Press, as a fellow at Google, and worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry. In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a senior enforcement counsel and special advisor.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Tim Wu: Trump has followed an ignoble history of attracting attention using techniques that other Totalitarian leaders used before him, particularly the Fascists. Now I’m not saying those are the views of Trump but I’m saying he does use the same methods. And one of the keys – this is something that Adolf Hitler in particular understood is that the most compelling way to fire up your audience is to speak to their unconscious fears and hatreds and give voice to them in a way. And that seems so really in terms of intention just grab people in this very intense way. So if you study carefully the rise of the Third Reich it is fascinating how well the speakers of the Third Reich targeted unconscious, unspoken but truly present fears, hatreds, powerful emotions, you know, far beyond the thinking mind.

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