It has little to do with politics.
I’m a fan of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work. Her brilliant 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, explored how a Tea Party community in Lake Charles, Louisiana, came to hold their political views, which became important in the weeks after the 2016 election.
Now, I’m reading her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, which does similar work in Appalachian Kentucky. She’s so brilliant that it makes me sad I never took a class with Professor Hochschild when I was a grad student at U.C. Berkeley just a few buildings over from Sociology. Hochschild, an octogenarian Northern California academic, approaches her vastly different-than-her subjects with empathy and curiosity rather than bafflement and condescension, which is why she gets so deeply inside the communities she explores.
Since I’m such a Hochschild admirer, it might seem odd that I’m about to pick two nits with one by-the-way passage in Stolen Pride:
While romanticized on holiday cards, rural life has also become linked in the public mind with things dull, backward, behind the times, while the city is associated with the new and exciting. For example, in the “rural purge” of 1971, television networks canceled many shows centered on rural life, like Green Acres, Hee Haw, Lassie, Petticoat Junction, and The Beverly Hillbillies, replacing them with programming aimed at urban audiences. Pride is embedded in public narrative. (p 28-9)
First nit: while a cluster of sitcoms set in rural America did end in 1971, that was far from the end of TV programming set outside big cities. The Waltons launched the next year in 1972, followed by Little House on the Prairie in 1974—both one-hour dramas rather than sitcoms—and then came the wildly popular Dukes of Hazzard, which was also a one-hour show but so cartoony that it can hardly be called a drama. (I loved Dukes as a child, but—looking back and putting it mildly—it has not aged well. The Dodge featuring a Confederate flag induces winces, and it is no surprise that the 2005 feature film didn’t spawn a big franchise.)
Second nit: broadcast TV networks don’t cancel shows that attract advertising and make money, and they don’t aim programming at urban audiences specifically. They aim programming at the largest possible audience they can gather. TV networks are also herd animals that believe imitation is the sincerest form of profit. The first Star Wars movie in 1977 led inexorably to TV’s Battlestar Galactica in 1978 and Buck Rogersin 1979, among others. It’s a GMOOT exercise. (GMOOT stands for “Get Me One of Those!”) The rural purge didn’t come out of nowhere: the breakout hit of 1971 was All in the Family, which explored polarized politics within one household and was far from the typical slapstick sitcoms that preceded it, regardless of setting.
You should still read Stolen Pride and Strangers in Their Own Land.
Here’s the weird thing.
As I was pondering that passage in Stolen Pride, it occurred to me that if a similar so-called purge of any flavor of programming happened on broadcast TV today nobody would notice. Yes, when shows that have devoted fan bases go on the chopping block, sometimes fans still create campaigns to save their beloved shows, but those are niche activities today. The eighth season of The Beverly Hillbillies had a 21.7 Nielsen rating, which is more than half the rating of the latest Super Bowl.
In other words, there will never be another audience like the one The Beverly Hillbillieshad towards the end of its nine-year run. No single piece of programming will have that much American mindshare. The closest we come is so-called “social media” like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
Which leads me to why Elon Musk is supporting Donald Trump, which has nothing to do with politics or which candidate would be better for the future of the United States.
Trump is good for Twitter (or X or whatever), and a strong Twitter is good for Musk. I’m not talking about an economically strong Twitter, which it isn’t, but one that has large social impact.
As attentive Dispatch readers know, I’ve been writing about Musk since he first started the Twitter acquisition process in the spring of 2022. Early on, I believed that he would wriggle out of a deal that he clearly no longer wanted. I was wrong about that, but I still believe that there is nothing mysterious about Musk. All he wants to do is sell more cars in order to make more money and enable his other profitable companies like SpaceX.
A strong Twitter helps him to do that.
Even if one were to give Musk the benefit of the doubt (which I decline to do) and believe that every wacky and amoral thing he does is in service of getting to Mars and making humanity a multiplanetary species, his motivations are still transparent.
Musk, with more than 202 Million followers on Twitter, is the platform’s most followed person. The ninth-most-followed person is Trump. Ahead of Trump, the second through eighth most-followed people on Twitter are Barack Obama, Cristiano Ronaldo, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Narendra Modi, and Taylor Swift. Of those, the one who bothers Trump is Obama. I will go to my death believing that the main reason Trump ran for office in 2016 was because he was still hopping mad that Obama made fun of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner (after Trump spread the lie that Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii).
Robert Reich has a nice analysis of the different ways that a Harris presidency would be more difficult for Musk than another Trump presidency, but if you watch the video Reich links to with Musk laughing with Tucker Carlson, it doesn’t look like Musk has any anxiety about the issue.
Even under a Harris administration, Musk’s campaigning for Trump helps to make buying electric vehicles thinkable for political conservatives, which is all Musk cares about.
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* Image Prompt: “A bright red baseball hat with the letters “MAXA” in white on it” to stand for “Make America X Again,” which isn’t my best work. This was after many frustrating other prompts. I tried to get ChatGPT, Firefly, and Ideogram to create a version of the famous American Gothic painting with Musk’s and Trump’s faces superimposed, but they wouldn’t allow it. Similarly, I tried a red baseball cap with “Make America X Again,” but some platforms wouldn’t allow it, and some couldn’t spell correctly. Yeesh.
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