Realitics: Speculative economies and the transformation of American politics

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REALITICS: SPECULATIVE ECONOMIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF
AMERICAN POLITICS

by

Kasia Anderson
__________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2018

2
DEDICATION
To the three good doctors who made this project possible—Anderson, Goodnight, and
Trifunovic—and to my family of origin and of choice.

3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is the most significant section of this dissertation, as without those
recognized here, there would be no dissertation in the first place. A small army of people
truly made it possible—and I mean that without any hint of figurative inflection. They
have inspired, supported, and pushed me accordingly, and to all of them I am more
grateful than I can rightly say.
It is especially challenging to do justice to my advisor, Tom Goodnight. Among
those as lucky as I have been to work with him, Dr. Goodnight’s graciousness is just
about as renowned as his intellect, making him something of a unicorn in any profession.
His generosity and kindness throughout what I’m confident was a much lengthier tour
than the one he signed up for never failed to strike me as remarkable and made for the
most valuable kind of education. He always got where I was going with this project, and I
know that the finished product benefited enormously from his guidance, as did I.
There were many other outstanding teachers, in many senses of that term, whom I
met both in and out of classrooms at Annenberg. Larry Gross had a knack for showing up
with the best advice at key points along my academic and journalistic paths, which often
seemed to contradict more than compliment one another. It is largely because of Larry
that I was able to pursue both at the same time, and I appreciate the good faith he showed
in granting me leeway to do so. The same goes for Tom Hollihan, Peter Monge, Patti
Riley, Anne Marie Campian, and Sarah Banet-Weiser, who all made room for me to
enter, stay in, and finish the Ph.D. program. Sarah played several vital roles in my
progression: I took more classes from her than any other professor; she steered me
4
through my qualifying exams; she pushed me to be both rigorous and creative in my
scholarship; and she was a valued friend.
Other USC professors who helped me along were Randy Lake, Colleen Keough,
Nina Eliasoph, Gordon Stables, and Joe Saltzman. Alison Trope welcomed me to campus
my first semester as her T.A. and gave me a boost later as I pushed to finish. Ann Crigler
and Gabriel Kahn were just the reflective and incisive thinkers I needed on my
dissertation committee, and I thank them along with Tom Goodnight for seeing me
through the last step—and for asking killer questions while they were at it. Special
mentions are also in order for friends I met at or through Annenberg and learned so much
from, including but not limited to: Daniela Baroffio, Marcia Dawkins, Aram Sinnreich,
Laura Portwood-Stacer, Jeff Hall, John Cheney-Lippold, Bettina Heiss, and Violaine
Roussel.
When other forms of motivation were less immediately accessible, the thought of
finishing this dissertation in order to honor Robert Scheer’s commitment to both my
education and employment was sure to do the trick. Bob is an extraordinary mentor,
another observation I share with dozens of others, who genuinely wants those he helps to
go as far and as fast as they possibly can. He and his family, including the formidable
Narda Zacchino, another invaluable node in my personal and vocational network,
extended to me a second home of sorts in Los Angeles and deserve a great deal of the
credit for my development over the last decade and a half. At this time, I would like to do
my part to accentuate Narda’s status as one of the country’s most admired career women.
Bob and Zuade Kaufman, Truthdig’s publisher, gave me the chance to do the kind of
journalism I’d wanted to do since I began my career, and it has been an honor to work for
5
their outlet and to count them as dear friends. I would not have attempted as much as I
have as a writer and an editor, nor would I have had nearly as good a time doing it, if
Zuade hadn’t been there to make it all seem possible—whether backwards and in heels,
as it were, or quite literally on a galloping horse. Peter Scheer, with whom I worked at
Truthdig, has been another admired comrade as well as a travel partner and, along with
his brother and sister-in-law, Josh and Isabel, among my favorite people in any setting.
Among those to thank and salute from jobs past and present would have to be the
ever-classy and sharp Tom Caswell. Still others would be George Rush and Joanna
Molloy, both as hilarious as they are kind. They gave me my first big break and taught
me the right way to be a reporter; I follow their example all the time. Lisa Fung is another
admired colleague who has set the bar high for me and for everyone else, I imagine, who
has watched her at work. This lineup would not be close to complete without Chris
Hedges and Eunice Wong, Scott Tucker, and the clever Dwayne Booth, a.k.a. Mr. Fish.
On a personal note, my father, Dr. Robert Anderson, has been an unwavering ally
and role model in this and every endeavor. He and my mother, Barbara, as well as their
parents, encouraged me to value education as highly as I do—this one’s for you, Mom
and Dad. I couldn’t ask for a better brother than Chris Anderson, full stop. My best
friend, Ayesha Khan, did the same, reminding me all the way from Singapore of what she
was sure I could do. Hats off to Francesca Cecil, Celine Kuklowsky, Alyson Meyer, Aitor
Lajarin, Wathana Lim, Dee Smith, Andra Popa, and Erik Henriksen. Finally, to Boris
Trifunovic, a true mensch and without a doubt the light of my life: ‘love’ doesn’t even
begin to cover it. Sky’s the limit.

6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication………………………………………………………………………….. 2
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………... 3
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………... 6
Chapter One: Welcome to the Age of the Realitician ……………………………... 9
A Preview Episode: Hoprah or NOprah? ………………………………….. 9
Recognizing Realitics, or Knowing It When You See It ………………….. 16
Know Your Realitician …………………………………………………….. 25
Reality TV: The All-Purpose Party-Crasher ………………………………. 33
Theoretical Tributaries to the Study of Realitics…………………………... 41
A Note on Methods, and a Celebrity Exclusive……………………………. 54
Chapter Two: How to Dixie Chick: Celebrity Advocacy, Public Protest and the Body
Politic………………………………………………………………………………. 59
Chicks in Crisis…………………………………………………………….. 61
Chicks Clap Back…………………………………………………………... 68
Chicks Come Back…………………………………………………………. 76
Dixie Chicks in Concert……………………………………………………. 84
Chapter Three: Making a “Mama Grizzly”: Sarah Palin Pioneers Realitics……….. 93
It Takes a Village…………………………………………………………… 97
From Discovery to Defeat………………………………………………….. 106
Rogue Trader.………………………………………………………………. 122
Sarah Palin, Inc. ……………………………………………………………. 132

7
Chapter Four: “Change the Channel, Darling” ……………………………………… 142
Arianna Rising……………………………………………………………….. 150
Celebrity Is the Killer App………………………………………………….... 161
Mixed Reception……………………………………………………………... 169
Uberize It……………………………………………………………………... 178
Arianna Unplugged……………………………………………………………186
Chapter Five: Global Realitics, The Davos Diorama, and Clooney-
plomacy……………………………………………………………………….. 191
The View from Davos………………………………………………………… 193
Prestige Realitics……………………..……………………………………….. 210
Pastiche Politics………………………………………………………………. 219
Going Global………………………………………………………………….. 227
Chapter Six: The “Golden Wrecking Ball” Swings for the White House……………. 240
Trump’s Foundations…………………………………………………………. 247
Trial Balloons…………………………………………………………………. 259
Reality on TV, Fantasy in D.C….…………………………………………….. 269
POTUS, Inc.: Selling Trump’s America……………………………………… 281
Chapter Seven: The Long Con(-versation)…………………………………………… 294
Realitics As Long Con………………………………………………………... 295
Realitics As Long Conversation………………………………………………. 307
Parting Glances and Future Horizons…………………………………………. 327
Epilogue: The Playbook’s the Thing………………………………………….. 332
Appendix: Realitics Playbook………………………………………………………….336
8
Notes……………………………………………………………………………………362
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………… 374

9

Chapter One: Welcome to the Age of the Realitician

Realitics is an emergent mode of elite communication. It is at once a pop-cultural
production, a domain of communication, and a hybridized space inviting participation
and innovation. It purports to democratize celebrity but, as will be detailed in pages to
come, gives rise to its own power hierarchy.
I begin with an illustration in which questions of style, substance, and the proper
function of the public sphere proliferate. It is a vignette in which one of the most
formidable and visible figures to emerge as a realitician marked a transitional moment in
American political culture from a podium provided by the entertainment industry. In so
doing, she was instantly recognized and called to action in electoral politics by a global
audience of fans, many of whom pledged their votes in what would remain an imaginary
contest, a shared virtual fantasy.
The chapter then proceeds by positing definitions of the key concepts running
throughout the thesis and discussing what makes realitics a new phenomenon even
though it has emanated, in part, from sources that extend back to classical western
cultures. A brief discussion how a study of realitics fits into the ongoing theoretical
conversation follows before the project shifts to present an assortment of episodes.

A Preview Episode: Hoprah or NOprah?
On January 8, 2018, the day after the 75
th
Golden Globe Awards, the hashtag
#OprahForPresident was trending on social media. This crowdsourced and highly
unauthorized nomination process had been set in motion by media tycoon Oprah
10
Winfrey’s rousing speech the night before at the Beverly Hilton, delivered before dozens
of her Hollywood peers assembled at the tony Beverly Hills venue in addition to some 19
million viewers tuning in around the world (Battaglio). Winfrey was on hand to accept
the Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the world of
entertainment,” conferred annually by the Golden Globes’ sponsoring organization, the
Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA).
As she took the podium, Winfrey took the opportunity to advocate for the
evening’s main cause célèbre: the #MeToo movement. The Twitter-boosted initiative was
first invented offline in 2007 by activist Tarana Burke and picked up on the social media
platform a decade later by actress Alyssa Milano, best known for playing ingénue roles in
long-running television programs like Who’s the Boss? and Charmed. Milano adopted the
slogan in the wake of detonative news breaks detailing multiple allegations of sexual
assault that named the formidable film producer Harvey Weinstein as the perpetrator. A
team of New York Times reporters led by Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor had fired the
opening journalistic salvo with a shocking story published on Oct. 5, 2017, and The New
Yorker dealt Weinstein another career-ending blow five days later with the release of the
first in a series of exposés by Ronan Farrow. Significantly, Farrow, as The Hollywood
Reporter referred to him in a glowing profile published on January 10, 2018, is “the
golden-haired progeny of Hollywood royals Woody Allen and Mia Farrow,” uniquely
positioned to take “a journalistic sledgehammer to this industry’s meticulously tended
façade” (Guthrie). Weinstein’s reign ended immediately thereafter, as an extraordinarily
swift cultural shift commenced that would leave a hashtag-heavy crumb trail for future
generations to trace. #MeToo. #WeinsteinEffect. #TimesUp.
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Weinstein’s shadow hung palpably over the Golden Globes that evening, as did
that of another powerful man who earlier had been accused of sexual assault but had not
been ousted from his eminent post: President Donald Trump. However, that would not be
the only reason why Trump’s presence was inferred in his absence. Winfrey may have
begun her rousing homily as an exalted member of the entertainment community, but she
had not even finished before another hashtag was picking up traction online:
#OprahForPresident.
Winfrey’s speech, delivered in a commanding and passionate yet sober tone, lit
upon scenes of gender- and race-based injustice and brutality from past and present
buttressed by propitious vignettes and visionary flights. She gave a précised crash course
in intersectionality, making several references to women and men affected by imbalances
of power that carve and assign meaning along axes of difference according to race, class,
gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and other classifications.
1
She opened with a
salute to the legacy of Bahamian-American actor, director and diplomat Sidney Poitier,
who in 1982 had received the HFPA’s DeMille Award for his paradigm-shifting work in
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, In the Heat of the Night, Lilies of the Field, and Stir
Crazy, films that challenged the technical and social conventions of their time. Recalling
her experience as a young girl witnessing Poitier’s best actor Oscar win in 1964 in her
mother’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin home “as my mom came through the door, bone-tired
from cleaning other people’s houses,” Winfrey confessed she was at a loss for words to
describe such a momentous event even so many years later, so she quoted Poitier’s line
from Lilies of the Field instead: “Amen, Amen …. Amen, Amen” (Fernandez). After
pausing to thank the HFPA and her show-business mentors and champions, she called up
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the 1944 gang-rape by six white men of Recy Taylor, an African American woman in Jim
Crow-era Alabama whose subsequent quest for justice was aided by civil rights icon
Rosa Parks, then an investigator for the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and still more than a decade away from her history-making
moment aboard a Montgomery public bus.
Throughout the speech, Winfrey brought the #MeToo movement front and center,
along with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, a cross-industry operation started by a
coalition of influential Hollywood women including producer and screenwriter Shonda
Rhimes, lawyer Tina Tchen, and actresses Reese Witherspoon, America Ferrara, Kerry
Washington, Natalie Portman, and Ashley Judd, one of Weinstein’s first accusers, and
backed by dozens of signatories. The multi-platform mogul known to much of America
simply as “Oprah” expressed gratitude “to all the women who have endured years of
abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and
dreams to pursue,” before closing with a warning and a wish. To men like Weinstein,
comic Louis C.K., journalists Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, music producer Russell
Simmons, director James Toback, actors Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman, and scores
of others who had allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct, Winfrey served notice that,
“[t]heir time is up.” To women, she affirmed that “a new day is on the horizon,” because
of the ongoing efforts of, as she put it, “a lot of magnificent women … and some pretty
phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to
the time when nobody ever has to say ‘me too’ again” (Fernandez). And … scene.
Then came the rapture. Twitter lit up, and press outlets like CNN quickly churned
out a story largely based on the tweeted reactions of celebrities and civilians to Winfrey’s
13
performance. “And we went to church,” Shonda Rhimes announced, adding the hashtags
#TimesUp and #WhyWeWearBlack, referring to how women and men attending the
HFPA fête dressed in black, some of them also sporting Time’s Up pins, to show support
for the #MeToo cause and the legal-action organization it inspired (Park). Actress and
Time’s Up organizer Reese Witherspoon declared, “I will now officially divide time like
this : Everything that happened before @Oprah speech : Everything that will happen
after” (@Rwitherspoon). Former speechwriter to President Obama Jon Favreau, who
should know from political celebrities, put Oprah on par with more traditional politicians
by calling her “as brilliant and inspiring as any public figure today” and advising, “Don’t
underestimate her” (@jonfavs). Journalist Shanita Hubbard said she “could not stop
crying” when Oprah spoke Recy Taylor’s name (@msshanitarenee). “I think Oprah just
crushed the patriarchy,” proclaimed Mark P. (@MarkPants).
Amid all the excitement and predictions of Winfrey as the obvious choice for the
title of “number 46” in the U.S.’ presidential sequence, several voices associated with
Twitter accounts that were not attached to fake accounts, trolls or extensions of President
Donald Trump’s administration were not so quick to jump aboard the Oprah 2020
campaign bus. One apparently conservative-leaning commenter equated Winfrey’s public
struggle with her weight to a deficiency in leadership ability: “The woman has not been
able to manage her weight in 30 years, yet she is thinking about managing a country! Not
to mention that she knew about #HarveyWeinstein,” said SKY45 (@SKYRIDER4538).
Mikki Kendall, a Chicago-based writer, opined that, while “Oprah is lovely, she isn’t
qualified to be President,” urging, “Can we stop with the cult of personality approach to
politics?” (@Karnythia).
14
Family Guy creator and prolific director, producer, and actor Seth MacFarlane
urged caution in preemptively christening another celebrity, even someone with
Winfrey’s uniquely potent combination of relatability and gravitas, as the nation’s next
big thing—or ‘Hoprah,” as Twitter user Lana Del Gay put it (McClellandShane).
MacFarlane argued that while Winfrey is “a magnificent orator,” he found the idea of
President Trump being challenged by Winfrey, or in MacFarlane’s words “a reality show
star running against a talk show host,” to be a “troublingly dystopian” prospect. “We
don’t want to create a world where dedicated public service careers become undesirable
and impractical in the face of raw celebrity,” he admonished (@SethMacFarlane).
Oprah Winfrey’s suitability for the nation’s highest office became the polarizing
topic of several Op-Ed pieces published over subsequent days, and camps formed in the
journalistic community as they had on social media. Assuming that an abundance of star
power can find purchase on the global political stage was a gamble that American voters
had just taken in the 2016 presidential election—and, some would argue, in the 2008 and
2012 elections, as well as a few from earlier decades and lesser offices. Depending on the
source, whether a member of team #MAGA or the #resistance, or somewhere else in the
political universe, the outcome of that venture could be cast as a disaster, a welcome
revolution, maybe another episode of upheaval in the country’s history that might test the
limits of its vaunted governmental architecture. For still others, Donald Trump’s
surprising ascension to America’s most powerful executive office laid bare the racket,
unconvincingly trussed up in Founding Fathers lore, that U.S. politics had long appeared
to those who felt overlooked, unheard or purposefully written out of the master script.
15
Finer points and probabilities aside, the plain fact that an Oprah Winfrey-versus-
Donald Trump contest for the White House was being debated in anything resembling
serious terms is startling in and of itself. It also sparks a fusillade of questions: how on
earth did U.S. politics—whether electoral, cultural, or an amalgamation of those and
other types—come to this point, and what could it all mean? Are there any possible
upsides to this picture? Did it signal, to run with the declinist thesis advanced by
MacFarlane and those of a similar mind, America’s precipitous slide into a Hunger
Games-style mediated futurescape animated by the country’s pulpiest and basest
collective drives and controlled by camp-horror demagogues? Why would it seem
appropriate to imagine such a scenario according to the visual language of a Hollywood
blockbuster? And can any plausible critique come from someone like Seth MacFarlane,
who has profited immensely from the same industries, forces and discourses that he
decried in his ‘Noprah’-themed tweet?
I will engage all of these questions directly or implicitly throughout the course of
this dissertation. A series of texts involving figures and controversies sharing many key
traits with the opening scene featuring Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globes will serve as
jumping-off points into more expansive investigations into the vastly interconnected and
media-driven domains of celebrity and politics. The chosen vignettes are set
predominantly, but not exclusively, in the United States during the last fifteen years. At
many points during the cotemporaneous process of researching and writing, flashpoint
events occurred that pushed, blurred, or in one obvious instance, obliterated altogether
the protean boundaries between the two coeval realms. Though it might seem difficult to
come up with a more apropos example than the Oprah Golden Globes moment that could
16
encapsulate most all of the major points to follow in this thesis, it represents just one of
many options that offer enough material to fuel multiple lengthy research projects, many
of which are no doubt commencing as this one concludes.

Recognizing Realitics, or Knowing It When You See It
As for how the chosen artifacts relate to one another, something more precise is
called for that has yet to be articulated as such, speaks to the particulars of the era, and
provides a through-line that does more than just reiterate how politics has become
celebrified and celebrity has become politicized. This is not simply because those
fundamental connections have already been covered by many scholars and journalists;
rather, from where I sit, something has been absent from that ongoing conversation,
substantial though it is. What has been missing, and what this dissertation aims to
contribute, is a cogent theoretical construct that captures the elements and developments
that led to the current state of affairs. More specifically, there is a term I would press
upon the reader with all the gravitas that Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) musters in The
Graduate when he pulls aside Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a high-achieving
youngster growing profoundly concerned about his future, at Benjamin’s college
graduation party at his parents’ house and utters the “one word” that Ben must remember:
“plastics” (The Graduate). Here, it is “realitics,” and like a certain polymer-based
material was for Mr. McGuire, it is current, versatile, and has suddenly insinuated itself
into just about everything.
In progressing through the chapters to follow, I will examine realitics with the
help of a supporting cast of well-known characters. Though the allure of fame can exert a
17
hypnotic pull on the sensible faculties of onlookers, enticing them to focus to the point of
obsession on the extraordinary individuals who appear to ‘have’ it, the star of this
production is the mode of realitics and not its proxies. Fame is an elaborate social
contract masquerading as an innate quality and as a sublime radiance possessed by those
blessed with rare talent and possessed of a special magnetism. So it is with realitics—
which is appropriate, as it springs in part from the “fame world,” as Laurent Thévènot
and Luc Boltanski map it out in On Justification: Economies of Worth, one of many
works that provided essential guidance for this investigation. Players may come and go,
but realitics carries on.
Instead of being a bounded thing that looks the same in different temporal, spatial
and other conditions, in practice realitics is more complex and is more of a verb than a
noun, as it were. It is available for various actors to interpret in myriad ways, and though
it is constantly moving, it is still recognizable across contexts. For these reasons, I prefer
the term ‘mode,’ which imparts a sense of dynamism, over more fixed or taxonomic
descriptors. The trouble with taxonomy will be addressed later; for now, suffice it to say
that, although it makes my job more laborious and my subject more slippery, I am firmly
in favor of movement and malleability over fixity when it comes to characterizing
realitics.
By way of a disclaimer, I will grant myself at times the syntactical license to refer
to realitics in a more objectified manner than I actually mean, and pertinent subjects in
shorthand as ‘realiticians’ rather than ‘practitioners of realitics,’ for purposes of linguistic
economy. Realiticians are identifiable as self-contained individuals who answer to
conventionally assigned names, but they might alternately be regarded as walking,
18
talking “media events” per Daniel Boorstin’s classic critique; ciphers for moneyed
interests and influencers; or symptoms of some mass sociocultural disorder (Boorstin).
They might be better comprehended according to the Foucauldian notion
2
of the “subject
position,” which again emphasizes dynamism and a multiplicity of causative forces
interacting to produce contingent subjectivities, as opposed to a static or wholly ‘self-
made’ model. Ideas along those lines can act as antidotes to mythologies driving celebrity
such as exceptionalism and meritocracy based on performative charisma. Here, the
hybrid figures under consideration will be referenced according to an aptly porous term
that speaks to the requirements of this rhetorical situation and can accommodate a range
of theoretical modalities.
What, then, is realitics, and what makes a realitician? By way of a preamble, I
will borrow from an auspicious occasion in the history of pornography, when United
States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart issued an instant classic from the bench
about audience reception and semiotics that called out for commentary from the likes of
John Berger
3
. In 1964, during the Jacobellis v. Ohio proceedings in which concerns about
freedom of speech were revisited with respect to obscene material, Stewart allowed that,
though it may be tricky to define “hard-core” pornography to the letter, in his words, “I
know it when I see it” (“Movie”).
Over the course of the last several years, I have come to be able to know realitics
when I see it. All the same, Justice Stewart’s subjective metric will not hold up in a
formal dissertation defense, so I will put more of a point on it now. I will first describe
the idea more generally before attending to some basics about how the realitician, or a
subject who has taken up the mode of realitics for however long a duration, may be
19
recognized. Then, I will take into account how reality television adds distinctive
inflections and dimensions that I had not seen addressed in precisely the manner I will
treat it in this project.
Realitics is an emergent mode of communication that has been co-produced by
the rise of reality and social media forms and platforms, as well as by preceding and
concurrent shifts in news and entertainment media, and by the ongoing merger between
the domains of celebrity and politics. Though it is a mode practiced by elites in and
beyond the trio of professional realms that will dominate this study—entertainment,
journalism, and politics—and is well-designed to meet their needs, arguably at the
expense of less privileged demographics, it is not to be misunderstood as the sole
province of notables from any implicated field, nor of the deliberately political. Rather, it
is better apprehended as a fluid set of performative practices that can be taken up and
enacted by just about anyone, and with varying degrees of cognizance.
This accessibility factor is one reason why I would locate the effective origin of
realitics in its most fully realized configuration as occurring after the turn of the twenty-
first century. It took the advent of social media and the preponderance of reality media,
and importantly the widespread adoption of the aesthetics and practices of those
technologies, to make it a true standout. This does not mean that dozens of precedents
cannot be called up from prior generations or even prior centuries, but the scale,
proliferation and impact of this current iteration set it apart. In addition to the
introduction of social and reality media, other enabling institutional, structural and
professional shifts occurred over several decades leading up to the designated starting
20
point that more thoroughly meshed the “apparatus” of celebrity with those of the
aforementioned domains.
During that period, politicians have increasingly been covered by the same media,
and in a similar manner, as their counterparts whose rise to prominence originated more
exclusively from within the entertainment realm. This hybridizing development is but one
of many sea changes without which, I will argue, the evolution of realitics would not
have been possible. The conflation in style, structure, and substance of political and
celebrity journalism was helped along by politicians in kind. Since Hollywood’s
institutional beginnings, politicians have selectively leveraged the associative potential of
celebrity to enhance their stature; appeal to entertainers’ fan bases and absorb them into
their own voting publics; and to take on the resonances of glamour, talent and uniqueness
that come, strings attached, with the Hollywood package.
For these and many other reasons, it would thus seem inevitable that the
intensified focus on celebrity in the news would lead to the gradual reimagining of the
politician, on the part of the western mainstream media, as a gainful subject upon which
to focus the kind of coverage that had historically been the main province and producer
of contemporary stardom. If politicians can be repurposed in this manner, then they may
be added to the lucrative milieu of bold-faced names, and their usefulness to a celebrity-
fueled news industry scales up accordingly. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement, as
anointed politicians join a global aristocracy that has also admitted V.I.P.s from literary,
sports, fine arts, big business, media, and other orbits beyond show business in its
orthodox sense. By even a cursory examination of the 2016 presidential election, it is
21
clear that politicians have been so reframed and an ontological transformation is well
underway.
Realitics is a polymorphic phenomenon, taking many shapes and open to
transitions at any time. This produces an exigence for an interpretive reading and critical
intervention. The presented conclusions may have a limited lifetime due to the changing
nature of the phenomenon; however, interventions are imperative so that lessons learned
can be mapped from its present manifestation and variations. In this thesis, I work
through agents from areas of journalism, politics, and entertainment who are caught up in
various schemes of common cause. In the final analysis, I will look at the lines of inquiry
that appear with some urgency as guided by my narrative of the unfolding of the
phenomenon.
Even those cited here as realiticians may move in and out of that mode depending
on the circumstances. To wit, I present the following illustration as a candidate for
inclusion under the heading of realitics: In late August 2016, former Texas Governor
Rick Perry decided to work in a turn on the hit television show Dancing with the Stars
between two consecutive presidential campaigns and, until 2015, his gubernatorial duties;
five months later, he was confirmed as onetime rival and current President Donald
Trump’s secretary of energy.
A follow-the-money rationale may get at what’s in it, so to speak, for politicians
and members of the media to engage realitics, but other groups may discover vested
interests of their own. Putting aside momentarily the direr implications of the continuing
dissolution of boundaries between entertainment, politics, and the media business, it
bears mention that scholars stand to gain as well in the form of rich material for
22
multidisciplinary exploration. Consequently, one principal goal of this thesis is to begin
to chart a site for future researchers to refine and redefine as they see fit.
In that spirit, I resume the work of exposition. Realitics may be detected in
flashpoint events that can be studied as artifacts, such as those that form the basis of the
next five chapters. I refer to such discrete events as ‘episodes,’ which leads to the next
item on the list of formative characteristics: Realitics is episodic. The mode lends itself to
rhythms and strategies of the entertainment industry—e.g., up-fronts, junkets, pilots,
seasonal releases, franchises, reboots, and audience ratings. This similitude is due to the
structural dependency of realitics on that propagative industry and because of how
contemporary societies have become permeated by entertainment products, byproducts
and effects.
It is also because realitics traffics in popular culture—as both a point of reference
and the primary coinage of the realm. The mode is articulated, understood, and contested
via the spaces, physical and figurative, and the vernacular of popular culture. (Like many
other aspects of realitics, this pop property may make it more democratic yet subject to
the vagaries of show business.) Thus, it can be distinguished from other, perhaps purer
enactments of politics that occur when, for example, a senator casts her vote for a bill on
defense spending, or a policy expert takes a by-the-numbers approach during a televised
debate on the future of Medicare. Plus, realitics can operate on multiple platforms, as
well as sites and time frames, simultaneously or consecutively. In addition to augmenting
Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat blitzes, realitics stands out in catchphrases and slogans,
as well as shareable, viral multimedia snippets and memes, film references, cartoons,
late-night comedy sketches, and other formats.
23
Given its facility for episodes and time frames, realitics also functions well within
the scaffolding of the campaign. The term ‘campaign’ can accommodate many
connotations, from an aspiring politician’s concerted run for office to various kinds of
advertising and social media drives instigated by an array of sponsoring parties in order
to promote a cause, product, or message. A campaign might also entail the reinvention of
a public persona, such as an entertainment celebrity’s varied attempts to be taken
seriously as a “thought leader” in hopes of building a second career. Other possibilities
could take the form of forays into synergistic fields or reversals of course out of
contrition, defiance, or simply necessity.
In some situations, such as those illustrated in Chapters Three through Six,
reinvention has become a way of life. Owing in part to realiticians featured in those
chapters, the campaign—whether specifically referring to running for office or envisaged
more broadly—never really ends. Because of their efforts, the ceaseless campaign has
become the norm, and not just for them, but for those competing with or otherwise
affected by them as well. The Christmas season is evidently not the only commodified,
sanctified ritual that begins earlier with each turn to the point of near-constancy; the
tempo of American electoral politics has become similarly relentless. Moreover, as the
sitting U.S. president at time of writing and protagonist of Chapter Six has confirmed
beyond doubt, it is not necessary anymore to have a specified occasion, goal, or reason to
campaign except for the sake of campaigning itself. As politicians become less
distinguishable from celebrities, who have long been obliged to view everything from
formal press junkets to routine trips to the grocery store as opportunities to market
themselves, it only follows that politicians would follow suit.
24
As evidenced by numerous occurrences recounted in this collection, realitics may
be most readily apparent in controversial situations in which conflict is triggered by a
perceived violation of what had until then been considered secure boundaries that
separated the “civic world,” “fame world,” the “market world” and other “orders of
worth” delineated in Thévènot and Boltanski’s scheme. Many precedents of realitics can
be traced in the forms and functions of the culture wars and wedge issues of the late
twentieth century, and fertile territory for its cultivation can be found in classic genres
like satire, parody and burlesque. For these reasons, controversy was one of the main
criteria that dictated the choice of subjects in each chapter. Another was the likelihood
that most of those featured would be familiar to readers.
It is not my intention to suggest that wherever a certain synergy between celebrity
and politics might be found, or whenever journalism takes cues from show business,
there lurks realitics. However, the likelihood increases when, say, a public servant draws
upon self-promotion strategies from entertainment media in order to foster her own cult
of personality. The local newspaper columnist who purposefully couches her coverage of
a presidential campaign as though it were a play-by-play of a World Wrestling Federation
showdown; the voter who holds a presidential candidate’s choice of headlining musical
acts on the campaign trail against him and the artists in question; the British mother who
buys her pre-teen daughter an Arianna Grande album in solidarity with victims of the
May 22, 2017 terrorist attack at a Grande concert in Manchester, England are all dabbling
in realitics as well.
Before continuing to a dedicated section on the realitician, a note on style is in
order. Realitics is a mode, which naturally puts considerations of style at the forefront,
25
but that does not obviate other approaches or levels of analysis. Engaging the subject of
realitics can be a dizzying activity, as it encourages zooming in and out on multiple
coinciding planes, scales, scopes, industries, and time frames. It demands that attention
be devoted to material and structural, along with ideological and symbolic, factors in
concert. The economy of attention
4
is heavily implicated in its function, as is the global
financial economy—both of which operate in quantifiable, discernable forms as well as
in abstractions. The same could be said of politics, in part a conceptual domain that
brings about very real effects for each member of a society.
Likewise, to state that style is vital to realitics is not to pronounce it insubstantial
or frivolous. As Robert Harriman writes in Political Style: The Artistry of Power, a work
in which he moved to “take seriously the aesthetic dimension of political experience,” to
underestimate the importance of style is to “become unduly defenseless against aesthetic
manipulation” (7, 10). Similar impressions have also informed this project, and I will rely
on Harriman’s views in sections to come.

Know Your Realitician
Referring back to my caveat about how the neologisms ‘realitician’ and ‘realitics’
are posited as nouns for pragmatic reasons when they are effectively processual, I will
now turn to a more precise examination of the realitician. It is crucial to be able to tease
out some features of the realitician as a newly available subject position produced by, as
well as actively constituting, certain media and political discourses. The utility of this
move ranges far beyond the task in progress, because irrespective of culture-wide and
26
now worldwide quarrels about legitimacy, this actor has clearly arrived on the
international stage and by all indications is here to stay.
By way of a workable description, the realitician is a political operator whose
initial means of entry into public awareness may or may not be through conduits
recognizably attributed to electoral politics, whether by holding office or campaigning for
an elected position, but whose means of maintaining media capital and other indicators of
status does not entail maneuvering exclusively within the political arena as it has been
traditionally conceptualized. In fact, straying outside those bounds is not just something
realiticians do from time to time in order to demonstrate that they are hip to the latest
social media trends or showmanship techniques when it comes to their governing style.
Rather, such departures are central to their publicity tactics, even when the risks would
seem to outweigh the gains in a more conventional political setup. They may flip in and
out of realitician mode as necessary for campaigning for office or garnering support for a
cause and then return to a more ordinary style of political performance, or they may
inhabit that role in a more or less consistent manner.
As it is used here, the term realitician is not intended to denigrate those whom it
describes as declassé, in the manner that participants in reality television can be regarded.
Rather, it is the end result of a bid to fill a linguistic gap in order to more accurately
describe something new. The term is based more on function over form. It arose from
observations about how realiticians follow a similar pattern of activity to their
counterparts in more strictly defined entertainment zones: how they accrue and use fame,
how they move in between realms, how they are criticized and justify their movements
when attempts are made to delegitimize them.
27
For realiticians, celebrity is a starting point. How it starts is not as important as
that it starts and that it is maintained. This precept applies to how celebrities who got
their big breaks in entertainment such as Oprah Winfrey, or U2’s lead singer Paul “Bono”
Hewson, Elvis Presley, or George Clooney have been able to leverage that capital to gain
entry into select political cliques. Celebrity can grant them passage into specialized
forums in which they may learn how to cultivate power in ancillary arenas if they play
their cards right. The same goes for celebrities who come up through electoral politics
and then diversify into entertainment. Another sense in which celebrity is a starting point
stands in contrast to takes on fame that would deem it more of a byproduct or side effect
of primary causes—talent, ingenuity, copious wealth—than a goal or stand-alone marker
of worth.
For a realitician, ‘I’m famous’ doesn’t mean ‘I’ve arrived,’ or the presumed
guarantee of financial and job security, admiration of the masses, and the prospect of
retirement on a beach somewhere knowing the next two generations also have it in the
bag. Instead, it’s, ‘I’m just getting started,’ and, ‘now which other parties can I crash?’ In
this respect, the realitician’s modus operandi is lifted from reality TV in that innovators
from that domain have modeled how to parlay an initial brush with fame, no matter the
magnitude, into a host of spinoff projects, some of which may not only prolong their time
in the public eye but could actually lead to more prestigious and rewarding gigs than they
would have landed had they just continued along their original track. The range of
follow-up attempts they may make run the gamut from book deals to product lines,
spinoff shows to punditry stints to runs for office. Among the more curious aspects of
realitics is that what they do to remain in play often does not seem to matter so much as
28
that they do something, even something off-brand or shocking. The point is to stay
relevant, which counts more than having the right credentials, experience, or the approval
of the old guard.
The realitician, like the reality television star, tends to draw widespread criticism
from within her or his field of origination (electoral politics and entertainment,
respectively, though not in every instance) for allegedly cheating by foregoing proper
training and by overleaping lower rungs on the professional ladder. Instead, the complaint
goes, they wind up undeservedly on top while their more qualified peers are relegated to
inferior roles as a direct result of their infiltration. Realiticians’ mere presence in the
professional spaces they colonize, according to more extreme variations of this line of
criticism, pollutes those fields and sullies the meriting agents endeavoring to advance
within them.
5
In sum, the implication is they spoil the game for everyone by lowering or
refusing to act according to established standards, while others who have put in the
requisite work and time wind up short-changed. This critique can also be leveled from the
outskirts, or even from completely outside, of their immediate circles, as by media
commentators who pick up on pass along, or generate, complaints about certain actors’
deficiencies and their failure to earn the stamp of legitimacy. (It is not always apparent
who bestows such a stamp or how it is earned, but it falls under the category of status-
related signifiers that are most noticeably defined by their absence.)
Relevance is the sine qua non that defuses such protests. It is one of the main
forms of currency in the economy of realitics and is valued above just about all else.
Choices that may seem disadvantageous in the short run can make sense in light of the
superlative goal of maintaining relevance across contexts. Relevance may register
29
monetarily, but it can also be tracked according to attentional metrics such as media
coverage, television ratings, votes, attendance at speeches and rallies, and followers on
social media. Gatekeepers and other quality-control managers of the celebrity sphere may
grouse about the unwelcome incursion of realiticians, but they are hard-pressed to
exclude them when presented with proof of relevance.
Although she may disavow ties to the fame world whenever expedient, the
successful realitician is inventive when it comes to maintaining relevance. Instead of just
reciting talking points and scripted jokes during an orchestrated cameo on a talk show, or
granting a supervised interview with a carefully selected celebrity magazine every four
years, the realitician takes advantage of multiple avenues of exposure, and not just during
decisive points in the election cycle. She makes the most of scheduled publicity occasions
while purposefully seeking out opportunities to create prospects that would not otherwise
have existed. She encourages a sense of spontaneity to her communications and
appearances. The paradigm shifts, with realitics as the engine, from one of targeted and,
relatively speaking, situationally specific communication to dispersed, multi-channeled
brand-building through carefully devised and impromptu performances alike. Less is not
more to the realitician—up to the point of overexposure, that is, a universal concern of
celebrities and their handlers. Mileage may vary before that limit is crossed, and its
coordinates are determined by the audience as well as the realitician. Usually, as long as
(consumer) citizens are buying, she’s selling.
Once an actor is recognized as relevant, he or she may enter what I call the
celebrity diorama, a conceptual space in which famous people of all descriptions from
around the globe circulate, network and boost each other’s celebrity stock through the
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transitive property of realitics. Everything from advertising campaigns to celebrity
endorsements of politicians to Twitter algorithms to film, news and other industries is
powered by the transitive property, which is a means of amplifying one’s perceived worth
through actual or inferred associations with celebrities, at times just by physical
proximity to them. The transitive property epitomizes the semiotic logic behind the
celebrity photo-op, the brand ambassador, superstar nonprofit advocate, political
campaigner, product pusher, and the sale of autographed merchandise. The diorama is at
once an abstract attribute of the apparatus of celebrity and available wherever bold-faced
names converge. It is a kind of roving, global VIP section, at times outwardly visible and
at other times occurring in virtual settings or behind closed doors.
I initially encountered the celebrity diorama over the years 2000-2 while working
in Manhattan as a reporter for the New York Daily News’ syndicated “Rush and Molloy”
column. I was assigned to cover the fame beat in all of its rapidly multiplying forms, right
at the point when reality television was becoming ubiquitous, the line between hard news
and entertainment news was becoming indistinguishable, and the seeds were being sown
in the post-Y2K online landscape that would yield new inventions like blogs, social
media platforms, and smartphones. From one evening to the next, I would leave the
newspaper’s headquarters and race to several events, following publicists’ invites to
spaces where recognized people from the film world, along with sports, literature,
politics, fashion, media, and other industries converged. Signs that these mergers were
happening also were apparent in guest lists and in the makeup of the crowds in
attendance. At any given reception, Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone might be spotted
talking to author Salman Rushdie as socialite Paris Hilton, then-New York Mayor Rudy
31
Giuliani, and assorted film actors, fashion models, magazine publishers, pop singers,
opera singers, financiers, news anchors, and artists milled about nearby. Not infrequently,
Donald Trump was on hand. More interesting to me than the explosion and reach of
celebrity, though, was how it was noticeably infiltrating domains and working in manners
that until then would have been considered untenable.
Currently, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, at
which anyone from movie stars from Hollywood to tech executives from Silicon Valley
to heads of state from around the world rub elbows, has become one high-profile
manifestation of the diorama. Anywhere a red carpet is unrolled and celebrities
congregate qualifies, as do after-parties at movie premieres, film festivals, and awards
galas; hotspots and members-only clubs; fundraisers; front rows at fashion shows; the
White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner; ritzy travel destinations. For those
within the diorama, celebrity is at once a common denominator and a ticket to
professional opportunities not limited to the industry through which they entered the fold.
How a realitician enters the celebrity diorama is not as important as remaining
there once admitted. Star wattage, as any star or orbiting party knows, does not maintain
a constant charge or intensity. Thus, it is paramount to keep feeding it by staying in
circulation, engaging in campaigns which overlap and allow exposure to the public at
large, to other stewards of fame, and to symbiotic fields and industries. Once in the flow,
seeking out openings will allow the realitician to cash in on celebrity capital accrued
through concerted campaigns as well as less official efforts and channel it into another
point of reinsertion—i.e., a structured foothold in the form of an institutional
appointment, show-business role, contract, elected position, or other assignment.
32
Another important distinction about the realitician, as the concept of the diorama
intimates, is that she does not restrict herself by considering electoral politics to be the
only strain of politics worth her while, a sensibility which expands her purview
considerably. As Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and other proponents of the “Southern
Strategy” implemented by Republicans during the 1960s and ‘70s verified, battles for
political power can be effectually fought outside of strictly legislative bailiwicks. Joseph
A. Aistrup recounted that Arizona Senator and presidential candidate Goldwater helped
instigate that campaign, but “[i]t was during President Nixon’s tenure that the Southern
Strategy became an explicit plan to use a web of social and racial issues to win the
South” (33). In this manner, critics have argued, credulous Americans were persuaded,
through coded, manipulative appeals to their emotions, biases, and community
allegiances, to vote against their own interests.
In its most basic format, this game plan is in no way exclusive to the GOP, and its
rhetorical DNA can be identified in any number of devices from across the political
spectrum in past and present occurrences. Getting the public riled up by invoking
cultural, racial, political, sexual, and other kinds of politics can also yield results in forms
that matter most, like money, votes, and relevance. As has happened in media hot zones,
in which outlets and pundits have been similarly implemented, realiticians can be
deployed as carriers of messages that analogously resemble the Southern Strategy. This is
one of many ways in which realitics can be an ideological, propagandistic, and
exploitative art, one that will be exposed in several chapters to come.

33
Reality TV: The All-Purpose Party-Crasher
By way of a segue into a brief literature review, sufficient attention must first be
dedicated to the essential ingredient of realitics that is most often referred to as reality
TV, or at times as reality programming, reflecting its cross-platform applicability. The
mode of realitics is evidenced less by its surrogates in and of themselves than by the
dynamics they exhibit—e.g., enactments of markers, gestures, practices, and
technologies—as well as by their relationships to the apparatus of celebrity, audiences,
and other corollary parties. Like reality television, realitics represents a contested
ideological zone fueled by turmoil and often spoken about as though its meaning were
stable, self-evident, and proof positive of the precipitous decline of the more legitimate
field from which it arose. Alternately, although not as frequently as before the year 2016,
it has been brushed off as a guilty pleasure, a sideshow somehow detached from the real
real world, even as it brought about palpable transfigurations in and beyond its native
realm and its actors attained a level of stardom that granted them access to the same
echelons populated by their more qualified peers. Even as, in Donald Trump’s example,
its most powerful players came within arm’s length of the proverbial red telephone.
As is the case with reality television, realitics is commonly viewed as a
downmarket facsimile of its more authentic source material, a cheap approximation that
is not only unseemly in its own right but also a pollutant of its source. According to this
line of judgment, the stars that each of these derivative domains produces, no matter how
wealthy and famous they may become, are likewise regarded as inferior and pernicious.
Explanations for this attitude run the gamut from the logistical to the hegemonic, but a
theme is consistent throughout: If the criteria for successful entry into top positions in
34
entertainment and electoral politics are challenged by new forms and figures, then the
dominant systems of credentialing and status conferment are likewise threatened.
Pushbacks against this dilettante class of arrivistes include such familiar phrases as
“famous for being famous,” “shut up and sing,” and that old, gendered saw, “slept her
way to the top.”
Artistic renditions of this argument, such as those that lament the inexorable creep
of the reality-based business model and those who perpetuate it, may summon aesthetic
justifications regarding talent and other innate and ostensibly undemocratic capacities,
which the new breed is seen to disrespect if not bypass altogether. Thus, the poseurs not
only threaten to displace, but also to degrade and endanger the work of, those who
rightfully traffic in creativity. Though that complaint can be applied to the arena of
politics as well, the case against realiticians as such is often made according to logistical
assessments concerning proper training and the catch-all term ‘experience,’ which
encompasses time in office, voting records, adherence to or divergence from party
platforms, and so on. In either sphere, the themes in common have to do with status,
disruption, the establishment and regulation of value, boundary maintenance between
worlds, and other forms of power negotiations.
On a more positive note, another crossover feature from the reality TV realm is a
heightened sense of opportunity, however accurately gauged, for aspiring realiticians.
The reality media model supposedly offers greater ease of use when it comes to
producing shows of various descriptions and to entering the field of entertainment more
readily than was possible before. The space of reality programming, like that of realitics,
purportedly challenges top-down power structures within the related enterprises because
35
of the comparatively less stringent requirements for admission. Actors on ‘unscripted’
shows can go on to share the limelight with bona fide entertainers without needing to
share their skills; likewise, would-be Washington heavy-hitters can catapult to very real
positions of power having spent little or no time in elected office. The key to entry in
both sets of circumstances involves a combination of media attention and what might best
be categorized as a fan base.
Still, this optimistic streak is mitigated by a corresponding contamination anxiety
to which elites seem especially prone. Mark Andrejevic was among the first cultural
studies scholars to tune into this issue, and in Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, he
sums up the implications of the genre’s seeming promise of democratization without
glossing over disadvantages that stem from its roots in commodity capitalism:
On the one hand is the promise of interactivity—that access to the means of media
production will be thrown open to the public at large, so that ‘everyone can have
their own TV show’—or at least a distant chance of becoming a star on one of the
dozens of reality formats that have seemingly taken over the airwaves. On the
other hand is the reality represented by reality TV—that interactivity functions
increasingly as a form of productive surveillance allowing for the
commodification of the products generated by what I describe as the work of
being watched (2).
That U.S. politicians have become conversant in the language of branding, and
have been regarded as brands themselves, is no accident given Andrejevic’s account of
the “products” of interactivity. The politician-as-brand is easily one of those, as is the
fan-turned-voter. Another is the recasting of the spectator-consumer as a more active and
36
“productive,” as Andrejevic puts it, participant in an evolving type of cultural production
that invites those who buy in to give up their privacy and reimagine their very selves as
wares to be peddled (2).
Also implied is that members of what the French Marxist theorist, Situationist
6

and filmmaker Guy Debord famously calls “the society of the spectacle” are passive
spectators subject to absolute psychic colonization by the spectacle.
7
While that totalizing
depiction might be attributable to the need to impart a sense of urgency or to economize
language, the operative model is one of a monolithic entity against which individual or
organized resistance is futile. There is little wiggle room for emancipatory possibility or
for the kind of sign-play and fecundity that certain postmodern theorists, for instance,
have glimpsed in popular culture. At the same time, given the turn of events in the 2016
U.S. election cycle, it is difficult to argue that Debord was not onto something, writing as
he was in the 1960s, vis-à-vis celebrity. In the balance, it now appears Debord was
actually delivering more literal and pragmatic, rather than figurative or hyperbolic,
pronouncements in sections such as this from his seminal work, The Society of the
Spectacle:
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered,
free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social
labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal:
power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end
of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-
star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the
lived (Debord).
37
Adding Debord’s reflections to Andrejevic’s makes for a sobering combination. It
is one thing to disparage, as has become a bromide in commentaries and vernacular
exchanges, reality media and celebrity worship as generally detrimental to individuals
(especially minors) in terms of their susceptibility to narcissistic, materialistic, and
unrealistic influences; those complaints can also take on the droning, tsk-tsk-ing tenor of
prohibitions against the excessive intake of television, junk food, video games, and other
personally unsavory habits that might render the next generation less agile than their
forebears. It is quite another to be confronted with details supporting the possibility that
reality television, as well as realitics, is part of a hegemonic scheme that secures
enthusiastic, voluntary public complicity on a mass scale, as Antonio Gramsci, Louis
Althusser and thinkers from the Frankfurt School warned would happen during and after
the World War II era. In short, realitics could carry the makings of a long con. This
darker proposition will be explored in latter chapters.
Irrespective of the endgame, it bears out that the construction of the realitician is
made possible by leveraging productive tensions within and among many overlapping
spheres and discourses, and by cultivating and capitalizing upon false hopes. The
entertainment-based machinery that produced this emergent form in part runs on
exploitation and relies upon the expendability of readily replenishable bodies and their
labor in the service of novelty, as is the case in fashion, sports and other previously
established conduits to stardom. As Andrejevic proposes, one feature that distinguishes
this newcomer from those precursors is that the “apparatus” of reality media has in a
sense become predominant and has taken on the special “aura” that Walter Benjamin of
38
the Frankfurt School describes in his influential 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” (5).
The aura is a somewhat esoteric concept that Benjamin comes at from several
directions. It has to do with the authenticity and uniqueness of an artwork, a singularity
that is derived in part from the “ritualistic basis” upon which early art forms were created
and that is lost through industrialized mass production. Among the most intriguing
remarks Benjamin makes, as though tailored to this undertaking, is that once the
“criterion of authenticity” drops out of the picture in artistic production, “the total
function of art is reversed,” he writes. “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be
based on another practice—politics” (Benjamin).
By extension, I would argue, the style of celebrity this apparatus engenders shares
in its predominance—to a point. While this may for some beneficiaries amount to a
desirable leveling of the playing field, it harbors a chaotic potential as well in that the
simple presence of the apparatus confers worthiness onto its subjects. Talent, training,
past accomplishments, connections with assorted muses and gatekeepers, and so on
become sidelined. Though the requirements for attracting media attention are relaxed,
endowing the apparatus with more power means that whoever is behind it
correspondingly matters more.
With each new success story, myths are reified—about individual talent, or at
least star quality, being rewarded by a more impartial system; about the genre of reality
being markedly different from its predecessors and more democratic with regard to
accessibility and to the range of personal attributes deserving notice; about less
superciliousness brought to bear on the backgrounds of actors. However, just as the
39
illusion of spontaneity and so-called realness involved in these productions has been
considerably disputed in recent years, in part spurring an effort by some industry
professionals to reclassify certain of their creations as “unscripted” entertainment, the
idea that reality media has broadened the horizon of opportunities available to the
average participant or democratized the field of entertainment also proves debatable
under scrutiny.
There’s the rub. While, for example, some reality stars may appear to be paid for
simply enjoying the high-flown, consumption-driven lifestyle of the most privileged
class, that equation may also be turned on its head in that, in order to stay relevant, they
must be constantly doing the work of selling themselves. Social media and other tools
ostensibly designed to encourage interpersonal connection become self-branding,
marketing and image-management devices, further encroaching upon privacy, downtime,
and offline lifeworlds.
Accordingly, realiticians are under pressure to amplify their visibility and
opportunity through product launches, red-carpet appearances, and book deals. The
camera is the mystical vehicle for power but requires that subjects be perpetually under
the klieg lights, and as Donald Trump’s signature 3 a.m. tweets illustrate, always wired.
At least the potential for performance and public interaction, of “the work of being
watched,” is ever-present, as is the risk of overexposure, of a hot-mic moment or of
losing control, of going fatally off-message. They can never truly step outside the bounds
of the self-promotion zone, and their work becomes either a constant advertising pitch, a
constant political campaign, or both. As “a top exec at a network with several hit docu-
40
soaps” phrases it, “‘The reality characters self-produce, knowing that they need to be a
heightened version of themselves’” (Polone).
Why those who do not count themselves among the class of actors in the domain
of reality media, or of realitics, might find reason to care about what happens within it is
that they may discover they are actually part of it. What is being advanced here, again to
borrow Andrejevic’s terminology, is “a cultural formation that can be used to think
through” the changes that interactive technologies, and more broadly the “digital
revolution,” have introduced into the increasingly blurred professional and personal
zones occupied by twenty-first-century workers (28). Reality television actors, as well as
realiticians—but more important, everyday citizens—have had to adapt to compulsory
practices imposed on them by their entrance into what Andrejevic calls the “digital
enclosure” (28). It is just this technically enabled ideological field that is responsible for a
good deal of the blurring between the professional and the personal, between work and
domestic spaces, private lives and public data, labor and leisure time.
Just as reality television presents a cultural formation that can be used to think
through the changes Andrejevic explores, the realitician offers another to examine in
appreciating how “the advent of new information technologies and their deployment
shape the forms of commerce, art, and communication”—and politics can readily be
added to this list— “in the emerging society of mass customization” (27). As of this
writing, the stakes have been raised to such unanticipated heights that the urgency of
getting a firm grasp of this political-cultural formation has spiked accordingly. Naming
and understanding the phenomenon is no longer the exercise in intellectual curiosity that
it was when I began this project. When realitics takes over the White House, in a clever
41
twist, a mode that is derived from simulated reality becomes a prime mover in the daily
reality of a nation, if not around the world.

Theoretical Tributaries to the Study of Realitics
This dissertation is written in dialogue with thinkers who grapple with questions
of citizenship, public culture, and fame. More theorists than there is room to mention in
several dedicated chapters have made invaluable contributions to countless scholarly
conversations that relate in one way or another to realitics. The theoretical roots of
realitics extend so far into the past that it is difficult to decide where to begin even an
abbreviated survey, and they spread in so many directions that it is difficult to know
where to stop.
The roundup that follows is not meant to be exhaustive so much as to situate my
work within a broader exchange of ideas and to credit some of the influences and voices
in those conversations to which I have been privy in my graduate training and research. It
also hints at the range of disciplines that can be applied to such a complex subject.
Throughout this section, and throughout this dissertation, I am drawing together, and
upon, a critical chorus whose individual voices are orchestrated into a style, which is
itself more than a style; it is an evolving assembly of making, doing, being, becoming,
and starring (Goodnight, “First Chapter”). Many of the names and concepts mentioned
below will be cited again in the body of the thesis; still others will be introduced
throughout.
If it has not already been spelled out, realiticians are hybrids. Correspondingly,
realitics is a theoretical as well as practical hybrid that operates from the crowded and
42
shifting ground of a capitalist global economy commingled with the economy of
attention. It manifests in the infusion of practices and conventions of the fame world into
the civic, industrial and market worlds of Thévènot and Boltanski’s devising. It relies
upon and thrives in the network society as elaborated by Manuel Castells in The Rise of
the Network Society, Communication Power and other touchstones of contemporary
theory. In order to fully explicate realitics, academics with backgrounds in rhetorical
criticism, cultural studies, critical theory, political science, international relations,
sociology, television and film studies, queer theory, feminist theory, literature, race and
ethnicity studies, American studies, economics, philosophy, semiotics, journalism, public
policy, globalization, geography, technology, and other emphases would all add valuable
input in the current climate and that represents only a partial lineup.
Realitics hails from a cluster of social phenomena that, whether taken individually
or together, tend to elicit strong reactions and opinions. It is only fitting, then, that a
review of the most applicable literature to the topic would read like a long, sometimes
heated, and unresolved argument. One way into the fray is by tracking one of the most
common refrains in academic, as well as media and popular, discourse about celebrity
culture: the theme of the unwelcome impostor. Time and again, celebrity is cast as a
toxic, monolithic entity with a reliable ability to sex up, dumb down, or trash altogether
anything with which ‘it’ comes into contact. On the receiving end of its noxious influence
are equally broadly conceived targets: the news, politics, public culture, civil society, and
so on.
This depiction calls up at least imaginary versions of the victimized parties that
were once not so thoroughly contaminated by the trivial, crass or purely spectacular
43
elements that the virus of celebrity cannot help but introduce to its host. Many of the
arguments can be difficult to dismiss and seem to ring true on a general level; anyone
with rudimentary communication technology and cultural memory can spot the signs of a
wide-ranging ‘celebrification’ effect. What’s more, substantive evidence has been culled
through empirical means, as numerous studies focusing on, for example, the entrée of
entertainment news into the hard-news realm have established.
While those analyses that have taken a declinist tack have proven useful in high-
theory orbits, they can also amount to the academic equivalent of conversation-stoppers:
heavy on the consternation and light on solutions, save for the expressed wish to restore a
preferred state of affairs that may never have really existed. They tend to hover on the
meta-level, opting to make sweeping pronouncements and transcendent categorical
distinctions rather than working from the ground up. Meanwhile, proponents of more
celebrity-positive perspectives have come up with a range of ways to justify their own
positions. Yet given the seeming inevitability of this cultural shift, arguing over its merits
has become less of a necessity, perhaps even superfluous.
Graeme Turner, who is clearly aware of these developments, declares in a 2013
essay that gossip has been redefined as news “as it moves out of the social pages and onto
the front pages.” Turner swiftly dispenses with any remaining doubt about the
predominance of celebrity and answers his own headline question, “Is celebrity news,
news?”, by the end of the article’s abstract (Turner). What happens in the news business
reflects and influences cultural trends, and the movement of celebrity from the fringes
into the nerve centers of societies is no exception.
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This process has been going on since well before the onset of modern-day fame,
let alone any of the media that have aided in its creation. As Leo Braudy traces in his
comprehensive text, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History, current issues
concerning political performance, persuasion, the use of spectacle in leadership, and the
proper construction and functioning of governments have clear antecedents in ancient
Greece and Rome. Braudy also considers the idolization of celebrities to be a
manifestation of an impulse toward god-worship that has turned into a kind of secular
religion at a time when the more traditional forms have lost their appeal. “The urge to
fame occurs in that strange and vitally important area where matters of the spirit and
matters of the flesh meet,” he writes (9).
Over the course of several centuries, the investment of divine power in the person
of the monarch assisted in that transition from heavenly to earthly realms (217). Those
more established denominations that have persisted have had to adapt since, as Braudy
observes, “[i]n our time, when preachers evangelize about inner, spiritual truths, they do
it on television” (9). Implicit in his wide-ranging tour, consisting of nearly 600 pages, is
the affirmation that fame in its many expressions is a worthwhile subject for serious
scholarship. Overall, Braudy takes a balanced approach to celebrity, stating up-front that
it does not always shape society for the worse. Such a productive capacity has been
imagined by many cultural studies specialists as well.
Not so for the Frankfurt School set. Writing, as many of them were, from
viewpoints honed by catastrophic events that led to, and followed from, the Second
World War, they watched as culture and politics collided to mass-produce propaganda,
public relations, canned and cookie-cutter entertainment products with malignant
45
potential that belied their packaging. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s definitive
essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” offers ample proof of
the authors’ portentous emphasis in its title, but passages such as this one convey the
enormity of their alarm while conclusively connecting politics and culture and gesturing
at the deleterious effects of this unholy alliance on the general public:
The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in
politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in
magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on
classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so
that none may escape. . . . The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of
mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete
quantification. . . . Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts,
and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique
that is used for any type of propaganda (Adorno and Horkheimer).
The thinkers who comprised the Frankfurt School, along with their like-minded peers,
were understandably troubled by the developments registered in their work. In addition to
the generalized dangers of two calamitous wars, many of them, as members of the
European Jewish diaspora, had been personally imperiled by what they considered a
betrayal of the promise of the Enlightenment. In addition to the wars’ aftershocks, the
ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud weighed heavily in their writings about western
societies.
In place of progress, they saw decay and a slide into disarray hastened by a
widespread cultural corrosion that would only be exploited on an ever-grander scale by
46
those in power. Walter Benjamin, mentioned earlier in conjunction with Andrejevic,
gives a gloomy prognosis about the curtailed possibilities for artistic expression and
appreciation in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Leo
Lowenthal documents an important relationship between the heroes and mores cherished
by a given society in “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” In so doing, he rails against the
overvaluation of consumption, excess, and leisure he sees around him—a trend that
would only continue—as he notices how “almost every one” of the idols he tracks is
“related to the sphere of leisure time,” does not “belong to vocations which serve
society’s basic needs . . . or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially
productive agent” (115).
Yet somehow, despite their combined exertions and enduring authority, it would
apparently not be enough to unmask the forces and figures that brought about the status
quo they denounce in order to effect change. There is a resilience to the influences they
call out, which have persisted in western culture to the present moment and are at once
deeply entrenched and flexible, resistant and accommodating. Theorists tackling late
twentieth-to-early-twenty-first-century versions of the issues raised by the Frankfurt
School—David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, Justin Lewis, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, to name just a few—would attribute this elasticity to
the rather remarkable ability of capitalism to withstand, disarm and incorporate changes
and challenges. Interestingly, the Frankfurt School have enjoyed a revival of late as
public intellectuals in mainstream American media discourse. Around the time of the
2016 U.S. election, they were credited for knowing Trump was coming, as a New Yorker
47
headline blared, as well as with providing the tools to make sense of the “Age of Trump,”
as a Vox think-piece acknowledged (A. Ross; Illing).
Returning to the post-war set, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser bring in a
nuanced appreciation for the softer ways that systemic power not only asserts and
insinuates itself but, through their conceptions of hegemony and ideology, coaxes
subjects to buy into their own oppression (“Antonio”; Althusser). Boorstin’s above-
mentioned classic The Image shares similar concerns about the dangerous artificiality and
stupefying power of mass media and about the usage patterns he spots on the part of news
organizations that further alarm him. Guy Debord is another in their midst, as is Jean
Beaudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation is broadly consonant with the above ideas
but with a twist: there is no longer a ‘there there’ as such. “Simulation is no longer that of
a territory, a referential being, or a substance,” he writes. “It is the generation by models
of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). As Simulacra and Simulation was
published in 1981, Beaudrillard’s is a more recent addition to the exchange; other entries
have since taken a similar tack, including Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business in 1985, and Neal Gabler’s Life: The
Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, published in 1998.
The Frankfurt School thinkers did much to lay the groundwork for what would
become critical theory and cultural studies in the latter half of the twentieth century, but
that does not mean that their sense of foreboding about popular culture was
unquestioningly taken up thereafter, or taken up in the same spirit. For his part, by
performing semiotic readings of everyday texts, Roland Barthes helped collapse the high-
low cultural divide that certain of the Frankfurt School members perpetuated. In
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Mythologies, Barthes inventories a mish-mash of wrestling, household cleaners,
photography, and toys, detecting ideological content taking cover behind the pretense of
face value (Barthes). Poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and postmodernist thinkers at
times have taken the task of uprooting and unmooring to bewildering levels, but they
have also made space for sign play and productive reworkings of linguistic and symbolic
‘givens.’
To shift theoretical emphasis, rhetoric is likewise indispensable to this project, as
it offers tools to assist in understanding the roles of symbols, style, gestures and
languages in the workings of realitics. Rhetorical criticism comprises one of the principal
approaches I will take to the artifacts under consideration in this thesis. Debates about the
art of persuasion and its place in a functional society, as laid out in the classical era, are
still being hashed out currently. From rhetoric also comes an appreciation for persona
(ethos), narratives (logos), and authority (rested in a mix of occupation and performance).
Rhetoricians from all phases of the field’s development would agree that it is crucial,
regardless of the era in question, to pay close attention to the ways in which language and
power are entwined. Twentieth-century contributions from Edwin Black on the “second
persona,” or the imagined audience that can be inferred from a text; Michael Calvin
McGee on the “ideograph,” which locates ideological content in more material
communicative formations; and Maurice Charland’s “constitutive rhetoric,” which
investigates how language shapes identity and vice versa have all, in addition to many
others, served as guides throughout this process (Black; McGee; Charland).
The theoretical revolutions brought about by the “turns” in late twentieth- and
early twenty-first-century—rhetorical, aesthetic—do much to assist in answering
49
questions about how reality has become “hyperreal,” again inviting Baudrillard into the
discussion. Though the purview of “big rhetoric,” or the “theoretical position that
everything, or virtually everything, can be described as ‘rhetorical,’” may seem too
totalizing, that approach is arguably preferable to an overly restrictive one that would
tidily relegate rhetoric to its prior, persuasion- and speech-focused categories (Schiappa).
After all, as Harriman argued, speech, gesture, and style are not trivial, especially not in
the zone of realitics. Though it resists characterization, the style of realitics might best be
described as consistently inconsistent.
Tracing corollary threads, the emphasis in argumentation theory on the
importance of consensus, a necessity that seems to fade further into oblivion with each
session of the U.S. Congress, will not be underestimated here. Jürgen Habermas, though
trained under the Frankfurt School’s auspices, sees more openings for critical dialogue
and deliberation in the idealized space of the public sphere, although the static introduced
by the mass media represents one factor that renders it less than ideal (Habermas). Nancy
Fraser’s intervention, and those of others, adds to Habermas’ foundations much-needed
complexity and an appreciation for how gender, class, sexuality, nationality and
additional indicators of difference makes “the” public sphere an ideological abstraction in
need of interrogation and not a neutral zone to which all are granted equal access
(Fraser).
Of course, no dissertation involving considerations of power, discipline, and
discourse is complete without the participation of Michel Foucault. This thesis is no
exception, and specific sections will take up Foucault’s work explicitly. By way of a
preview, it is clear that realitics is discursive. Though certain figures have demonstrated
50
particular inventiveness or range in their uses of the mode, and differences relating to
relative wealth, visibility, occupation, time in office, career longevity and other variables
may distinguish some exemplars from others, each of them extends into a bigger
framework that she or he did not single-handedly construct from the ground up. The ways
in which the subject position of the realitician has come into being, and at the time and
place it has arisen, may be described as genealogical in the Foucauldian sense of the term
(Archaeology 49).
10
Accordingly, realitics operates within a vast and interconnected
discursive scheme in which class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, cultural milieu,
language, perceived skill, technology, ability, age, and a host of other countervailing
influences are also in play. The discursive aspect of realitics also concerns mimesis,
repetition, and resonance. As with any codified social practice, patterns, tacit and overt
rules, contextual cues, and other factors delimit the possible range of expression from one
case to another.
Cultural studies brings to the table ideas about subjectivity, ideology, consumer
citizenship, media reception and production, and the productive capacities of popular
culture. The insights and perspectives cultivated in that field encourage scholars to
identify sites of resistance and offers insights about how race, gender, class, and other
identity markers are implicated in a number of practices and sites, especially when those
power relations are hidden. Cultural studies, too, contributes through exploration of the
political economy of culture, as became a central focus for that cohort, which has
incorporated work by Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Angela
McRobbie, and several others cited in this dissertation. Their efforts to engage feminism,
post-colonial studies, LGBTQ+, race and ethnicity studies, fan culture and subjectivity,
51
for starters, have influenced my own. Scholars such as Sarah Banet-Weiser, Lisbet von
Zoonen, Jeffrey Jones, and others have illustrated in their work, the notion of
“citizenship” has taken on charges and meanings derived from consumer culture. They
have provided the theoretical means to conceive of how the consumer citizen emerged in
the latter decades of the twentieth century.
Josh Gamson, P. David Marshall, and Richard Dyer will appear recurrently to add
heft and depth to considerations of celebrity. P. David Marshall notes the “convergence
in the source of power between the political leader and other forms of celebrity” in
Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, one of the works that I would
count in a compilation of the greatest hits of realitics:
Both are forms of subjectivity that are sanctioned by the culture and enter the
symbolic realm of providing meaning and significance for the culture. The
categorical distinction of forms of power is dissolving in favor of a unified system
of celebrity status, in which the sanctioning of power is based on similar emotive
and irrational, yet culturally deeply embedded, sentiments. (19)
Political power, as is the case with celebrity, consists of a kind of social
agreement—one that is facilitated by a host of structural and physical props, including,
but not limited to, other humans. Thus, perspectives from sociology, philosophy, and
other fields are extremely helpful in introducing ideas that range beyond the province of,
say, social constructivism and semiotics, not to mention discourse analysis, and in
broadening the scope of this inquiry. Thévènot and Boltanski’s framework, as laid out in
On Justification: Economies of Worth, of interrelated and integral cités (polities, worlds)
distinguished in part according to the justificatory regimes that find purchase in each,
52
represents one structurally informed theoretical amalgamation that draws from social and
material sources. Via Thévènot and Boltanski, questions of social context and value can
be approached through a practical framework. On Justification, along with a subsequent
collaboration by Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, will be brought in to enhance this and
other chapters.
Another expedient tool that has aided in my understanding of realitics is Bruno
Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). In Latour’s words, though ANT harbors a “distrust
for such vague all-encompassing sociological terms” and “too global concepts like those
of institutions, organizations, states and nations,” it still “aims at describing also the very
nature of societies” (“On Actor-Network” 2). This may sound like an oxymoron, and in
fact ANT has been criticized for appearing to encourage a kind of ‘turtles all the way
down’ approach that would remove key contextual elements, many of which provide the
necessary basis for a passable understanding of how power operates in contemporary
societies, in favor of listing approved, neutralized, and isolated ingredients ad infinitum.
Yet Latour insists that it affords a ground-up rethinking of social theory, one that purports
“to rebuild social theory out of networks” (2).
8
That is a debate for another project; most
pertinent to this one is Latour’s incorporation of “non-human actors” into ANT, as well
as the “diplomacy” it takes to couple networks and to travel back and forth among them.

In sum, many scholars have already mined deeply the veins of inquiry that have
led me to this study of realitics, including several professors from the University of
Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In fact, it
was the prospect of doing this kind of scholarship, along with the school’s location at the
hub of what Maureen Orth has called the “celebrity-industrial complex,” that drew me to
53
USC after working in New York as an entertainment reporter (Orth, The Importance).
Take, for example, Sarah Banet-Weiser’s studies on consumer citizenship and brand
culture (Authentic™). Or “Mother Angelina,” as Alison Trope dubbed Angelina Jolie in
the actor’s ongoing, off-screen role as Princess Diana’s and Audrey Hepburn’s charitable
heiress apparent (Trope). Stacy Smith’s research on the many ways gender disparity has
been normalized and reproduced by mainstream entertainment structures in Hollywood,
plus her collaborations with the Geena Davis Institute, the Sundance Institute, and the
Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, have been inspiring as well.
I cannot count the number of times I have leaned upon Larry Gross’ Up from
Invisibility in the classroom and in my research and work as a journalist; his “Art vs.
Life” will also turn up in coming pages. G. Thomas Goodnight’s dialogic exposition of
how entertainment products themselves can serve as commentary in moments of high
political drama, as Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 and Mel Gibson’s
visceral Biblical epic The Passion of the Christ did in the lead-up to the 2004 U.S.
presidential election (“The Passion”). Robert Scheer’s insistently pertinent book Playing
President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton – and
How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush did much to prepare me for President
Donald Trump and equipped me with a more nuanced understanding of how the
performative office of the U.S. president compromises those who seek to occupy it
(Scheer).

54
A Note on Methods, and a Celebrity Exclusive
There are many more facets through which to view what I intend to be more of a
kaleidoscopic, rather than an overly impressionistic, survey, one that presents each
component precisely whenever feasible while taking care not to impose an artificial
overlay of intelligibility when such a degree of conviction is not realistic. Bringing
together the pieces just outlined presents at least the beginnings of a theoretical basis,
with the implied incitement for further pursuit and advancement of these embryonic
ideas, for the “ground”—as in figure-versus-ground—of realitics. Contra myths of
meritocracy and individualism, I would argue that it is impossible to fully comprehend
this phenomenon, or the “figure” of the realitician, without paying ample attention to the
environment that produces it. Here I am employing metaphorical terms loosely, since if
anything is to be taken away from the preceding pages, it would hopefully be that there
have been energizing developments in recent scholarship that make a good case for
integrating hybridity, fluidity and intricacy in studies of topics such as realitics.
Making sense of realitics is not best achieved by adopting a taxonomic
approach—i.e., by assigning a broad array of actors and acts, styles and scenes to
quantified positions within a one-size- fits-all matrix of conceivable positive outcomes.
Although similarities may be traced across different episodes, as performed by a single
character or by many, the circumstances and major players tend to be too distinct to be
classified as extrapolative prototypes. Nor does a single exercise, however effective,
ensure future gains in other endeavors or repeat wins in similar contexts. Moreover, what
amounts to a “kiss of death,” career-wise, in one instance does not necessarily spell
disaster in every other, even in cases that may seem quite alike on the surface.
55
Considerations of gender, race, class, and other matrices, as well as idiosyncratic aspects
of different personalities, make the taxonomic approach an overly clinical and ultimately
ineffective strategy for discussions about celebrity and realitics.
The chapters and their subjects that follow were conceived and arranged in a
particular order. Chronology was not the only determinant, but it does figure in
appreciably, as realitics has moved and changed along with happenings and meanings
that have defined specific moments. What was possible for realiticians in 2004 is
different from what has since become commonplace, to say the least. Realitics is
characterized by certain nonsequential qualities as well, but it is useful to trace narratives
along a loosely chronological arc before making departures and blending time frames. I
have endeavored to arrange the chapters as I have seen realitics developing in different
contexts, professions, and “worlds.” So, among the main players to be examined are
realiticians who have come up through entertainment channels, as well as through media
positions, through business, and through electoral politics.
Subjects were chosen according to a number of variables, including availability of
information and accessibility to them; in every case but one, I have been able to observe
them in the field as a journalist (the Dixie Chicks are the exception), and in three cases
(Arianna Huffington, George Clooney, and Donald Trump), I have spoken with them in
my capacity as a reporter. Excerpts from interviews I have conducted in the field with
more than a dozen well-known actors, directors, and politicians will figure in at several
junctures.
I will encourage a complete picture to emerge through a combination of these
methods and a couple more. By invoking the theoretical frameworks just introduced, I
56
will continue to provide structure and to substantiate my own formative theories. Another
of my main approaches is to examine individual artifacts and texts on their own terms
while putting them in conversation with one another in a series of episodes. Several have
already appeared in this introduction, beginning with Oprah Winfrey at the Golden
Globes and continuing with my reference to the Hunger Games film franchise and use of
a key scene from The Graduate to aid in the reveal of the central idea that inspired this
dissertation.
The following is another episode, which will be revisited in a forthcoming sequel:
On October 9, 2017, U.S. news outlets reported that sports broadcast giant ESPN had
suspended Jemele Hill, anchor of the popular show SportsCenter. Hill, an African-
American journalist, had tweeted her endorsement of a boycott against the Dallas
Cowboys in order to protest white owner Jerry Jones’ threat to bench any athletes from
his NFL team who would kneel while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played before a game.
That political demonstration had been occurring at various football games around the
U.S. in solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who is
biracial and of African heritage, and whose decision to “take a knee” during the national
anthem at a 2016 preseason game touched off a heated debate about America’s legacy of
racial injustice and the interlinked issues of police brutality and mass incarceration
(Lombardo).
Turning to the global arena, another sports-based story jetted around the world
two weeks after the Jemele Hill incident. This one involved the Turkish government’s
investigation into a tifo, or choreographed gesture of support by sports fans for their
favorite team, that had caused a stir at an Oct. 22 match between soccer teams
57
Galatasaray SK and Fenerbahce. During the game, spectators seated in the section
designated for Galatasaray fans unrolled and hoisted a giant image of Sylvester Stallone
in his legendary role as Rocky Balboa in the Rocky film series, accompanied by a caption
that read, “Stand Up … They look big because you are kneeling” (Matamoros). To
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, the elements of the tifo conspired to create a
defiant message referencing the words of alleged coup instigator Fethullah Gullen, who
had fled Turkey and sought refuge in the fictional Rocky Balboa’s home state of
Pennsylvania (Kozok). Four decades after hitting it big in movie theaters, Rocky is
slugging away in Turkey.
When this thesis project began in 2007, the idea that the merger between
entertainment and politics could assume the proportions of the recent Trumpian takeover
of the Oval Office would have seemed like the basis for a ham-fisted Hollywood morality
tale, a B movie with A-list ambitions asking to be summarily put in its place by critics.
The shift in American electoral politics toward realitics is significant for many reasons,
one of which is because its practice entails an emphasis on style and performance,
arguably at the expense of substance. However, as with news and entertainment, the
cross-pollination between these worlds appears to be inexorable, regardless of whatever
critiquing, hand-wringing, or high-vs.-low-culture boundary policing their combinations
may inspire. If the 2016 American presidential election is any indication, and it is, the
mode of realitics is ascendant and will continue to dominate in and beyond U.S. electoral
politics. Accordingly, politicians can no longer afford to assume that the rules have not
changed for them as they have for celebrities whose provenance lies more in Hollywood
than in Washington, D.C.
58
The episodes that give shape and momentum to this dissertation begin in 2003, on
the eve of the Iraq War. As they unfold, a more complete picture will begin to emerge
that will ideally justify my assertion that realitics is, though complex and mercurial, quite
real. So are the ways in which it has changed American politics and, arguably, global
politics, though my main focus is on the national scene to keep the scope somewhat
manageable. Additionally, in order to pin down realitics, insofar as that is possible, I have
included a kind of how-to guide in the form of the Appendix.
As it happens, a marquee player who is himself no stranger to realitics has
probably done the most with the fewest words to cut right to the crux of my argument.
While in conversation in 2009 with Truthdig’s Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, who has
been my colleague and boss for several years, this artist heard and helpfully commented
upon my dissertation subject. The actor in question is Warren Beatty, and as to the
subject of realitics, he had this to say: “There’s no business but show business” (Beatty).

59
Chapter Two: How to Dixie Chick: Celebrity Advocacy, Public Protest, and the
Body Politic

The complex relationship between celebrity and politics in America is a theme
that often provokes negative reactions in public discourse, ranging from disdain to
ridicule to outright alarm. The celebrity is a composite figure, part floating signifier; part
‘real person’ with a family, an address and a Social Security number; and part walking
advertisement. Celebrities are emblematic of a discordant, even contradictory, jumble of
traits and values: material success and flagrant excess, extraordinary individuality and
mass-produced conformity, rare talent and crass posturing, among other associations.
The steady stream of celebrities infiltrating the political sphere periodically triggers a
backlash among political purists, territorial lawmakers and scornful citizens who
typically invoke the refrain “shut up and sing”—calling for stars to keep within the
prescribed bounds of their roles as entertainers.
Despite this stock rebuke that would confine celebrities to their proper social
position as entertainers suitable only for passive consumption or passing curiosity,
entertainment and politics are becoming ever more symbiotic. Performers are assuming a
host of political roles, and politicians are incorporating celebrity performance styles into
their presentation and image-building strategies. Instead of signaling sweeping and
certain democratic attrition, the cross-pollination between these two spheres of social
influence, or “fields,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, can be cast in a more
nuanced, even productive, light. As cultural icons, celebrities act as screens onto which
commonly held ideologies, anxieties and values are projected. As cultural producers in
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command of symbolic capital, they have the ability to affect discourses about politics,
sexuality, success, and morality in a consumer culture that links image with power.
This chapter investigates how the media scandal sparked by the Dixie Chicks in
2003 created a discursive space to explore how ideas about patriotism, dissent and
popular leadership are constructed and contested. The story of the “DXC” is one in which
an overt act of political protest delivered in a public venue touched off a response that
could be construed as disproportionately intense. The Chicks collectively functioned as a
lightning rod, the focus of charged affective responses heightened by culture-wide
conflicts about gender politics, U.S. diplomacy, and celebrity advocacy. In addition to
their careers, the very bodies of the three female musicians were caught up in that
dispute, and part of their own response took the form of a physical acknowledgment of
how they had become sexualized and circumscribed screens onto which a collection of
anxieties and attitudes were projected.
Gender was strongly implicated in how so much would come to hang on so small
a comment before the controversy passed into history, but in other respects the Dixie
Chicks’ case is not entirely unique. The process of signification through celebrity culture
often involves a number of disparate parties constituting and disputing the meaning of
ongoing occurrences; in so doing, they frequently reach beyond the scope of the inciting
incident. This arbitration activity may not always include the express participation or
agreement of celebrities themselves. As the DXC saga also demonstrates, echoes from
the past have the capacity to transform present episodes and vice versa, granting realitics
a self-referential capacity as chains of signification need only rely upon their own
content, and corroboration and external validity become superfluous. How the country
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band’s crisis occurred, how they responded, and the stakes and outcomes in play will
comprise the successive sections of this chapter and will come to bear on larger
conversations progressing throughout this dissertation.

Chicks in Crisis
The Dixie Chicks’ ordeal began in March of 2003, when singer Natalie Maines
caught heat for criticizing President George W. Bush on a concert stage in London as
American troops were poised to invade Iraq. In a flash, the group’s familiar act as girly,
innocuous pop-country stars was instantly up for revision, and their campaign as citizen-
performers began. Over the next 20 months, the Dixie Chicks tumbled into their own
style of realitics, one which may have originated with an offhand comment followed by
retroactive reframing for the sake of damage control but evolved into a more deliberate
technique. In the process, the group engaged in a civic dialogue with fans, detractors, and
other country artists while advancing their critique of American foreign policy. With their
new role came uncertainty about their future in the music industry, as they struggled to
maintain their standing as successful crossover artists while asserting their own terms and
pushing the limits of their position within their field.
Before the London episode, the Dixie Chicks were known mostly for gaining
traction in the mainstream pop market, starting with the 1998 release of their debut album
“Wide Open Spaces,” without abandoning their country and bluegrass roots. Some of the
die-hard country set had proven to be a persistently tough crowd for them along the way,
and their stylistic departures did not help matters, but sales figures shored them up. The
group, consisting of Maines, as well as sisters Emily Erwin Robison and Martie Erwin
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Maguire, had in their early years been positioned by the media as feisty, normatively
feminine performers who judiciously adhered to conventions of the pop genre. Their
main brush with scandal by that point took the form of a minor fuss over their song
“Goodbye Earl,” told from the point of view of a battered woman who decides to poison
and “stuff” her abusive husband into the trunk of her car. Another song, entitled
“Travelin’ Soldier,” deals with the topic of separation and loss during the Vietnam War,
again through the narrative of a personal relationship. “Soldier” did not stir up excessive
commotion at the time of its release in 2002, although its original connotations would
change in accordance with the band’s transformation, which is best charted by touching
on some key events along the timeline of their most impactful phase.
Natalie Maines’ aside to a concert audience in London on March 10, 2003 set off
a chain of events that she could not have foreseen. “Just so you know,” she said at the
Shepherd’s Bush Empire nightclub, “we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want
this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from
Texas” (G. Smith). Her remark went relatively unnoticed on the band’s home turf until
March 12, when a stateside country fan site picked up concert coverage, including
Maines’ statement, printed that day in the British newspaper The Guardian. In calling
them “good-time girls the country establishment loves to hate,” as well as the “renegade
ladies of country,” in her Guardian piece, reporter Betty Clarke anticipated the road
ahead for the Chicks as she alluded to their past (Clarke).
“Too direct, too old-fashioned, too modern … you name it, it’s been slung at the
Texan trio,” Clarke wrote, pitting the “country establishment” at large against the London
crowd “cheering” Maines’ big moment. She also contrasted country music with an
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outwardly discordant genre: “… at a time when country stars are rushing to release pro-
war anthems, this is practically punk rock” (Clarke). Meanwhile, word of the galvanizing
occurrence picked up the buzz of outrage as it crossed the pond to the U.S. via a post on
the Internet discussion group rec.music.country.western with the title “Dixie Chick Tea
Party – Dump Lipton for Sponsoring Anti-American Chicks!”—alluding to the legendary
Boston Tea Party during the American Revolutionary War (Rossman 61). The Lipton tea
company broke off its advertising contract with the band shortly thereafter (G. Smith).
In the weeks following Maines’ anti-Bush jibe, the Dixie Chicks’ image and
position as prominent figures in the public eye were abruptly and irrevocably altered, and
the fate of the group that had earned the title of the top-selling female act of all time hung
in limbo (G. Smith). As G. Thomas Goodnight observed in “Sketches in Celebrity
Advocacy: The Passion of the Christ Meets Fahrenheit 9/11,” his meditation on how film
and television discourses jostled to shape public opinion about U.S. foreign policy during
that era:
. . . the attacks on September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
constant reminders of insecurity—whether by colored warning alerts, personal
searches at airports, or the errant private plane over the Capitol—all these created
currents of anxiety among American publics that invited release into fresh
communicative space” (2).
By March 13, it was clear that “currents of anxiety” were in fact surging toward the
Chicks, attracted and augmented by a much larger reservoir of affective energy than the
rather picayune incitement warranted in and of itself. Starting that day, angry listeners
began calling radio stations like Nashville’s WKDF-FM, demanding a boycott of the
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DXC’s music (Rossman 62). Here another principle from the realitics playbook applies:
Realitics polarizes groups and sparks the so-called chattering class into action.
In a follow-up effort to justify their position, the group released a statement,
noting that during their overseas tour they had come to see that “the anti-American
sentiment that has unfolded here is astounding,” and adding that, although they support
American troops as a matter of course, “there is nothing more frightening than the notion
of going to war with Iraq and the prospect of all the innocent lives that will be lost.”
Maines also attempted her own separate explanation on the 13
th
, apologizing for her tone
but pressing on with her message, charging that Bush “is ignoring the opinion of many in
the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.” In making her case, Maines also
emphasized Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech: “one of the
privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view” (J.
Murphy).
These first takes from the band, and many that followed, amounted to standard
practice in line with what communication scholar William L. Benoit, widely cited for his
expertise in crisis communication strategies, has called “image repair theory.” In
appraising the theoretical and practical utility of Benoit’s ideas, Denise L. Oles, who
herself drew upon those ideas in her celebrity-focused article “Deny, Delay, Apologize:
The Oprah Winfrey Image-Defense Playbook,” points out that, “because image
restoration rhetoric is a form of persuasive discourse, suggestions for effectiveness can be
derived from our understanding of persuasion generally” (183). Per Benoit’s parameters,
the key “message options” available to individuals or companies in crisis include denial,
evasion of responsibility, offensiveness reduction, corrective action and mortification
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(Benoit). Building, and in Benoit’s estimation improving, upon older models of crisis
control such as “apologia, accounts,” image repair discourse requires an understanding of
the nature of the crisis and of the multiple potential audiences that must be addressed
according to priority (178). Most imperative, Benoit emphasizes that, when it comes to
the real threats posed by crises of publicity, however deserved or accurately gauged by
various audiences an alleged offense may be, “perceptions are more important than
reality” (178).
As is the case with many other aspects of fame, and of politics for that matter,
determining the meaning of an event is a collaborative process over which the audience
has considerable sway. Building and maintaining power in the political economy of
American electoral politics, in which attention figures so substantially, at times requires
the enactment of a conceit in which actors pretend as though they are just workaday
professionals going about their business while burdened with, and highly ambivalent
about, the accoutrements of fame. Paparazzi attention, fashion-police scrutiny,
Entertainment Tonight sit-downs, photo-ops with other famous people, paid appearances,
speeches and scandals, are somehow still treated as superfluous, as if the actors were not
largely dependent upon others for their status, and as if those same trappings did not
provide the attentional capital that makes up an ever-burgeoning share of their enterprise.
As if, to apply P. David Marshall’s term, the “extratextual”—the off-screen, offstage,
offline, province of a famous person’s lifeworld, details of which used to be more
carefully meted out for public consumption—were not diminishing to the point of near-
obsolescence (Celebrity 82). The advent of realitics would greatly lessen the need for this
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chronic renunciation of the trappings of fame; in fact, it would create possibilities for
embracing them.
The Chicks’ first attempts at image repair mostly fell under the “Denial,”
“Evading Responsibility,” and “Reducing Offensiveness of Event” subcategories in
Benoit’s typological scheme, as they confronted a fame emergency that offered a crash
course in damage control methods (Benoit 179). They also indulged the conceit of
ambivalence in emphasizing that the uproar in which they suddenly found themselves
was the unfortunate by-product of an authentic expression of their rights as private
citizens and not the regrettable result of a ploy to garner publicity as celebrities. What
choice did they have, really, but to agree to a series of high-profile media engagements if
that is what it would take to defend their good names?
By appealing to affect, invoking the fearsome specter of war, and presaging its
human toll in their joint statement, the three band members hazarded an intervention that
leaned heavily on the “transcendence” tactic from Benoit’s reducing-offensiveness
directive (ibid). They inferred that Maines’ comment was more than warranted, even
necessary, by juxtaposing the projected loss of life that would follow the U.S. invasion of
Iraq with the affront her words had caused certain audiences. Both the band’s and
Maines’ exercises in self-defense resorted to evasion of responsibility, endeavoring to
tamp down the flare-up by inferring that the offense was committed with the best of
intentions and that it had been provoked by the Bush administration’s decisions.
Maines’ note seemed to at least dabble in apology—mortification, in image-repair
parlance—yet she was mostly in sync with her bandmates in terms of the work her own
message achieved. “I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and
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alienating the rest of the world” she said (message options chosen: denial, shifting
blame). She added a patriotic flourish by declaring that her “comments were made in
frustration, and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your
own point of view (evasion of responsibility through provocation, reducing offensiveness
through transcendence) (Clarke; Benoit 79).
Though the Dixie Chicks flexed their public relations know-how in their
choreographed reactions, targeting different audiences and testing how working multiple
recuperative stratagems simultaneously may pay off and play off each other, within a few
days it was clear that they had run up against the limits of what their cleanup efforts
could accomplish (184). A vigorous backlash began that same week as radio stations
started dropping Dixie Chicks songs from their playlists and placing trash cans outside
stations, encouraging listeners to junk their Dixie Chicks CDs (Rossman 62). Other
protesters organized CD-smashing gatherings and posted updates and take-downs on chat
boards and blogs. Within two weeks, the group’s album “Home,” which had held top
spots on the adult contemporary and country charts before March 10, slipped out of the
No. 1 position.
The fracas reached the magnitude of a national debate by late March, when a
conspiracy theory began circulating that accused big radio conglomerates like Clear
Channel and Cumulus Media of banning the Dixie Chicks from their stations in order to
curry favor with the Bush administration. The George W. Bush White House was a
tightly run operation when it came to messaging and press management, as The New
Yorker’s Ken Auletta detailed in a 2004 institutional profile titled “Fortress Bush,” and
access to high-ranking officials reportedly hinged on a quid pro quo arrangement
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(Auletta). Though some Democrats and Chicks allies suspected the Republican Party of
engineering the boycott (indeed, the concern about imposed bans was floated in a July
2003 Senate hearing on radio consolidation), others argued that the Dixie Chicks’
disappearance from heavy radio rotation was the product of a ‘grassroots’ conservative
movement and not the result of a mandate propagated by biased media executives. Two
Colorado DJs were reportedly suspended in early May 2003 for locking themselves in the
KKCS studio in Colorado Springs and inviting listeners to call in with their Dixie Chicks
requests, flouting a ban on the band’s music imposed by station management (Laurier).
Media analyst Sean Ross, referencing the backlash against the Chicks in the public and
business arenas, said, “there was a moment, at the height of the Dixie Chicks hysteria,
when one would have been forgiven for wondering if we were witnessing the end of
dissent” (S. Ross).

Chicks Clap Back
In April and May of 2003, the group began using the climate heightened media
attention to take its response to a new level. On April 24, ABC News ran a teaser story on
its website previewing anchor Diane Sawyer’s interview with the Dixie Chicks on that
evening’s edition of Primetime in which, once again, the three musicians worked multiple
angles in their defense while inching a bit closer to mortification. Maines struck a defiant
yet conciliatory pose, while Emily Robison and Martie Maguire backed her up. The
accidental commingled with the remorseful: “We don’t plan things that we’re going to
say,” offered Maines, “[a]nd sometimes it backfires.” I think our fans … know that we
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come from a real compassionate place,” Robison said, adding that “[m]istakes are made”
and sizing up the mêlée that they had instigated as “colossal” (“Dixie”).
Instead of a complete apology, in which she would need to plainly concede that
she was in the wrong, Maines made what has come to described in vernacular terms as a
‘sorry not sorry’ move, a now-recognized canonical entry for apologia in the era of social
media. “Accept an apology that was made,” she said in that go-round, distancing herself
from the act of mortification through use of the passive voice while busily attaching
strings: “Don’t forgive us for who we are” (“Dixie”). She added that her wording on the
London stage did not accurately capture what she really meant—another way of
distancing herself from what she had spoken in that moment.
More unexpected in this rhetorical mélange was Maguire’s take, in which she
indicated in the interview with Diane Sawyer that, in addition to timing, it was genre,
more than gender, that was incriminated in the way in which she and her cohorts had
been censured by fans and industry peers. “History tells us that we’re very conservative,”
she told ABC’s Sawyer, referring in her use of “us” to the country community more
broadly. “I think it’s because we’re in country music. I don’t think it’s because we’re
women” (“Dixie”). Yet at the time she made that call, Maguire, along with Maines and
Robison, had just collaborated with a major-market magazine to create an arresting
tableau that invited different impressions about the group’s sense of how gender figured
into their predicament.
On the May 2003 cover of Entertainment Weekly, the bandmates made a
provocative, problematic riposte to their detractors by posing nude and quite literally re-
appropriating the epithets and slurs that had been flung at them. Among the terms
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inscribed directly onto their skin were: “BOYCOTT,” “DIXIE SLUTS,” “SADDAM’S
ANGELS,” “PEACE,” “TRAITORS,” “FREE SPEECH,” and “PROUD AMERICANS.”
The top of the issue trumpeted “The Dixie Chicks Come Clean,” invoking the lingo of the
confessional while riffing on the bare visual presented beneath. The right-hand margin
copy, on the other hand, drew battle lines: “Country’s Controversial Superstars Take on
Their Critics” (Willman).
The main attraction was the photo. Maines’, Maguire’s, and Robison’s nudity was
presented ‘tastefully,’ to use a term not uncommonly associated with descriptions of
Playboy pictorials (Koop). Their limbs were arranged in a manner suggesting modesty
despite exposed expanses of skin, the untroubled view of which was impeded by the
emblazoned words and by the challenging and direct stares of the three women pictured.
If, as John Berger famously put it in Ways of Seeing, “men act and women appear,” and
if, as he noted, “[m]en look at women” while “[w]omen watch themselves being looked
at,” it is as though the three women had determined that meeting the male gaze halfway,
or that watching men watching them watch themselves being looked at, were tantamount
to taking control of the frame (47). If they were going to be objectified, their demeanor
suggested, then not only would they beat their oppressors to the punch, but they would
get a few words in edgewise while they were at it.
Whatever their goals might have been vis-à-vis that image, the band had staged
what Daniel Boorstin labeled a “media event” or a “pseudo-event,” or a purposefully
planned, man-made happening intended to be “reported or reproduced,” and bearing an
intriguingly ambiguous “relation to the underlying reality of the situation” (11). Less
generous interpretations would explain the motive behind Maines’ Bush quip, and
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formulate the entire ensuing scandal, according to the logic of the media event. That
would only make sense, as Boorstin himself pointed out that “[p]seudo-events spawn
other pseudo-events in geometric progression” (33).
The Chicks also had effectuated what Larry Gross has designated a “symbolic
event,” in which an artifact is “intended to communicate something to us. As that
“something” is visually relayed, “we assume that these events are articulated by their
‘author’ in accordance with a shared system of rules of implication and inference” (L.
Gross, “Life” 2). The meaning of the image is derived, or rather co-created, by those on
the production and reception ends of the signifying circuit, out of preexisting discourses,
conventions, and other images in cultural circulation. In this sense, the Dixie Chicks
insinuated themselves into a broader tradition of visual storytelling that, combined with
the more immediate context and content of the photograph, could not help but color what
viewers saw.
In turn, those perceptions, as scholars such as Susan Bordo have argued, cannot
help but be informed by the social contagion that is ideological conditioning. In addition
to serving as a “medium,” a “metaphor,” and a “text of culture,” Bordo, referencing
Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, claims that the body is “a practical, direct locus of
social control,” and through various rituals (including the routine display of female
bodies for the purpose of titillation), “culture is ‘made body’ …” (165). This
acculturation process is far from benign, in Bordo’s estimation:
Viewed historically, the discipline and normalization of the female body—
perhaps the only gender oppression that exercises itself, although to different
degrees and in different forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation—has
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to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social
control (166).
On one level, the EW shoot could be read as a winkingly subversive gesture that
visually referenced other splashy, fleshy entries from the annals of risqué celebrity
coverdom.
9
A more incisive read of the Chicks’ stripped-down gambit, however, would
scrutinize whether they squandered their opportunity to make an effective show of protest
by allowing themselves to be portrayed in a way likely to invite what in hegemonically
gendered language is referred to as the wrong kind of attention. The Chicks were clearly
seeking to assume an unapologetically confrontational, even shocking, posture in the
iconoclastic tradition of a Lady Godiva or a Madonna. But since symbolic events are
collaborative, their creators only have so much say in how they are deciphered. The sight
of three white, stereotypically feminine, managed—or disciplined, in the Foucauldian
sense—bodies shown on yet another popular magazine may have defused the full force of
their message. If so, their defiant expressions would only serve to chide viewers for
arriving at conclusions to which the image itself had carefully guided them.
The Dixie Chicks’ own symbolic repertoire was influenced by societal currents
that affected how their political demonstrations, verbal and visual, were decoded by
consumers who also participated in the “shared system” of signification that Gross
elucidates in “Life vs. Art” (2). Among the most pronounced of those flows, judging by
the end products and the time frame within which they were produced, would be
postfeminism, which as Sarah Banet-Weiser, citing Rosalind Gill, characterizes as “a
‘sensibility’ that shapes everything from products to media representation to digital
media” (Authentic™ 61). Originating in the 1990s, the postfeminist sensibility emerged
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from an array of discourses that supported a number of interrelated implications,
including but not limited to the following, according to Sarah Projansky: “that feminist
activism is no longer needed,” that “heterosexuality is naturalized,” and that the
“intersection of gender and race oppressions that women of color may face in the United
States is ignored” along with class considerations (87).
Postfeminism is also an “extremely versatile” ideological complex able to make
appeals to “multiple and contradictory audiences” (Projansky 86). Among its many
perplexing incongruities and conceits is the notion that, since the objectives of multiple
waves of feminism have supposedly been achieved, women are now free to express
themselves however they please, even if that means playing back into an old-school
patriarchal schematic. Even if that means risking self-exploitation in the name of self-
expression by, for example, taking off their clothes for an entertainment magazine while
insisting that their politics be taken seriously. Angela McRobbie elaborates:
We might even argue that through this liberalizing process, through this sense of
freedom now routinely made available to young women (with feminism duly
taken into account as having played a role) so indeed are new modalities of
constraint brought into being. . . . The heterosexual matrix is loosened up, it loses
its coercive, compulsory force, it allows degrees of choice, it permits
experimentation, it encourages freedom, but perhaps all the more insidiously, to
redraft the boundaries of power through a process of seeming matrix relaxation
(74-5).
The Dixie Chicks’ Entertainment Weekly exhibition is yet another illustration of
how brand culture, foundational to realitics, is rife with “ambivalence and
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contradictions,” as Banet-Weiser has argued (Authentic™ 48). The Chicks would not
have the platform they had without working within bounds designated by the music and
mass media industries and the larger capitalist system in which they operate—all of
which also help determine how their image, music, words, and gestures will be consumed
and comprehended. This setup also carries political implications, Banet-Weiser explains,
as, “like other manifestations of marketing and advertising in recent US history, political
ideals such as social equality, freedom, and empowerment are realized through the
practices of consumption and consumer citizenship” (48).
One last theoretical annotation to the EW episode before moving on: In Stars, his
pivotal work on the production and meaning of celebrity, Richard Dyer makes a crucial
observation in his exposition of how the star image—a complex, multivalent, and
changeable artifact, the analysis of which is aided by the semiotic notion of “structured
polysemy”—can reinforce ideological constructs and reconcile contradictions by
appearing to incorporate multivalent associations in a single body (27, 63). Over the
course of a career arc, which also encompasses off-screen elements, Marilyn Monroe can
come to signify both mature sexuality and childlike naïveté, and Jane Fonda can embody
both space-age pinup and Vietnam-era firebrand, among other possibilities. Stars,
according to Dyer, “may reinforce aspects of ideology simply by repeating, reproducing
or reconciling them,” but also via a sleight of hand. Citing the work of Barry King and
Charles Eckert, Dyer posits that stars may also reinforce ideology “not so much by
reiterating dominant values as by concealing prevalent contradictions or problems” (27).
Dyer’s take on the containment of contradictions in stars’ persons, as well as the
ideological functions they can perform, makes more legible the embodied contradictions
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on display in the Dixie Chicks’ EW tableau. Given the obvious incongruities in the
content written on their bodies, it would seem that the Chicks themselves were aware that
in that moment that it was not possible for them to take on the status of blank slates
whose meanings were solely up to them to dictate. They packaged their politics in sound-
bite-sized pieces for mass consumption while potentiating a distracting arrangement in
which audiences were kept at least one degree removed from the reality of the wartime
situation.
Again, realitics is well-suited to this sort of thing. The mode rationalizes the
contradictions of prevailing ideologies, from postfeminism to capitalism, nationalism to
neoliberalism, underwriting changes happening on a macro level to make them salient on
the micro level. The Dixie Chicks’ EW visual blitz can be interpreted according to
“prolepsis,” which Richard Besel calls a “device of argumentative anticipation.” Citing
Richard Lanham, Besel states that prolepsis entails “the rhetorical tactic of ‘foreseeing
and forestalling objections’” and is applied as a way of absorbing and deflecting
criticisms and counter-arguments before they happen (233, 237).
In the layman’s-terms version, as journalist Martin Shovel sums up prolepsis in a
column for The Guardian’s recurring “Mind your language” feature, “[y]ou have an
inkling that what you are about to say might ruffle a few feathers. So you try to head off
criticism by anticipating, articulating, and answering your listener’s objections, before
she’s even had a chance to clear her throat.” There is always the chance that giving
prolepsis a whirl will backfire by putting ideas in an opponent’s head that may not have
been there already, by incorrectly presuming what may be said, by appearing to agree, or
by overvaluing counter-arguments (Shovel). The Chicks had been ruffling feathers for
76
several weeks by the time their cover story hit the stands, so by then, they had probably
been painted several times over with all the epithets they wore for their shoot.
Faced with so daunting a conjectural snarl, it is no wonder that so many attempts
at capital-F feminist statements made in the fraught zone of popular culture come off as
dicey at best. Similar quandaries await those who tout politics of any variety in pop
territory. Was Maines’ original comment, plus the fracas that ensued in the consumer
sphere through boycotts, retorts in the form of risqué magazine covers, and orchestrated
appearances on news programs, tantamount to valid expressions of civic debate? Or did
the venues and the forms they took render them null and void? If the Chicks had appeared
fully clothed with painted-on words for the EW cover shoot, what, if anything, would that
have changed? The capriciousness of their situation underscores the discomfiting fact that
they were not in control of how their choices would be received nor in command of the
‘language’ of popular culture from which realitics draws. With armies of appropriators
but no ultimate arbiters, ambivalence rules.

Chicks Come Back
The Chicks’ strategy of meeting criticism directly and throwing it back through
gestures and embodied, reappropriated statements surfaced again later in May, when an
emboldened Maines took on a male country star, Toby Keith, in another mediated face-
off. Keith’s unabashedly pro-war tribute, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The
Angry American)”—featuring the lyric, “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S.
of A. / ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way”—spurred Maines to
make her own costume for the American Country Music Awards that month: a white T-
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shirt featuring only the letters “F.U.T.K.” (Fuck You Toby Keith) written in black.
Keith’s followers put out a call on their fan sites to wear “F.U.D.C.” shirts of their own
making, further widening the rift between different factions of the patriotism debate
among country stars and listeners (Gilbert, “Maines”; Walker).
The Dixie Chicks were contending with a lengthy tradition that had helped create
those divisions. CMT’s Chet Flippo makes the point that, while country music and
politics have often made “especially uneasy bedfellows,” the genre’s relationship to war
is less fraught, in that a good part of that history has consisted of artists rallying behind
the American flag. “And it’s not a mystery as to the reasons why,” Flippo notes, pulling
in the issue of class. “Traditionally, poor young men were the ones who were sent off to
war” (Flippo). Thus, speaking out against a war effort could be taken as an affront against
women and men in uniform from the country demographic who are fighting abroad.
Along with Keith, country singers Alan Jackson and Darryl Worley released
songs after Sept. 11, 2001, that followed the more expected country path. Jackson’s
“Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” topped the charts in 2002, and
Worley’s “Have You Forgotten” spent seven weeks occupying the number-one spot on
Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in 2003 (Asker). Neil Young, not always considered
part of the mainstream American country scene, came out earlier with a tribute to the
Flight 93 passengers who died on 9/11; his “Let’s Roll” was in rotation the same year as
the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. (Walker). (In 2006, Young
would make an about-face with his anti-Iraq War album Living with War, which boasted
the track “Let’s Impeach the President”.) Further back in history, artists like Hank
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Williams, Hank Williams, Jr., Johnny Wright, and Ernest Tubbs all did their part to
musically salute U.S. troops (Flippo).
Although patriotism and Iraq War boosterism tended to be predominant and
rewarded in their genre, it is not as though there existed a unanimous country hive mind
solely opposed by the Dixie Chicks. In fact, the Chicks were far from the only country act
to have expressed anti-war sentiments in the early naughts, in line with forerunners such
as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Loretta Lynn (Flippo). Nelson issued the anti-Iraq
war tune “Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth” in January 2004, and fellow country
star Steve Earle had dropped “John Walker’s Blues” in July 2002. Earle’s contentious
track was about John Walker Lindh, a young American man who had just drawn
widespread outrage by converting to Islam and joining the Taliban before his capture in
Afghanistan in late 2001 (“John”). While gender certainly accounted for much of the
blowback the DXC encountered, they may have caught as much static as they did for
timing reasons as well. In Earle’s case, the U.S.’ post-9/11 incursion into Afghanistan
was already underway, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s alleged, later refuted,
possession of weapons of mass destruction had not yet been underwritten as sufficient
basis for an American-led campaign into that nation. By the time Nelson composed his
“Peace on Earth” single, the Iraq conflict was going on a year old.
Studies about country music and its fans conducted during the latter half of the
twentieth and into the early years of the twenty-first century have registered disparate
sensibilities about themes, tropes, and tensions that have been endemic to the genre for
decades. Working-class struggles, individualism, fatalism, populism, and romanticism
have introduced complex and at times discordant inflections. While Bill C. Malone linked
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an uptick in motifs of individualism to a concomitant and unfortunate decline in class
solidarity and involvement in labor unions, Aaron Fox thought that a shared sense of
social upheaval and loss of status might have contributed to an apparent focus on local
scenes and subjects. For his part. Jock Mackay called country music and populism
“responsive cousins” and saw ongoing potential for the genre to articulate—complicated,
not univocal, and reactive, mostly not revolutionary—political messages that reflect “the
multiple tensions inhering in working-class life” (Edwards 130).
The Chicks’ brand of activism might not have been unheard of in country history,
yet over time, it was plain that the group’s original audience did not want to hear it from
them. In the fall of 2004, the Dixie Chicks, by that point more focused in their political
efforts, concentrated on the upcoming presidential election and courted new audiences as
they went along. They joined other musical acts such as Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M. as
part of the “Rock the Vote” tour, which was organized to encourage Americans to
become engaged citizens. The tour performers were mainly seen as supporters of
presidential candidate John Kerry but focused their message on voter registration more
generally (Denton and Kuypers 317).
Following George W. Bush’s victory in the presidential election, the Chicks did
not lie dormant for the remainder of that presidency, nor did they try to resuscitate their
former group identity or woo back estranged factions of their fan base. Instead, they
recognized that their rebellion had set them on a new course and reconstructed their brand
around the narrative that the controversy and its aftermath had produced. The knock that
the Dixie Chicks took in the immediate wake of the 2003 London transgression may have
cost them in terms of numbers of fans and sales, and it is difficult to determine if what
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they gained instead appreciably supplemented those losses. What is certain is that, at least
for a beat or two, their reinvention plan worked in their favor, even though it took a beat
or two before it began working.
After the initial tumult died down, and after the national anxieties about the U.S.
invasion of Iraq were supplanted by those inflamed by the reality of the second Iraq war,
the Dixie Chicks found themselves in the company of many other entertainers, journalists
and public figures on the international stage who spoke out against that war, many of
whom also paid for their protestations.
11
Tim Robbins was one of them, as well one of
Hollywood’s most politically outspoken actors in recent decades. Robbins gave me his
take on celebrity advocacy during a 2007 interview:
Oh, hell, I wish we lived in a world where that wasn’t necessary. I mean, I
certainly think that artists should be involved in the world they’re living in and
should try to reflect humanity in the work they do. And part of reflecting on
humanity is understanding what’s going on in the street and telling stories that
reflect the society at large and not just an elite portion of society. Anytime you’re
dealing with stories regarding the poor or the powerful, one has to address larger
issues and, hopefully, we can do it in a way that’s entertaining or emotionally
involving. . . . People have asked me, “Why do you feel like you should be the
one that’s speaking out against the war?” And my question to them is, “Where’s
the opposition party?” Where were those voices before the war, and why was it up
to an actor? Believe me, if there was a Democratic Party that was functioning as
an opposition party in that time period, I would see absolutely no reason to go on
television (Anderson, “Tim”).
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Though in a 2007 National Review article on Maines and the anti-Chicks backlash, Anna
Nimouse wrote that “[m]any Hollywood celebrities—Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon and
Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Alec Baldwin—make loud and
foolish political statements, and usually face no repercussions,” there were some tangible
indicators that the DXC did not emerge unscathed (Nimouse). As of late November 2003,
the Dixie Chicks also found themselves in trouble with their album sales, as their first
live album, Top of the World Tour: Live, only reached gold status on U.S. charts, a
lackluster showing compared to the platinum and diamond status secured by their prior
three releases.
The ups and downs of the Chicks’ public trial provided the ingredients for their
next outing, Taking the Long Way. That album was released in May 2006, a full three
years since the band’s fortunes were irreversibly altered by Maines’ commentary, and the
impact of that change on the group registered in their resulting compilation. Several
songs— “Not Ready to Make Nice,” “Everybody Knows,” and “The Long Way
Around”—addressed the Chicks’ political controversy, and they aimed for a comeback
and a reinvention with the album. Taking the Long Way was embraced and rewarded by
the music industry: the Dixie Chicks took home five Grammys on February 11, 2007.
The New York Times’ Jeff Leeds commemorated the occasion two days later.
Tracking shifts in the music industry that had occurred over the prior 11 months, Leeds
framed the Chicks’ win as a victory over powerful forces that had been working against
them, as conveyed by his story’s headline, “Grammy Sweep by Dixie Chicks Is Seen as a
Vindication” (Leeds). Leeds’ account situated the Chicks at pressure points within the
music industry as well as within American society more broadly, noting that the band’s
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Grammy triumph “exposed ideological tensions between the music industry’s Nashville
establishment and the broader, more diverse membership of the Recording Academy.”
To certain Academy members and industry insiders, Leeds said, “the voting
served not only as a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, but also on
what was perceived as country music’s rejection—and radio’s censorship—of the trio.”
The Academy’s pronouncement, as well as the disparity between the Chicks’ standing in
Nashville versus Los Angeles, was roundly demonstrated in the form of the band’s total
trophy haul. In November 2006, just three months before their glowing Grammy
showing, the former industry darlings had been snubbed at the Country Music Awards.
The feeling was apparently mutual; as Leeds noted, Martie Maguire “said the group
would rather have fans ‘who get it’ instead of ‘people that have us in their five-disc
changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith” (Leeds).
Despite their dramatic revival when it came to earning critical acclaim and
cultivating an edgier brand, which was further honed by the 2006 documentary Dixie
Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, the Dixie Chicks did not fully recapture the heat they
sustained in the years leading up to the U.S.’ second foray into Iraq (Dixie). Their relative
comedown may have been due to any number of variables in addition to their 2003 trial
by fire. Musicians of all descriptions are challenged enough by a youth-focused,
capricious, and changing industry. Fads and fans move on, and the lifespan of any
popular band does not typically run as long as that of, say, the Rolling Stones, still
touring as septuagenarians.
That said, in late June of 2006, Billboard’s Calvin Gilbert documented how
“insufficient radio airplay” of the Chicks’ single Not Ready to Make Nice had “caused it
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to vanish from the Billboard’s country singles chart” earlier that month, and the track
wasn’t “blowing off the roofs at non-country stations, either,” though album sales had
been strong enough to lift Taking the Long Way to the top of the country albums chart
(“Dixie”). In 2015, The Guardian’s Grady Smith counted “The Dixie Chicks’ swift
removal from country radio in 2003” as “one of the key reasons that country music has
developed such a woman problem over the past 15 years.” To substantiate that
indictment, Smith looked closely at the top 100 country songs from 1999 to 2014; the
number of “female-led songs” to make that list had dropped 20 percentage points, from
38 to 18 percent, over that time (G. Smith). One prominent exception took the form of
another young up-and-comer who has since come up through Nashville, cornered the
country market, and taken up pop. That was Taylor Swift, who, as Entertainment Weekly
remarked, “is typically silent when it comes to political topics” (Lenker).
12

The Dixie Chicks went on hiatus at Maines’ request toward the end of George W.
Bush’s tenure in office and released a best-of album in June 2010, just over two decades
after the group’s launch in 1989. Maguire and Robison formed a spinoff act, the
Courtyard Hounds, released a first album in 2010 and another in 2013, and toured
without Maines. The Chicks reunited for a 2016 tour and as of March 2018, they were
making another go-round. On March 23, 2018, the night before American high school
students had planned a nationwide gun-control rally, Maines spoofed herself on Twitter
while putting another sitting Republican president, this time Trump, on blast. Revising
her statement that 15 years before had caused an international incident, Maines tweeted:
“Just so you know… I’m embarrassed that that the President of the United States is
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choosing to waddle around Mar-A-Lago over marching with the future of America”
(@1NatalieMaines).

Dixie Chicks in Concert
Realitics clusters ideas and gives them reality and resonance, and the mode can
operate on multiple platforms and in multiple time frames simultaneously. These qualities
correspond with the episodic and transitive properties of realitics as well as with the
tendency for figures and events to be articulated and understood through pop-cultural
references and artifacts. They also reinforce how time is not always linear in the mode of
realitics.
While no two instances of realitics are exactly alike, the manner in which the
actors and audiences articulate, co-create and contest the meanings of those episodes, at
times sticking within discursive limits and sometimes pushing those limits, forms
resonances across temporal and other contextual distinctions and puts disparate
performances in ‘conversation’ with one another. At times these connections can be
beneficial to particular celebrities, but they can also be limited or undermined by certain
associations—the downside to the transitive property of realitics. What’s more, as
episodes of realitics influence one another, they may form chains of signification that
take on their own internal logic and can, through repetition and allusion, become
substituted for external validity, uprooted from their immediate context, tautological.
Celebrities have made recurrent forays into the political arena in the U.S. through
their involvement in controversies and scandals, including the Hollywood blacklisting
spree during the McCarthy trials of the 1950s, Vietnam War protests in the ‘60s and early
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‘70s, and other polarizing moments. Their demonstrations and plays for political clout are
consistently depicted as attention-seeking stunts by the press and politicians. The
continual invocation of tropes along the lines of “shut up and sing” cues an increasingly
celebrity-saturated public to make flash judgments and to interpret events in real time
according to predetermined scripts.
Given this setup, it is difficult to understand why some stars make no ripples
whatsoever with even grandiose political actions, which would seem to be in keeping
with the dismissive attitude just described, while others set off full-blown scandals with
far less provocation. The DXC crisis, though repeatedly downplayed as trivial, was
evidently significant enough to merit attention from major radio conglomerates and news
outlets, plus untold numbers of country music aficionados and the U.S. Senate. A few
plausible explanations will be presented below, beginning with a summary of how the
Chicks’ narrative became part of a broader dialogue implicating other controversial
figures and moments. The discussion will then shift to a brief explication of how the
debate about the Chicks was actually tantamount to a displaced argument about bigger
concerns with which the circumstances of their scandal resonated. Both of these
possibilities will be considered through the lens of realitics.
In moments of impending international conflict, the “civic polity,” per Boltanski
and Thévenot’s blueprint in On Justification: Economies of Worth, typically assumes
supremacy as decreed by patriotic custom. Citizens are expected to set aside personal
views in order to rally behind the commander-in-chief and the troops. “The Sovereign of
the civic polity,” Boltanski and Thévenot postulate, “is created by the convergence of
human wills that comes about when citizens give up their singularity and distance
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themselves from their private interests to take only the common good into account”
(108). There is not much room for celebrity in a scheme that discourages singularity.
Still, the Dixie Chicks may have thought that they were, in fact, prioritizing the
“common good” in acting as Cassandras on the eve of the Iraq War. This is where the
hybridization upon which realitics depends complicates matters further. Despite their
insistence that they could move in and out of the contingent aspects of their composite
profiles at will, at least in that circumstance, the Dixie Chicks were not the ultimate
authorities on the nature and import of their own images or on how they would be
received. Thévènot and Boltanski help explain the clashes between worlds that can occur
when celebrities attempt to toggle between the civic and fame worlds, postulating that,
“in a formula of subordination based on fame, worth depends only on the opinion of
others” (98).
The group’s negative treatment by a large swath of the American populace hints
at political celebrities’ inability to independently and reliably determine when they are
speaking primarily as civilians, entertainers, or political operatives—a challenge shared
by others circulating in the realm of realitics. Moreover, different rules apply in different
contexts in the fame and civic worlds, so confused signals are sure to result. Adding
another layer of textual complexity in considering the Dixie Chicks’ case is that their
anti-war statement was bound to be instantly read against and according to a collection of
other resonant episodes. As celebrities taking a political stand, they forfeit the ability to
be heard, in a sense, as private citizens simply speaking about the issue at hand. Instead,
they may trip any number of wires regardless of their intention.
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The chain-of-signification effect of realitics can be detected in another example
from U.S. history that stands out as an antecedent to the Dixie Chicks dispute and offers
more clues to understanding their predicament. Journalist Carly Severn brings this link
into view in a KQED Arts story from September 2017 entitled “Another Look at Hanoi
Jane.” Severn reflects, “[i]t’s telling that when you ask most people to name any recent
public figures that met with Fonda-level opprobrium for their activism, they’ll probably
name the Dixie Chicks” (Severn).
Like the Dixie Chicks, actress Jane Fonda was condemned for speaking out
against U.S. foreign policy during a volatile moment of international conflict. Fonda’s
1972 visit to North Vietnam, during which the actress held press conferences, spoke out
against the war on Radio Hanoi, met with Communist officials, and visited American
POWs, earned her the enduring nickname “Hanoi Jane.” She also was seen to be
betraying her country by voicing her critique abroad, addressing an audience sympathetic
to the opposition. Like the Chicks, Fonda is also a woman, and so her claims to
citizenship and the right to participate in public deliberation about political matters was
as contested as her perceived betrayal was sexualized.
Fonda’s own international scandal from decades prior took on new significance
retroactively as it provided a vocabulary for the Dixie Chicks’ supporters and detractors
to aid in their comprehension of contemporary events. In the process of creating this
bond, which upon close inspection proves rather flimsy, the particularities of their
respective situations and messages are glossed over. It could be said that strong ties were
made between the Dixie Chicks and Fonda because enough prominent people said their
names in the same sentence enough times. This draws from the same associational logic
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as advertising and from Benoit’s image-management playbook mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter, in which perceptions are more important than reality.
Another potential drawback to this realitics-enabled political association game is
that it may supplant styles of leadership that better encourage action. Richard Dyer
specifically name-checks Jane Fonda as one of a number of “stars with obvious political
associations” who paradoxically, despite political activities that typically provoke in
detractors the fear that fans will be goaded to follow suit, encourage passivity among the
general public and “obscure the political issues they embody simply by demonstrating the
lifestyle of their politics and displaying those political beliefs as an aspect of their
personality” (31). Stars are thus situated as the carriers, or the sites, of personality-driven
politics to be watched, consumed, disputed, but not necessarily emulated in terms of their
agentive actions in the political sphere, underscoring the complex and mutable
relationship between ideology and celebrity. What’s more, when stars take up the mantle
of politics, potentially motivating factors such as class consciousness and awareness of
other social distinctions can be masked or superseded. Instead of directly encountering
the issues that their citizen counterparts from the fame world are engaging through their
brand of advocacy, audiences squabble over whether to accept or reject the celebrities
themselves.
Further analysis, calling upon argumentation theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s social
field theory, affords a useful backdrop to a study of the Chicks’ episodes and assists in
the understanding of how the controversy about the group amounted to a displaced
argument about the Iraq War. In their essay “Argument fields as arenas of discursive
struggle,” Prosise, Miller, and Mills emphasize the importance of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas
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in fleshing out the concept of fields, basically defined as “different human arenas,” in
argumentation theory. The authors credit Stephen Toulmin for providing useful
contributions with his observations that distinct fields can be delimited by examining the
argumentative forms commonly used in social fields or, as Toulmin later posited, by
comparing them to academic disciplines organized according to their subject matter.
However, Prosise et al. argue that “the literature on fields has virtually ignored the
dynamic discursive struggles for epistemic legitimacy in social fields in favor of a more
evolutionary conception of epistemic development” which advances the notion that the
most suitable argument of forms for the field naturally endure (Prosise et al.).
Missing from these former theories is the issue of power, put simply. Those who
have the power to define the dominant forms of discourse within a field are able to
exercise social authority in “the conflict over scarce symbolic resources at the base of that
social power.” Instead of an “evolutionary” perspective, Prosise et al. offer a different
picture of how the study of struggle within fields “relates to the stability and legitimacy
of the dominant forms of discourse.”
Thus, Bourdieu’s models of social fields, with his emphasis on power hierarchies
within fields, adds a crucial element. Bourdieu’s field theory “claims that every social
action is understandable only in terms of the field where it is situated,” which seems
analogous to Toulmin’s first description of fields above (Couldry). However, as Prosise
et al. point out, Bourdieu’s fields “are distinguished by the structured forms of authority
celebrated in the social space and by the stakes available to participating members”—
with symbolic capital acting as legitimizing factor in the “struggle over which actors will
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wield power and structure the field through the use of symbolic signs and codes” (Prosise
et al.).
Ultimately, symbolic capital is arbitrarily distributed and can be constantly
renegotiated through successful use of these dominant symbolic signs and codes—a point
that explains why actors who demonstrate resistance to their position within their field
through a kind of “reflexive critique” are met with strong criticism (Couldry). Part of the
hullabaloo about the Dixie Chicks can thus be attributed to how they exposed the
ideological constructions dictating how they are expected to act as women, country stars,
celebrities, and patriots in post-9/11 America; in short, how they made certain myths
from American contemporary society transparent and strayed from the expected script.
As country performers, they are part of a field that emphasizes selective values: family,
Southern, blue-collar, and nationalistic mores among them.
As Marshall notes, a “celebrity sheds its own subjectivity and individuality and
becomes an organizing structure for conventionalized meaning” (57). Nonetheless, the
Dixie Chicks insisted on mobilizing certain aspects of their subjectivity throughout their
series of exchanges with the public and with other country stars, referring to themselves
implicitly and explicitly as mothers, American citizens, and women. As a result, their
words and gestures often provoked a flurry of hostile reactions that addressed them
according to their gender, referencing a long history of infamous female betrayals
(stretching from Jezebel in the Bible to the more contemporary “Hanoi Jane”) in
sexualized terms. The group responded in kind by reclaiming those terms in embodied
demonstrations and shows of defiance. The effectiveness of their strategies is up for
debate, but their actions illustrate the notion that within social fields, those who are in
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control of the dominant discourse are in control of symbolic capital. As Prosise et al. put
it, “Power is manifested in the ability to determine the ‘terms through which the world is
understood’” (9).
Celebrity, which currently plays into the mechanisms of power, is caught up in
those terms, as this instance of realitics makes clear. Realitics can offer, for better or
worse, a space in which displaced arguments can occur about hot-button issues on a local,
national, and even global scale. While much attention and ink have been devoted to the
notion that coverage of celebrities is taking over the news business, with the implication
that more important information is thus crowded out of mainstream outlets’ news lineups,
realitics can also inspire public conversations in oblique or coded language about
controversial subjects that, for any number of reasons, are not among the topics that can
be discussed and debated overtly.
The phenomenon of celebrity advocacy stimulates public discourse and raises
important issues about the American political process, dissent, and democracy,
irrespective of differences in opinion about the proper function of stars in society. The
paradoxical aspect of critical media discourses that proliferate in cases like the Dixie
Chicks’ is that, by repeatedly highlighting the inherent in significance of celebrities’
opinions, the opposite effect is more likely to result. The forcefulness of the anti-DXC
backlash, along with the vast amount of media attention focused on the scandal,
ultimately made the group’s statements more prominent then they otherwise might have
been.
The ongoing merger between the spheres of celebrity in politics is showing no
signs of slowing down, and it is a subject that warrants exploration by communication
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scholars with an appreciation for how symbolic power can be negotiated in cultures that
place increasing importance upon images and symbols. Further investigations of celebrity
advocacy might expand upon Couldry’s ideas about how media capital (possibly a form
of “meta-capital” that has value within and across various social fields) impacts the
broader social landscape, allowing for a better understanding of the phenomenon
(Couldry).
However unlikely they may have seemed as catalyzing agents, by questioning the
president at a critical moment, the Dixie Chicks introduced an oblique way of addressing
the erupting war in Iraq and America’s changing role in global politics when few outlets
for public deliberation were available. Whether the culture-wide turn to ‘personality
politics’—suggested by the intense focus upon the country group and the re-routing of
national anxieties into pro- or anti-DXC debates —amounted to the possible abdication of
what could have been a more robust debate about the Iraq war is hard to say. They also
made their discursive mark in a different sense, as the verb “to Dixie Chick,” a slang term
for the public boycott of an entertainer, entered the vernacular. The phrase carries
negative connotations, referring to the alleged conspiracy on the part of big media outlets
to pull their music off the airwaves, but it also serves as a reminder of a moment in
American cultural and political life when questions were raised, from an improbable
source, about free speech, celebrity status, and what it means to be patriotic in the public
eye.

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Chapter Three: Making a “Mama Grizzly”: Sarah Palin Pioneers Realitics

On July 3, 2009, Sarah Palin stepped up to a microphone in the backyard of her
family home in Wasilla, Alaska and told a crowd of assorted friends, neighbors, and
members of the press that she was stepping down from her position as Alaska’s head of
state. “I cannot stand here as your governor and allow millions upon millions of our
dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of governor. And my children won’t allow it
either,” she said, referring to money she claimed her office was spending fighting
allegations of ethical violations (Graham).
Palin’s announcement struck some analysts as puzzling, primarily because she
was at that time just 18 months away from the predetermined end of her tenure as the
forty-ninth state’s executive leader. An abrupt decampment could make her appear
inconsistent, as in the not-too-distant past she had taken jabs at an “untested” Democratic
nominee Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential race, insinuating that time spent in
office is directly correlated to a politician’s validity. As it was, her “untested” comment
had already invited that order of criticism when she said it, since as a first-term governor-
turned vice-presidential candidate, she was more like Obama than not when it came to
her own track record. Anticipating this response, she drew a line between herself and
Obama based on the fact that, as Alaska’s governor, she had already “wielded a veto
pen,” while as a first-term Illinois senator, he had not (Conroy).
Other representatives of the chattering class saw the July surprise as a sign that
Palin was preparing to run for president in 2012, having somehow emerged from the
punishing juggernaut she had endured alongside her 2008 running mate, Arizona Senator
John McCain, with her ambition intact. Still others interpreted it as a tacit admission of
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defeat. As political analyst Stuart Rothenberg told the Los Angeles Times, “[t]his makes
her subject to the criticism that for whatever reason—she gets tired, bored, criticized too
much—she just walks away” (Barabak and Abcarian). The short-term timing of her
announcement did not go unnoticed, either; she had followed a widely observed custom
known as the ‘news dump’ by making a potentially disadvantageous announcement on
the cusp of a major holiday, when the press and public were not bound to be as attentive
as they would on a regular workday. She was a quitter, according to her detractors, and as
for her future prospects, she was done.
While her plans for 2012 remained vague at that time, it soon became clear that
the outgoing Gov. Palin was not finished with the spotlight—far from it. In fact, by the
spring of 2010, less than a year after she vacated the governor’s mansion in Juneau,
Alaska, her move away from the elected post she had held since 2006 was beginning to
look rather shrewd, particularly in terms of boosting her own earning potential. Her
political action committee, SarahPAC, received a bump in donations right after her
retirement announcement (Barabak and Abcarian). She was well on her way to becoming
a one-woman cottage industry, having pulled off a successful book tour, raked in top-tier
speaking fees, and landed a television deal with Discovery Communications for what the
company called a “documentary series,” Sarah Palin’s Alaska, at the requested rate of $1
million an episode (Stelter, “TLC”). Not a bad take for a quitter.
Since her emergence on the national political stage during the 2008 presidential
campaign, Sarah Palin has been framed in far worse, as well as better, manners. She has
been portrayed by critics from adversarial media and political factions as emblematic of a
futile and shameful Faustian bargain made by the Republican Party; she has been held up
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for praise and emulation as a scrappy and straight-shooting “maverick” on a righteous
mission to revamp the GOP; and she has been marked with a number of labels that fall in
between those extremes. Some of that collection of descriptors, and the conditions in
which they were contrived, will be featured in this chapter. Of possibly more
consequence is what the attempted takedowns, burns, snark attacks, and other public
displays of denigration revealed about the motives behind those calls rather than what
they may have established about their target. The same can be said of the “Mama
Grizzly” tributes, opportunistic and partisan pantomimes of minority equivalency (e.g.,
“I’ll see you your Democratic African American male/white female candidate and raise
you one Republican white woman”), and postfeminist girl-power paeans to Palin that
reified gendered distinctions even as they denied the persistent reality of gender-based
discrimination.
Despite the typical shelf life for political outliers, fads, and novelties, especially in
an oversaturated media environment that seems permanently stuck in overdrive, Palin’s
advocates and foes alike would have to agree on at least one point: for the better part of a
decade, and despite considerable odds, she has managed to remain within reach of an
exalted state commonly referred to in the theater of realitics as ‘relevance.’ The means
though which she has maintained her status have varied so strikingly at times that by all
prior indications they should have had the opposite effect—yet she moved from one to
the next as though she were capitalizing upon her own peculiar, lucrative, and almost
certainly rigged gig economy.
Even more unusual is how many of the muscular attempts to sink her that she has
evaded have actually seemed to bolster and extend to her more, not fewer, channels
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through which she could promote herself. Her surprising staying power might imply,
among other possibilities, that she signifies something more than a sideshow attraction in
the grander picture of American politics. It could also suggest that there has been an
alteration in the necessary qualifications required for actors to work to their full
advantage the conjoined apparatus that assists in the production of stardom derived from
the realms of media and politics. A combination of those and other factors will be
examined presently.
This chapter will investigate the associational, ideological and rhetorical
constitution of Sarah Palin, proto-realitician par excellence. Attention will be paid to the
singular properties of her profile as well as to those that may sync with others. Of interest
will be how Palin fused available discourses and power sources derived from the “fame
world,” the “market world,” the “domestic world,” and the “civic world” of Thévènot and
Boltanski’s rendering in On Justification: Economies of Worth to help create the
emergent mode of realitics (On Justification). Equally important to this larger project is
how she encouraged audiences comprised of fans and consumer citizens to become
voting publics in a transformation galvanized in part through the performative and
practices of celebrity. Finally, the riddle of how Palin became the most resourceful and
visible early adopter of realitics to show up in the sphere of American electoral politics
during the first decade of the twenty-first century will be figured out by consulting extant
research and by proposing original scholarship.

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It Takes a Village
The mode of realitics often manifests in the interplay between apparently discrete
instances, creating a kind of symbolic and semantic resonance between them that shapes
them even as they remain porous. As disciplines conjoined with the field of
communication such as cultural studies and rhetoric have established, the power to name
ongoing struggles and debates is equated with the ability to direct communication flows
and narrows the field of possible outcomes. Trans-temporal resonance is just one of many
associational dynamics that realitics makes available for these purposes. Reaching into
the past yields fresh possibilities from preceding episodes that may influence the present,
providing familiarity in instants of ambiguity and upheaval. Analogues from decades
prior may take on new valences as they inform and even reconfigure the meaning of
currently unfolding circumstances, and vice versa, as the last chapter demonstrated in the
interchange between Jane Fonda’s “Hanoi Jane” ordeal and the Dixie Chicks’
international incident.
In fact, each of the characters taken as the main focus of the chapters in this
dissertation resonates with the others, and not only because they could all qualify as
members of the same coterie—the celebrity diorama described in the introduction.
13
They
are, as with more traditionally defined celebrities, seen as exceptional individuals whose
unrivaled talents and other inborn characteristics set them apart from mere mortals. At the
same time, they are dependent upon dedicated fan bases to prop them up and continually
lend them the sheen of singularity that is treated as a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Another of the many paradoxes of realitics shared with conventional styles of celebrity is
that those perceived to ‘have it’ are oftentimes praised for their relatability and
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accessibility—but only to a point, as they might be ambushed should their feet hover too
close to the ground.
With specific regard to the idea of resonance and to the subjects of Chapter 2,
Sarah Palin would at first seem to share only a few surface-level commonalities with the
Dixie Chicks. They may overlap in the following departments: a countrified aesthetic;
perceptible adherence to mainstream, racially coded norms of femininity with regard to
beauty practices and bodily discipline; the melding of heteronormative, cisgendered and
commodified sex appeal with professional performance style, and so forth. However,
despite clear dissimilarities between Palin and the musical trio in terms of their opposing
political affiliations, in the course of her own career Palin has also encountered a virulent
backlash that was sparked by her very presence in the public sphere as well as by her
frank efforts at attaining and utilizing media, financial, attentional and political capital in
spaces that have historically been dominated by men. For Palin, the tricky quandary of
navigating the gender-based hazards of her elevated position in those spaces has been
further complicated, but also ultimately aided, by her conservative political allegiances,
as well as by a more general shift in American politics that prizes brand loyalty over strict
adherence to party principles.
Taking another approach to resonance, just as the Dixie Chicks have been read
and comprehended in part through comparisons with other figures and episodes from
pop-cultural history, Sarah Palin is situated among her own assemblage of supporting
characters without whom her unique act would not be achievable. Though it may be
difficult to say where they end and she begins, as it were, it is quite feasible to name and
describe the mechanisms, theoretical frameworks, organizations, and subjects that
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contribute insights about how the hybrids under investigation are formed and how they
function, as well as why they merit attention. In order to view Palin’s situation from a
more panoramic outlook, a cursory accounting of her enablers follows.
Palin owes a debt of attitude to the following people and many more: fabled
American frontier heroine Annie “Get Your Gun” Oakley; Alaska’s Yup’ik community;
right-wing pundit Anne Coulter; anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly; talk-show titan
Oprah Winfrey, conservative mass-media agitators Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh;
Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell; Hustler founder and First Amendment crusader
Larry Flynt; barrier-breaking Republican statesman Ronald Reagan; and pop reinvention
artist Madonna. This shadow cabinet could also accommodate “Southern strategy”
engineers President Richard Nixon and evangelist Billy Graham; leaders of the Christian
Right such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson; 1984 vice presidential
forerunner Geraldine Ferraro; the fictional populist anti-hero Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes
played by Andy Griffith in the 1954 film A Face in the Crowd (1954); and America’s
(teetotal) beer buddy-in-chief, George W. Bush (Douthat). From among her political and
entertainment-industry peers whose own career advancement roughly coincided with
hers, she was able to draw legitimacy and again, relevance, from former First Lady and
New York Senator-turned presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; “Number 44,” President
Barack Obama, who, like Palin, was criticized for being too inexperienced to shoot for
the White House so soon; and Saturday Night Live alumna Tina Fey, who had left NBC’s
long-running variety show in 2006 but returned to send up Palin in a series of
appearances that amplified Fey’s star power as they boosted Palin’s own.
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Markedly, Palin’s ascent was primed, and audiences groomed, by the onslaught of
reality television. Her case is one in which some of the clearest confluences between
reality-themed entertainment and politics can be charted. Thus, her list of tributaries
expands to encompass the likes of reality TV forebears Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie
from Fox and E!’s The Simple Life; Kim Kardashian of the multi-pronged Kardashian
family empire that began with E!’s Keeping Up with The Kardashians; Pedro Zamora of
MTV’s seminal reality show The Real World; Kelly Clarkson from American Idol;
Richard Hatch from CBS’ Survivor; and Donald Trump from NBC’s The Apprentice
franchise. From behind the camera are production and hosting notables like the onetime
soap opera producer Mary-Ellis Bunim and her business partner, news and documentary
veteran Jonathan Murray, who in 1987 together formed Bunim-Murray Productions and
churned out The Real World, as well as Road Rules, Keeping Up with the Kardashians
and more (“Our”). Ryan Seacrest of American Idol and Kardashians fame figures in, too,
as does Mark Burnett, hit-maker of Survivor and The Apprentice. Predating them all are
Alan and Susan Raymond, the filmmaking team who in 1973 zoomed in on the Loud clan
for PBS’ An American Family, widely credited as the very first reality television
production, before following up with American Family Revisited a decade later. A more
comprehensive lineup might pull in other documentary filmmakers, producers and stars
of scripted and otherwise designated television shows and films, even from less obvious
corners of the industry such as soaps, beauty pageants, morning shows, nature programs,
Entertainment Tonight, Jerry Springer-esque talk shows, and, per Roland Barthes’
paradigm in Mythologies, the World Wrestling Federation (Barthes 3).
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Finally, counted among Palin’s more immediate support network would be News
Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and the late Fox News Chairman and CEO
Roger Ailes; the voters of Alaska; and key aides from Sen. John McCain’s 2008
campaign team. Hailing from the farther-right ranks of online media are enfants terribles
such as The Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge and his erstwhile contributor Andrew
Breitbart, who launched Breitbart.com in 2007. Though their support may have surged
and ebbed at various points along her story line, members of the media from numerous
outlets and points on the political continuum, publicists, book publishers, convention and
speaking-circuit organizers, and Republican party leaders would also be eligible for
Palin’s figurative conglomerate.
The point of trotting out so many Palin-adjacent operatives in the prior passages is
not to push the limits of a reader’s patience; here it is twofold. First, it is to fortify and
develop the somewhat hazy impression of resonance that opened this section of the
chapter. Second is to perform a related task that for spatial considerations will not be
undertaken again to so thorough a degree, though it applies to every example in this
thesis. It involves an accounting of the contingent subjects and conditions, the
components of the far-reaching apparatus that assists in the production of realitics writ
large and, in this instance, of Sarah Palin as a realitician. To borrow from the literature of
Hillary Clinton, it actually does take a village (Clinton and Frazee).
It is important to emphasize that the above lists are made up of human subjects,
which is a way of concretizing faculties of realitics—e.g., resonance and the transitive
property—that rely heavily on interpersonal mechanisms such as alliance, collaboration,
and ingratiation, or physical proximity, for their expression. There are other means, of
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course, through which power is conferred, contested and negotiated. Taking them into
account requires grappling with how meaning is created, shared, stolen, inferred,
projected, articulated and assigned to subjects and their practices.
This is all to say that realiticians like Sarah Palin do not occur in a vacuum.
Rather, they are relational, discursive, and rhetorical co-productions that arise from
communicative and other transactional processes in complex ways, many of which do not
fall within the bounds of what is commonly thought of as individual control. Textual,
visual, ideological and other systems of signification work in concert to provide context
in which a person, however individualistic or “maverick” she may claim to be, is situated
and without which she would not be possible as such. This theoretical strain will briefly
be elaborated before resuming a more specific treatment of Palin.
The lists that began this section can be looped in again to bring the discussion to
the level of praxis. Recalling Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), it is
conceivable that influences other than the human variety can join in Palin’s formative
party. In “accounting for the very essence of societies and natures,” Latour writes in an
article devoted to dispelling certain misconceptions that have repeatedly cropped up since
he introduced his idea, ANT “does not limit itself to human individual actors but extends
the word actor—or actant—to non-human, non-individual entities” (“On Actor-Network”
369).
It is just this reimagining of what might be included under the heading of “actor”
that is important to a study of realitics, as well as the granting of equal agency to human
and non-human actants within “actor-networks,” as David Banks summarized it in a Dec.
2, 2011 post on Cyborgology. “Anthrax spores, Portuguese navigators, car batteries,
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Thomas Edison, the Renault Car Company, and scallops are all given equal treatment as
nodal points within an actor-network” (Banks). Quoting Latour’s fellow ANT specialist
John Law, Banks hits upon another of asset to be quarried from this vein of scholarship;
per Law, ANT is
… a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of
analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously
generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes
that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. Its
studies explore and characterize the webs and the practices that carry them . . .
(Banks).
Thus, ANT insists on studying networks as they occur in particular spatial and
temporal instantiations, and the actants in these enactments necessarily include non-
human components. Though these ideas, along with those advanced in other de rigueur
circles such as the object-oriented ontology (OOO) camp and Peter Sloterdijk in his high-
concept collection, Bubbles, might strike some as too ephemeral, frothy or unmoored.
The pertinent material, though, consists of how “things” have become “a subject of
serious theoretical inquiry,” and how instantiations, singularities, and one-offs matter as
well as long tails, mash-ups, revisions, and iterations (Han). Sometimes, rather than
forcing linkages and contriving classificatory blueprints, it is possible to simply state that
realitics is as realitics does—just like this, here, now.
Two supplements must be added to this theoretical section before switching gears.
Both were originally furnished by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and have later been taken up by Latour as well
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as other contemporary thinkers such as Manuel DeLanda. First is the model of the
rhizome, in familiar use a kind of plant root that typically contains many offshoots that
can form new networks, which Latour positions as central to ANT, as it constitutes “a
change in metaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments,” or
rhizomes. The rhizome also represents a paradigm shift in that, Latour says, “[i]nstead of
thinking in terms of surfaces—two dimension—or spheres—three dimension—one is
asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections”
(“On Actor-Network” 3). Here is Deleuze and Guattari’s description, reproduced here in
some detail as is germane to this thesis:
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their
roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not
necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different
regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible to neither the
One or the multiple. . . . It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle
(milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear
multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be
laid out on a plane of consistency . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 21).
What, then, is the significance of the rhizome for social criticism beyond
introducing a foundational image that had until then not yet been claimed? Latour again
has provided an answer that poses a conceptual challenge as it melds Deleuze and
Guattari’s ideas with his own. “At first approximation,” he writes, “[actor-network
theory] claims that modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as
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having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never
captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structure,
systems” (“On Actor-Network” 3).
Lastly in this survey comes the “assemblage,” which, much like others just
mentioned, seeks to expand the possibilities of social theory using schematics that better
accommodate dynamism, contingency, and the ability to think about multifarious social
systems from a “parts to whole” scale and a “bottom-up” trajectory (“Deleuzian” 251-
2).
14
Assemblages are heterogeneous groupings, illustrated by Deleuze and Guattari using
the image of the “constellation,” that may include “forms of content” or material forms
(human and nonhuman bodies, plus actions and reactions) and “forms of expression”
(incorporeal enunciations, acts, and statements) (265, 58). They are kinetic and invite
movements away from rigidity and anthropocentrism, which can make them slippery to
work with on the level of application.
Still, scholars like DeLanda have adopted and adapted assemblage theory and
have found it to be valuable, for reasons such as these, as DeLanda explained in a 2011
lecture: “Social justice movements can’t be reduced to the people that make them up.
Governments cannot be reduced to the organizations that make them up. Cities cannot be
reduced to the streets that make them up” (“Manuel”). In this manner, the avant-garde of
the academy are equipped with more plentiful and precise ways of corroborating that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and encouraging that subjects and phenomena
be considered in situ and in the moment.
15

What’s more, taking things, assemblages, rhizomes, and non-human actants on
board adds ‘prop master,’ and something approximating ‘social botanist,’ to the job
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description of the scholar of realitics. To give those specialties a whirl, a sampling of
entities applicable to Palin’s composition might include: the GOP and the Tea Party, the
Heritage Foundation, the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958, Facebook, the Colt .45 revolver,
grizzly bears, neoconservatism, Saturday Night Live, snowmobiles, the pro-life
movement, basketball, lipstick. Some rudiments are more vital than others to her makeup,
but they all share credit for her constitution, as she adds to theirs in kind. Her rhizomic
framework is one attribute that is actually unique to her and, as with every other
realitician, certifies resonance, not taxonomy, as the go-to term for relating one person or
episode to another.

From Discovery to Defeat
After reviewing the vast and crowded field of associations from which she sprang,
Sarah Palin’s plays at rip-snortin’, gun-totin’, moose-shootin’, down-home-pioneer-gal-
from-up-North individualism can begin to seem more like an outlandish sales pitch than
an earnest self-assessment. No matter; as will become something of a refrain in this and
other examples, accuracy is frequently beside the point, and optics are often more
important than facts, in the domain of realitics. That said, Palin is owed credit for her
considerable rhetorical feat of using the “available means of persuasion” to put together
something new out of existing materials and for flipping the expected script that was
handed to her, and predominantly dictated, by men (Aristotle vii).
She somehow accomplished all this without fatally violating—or rather, without
seeming to violate—the core tenets of her personal brand, itself bound up with her
political party’s brand and professed values, especially with regard to platforms and
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approved gender roles. Unlike the Dixie Chicks, Palin was able to move through more
than one substantial reinvention stage, and more than one bout of occupationally
hazardous turbulence, and progress forward fairly unscathed. Her job options were not
foreclosed by those trials; on the contrary, she at several points seemed to be sustained or
even energized by them. Most remarkably, she used inconsistencies, ruptures, and even
outright losses as ways of buttressing her brand. In so doing, she showed the way for
others to do the same.
It is important to stress that, in addition to the fact that Sarah Palin was not an
invention entirely of her own making, neither was she divested of all agency or fashioned
by crack teams of savvy handlers into a kind of Extreme Makeover: Realitician Edition-
meets-Stepford Wives automaton. She might not have been the rogue firebrand she made
herself out to be, but neither was she was a cypher. As has been established, politicized
celebrity personas emerge not so much out of some formative stew of their own wills and
imaginations as out of an economically arbitrated matrix over which no single person or
party holds sway. The goal is not to pinpoint, if that were even possible, exactly where
something like agency that is localized within one person leaves off and outside forces
take up the work in an abstract conceptualization of contemporary power that applies
across the board. Rather, a more useful way of describing these co-dependent characters
would be to say they are mutually constitutive and possess some negotiable ability, the
variable extent of which is less important than its simple presence in the equation, to
shape the fields they inhabit even as they are formed by them in turn.
That calibrated take is not exactly on par with a prevalent origin story that some
mainstream press outlets ran with during the nascent stages of Palin’s national political
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career. Such accounts of her debut glimmered with the mythical promise of a Pygmalion
for the new century. In the classical rendition of the legend chronicled by the Roman poet
Ovid in Metamorphoses, persnickety sculptor Pygmalion chisels, falls for, and then
successfully lobbies love goddess Aphrodite to animate his ideal woman (Ovid). Or, to
pull from a more contemporary plot suited to this project, c. 2007 Palin was the ingénue
in the classic Hollywood canard about the soda-fountain discovery, the “it girl” whose
wholesome good looks and dazzling endowments might have made her legendary in her
hometown but who had not yet clinched her big break on the big screen.
16
Until, that is,
she is spotted and recognized at once by older, more sophisticated male sponsors with the
means to float her name above the marquee after she undergoes an intensive and ethically
suspect refinement regime of their devising.
According to this arrangement, Palin was to be plucked from her humble
governor’s mansion in Juneau, and once she had mastered and executed her prescribed
charm offensive throughout the ‘lower 48,’ she would be installed in the White House as
vice president through the commanding guidance of a select and tastefully libidinous
group of male Republican authorities and the aid of compliant voters. What Palin’s
backers wound up with was more faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s reworked
Pygmalion drama, in which female protégé Eliza Doolittle has other ideas about what to
do with all that training and exposure once she has been given a leg-up into high society
by patron phoneticist Henry Higgins (Shaw). As with the Dixie Chicks, Palin’s
commitment to the sweetheart act set before her had its limits, which happened to
dovetail with her own ambitions. For a time, though, she was willing to operate within
specified bounds.
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As watchful journalists told it, two boatloads of GOP gatekeepers from two
influential right-leaning publications arrived on Alaska shores over the summer of 2007,
roughly a year before Palin was picked to be John McCain’s vice-presidential running
mate. That June, Palin hosted a private luncheon with opinion leaders who disembarked
from a cruise ship affiliated with The Weekly Standard, and in August she did the same
for VIPs cruising with The National Review. The first batch of would-be Henry Higginses
included conservative New York Times columnist and Weekly Standard founder and
editor William Kristol, as well as the Weekly Standard’s executive editor and Fox News
pundit Fred Barnes; both of their wives also attended. Among Palin’s listed guests from
The National Review were that periodical’s columnist Rich Lowry, Bush II-era
Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and federal judge and erstwhile U.S.
Solicitor General Robert Bork—who, like the Dixie Chicks, had the experience of his
name being made into a verb following a highly public professional setback.
17
Though the cruises to Juneau had been planned well before speculation about the
2008 American presidential campaign ramped up to the level of a national sport,
columnists such as The Daily Beast’s Scott Horton drew causal links in an article posted
Oct. 10, 2008 between the meeting with Kristol and Palin’s subsequent rise up the ranks
of the GOP establishment. Significantly, the language that Horton and many of his
colleagues used to describe instrumental men like Kristol in relation to Palin picked up on
themes just mentioned about romantic courtship writ large and the Pygmalion myth more
specifically (with the soda-fountain variant also making cameos). Horton pushed further
into problematic metaphorical territory in his Daily Beast lede by invoking the imagery
of colonial conquest while describing Kristol and his companions alighting on the shores
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of Juneau. “It was a moment of discovery to equal Hernando Cortez’s landing at
Veracruz,” Horton proclaimed below the equally interesting headline, “Palin’s Talent
Scout.” Further down, he surmised that Kristol, whose magazine had run some 41 articles
about the Alaskan governor since their meetup in Juneau, “can fairly lay claim to having
‘discovered’ Palin for Washington political circles” (Horton).
Among the most conspicuous of the Weekly Standard series was “The Most
Popular Governor,” written by Fred Barnes and posted in July 16, 2007, once fresh off
the boat from his journey to the northern state known as The Last Frontier. Barnes was
clearly in cahoots with Palin promoters like Kristol and Adam Brickley, a young blogger
whose own research that same year into viable female Republican contenders spurred
him to launch the website Palinforvp.blogspot.com. Again, the language is noteworthy.
Barnes brought good tidings for fellow party members still smarting from a bad outcome
in the 2006 midterm elections: “they’ve overlooked the one shining victory in which a
Republican star was born,” he said. “The triumph came in Alaska where Sarah Palin, a
politician of eye-popping integrity, was elected governor” (Barnes).
At the same time, Barnes granted Palin substantial agency and her star quality a
degree of autonomy, paying postfeminist lip service in claiming that she “has crushed the
Republican hierarchy (virtually all male).” He thus cleverly distanced himself and his
publication from the contributing factors that sustain that same hierarchy, dissembling in
a manner similar to how members of the media elite speak disapprovingly of the media
elite. Barnes plugged Palin as a formidable combatant in her own right by adding that
“[p]olitical analysts in Alaska refer to the ‘body count’ of Palin’s rivals.” He mentioned
how she sharpened her leadership skills in such distinctive arenas as her high school
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basketball team, which dubbed her “‘Sarah Barracuda’ for her fierce competitiveness”
and the “Miss Wasilla beauty contest, in which she was named Miss Congeniality.” She
was a woman of faith, too, and having arrived in Alaska as an infant, “practically a
native.” Admirers quoted in the piece referred to her by turns as a “hockey mom,” a
hunter, an NRA member, snowmobiler, smart yet guileless, “pretty and young,” a mother
married to her high-school sweetheart (Todd Palin, himself verifiably of Alaska Native
heritage, a four-time “Iron Dog” snowmobile race titleholder, and at that time an oil
industry employee), and possessed of an “Alaskan chauvinism,” which was evidently the
kind of machismo Palin and her benefactors could get behind (“Todd”). Despite some
blights on her record, Barnes perspicaciously resolved, “she sold voters on the one
product that mattered: herself” (Barnes).
Meanwhile, Horton’s Daily Beast take drew upon inferences and statements made
in one of his source materials published in September 2007 by The Telegraph’s Tim
Shipman, titled “Neoconservatives plan Project Sarah Palin to shape future American
foreign policy.” For his part, Shipman positions an elite group of “neocons” as the
programmers behind the content delivery system that was Palin (Shipman). Multiple
passages excerpted below from Shipman’s piece reinforce this purported dynamic:
Now many believe that the ‘neocons’ . . . are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew
their influence.
A former Republican White House official . . . admitted: ‘She’s bright and
she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”
Asked if he sees her as a ‘project,’ the former official said: ‘Your word, not
mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment.”
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Pat Buchanan, the former Republican presidential candidate and a foreign
policy isolationist . . . said: “Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless
political asset the movement has.
“Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their
camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the
[conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute]-Weekly Standard-War
Party orbit” . . . (Shipman).
Elsewhere in Shipman’s account, another think-tank cognoscente granted Palin little to
no agency as he worried aloud that Palin’s top foreign policy adviser, Steve Biegun,
would “turn her into an advocate of Cheneyism and [George W. Bush’s Vice President
Dick] Cheney’s view of national-security issues” (Shipman).
Keen-eyed observers will spot in passages like these a permutation of what
feminist scholars refer to as the double-bind of femininity, a built-in feature of
conventionally constructed feminine subjectivity that pits a pair of irreconcilable, often
opposed qualities (e.g. madonna/whore, self-made reformer/man-made project) against
one another while insisting that women occupy both without incident. Kathleen Jamieson
offers a variation, the “femininity-competence double bind,” specific to female leaders in
the political sphere (Jamieson). In this setup, women are put in a no-win situation in
which they are penalized if they are seen as too aggressive in a professional setting, but if
they back off too much or are too ‘girly,’ well, maybe they are not up for the job.
Meanwhile, their successes are claimed by everyone around them, while their failures are
theirs alone.
Beyond the neocon palace intrigue chronicled in these stories, they offer
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compelling archival material from that setting to recount how men operating in centers of
political and media power jockeyed for control over the frame through which the
American populace would ideally view Palin.
18
Also striking is how often—or not—Palin
was given an active, much less a speaking, role in press coverage about how she
ostensibly won over such high-flying believers, and how characterizations of her often
conflicted with one another. She was cast alternately as a rule-breaking reformer, a
project to be molded and handled, tabula rasa, a star, a killer, a naïf, a priceless asset,
uncharted territory. (She would later be recast in plenty of other contradictory roles.)
Granted, Shipman credited Kristol with “molding” George H. W. Bush’s male
Vice President Dan Quayle as well (Shipman). This sort of behind-the-scenes speculation
about who was most responsible for steering Palin inside the Beltway also jibes with the
previously laid out figure-ground argument about how no realitician, no matter the
description, is an island. When it came to Palin in particular, the star machine formulating
her public persona was linked to the normative societal circuitry of gender, sexuality,
race/ethnicity, class, ability, age, and other differentials. Though hegemony functions
most effectively when its contrivances remain hidden, glimpses such as these afforded by
the press can expose its inner workings. To wit: turns out the soda-fountain ruse can
conceal patterns of grooming that hinge on the conditional authorization of white male
chaperones.
During this phase, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer catalogued in her Oct. 27,
2008 essay “The Insiders,” Palin was sexualized and objectified by the same set of
promoters, which had the effect of couching potential threats she may have posed to
bigger institutions than the Alaskan political establishment within the normative and
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reassuringly familiar narrative of bourgeois, white, cishet romance. Right-wing radio
stalwart Rush Limbaugh signaled his approval of Palin by pronouncing her a “babe.”
Mayer logged Fred Barnes’ appraisal that, in addition to being smart and self-possessed
(perhaps owing in part to her background as a “beauty queen”), Palin was “exceptionally
pretty.” Meanwhile, Kristol was featured as Palin’s champion, enthusing that, “It would
be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor” to be McCain’s running mate,
without specifying which of those descriptors would most qualify the choice of Palin as
“pretty wild.” Mayer also relayed how during a July 2008 appearance on Fox News,
“Kristol referred to Palin as ‘my heartthrob,’” how others who met her on the fated
Alaska trip compared her to Joan of Arc, Annie Oakley, and Barack Obama, and how
Kristol was her most “ardent” supporter (Mayer).
Mayer’s input is useful for the overt acknowledgement and added nuance about
the gender dynamics in effect during the formative stages of the pro-Palin drive. Her
piece gives the distinct impression that insofar as Palin had been allowed into the GOP
boys’ club, it was because a phalanx of eminent men had agreed to usher her in. Among
Mayer’s interviewees was Palinforvp.blogspot.com originator Adam Brickley, who
impressed upon the writer that he “generally opposes affirmative action,” as Mayer
phrased it, and that he was spurred to launch the site not so much by Palin’s merits but by
the need to head the competition off at the pass. “‘People were talking about Hillary
[Clinton] at the time,’” Brickley reflected (Mayer).
Additionally, Mayer pointed to parts of Palin’s description that did not align with
her outsider shtick, opining that the Alaska governor “owes more to members of the
Washington elite than her rhetoric has suggested.” In support of this premise, Mayer
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quoted one John Bitney, “top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign”
who complicated the Palin-as-straight-shooter description from Fred Barnes’ Weekly
Standard tribute. “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah,” Bitney
offered. “She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-
politician politician” (Mayer).
Regardless of the degree to which Palin actually did, or could, mastermind her
own moves toward the nerve center of the American government, even those enabling her
progress to whatever degree they did were not exactly closed-mouthed about why she fit
their bill. In the final analysis, the picture they presented was ultimately not all that
unique. Once her sponsors looked past all the rustic idiosyncrasies about Palin’s zest for
cooking moose chili, storming the castle in Juneau, shooting hoops and wild game, and
making it all look sexy, what they had on their hands was an aspiring career politician in
the form of a white, married, Christian, conservative mother who supported all the right
causes and opposed the right wrong ones. Some maverick.
As it happened, the pro-Palin Republican contingency’s May-December romance
with the V.P. competitor of their design, as anyone watching the 2008 American
presidential election with one eye remembers, did not last. Nor did the version of Palin
that they had supposedly wrought. The plot survived long enough, at any rate, to get her
in the door. Late that summer, Republican presidential nominee and longtime Senator
John McCain yielded to intra-party pressure and revealed that Sarah Palin would be his
running mate.
McCain’s announcement had closely followed the release of his first campaign
spot, an attack ad fatefully titled “Celeb.” In it, a narrator mocked Democratic
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presidential Barack Obama by calling him “the biggest celebrity in the world” as visuals
of pop singer Britney Spears and reality television star Paris Hilton—who were both
white, blonde, female, in their 20s, and known for trading on their sexuality—faded into
an image of Obama, who was none of those things, striding and waving in slow-motion
in front of crowds chanting his name (“Celeb”). McCain’s apparent reversal of course, as
inferred by his capitulation, could make him seem like he was pandering to younger
voters, susceptible as they were to the charisma of a “celeb” like Obama. Or perhaps he
was kowtowing to women who had been planning to vote for Hillary Clinton and might
still base their decision on gender. That such a fixture of the GOP old guard as McCain
would be obliged to run alongside a relatively unknown young woman, unproven on the
national stage and early into her first term as governor of one of America’s most far-flung
states, carried more than a tinge of cynicism to some onlookers,
Prominent conservative columnist Peggy Noonan was initially open-minded,
stating in a story published Sept. 4, 2008, just as the McCain-Palin ticket became official,
that “[t]he choice of Gov. Palin is a Hail Mary pass.” That assessment was not
necessarily a put-down, as at the same time Noonan made room for the possibility that
Palin “could be a transformative political presence.” If so, Noonan concluded, Palin’s
foes “are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick. And it’s going to be brutal”
(Noonan). In her last prediction, at least, Noonan was not far off.
The “Celeb” advertisement, clumsy though it was, captured the zeitgeist, marked
a societal transition in the U.S., and offered a glimpse of what was to come, not only with
regard to the next three presidential elections but also McCain’s prospects in the
company of Sarah Palin. Noonan was also right in forecasting a bumpy time ahead for the
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“Alaska Tough” governor and in recognizing novel and antagonizing prospects in that
same package, but her analysis did not prove to be entirely accurate:
Gut: The Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It’s not
going to be a little successful or a little not; it’s not going to be a wash. She is either
going to be magic or one of history’s accidents. She is either going to be brilliant
and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter
staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books.
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a woman
who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American
feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels
and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she
is conservative, and pro-2
nd
Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives
can smell this sort of thing—who is really one of them and who is not—and will
fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a
real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy
(Noonan).
Palin was a jumbler all right. For that reason, and because Noonan was operating off of a
previously reliable template that was about to be drastically altered by the same two 2008
candidates named in the above passage, she could hardly have known that her prognosis
was off in at least one major way. It would soon become clear that it actually is possible
for someone in Palin’s position to be at once “groundbreaking” and the target of
impugning staffers in the aftermath of the election—because Palin fit both of those
descriptions herself. (Realitics is paradoxical.)
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Noonan issued her evaluation according to precedents set by decades of U.S.
elections. Palin may have been the first woman to assume the second-highest ranking in a
Republican run on the White House, and the second woman ever in the country to occupy
that spot on a major-party ticket, but 2008 was not the first time a presidential hopeful
pulled an eleventh-hour caper in the face of daunting odds. What’s more, any backlash
McCain might otherwise have brooked for inviting a woman so close to the seat of global
power was offset somewhat by logistical factors introduced earlier in that cycle; namely,
by the presence of a pair of minorities, a woman and an African-American man, who had
been in the running as the top two rivals for the Democratic Party’s final selection. Plus,
Kristol, Barnes and other male taste-makers on the GOP side had already done a good
deal of advance work to make Palin seem like a plausible option by the time McCain
made his decision. In so doing, they modeled how Palin’s standing in the civic world
could be made palatable to party honchos, men, and conservative voters who might have
had a harder time accepting her candidacy. After all, they submitted, Palin was a
renegade and a “babe” who boasted that rare blend of “eye-popping integrity” and
“Alaskan chauvinism.” If those tag lines didn’t take, they could always play the Hillary
Clinton card in the name of compulsory affirmative action.
Over the course of the frenetic stretch to Election Day, the drawbacks to the
GOP’s gamble showed themselves in flashing lights. For every effort McCain’s team
made to tout the preferred backstory about how Palin was emblematic of a new breed of
politician the American public needed and deserved, opponents deployed multiple
counter-narratives intended to reframe those professed assets as liabilities or worse. On
the pro-Palin side, she was showcased as the proud patron saint of several vital GOP
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crusades, from the Christian right to gun rights, pro-life to anti-immigration, abstinence
to marriage protection, who went all in for big business, small government, and family
values. Much was made of her lengthy marriage to Todd Palin and of their brood of five
children, including the youngest, Trig, whom she had carried while in office and who was
born in 2008 with Down Syndrome.
She showed early promise in kicking up populist fervor, memorably saluting her
key constituency of “hockey moms” during her speech at the Republican National
Convention on Sept. 3, 2008, her debut as McCain’s second in command. “What’s the
difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” she asked the crowd. The answer:
“Lipstick” (Scott). She played up her working-class appeal with hunter-chic photo
sessions and strategic mentions of how she eschewed the luxurious trappings of her office
in Alaska by ditching the private plane commandeered by her rival for that post, former
Gov. Frank Murkowski. According to The New York Times, the plane ploy was one of
Palin’s gambits that had “grounded” her predecessor (Yardley).
The opposition was ready with their rundown of cons and were eager to position
her, with varying degrees of candor, as a backwoods bimbo. At times, they went so far as
to use classism, sexism, and other markers in so doing. They went after her more obvious
weaknesses and attempted to make additional blights out of what could be spun as her
strengths: her family, her dedication to her work, which saw her returning to office in
Juneau within days after giving birth to Trig, plus her youth, background, looks,
conservative values, populist and anti-establishment aura, love of guns. Selections from a
colorful compendium of nicknames she had inspired over the years were marshalled
according to their use value to the factions invoking them. A short list of those sobriquets
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may include any of these, some of which could be intended as compliments or potshots:
Caribou Barbie, Gov. Mooselini, The Moosiah, Mama Grizzly, Sarita, Bayonetta, The
Thrilla from Wasilla, Klondike Kardashian, Pit Bull in Lipstick, Sarah Barracuda, The
Paliban, Money Boo-Boo, Alaskan Evita, Dickless Cheney, Bible Spice, Lady Blah Blah,
Hello Quitty (“Top Ten”).
Forceful criticisms of Palin could not all be chalked up to partisan politics or
misogyny. She fumbled crucial interviews and perplexed allies as well as foes with her
idiosyncratic speech style and apparent inconsistencies between her presented image and
actions. One of those was in her embrace of abstinence-only sex education and her
teenage daughter Bristol’s pregnancy, news of which inconveniently broke near the
height of the pre-election competition. Others emerged in the form of unflattering news
reports detailing her interest in the limelight and her use of some $150,000 worth of
campaign funds to buy upmarket clothes to wear on the trail, which was construed as
mercenary and detrimental to the McCain camp’s ethos. It also, as The New York Times,
Vanity Fair, and other publications were swift to observe, clashed with the sensible,
hockey-mom-next-door image she had been marketing (Healy and Luo; M. Gross). Her
resistance to performing some of the less enjoyable tasks of campaigning such as
prepping for her vice-presidential debate against her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden,
was also meticulously documented (Heilbrunn).
Behind-the-scenes reporting about McCain’s impulsive decision to run with Palin
and about friction she allegedly caused within their camp did not help matters either
(Heilbrunn). Fielding sniper fire had always come with the package for politicians, but
once realitics was in force, it could only proliferate and become more implicated in how
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the press and the voting public would evaluate candidates. Like Obama, Palin also found
herself on the receiving end of the ‘celebrity’ slight. She was stamped with a more
gendered showbiz term during the campaign, too, and by an anonymous campaign
adviser within the McCain camp, no less. “She is a diva,” the adviser told CNN on
October 26, 2008 (Bash et al.).
As the end neared and it looked as though the pooled assets of the McCain-Palin
union would not be enough to overpower the rival tag team of Barack Obama and Joseph
Biden, largely owing to Obama’s charisma, star power, and even his celebrity
associations, Palin’s allies began to abandon her. At that same time, her quirks, as in the
cliché about romance, began to look more like liabilities. While playing the part of vice-
presidential contender during that campaign, Palin weathered an onslaught that ranged
from family scandals to excoriation by the media for everything from her folksy persona
to her pricey wardrobe to her uneven showings in interviews to, finally, her joint defeat
with John McCain in the 2008 election. Still, much as her antagonists hoped for their
projections to bear out in her case, and much as she might have seemed rattled or even
cowed at certain points—never more so than on the evening of November 4, 2008, when
she smiled mutely on an Arizona stage as John McCain conceded defeat to Barack
Obama—Sarah Palin went on to defy the laws of political physics. She remained aloft
while others crashed after committing far fewer image-related and other offenses.
The next section will determine how even if the ginned-up legend of Sarah Palin,
vice-presidential wild card, is not all that original, the sequel about Palin the up-and-
coming realitician absolutely is. What follows may read like a theorized confirmation of a
phenomenon that the savvier and perhaps more jaded American populace of 2018 had
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witnessed as it unfolded in real time. Yet even those whose livelihood depended on it
were unlikely to have anticipated the range and muscle of tactics such as the ones Palin
helped potentiate a decade ago. Again, though she was not so much the inventor of her
methods, she was an innovator in terms of how she leveraged them.
As a preview: the ways Palin changed her audience in more than one respect, and
changed how she addressed them, make up part of her technique. Another relates to how
she at least gave the impression that she avoided violating some rules while denying or
reframing bona fide breaches of expected protocol. She also took advantage of and
amplified the aesthetic and performance-, ends-, and emotionally-oriented traits of the
emergent mode of realitics in order to exempt her words and actions from legitimacy tests
such as proof, consistency, external validity, and so on. These maneuvers might all be
summed up according to the operative term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

Rogue Trader
Just as Palin’s resignation from her post as governor of Alaska caused some
political analysts to clang out a death knell for her future career options in electoral
politics, several other post-2008 moves she made provoked similar responses. There was
no shortage of adversaries from national press and political circles who proved as vocal
as they were vigilant whenever she made what they considered to be a blunder. That
trend did not wind down along with McCain’s presidential campaign.
The tradeoff of focusing media attention on Palin was that she seemed uncannily
impervious to critiques, even energized by them. This was one way in which she was able
to exploit contingencies as part of her repertoire of skills for maintaining long-term
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relevance. For those who genuinely thought her a dilettante, or an opportunist, or
emblematic of the breakdown of civil discourse in America, and by inference a threat to
the nation, raising the alarm came at the cost of raising her profile. The payoff for those
who were less sincere in their concern was that linking their names to hers was a means
of attracting notice and gaining media currency. Whether she was being attacked or
defended, she was good for ratings.
It would seem that the suggestion from the beginning of this chapter—that Palin
went from VP hopeful to one-woman cottage industry—was not quite correct in that it
might convey the false sense that she alone stood to profit. In actuality, her 2008 loss
improbably led to a lot of other people’s gains along with her own. This was proven out
by the many projects and products that were directly and obliquely related to her actions
and fortunes. Some she endorsed or signed on for; others were made without her consent
or even her knowledge, or at her expense. Entertainment-based celebrities and their
handlers have long known how names and likenesses can be poached and how to weigh
threats to worth against the prospect of relevance in their responses—one of the
innumerable cost-benefit calculations to be made in the marketplace of attention, in
which the realitician also traffics. Palin would grapple with these challenges as she spent
the next decade building a brand constructed on paradoxes, two-way exploitability,
recruitment, cross-platform communication, and a kind of alchemy that would transform
politicians into avatars and audiences into fans.
Taking stock of a few of the by-products of Palin, Inc. would require an inventory
of the accessories and clothes that her campaign fashions popularized, such as the Kazuo
Kawasaki 704 eyeglasses still being peddled, however officially, as the Sarah Palin
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model (“Kazuo”). The New York Times checked the labels and price tags on her clothes,
listing the ivory jacket she wore at the Sept. 2008 Republican Convention as a “$2,500
silk shantung Valentino” from Saks Fifth Avenue. Other pieces, such as the red leather
jacket that became one of her sartorial trademarks during that time, were reportedly less
costly and more widely reproduced. “[N]othing says maverick like red leather,” the
Times’ Eric Wilson wrote in his Oct. 22, 2008 feature about her wardrobe. Wilson had
taken the trouble to contrast Palin’s upcycled styles with the fleece outerwear and “what
appeared to be a knockoff Burberry scarf” she had sported as a lesser-known office-
seeker in Alaska (Wilson).
As was true of Palin’s career as a realitician, the open-ended open season for
merchandising and franchising ventures instigated in her name did not conclude with that
election. In addition to the many journalistic sources and entertainment programs that fed
off of the Palin bonanza, Larry Flynt’s Hustler enterprise also found a way to profit with
a pornographic video: Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, starring Lisa Ann as “Serra Paylin,” was
released on Nov. 4, 2008—Election Day. Since adult films are not exactly known for
their complex plots, what ends up in forming their story lines has to be easily identifiable
to form the desired scenario; Paylin’s caricatured take on Palin’s narrative worked in
references to Russia, snowmobiles, and, presaging a future source of her income, Fox
News (Bans).
Over several months succeeding Election Day, as Palin’s business as a realitician
began taking shape, Discovery Communications, Mark Burnett Productions and TLC, the
team behind Sarah Palin’s Alaska, were among the parties that traded off her name.
(Exploiting contingencies can work both ways.) She starred in that reality show for one
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season from late 2010-early 2011. Over time, a long list of media sources that included
popular magazines and news outlets also made hay from whichever of Palin’s suite of
offerings was trending at the time, as she herself did. In January 2010, The New York
Post’s influential Page Six gossip column reported that In Touch Weekly had paid Palin
and her eldest daughter, Bristol, $100,000 for a cover story and photo shoot with their
respective infant sons, Trig and Tripp (PageSix.com Staff). The story, titled “Sarah &
Bristol Palin: We’re glad we chose life,” worked the Palins’ pro-life politics into that
consumer space, and as Page Six calculated, the paycheck came close to the $125,000
annual salary Palin had earned as Alaska’s governor. “It seems her decision to quit her
political role is making big financial sense,” the Post column deduced, adding that Palin
reportedly earned $100,000 per gig as a public speaker and as of 2010 had signed “a
multiyear deal as a Fox News Channel analyst” (ibid). That deal, according to CNN, was
worth $1 million a year, making her “the highest-paid pundit” at that time at the cable
channel (Kludt).
How, then, to explain Palin’s unconventional career arc, as well as her resilience
in the face of what would normally spell certain doom to many other political
aspirations? In a word: realitics. Hers had clearly not been a standard-issue political
career, and thus the attendant measures of success, not to mention the means of achieving
it, did not fully apply in Palin’s case. Rather, she is a hybrid of several different figures—
a creation not entirely of her own making, even if she is given to adopting poses of just-
folks authenticity and the language of “common sense,” a term she invoked repeatedly in
her on-air commentary (Rosenfeld).
Her 2010 incarnation as Fox News contributor invited negative readings based on
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past journalistic conventions regarding expert commentary (“Palin”). For reasons
stemming from stated and implied journalistic ethics, it has generally been held that
experts from certain professions—e.g., prominent leaders from the military, politics, and
business—could run up against ethical issues if they also moonlighted as journalists, at
least insofar as they might risk giving away state secrets or reporting about topics that
represented conflicts of interest.
19
The Society of Professional Journalists, a prominent
organization in the industry, lists on its website a set of standards derived from the
organization’s position papers; when it comes to the subject of political involvement, the
SPJ’s stance is firm. “Don’t do it. Don’t get involved. Don’t contribute money, don’t
work in a campaign, don’t lobby, and especially, don’t run for office yourself.” Other
guidelines include distinguishing between advocacy and news reporting, steering clear of
associations that could affect credibility, and “being vigilant about holding those with
power accountable” (“Political”).
In making such recommendations, the SPJ is addressing journalists who may be
thinking of dabbling in politics, but what of the politicians who, like Palin, are coming
through the same door from the other side? That trend has only picked up since 2010, and
along with other changes introduced by the widespread introduction of blogging, social
media, celebrity, gossip, and pervasive punditry, it adds another kind of role confusion to
the news business. In 2012, I interviewed California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom
and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who at the time were both appearing
regularly on Current TV, a now-defunct channel that was co-owned by former Vice
President Al Gore, about the subject of politicians doubling as media commentators.
Newsom admitted that although he had broadcast a weekly radio show while
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mayor of San Francisco, “the most important question that we still have not answered, I
will confess, is whether I can [do the show].” Granholm said to Newsom, half-joking, “I
would say that you should have answered that before you went on the air.” She did not
share that concern, having left office the previous year, and she did not hesitate to say
outright that she hoped to effect change through her televised platform. “I wouldn’t be
doing it if I weren’t,” she said (K. Anderson “Current”). Below is an exchange reprinted
from that interview that is especially apropos to this chapter:
[Anderson:] How do you think the role of the politician in the media has changed?
It seems like the barriers between politician and commentator aren’t so rigid
anymore.
Newsom: What a wonderful, revolving, open door in this case. I mean, rather
than disappearing into the private sector. To have a conversation with all that
experience fresh in mind and the ability to dissect and understand what’s being
said and what’s not being said and why and how they’re positioning—what an
enriching experience for the public.
… Granholm: It is interesting, though—your question speaks to the new media
era where political figures end up becoming seamless with celebrity. Think of
Sarah Palin, for example. In that case, I don’t think it’s healthy at all—because I
don’t think her brand of politics is healthy. But I do think that to an extent that it
makes political life more accessible to people because they can see it and touch
people in different ways than physically having to be at a speech that Gavin
Newsom is giving (K. Anderson “Current”).
Undeniably, as Newsom, Granholm, Palin and fellow crossover acts on Current
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TV, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN would prove, many legacy media embargoes against
mixing politics and news had effectively become obsolete somewhere along the way.
Before Palin’s auspicious entrée, Fox News already counted another member of the
Campaign ’08 conservative cohort, former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican
presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, among its stable of personalities. What had once
been viewed as career purgatory had turned into a springboard.
So much so, in fact, that MSNBC mainstay Chris Matthews, The Atlantic blogger
Andrew Sullivan, and former President George W. Bush’s cousin John Ellis, all predicted
at the time that Palin had a good chance of upsetting the GOP establishment and making
a serious play for the 2012 Republican nomination. “Know fear,” Sullivan concluded in a
July 2009 post, notably entitled “The Unstoppable Sarah Palin” (A. Sullivan). As early as
January 11 of that year, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz had predicted that Palin’s
Fox News position would ultimately serve to magnify her influence rather than cause a
flame-out, declaring in his column that “[t]he exposure can only help Palin if she decides
to pursue a 2012 presidential bid” (Kurtz). It seemed that her contract with the
conservative channel, which she would subsequently renew and renege as she saw fit in
subsequent years, amounted to a valuable point of reinsertion into an institutional
framework as well as a possible way into more powerful stations down the line.
Two other heavyweights from the pundit class granted Palin added clout in
January 2010, when publisher Harper Collins came out with Game Change: Obama and
the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, written by seasoned political
journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The book became a bestseller with its
behind-the-scenes reportage about interpersonal dramas, scandals and friction, a tone that
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complimented realitics and augmented Halperin’s reputation as an insider in all the right
spaces. Gossipy portions with the most headline-grabbing appeal stemmed not just from
the McCain-Palin pairing, but also from within clashing Democratic factions in the
Senate, from 2008 Democratic candidate and former Sen. John Edwards’ affair with
filmmaker Rielle Hunter, as well as from Hillary Clinton’s issues with her marriage and
with up-and-coming Democratic challenger Barack Obama, among other sources
(Heilemann and Halperin).
Two years later, in February 2012, more than 2 million viewers tuned in to watch
HBO’s film adaptation of Game Change, which the prestige cable network based and
marketed heavily on the book’s story line about Palin. Acclaimed actor Julianne Moore
was enlisted for the part. Though Palin’s entrée into national politics had occurred three
and a half years prior, she still drew a crowd. Moore’s foray into Palin territory in her
made-for-TV turn also paid off, as Moore went on to win a Golden Globe and an Emmy
for her portrayal. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley relayed that Palin’s
sympathizers pronounced the film a “liberal smear job,” and thought Moore’s
impersonation lacked her inspiration’s “sexy sassiness” (Stanley). Stanley also remarked
on how much time had passed since the events that informed Game Change—“the real
tribute is that it exists at all,” she said of the film—before describing another kind of
tribute to Palin that would take on even more significance in four more years:
On Sunday night Reelz will show “The Undefeated,” a two-hour documentary
that its creators say was “inspired” by Ms. Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An
American Life.” Made by the conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon, it’s a
hallucinatory hagiography that uses baby pictures, Scripture, re-enactments and
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nature films of lions devouring zebras to chronicle Ms. Palin’s martyrdom at the
hands of the left. (Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing blogger who died just over a
week ago, delivers a fire-breathing testimonial.) “The Undefeated” is a staggering
work of bombast and overstatement, the closest thing in the United States to the
campaign biographies of the newly elected Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin
(Stanley).
In the juxtaposition between The Undefeated and Game Change, another
playbook entry presents itself. Realitics need not involve individual actors speaking to
one another in order to communicate a message or hash out an issue. Debates and
conversations can take place between entertainment artifacts, along with the various
parties promoting and contesting those texts, as well as between individuals interested in
sponsoring a message. As G. Thomas Goodnight posited in “The Passion of the Christ
meets Fahrenheit 9/11: A Study in Celebrity Advocacy,” politically activated films can
be probed “as stylistic visions, different yet responding to one another at election time”
(10). In Game Change, Palin was presented with an added opportunity for exposure. In
The Undefeated, yet another reason for her staying power becomes apparent: Recruitment
is one of the foremost aims and raisons d'être of realitics, and Palin was a proven
recruiter.
Stephen Bannon recognized this capacity in Palin. So did Jennifer Granholm,
Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan and Howard Kurtz. Breitbart media empire founder
Andrew Breitbart noticed it, and those instrumental in what would become known as the
Tea Party movement did, too. Taking shape after George W. Bush left the White House
and Barack Obama moved in, the Tea Party took off without a central command, or at
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least without one that lined up neatly with major party structures in the U.S. Its ethos
encouraged populist and reactionary attitudes, and its motif was the anti-establishment
rebel, harkening back to the Revolutionary War-era Boston Tea Party episode, in which
American dissidents revolted by tossing stockpiles of their British oppressors’ tea into the
Boston Harbor, for its imagery. Pushing back against what participants saw as intrusions
sanctioned by an oversized government with a penchant for taking liberties, it tended to
run hot, at times drawing energy from the fringes and from atypical advocates
(Suderman).
For a time, anyhow, Palin played well to that crowd. Many of Palin’s moves after
she quit her position as governor of Alaska were similarly risky and yet executed without
ultimately hurting her chances of taking prominent leadership roles in the national
political scene, as evidenced by her well-paid job as the keynote speaker of the Tea Party
movement’s first-ever national convention, held in Nashville in February 2010. A brief
media skirmish ensued after news broke about her $100,000 asking price for that
convention, as well as about her “rock star” requests detailed in her agreement, in the
words of a Tea Party member who had helped in the early stages of planning for the
convention (Budowsky; Sherman). Palin quickly countered claims that she was pocketing
the fee for personal profit by announcing her intention to give the money “to support the
grassroots activists who are fighting for responsible, limited government—and our
Constitution” in a column she wrote for USA Today and posted to her Facebook page
(Spillius). The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich followed her moves in a February 5,
2010, piece with a headline that the paper’s editors changed in a telling manner for
publication in the late edition the following day. The version that appears on the NYT
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website and is dated February 5 reads “Palin, Visible and Vocal, Is Positioned for a
Variety of Roles”; the February 6 edition is headlined “Sarah Palin, Vocal and Ready …
but for What?” (“Palin, Visible”; “Sarah Palin”).

Sarah Palin, Inc.
What indeed. Palin’s only became more apparent the more time passed since she
left office, even though her job description progressively became more difficult to define
in readily categorized terms. As her Fox News gig enhanced her clout and belied the
belief that engaging in punditry meant she had few other options, so, apparently, had
unwritten rules changed about several other exploits she would carry off.
Whatever the particulars of her pursuits along the way, Palin found multiple
points of reinsertion and stayed in circulation. She followed up on her top-selling memoir
from 2009, Going Rogue: An American Life, with another a year later, America By Heart:
Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, and in 2015 she published Sweet Freedom: A
Devotional, positioning herself as a spiritual leader as well as a political beacon. She was
instrumental in rallying nascent movements within conservative ranks; even John
McCain tapped into her post-election popularity by bringing her onto the stage while
campaigning to re-up his Senate seat in 2010. She served as a guest of honor at various
conservative events in “the lower 48,” or in another Alaskan slang term for states other
than their own and Hawaii, “outside.” She made a series of top-billed speeches and more
than one star turn at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) annual
meeting, until as recently as 2015.
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The realitician communicates directly, or at least appears to, using social media
and other channels in order to convey a sense of authenticity, make a show of
accessibility, and break from dated and highly managed methods of interaction between
famous people and the public. As with many other standards from the realitics playbook,
Palin was adept in this practice. Despite the ridicule she incurred before and after the
2008 election with her speech style—Tina Fey’s SNL act helped certify Palin’s “you
betcha” as part of the national lexicon—Palin displayed a knack for making that quirk
into a selling point as further evidence of her accessibility. She was adept at seeding the
national discourse with catchphrases that caught on and traveled like memes, as she did
in commenting on the contentious issue of health care reform. She was credited with
pushing the highly contested term “death panels,” via Facebook, no less, in order to
describe how the Obama administration would purportedly prey upon ailing sectors of the
American population (Coaston). She played upon associations, whether self-generated or
instigated by others, with a trending strain of country, down-home sensibility that
embraced traditional values and Tea Party conservatism and rejected bicoastal elitism.
She aimed straight for Second Amendment-touting, Bible-toting white voters who saw
themselves as members of a shared heartland no matter their actual location. Leaders of
this territory, like Palin, claimed to be color-blind, post-racial, and all-inclusive while at
times speaking in code that addressed a targeted audience that responded to the oblique
logic and language of “common sense” (Hogan).
She was making money for other people and companies as well as herself, and
being known—whether as a hockey mom, loyal GOP soldier, Tea Party mutineer, reality
show host, target of Democrats’ scorn, or just an all-purpose controversial figure—was
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advantageous for her in terms of her financial and professional prospects. She could work
with negative attention, in that it supplied her with contingencies to exploit, kept her in
circulation and buoyed her reputation as a renegade reformer. Each potshot from a press
source could be held up as evidence that, since she continued to be persecuted by what
she sardonically dubbed the “lamestream media,” she continued to pose a threat to the
establishment and was obliged to keep fighting the good fight (Barr). Mainstream media
censure thus became a medal of honor; by inference, if she really did not matter to her
critics, they would simply stop talking about her altogether.
That, to date, still has not happened. Palin’s star power has perhaps dimmed; more
likely, it has been eclipsed, but she is still actively circulating. In addition to the reasons
already mentioned, her endurance can be understood with the help of tools created by
scholars of rhetorical criticism. Foremost among them is the privileging of aesthetics,
ideology, affect, and fantasy as powerful implements, as well as a concerted effort to
advance what Ronald Greene, Maurice Charland, and others have called constitutive
rhetoric. As Greene explained in his essay “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical
Perspective on Argumentation,” “[a] constitutive model is in opposition to a theory of
rhetorical effectivity based on a ‘logic of influence’” (19).
21
The impact of this
modification was far more substantial than a collective agreement to replace one
academic blueprint with another, as it resulted in the “an increasing awareness of the
‘fictions’ generated by rhetorical discourse” (21). The operative model of politics
becomes one not so much about one fully-formed and static subject, the ‘orator,’ working
hard to persuade other such subjects in the audience to adopt her point of view. Rather, it
is about creating worlds and roles to take up and inhabit; per Charland, Greene asserts
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that “the representational logics of speech are conceptualized less as a curtain to be pulled
back in order to reveal a more primordial reality, but as a form of reality that ‘brings
forth’ a subject in both political and aesthetic senses” (24).
Suddenly, the stakes seem much greater in terms of the work accomplished by
those able to shape, to whatever degree, the dominant discourse of the moment. Greene
counts “stylistic tokens of a message” as important cues as to how audiences are
positioned and as building blocks of the world audiences are invited to occupy (22).
Looping Robert Harriman into this discussion adds his recommendation that the “modern
human sciences” catch up to “what every successful politician knows intuitively,” which
is that “political experience, skill, and result often involve conventions of persuasive
composition that depend on aesthetic reactions” (Harriman 3).
Palin is one such world-creator. More generally, she helped conjure a framework,
as did contemporaries such as Barack Obama, in which politicians could be positioned as
celebrities, as well as avatars, through a kind of alchemical propensity of realitics. In this
scheme, performance can take precedence over experience, making Palin’s decision to
decamp from her gubernatorial post more intelligible. Through these and other means,
realiticians come to ‘represent’ their audiences in a different sense of the word, one that
incorporates stylistic and aesthetic relationships and inspires the mimetic impulse to
become like the image projected of an esteemed, even desired, other. Their more old-
school counterparts were also placed on pedestals by and for their constituents, but the
functional expectation of their office was to serve as stand-ins or proxies in order to
represent the collective will of the people (Thévènot and Boltanski 113). This is not to
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say that realiticians in the electoral system are not bound to those traditional
responsibilities as well; rather, the novel factor has to do with degree and priority.
It also has to do with consumer culture. In the 1940s—coinciding with the ascent
of film celebrities and their migration into political spaces—Leo Lowenthal remarked at
length about the preponderance of “idols of consumption,” as opposed to “idols of
production,” as topoi appearing in laudatory biographies from popular American
magazines (Lowenthal 217). Consumption and celebrity are deeply entwined, as are
celebrity and politics, so the slide from politician to realitician corresponds to a parallel
phenomenon, which Sarah Banet-Weiser summarizes in Commodity Activism as “the
discursive transformation of a nation of citizens into a nation of consumers” (6). This
addition rounds out the second part of an equation occasioned by realitics: politicians
plus celebrities yields realiticians. The companion piece goes as follows: audiences
comprised of consumer citizens are hailed, as Louis Althusser described how ideology
enlists and “interpellates” subjects, as fans who vote based on considerations of style,
identification and brand loyalty (Althusser).
How better, then, to do the job of recruitment so central to realitics than to
position oneself, à la Sarah Palin, as the unapologetic supporter of free-market capitalism
whose package deal comes with commemorative glasses, a series of books and TV
shows, and for the truly dedicated, red leather jackets and guns? Or, for that matter, as the
cool, culturally savvy, star among stars Barack Obama, who counted Beyoncé, Jay-Z,
Eva Longoria, will.i.am, George Clooney, Marc Anthony, and Gwyneth Paltrow among
his group of famous friends and professed fans? Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter made
the vending of counterculture and commodified dissent the thesis of their book The Rebel
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Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture; Banet-Weiser made
commodified authenticity the basis of Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a
Brand Culture, so clearly the thread Lowenthal took up, as did the likes of Thorstein
Veblen (not to mention Karl Marx) before him, has worked its way into the twenty-first-
century academy.
P. David Marshall can also assist in articulating the complicated and—there it is
again—hybridized ways that audience and realitician mutually constitute one another,
and how the ways in which realiticians represent their fan bases is bound up with
practices of consumerism and with celebrities’ function in the entertainment industry. In
his essay, “New Media-New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity,” Marshall presents
a panoramic outlook:
Collectively, traditional media have produced ‘audience-subjectivities’ that imply
the engagement of the audience with particular celebrated personas. . . . Via that
category of the audience, the production of our celebrity culture can be
characterized as one modalized through an elaborate system of representation.
Celebrities in a sense ‘represent’ audiences in various public worlds. In terms of
the industry itself, celebrities embody the power of the audience members: the
audience’s power—economic clout—is represented by the celebrity and their
capacity to deliver that audience for the industry (636-7).
The introduction of politicians into spaces in the fame world where traditional
media produce these ‘audience-subjectivities,’ it can be argued, primes the public to
engage with realiticians in a way that invites both parties to progress along a
transformative continuum. Audience members may start as consumers of the politician’s
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brand, sampling a suite of offerings that can include products that may or may not pertain
to electoral politics as such. Next, they may move to identifying with the politician, based
on her persona as well as her platform—or even in place of her platform, to take
‘personality-driven politics’ to its fullest culmination—and seeing her as a kind of
exemplar. Activities that may be produced through this process can include those
commonly associated with fan, political, and/or consumer culture, and they may overlap,
as evidenced by the Palin fan who buys her book on spirituality and votes for candidates
whom she endorses. Of note here is how the conditions for identification, for the
politician-as-avatar aspect, need not align closely with formerly prescribed standards of
behavior and self-presentation suitable for public servants. In fact, as will be elaborated
later, a paradoxical element of wish-fulfillment has become activated by realitics, in that
rebellious, controversial or even scandalous traits can be seen as assets rather than
disqualifiers in this arrangement.
Bringing it all together, Palin has evinced at several stages an aptitude for taking
the cultural temperature and for working controversy and unrest to her potential
advantage. Her ability to recruit is key to her continuing relevance and became her ticket
from one world into another. As a realitician, she stands at the juncture of familiar and
new narratives of fame and celebrity from the political and entertainment realms, and she
is potentiated by these narratives just as she may play them off each other in
combinations all her own. She has not committed fully to any one world, has refused to
stop at just one reinvention, and has avoided certain repercussions by never quite
belonging enough to any one world to need to abide entirely by its rules. She could
negotiate her way into another world when the one she was in was not yielding the best
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returns.
Since part of her brand was built upon her being a conservative, Christian woman,
Palin could avail herself of a clear set of expectations that she did not violate and lines
she did not cross, despite her zeal for rebellion. Her image-management protocol has
been less precarious and contradictory than that of the Dixie Chicks, who switched gears
mid-career to operate from a different political standpoint than much of their fan base.
She has not aimed for the presidency, and she has not truly challenged the dominant
framework within her party. Per Thévènot and Boltanski, she has prudently hewed to the
values of the domestic polity, which eschews pretense and prizes connections and
“belonging to the same household” (90-1). That domestic space may be extended to
encompass the Republican Party in addition to her own family unit; in both contexts, she
knows how to work her ambition within the expectations of her role.
Palin has rationalized her own presence in the public sphere and the male-
dominated political sphere of the GOP and American electoral politics more generally by
qualifying herself on the basis of her faith, family, and social politics. Like Phyllis
Schlafly before her, who opposed second-wave feminism and extolled the virtues of
conservative femininity while becoming a prominent public figure and a political opinion
leader, Palin has been able to dodge some of the stigma foisted on more liberal women
who pursued career ambitions by invoking her religion and conservative morality. She
has used her orthodox femininity as a foil of sorts, foregrounding her traditional family as
an intrinsic part of her professional package.
Ambition is circumscribed by convention—the pit bull is never without her
lipstick. As a political performer, Palin has been known to hit the stage in what Michael
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Medved has, evidencing an attitude in accordance with realitics, described as “Sex and
the City heels.” In his rather humid account of Palin’s CPAC 2012 speech, Medved also
characterizes her according to the frame of romance: “Mitt Romney may have won the
straw poll,” he writes, “but Sarah Palin won CPAC’s heart.” He even works a sex scene,
measured in a conservative pundit’s terms, into his prose: “Sarah Palin not only provided
pleasurable thrills to her adoring crowd, but seemed to receive her own ecstasy and
energy from their delirious reaction” (Medved).
Palin has also exploited contingencies made available by a climate friendly to the
consumer citizen. These merchandising opportunities not only gave her a foothold in her
own private business but has made her into a one-woman celebrity brand, thus increasing
her worth in a public sphere in which media capital is paramount. She has proven her
value as an agent of recruitment because of her specific appeal in a fame-fueled consumer
economy, in which women—as well as gays, lesbians, African Americans, Latinx,
transgendered people and other marginalized demographics—have been able to ‘register’
their political opinions in ways that influence national discussions on political issues from
outside, as well as inside, the proverbial voting booth. Her bids to stay in circulation have
not just been about moving her own career forward; they have served other interests as
well, from Fox News to the Tea Party to the GOP.
Thus, Palin has continued to receive support and exposure, as well as TV deals
and invitations to speak at conventions. That is not to say that her continued success is a
given; more recently, her reviews have been as mixed as her résumé. She has tried and
failed at some sizable ventures, including the Sarah Palin Channel, an online subscription
outlet that did not inspire enough viewers to spring for the $10 monthly fee (Spangler).
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Her name was not included on the roster for the 2017 CPAC power huddle; a conference-
goer told USA Today that “conservatives might be trying to rebrand a little” and were
looking for newer acts—such as one Kellyanne Conway (Steakin). She has taken hits,
and after vacating her most powerful elected position, she has not sought another. Still,
she has irons into so many related fires that she has become harder to dismiss from any
one of them, even if she has not committed to them fully.
Ultimately, her main job is the business of being Sarah Palin. Her brand of
realitics keeps supporters politically engaged, or at least keeps them buying what she’s
currently selling. The payoff for realiticians in following Palin’s lead is that, as Page Six
identified in 2010, there is real money to be made in launching campaigns of political or
whatever kind seems to be working, and in moving in and out of the political sphere as
seems expedient and then justifying it later as needed.
In early 2015, Palin’s business brought her into the studio of Fox News’ biggest
draw, Bill O’Reilly, not long before she parted ways with the network for the last time.
During their televised discussion, Palin did not take kindly to O’Reilly’s suggestion that
if she were to involve herself, the 2016 presidential contest could become like a “reality
show.” She fired back on Fox News colleague Sean Hannity’s show shortly thereafter,
chiding O’Reilly in her distinctive speaking style. “He’s taking about his show tonight, or
the commentary on his show, and that would be, ‘Oh, all these GOP contenders thinking
about running for president like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin’ . . . He says, ‘Oh, what a
reality show that would be, yuk, yuk,” Palin said. “Hopefully the media, even the quasi-
right side of the media, won’t be looking at this as some kind of reality show,” she said to
the camera (Kludt).
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Chapter Four: “Change the Channel, Darling”
On March 10, 2011, journalist Bill Keller, then rounding the home stretch of his
eighth and final year as executive editor of The New York Times, wrote an Op-Ed piece in
which he vexed about the future of his chosen industry. Not that he had much to worry
about, as his investment of time and effort as an ‘ink-stained wretch’ had paid off well.
Over the course of a nearly three-decade career at the Times, Keller had made his way up
the ranks, occupying ever higher positions before assuming command of the most
powerful editorial desk in the entire newsroom. In the process, he had made a name for
himself, the magnitude of which, he thought, had grown so far out of proportion when
compared to his job description that he felt obligated to set the record straight.
Keller began his lede in that column by mentioning several power lists from
widely read publications in which his name featured prominently, including Forbes (he
was the magazine’s 50
th
most powerful person in the world, somewhere between the
Pope and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), and The New York Observer (Keller came in at
number 15 in the paper’s “Power 150” list of New York-based influencers, keeping
company with Lady Gaga and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg). These
and other honorable mentions, Keller claimed, caused him consternation. “What the
hell?” he wrote. “I run a newspaper. I haven’t cured a disease, governed a country, built a
business, discovered a galaxy or written a series of books about wizards or vampires.
What makes me so important?” (Keller).
What indeed. Journalists are known for many things, and humility is not typically
one of them. As in any other influential field, Keller’s is rife with robust egos, so to have
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a top-tier editor engage in this kind of public deflation might strike some as disingenuous,
as it did in the case of one of media personality whom he called out by name. Yet Keller
persisted, pointing to three factors that, at the time he wrote the column, may have
seemed gratuitous or smacked of yet another think piece bearing little interest to those
outside his immediate clique. However, recent history has proven his analysis to be on
point beyond the bounds of the New York City boroughs.
The first factor has to do with what Manuel Castells calls “communication
power.” This theoretical construct links Castells’ more general definition of power, or
“the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the
decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favor the empowered actor’s will, interests
and values,” to specific actors occupying gatekeeping positions within media networks
(Communication 10). In his reflexive, come-to-Jesus treatise on the contemporary state
and future of journalism, Keller, however sincerely, decried how “our fascination with
capital-M Media is so disengaged from what really matters,” inferring that delusion is
heightened by rituals such as the power lists he mentioned. He characterized the media
elect’s collective attitude of as, “It’s a media world, kids, and media begins with Me”
(Keller).
The overdetermined sense of global importance granted to and claimed by media
leaders could be chalked up to the fact that they are counted among the “programmers,”
or powerful actors who are able to create networks, in Castells’ model of the network
society. Many are also “switchers” who serve as connectors between larger media,
political, cultural and financial networks (Communication 5, 429). Thus, it only follows
that they would share a vested interest in associating themselves with the most influential
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people from government, business, entertainment and other fields; besides, who would be
able to (fact-) check their overstatements anyway?
Also of interest is how Keller pointedly connected the self-aggrandizement
described above to a kind of mystification that had enabled the programmers and
switchers of the financial industry to touch off a full-blown international economic crisis
starting in 2007. “Much as the creative minds of Wall Street found a way to divorce
investing from the messiness of tangible assets, enabling clients to buy shadows of
shadows,” Keller wrote, “we in Media have transcended earthbound activities like
reporting, writing or picture-taking and created an abstraction—a derivative—called
Media in which we invest our attention and esteem.” By mentioning the “orgy of self-
reference” he perceived among his colleagues in the same breath as the enormously
consequential economic meltdown, Keller brought his lofty insider chatter back to earth
and got to the core of the matter, which helpfully aligns with the crux of this thesis as
well (Keller). In short, it is this: what goes on in ideological zones, the creation of the
“shadows of shadows” by the powerful, leads to very real outcomes extending far beyond
the enrichment of those privileged actors.
The need to understand how celebrity plays into this equation is the last factor
Keller mentioned, in so many words. Given the tone of his argument, it is safe to say he
did not applaud what could be considered the introduction of realitics into his chosen
field, even if his home publication profited from it. “By turning news executives into
celebrities, we devalue the institutions that support them, the basics of craft and the
authority of editorial judgment,” he warned, adding that “[s]ome once-serious news
outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are
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“trending” on Twitter—the ‘American Idol’-ization of news” (Keller, emphasis added).
He spent much of the rest of his column unpacking how certain of his colleagues “have
bestowed our highest honor—market valuation—not on those who labor over the making
of original journalism but on aggregation,” taking up a thread pertinent to the function of
realitics in journalism in the process (Keller).
It is that same thread that runs through this chapter. This time, author,
commentator, online media magnate, and ‘thought leader’ Arianna Huffington will be the
primary focus. Huffington was one of the principal offenders at whom Keller took aim in
his Op-Ed for intensifying severalfold the industry-wide emphasis on aggregation, the
journalistic practice of reprinting content produced by other outlets, sometimes with
relatively minor tweaks and additions, and involving varying degrees of human
intervention. He was not alone in singling her out thusly. Along with her Internet-only
news source, The Huffington Post, now known as HuffPost, Huffington’s carefully
managed persona, which melds the public with the private, the domestic with the
inspired, the civic with the commercial, will provide the basis for a broader discussion
about how realitics functions vis-à-vis mainstream media sources and how news outlets
have fostered conditions that created and sustain the mode of realitics.
Also under close examination will be how journalism, specifically in the United
States, has become preoccupied with encouraging emulation and engaging in recruitment.
Both are activities, as the last chapter made apparent, that feed into to a bigger project of
‘personality politics,’ for which realitics is plainly well-suited. In this arrangement, media
operatives like Huffington serve as curators, interpreters and distributors of newsworthy
information while modeling responses, through various textual and performative means,
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for their audiences to replicate. More proactively, they also offer prototypes that invite
identification and assist subscribers in apprehending unfolding events and anticipating
future developments. These mimetically optimized enactments benefit individual media
personalities as well as the bigger interests that they serve, even as they are alternately
presented as desirable, justified, and, in an age of outrage, beholden only to the higher
authority of ‘common decency’ or, in Palin’s terms, “common sense” (Hogan).
Like Sarah Palin, Arianna Huffington has reinvented herself several times over.
At least one profiler has referred to this tendency in the deliberate language of religious
conversion, evoking Huffington’s periodic stints as a self-styled pop guru as well as her
storied connection to the religious group (or “high-demand group”) known as the
Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, or MSIA (Dubrow-Marshall and Dubrow-
Marshall 393). In keeping with the mode of realitics, she has also turned herself not just
into a leader to be venerated and a commentator to be solicited, but also a multi-platform
media creation with spinoffs and package deals primed for mass consumption. Among
the many artifacts to be examined are Huffington’s media properties, including The
Huffington Post, the 13 books she has authored, and her newest venture, Thrive Global.
Taken as texts in and of themselves, the many offshoots of Arianna Inc. can be read not
just as extensions of herself for others to consume, but as stepping stones that have
enabled her to grow her reserves of capital in various realms, and to augment her prestige
in each, while buoying her up during periods when she circulated between points of
reinsertion. Another of her most valuable contributions to this line of inquiry is that
Huffington has stockpiled rich material for exploring another central aspect of realitics:
the branding of the self.
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Broadly, Huffington has been instrumental in the intermingling of industries,
domains and institutions in which she has been active. She is undoubtedly a hybrid with a
well-established knack, not to mention the copious means, for regeneration. To refer back
to two known touchstones, Oprah Winfrey and another adept and visible early adopter of
realitics, Madonna, were busy refining that art form during the same period that the
former Arianna Stassinopoulos was en route to becoming Arianna Huffington. (Later,
like Oprah, Madonna, and Cher, she would be referred to simply as “Arianna.”) They
were far from the first media impresarios to fuse cultural and electoral politics, consumer
citizenship and self-branding to profitable effect; the process of morphing a person into a
“nationally advertised brand,” implicated with the invention of a “new category of human
emptiness,” was denounced by Daniel Boorstin as far back as 1962 in The Image (58).
Huffington initially followed predecessors’ examples but then innovated by harnessing
the capacities of online publishing and blending them with emergent and established
practices of celebrity—making her a hybrid developing a hybridized mode via a
hybridized medium.
Some of Keller’s descriptions of the present-day news media and the Forbes-
ranked leaders it has produced are not novel as such. Scholars from communication and
accordant fields have argued that one chief purpose of the mainstream news media in
America has long been to sell the public on the interests of the corporate and government
elite. That said, institutional, technological and cultural transformations have occurred in
recent decades that have given rise to new expressions of known quantities, so to speak,
as well as to new phenomena. They have also led, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
have argued, to another “crisis of governability” that has again required capitalism, that
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remarkably versatile and resilient economic system, to accommodate challenges and
unprecedented conditions in order to renew itself (199). According to Boltanski and
Chiapello’s analysis, another transition is well underway, as the title of their work The
New Spirit of Capitalism suggests.
This morphological theme is reinforced by other recent works on capitalism, such
as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Naomi Klein’s The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and Joseph E. Stiglitz’ The Price of
Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. None of those authors
buys into the portrayal of capitalism as an ideal, indispensable second wing needed to
keep any democratic society aloft—a cherished sensibility of subscribers to an
overdetermined and romanticized variant of free-market doctrine that insists democratic
governments must maintain a hands-off approach in order for the “invisible hand” to
work its magic (A. Smith). Rather, of interest here is how their projects speak to the
tenacity of the globally operant economic engine and describe its current and projected
impact. The media business, and certainly Arianna Huffington—via The Huffington Post,
Thrive Global, her alliances with big-business interests and consulting gigs with rideshare
tech giant Uber and the World Economic Forum—have enabled that engine to propel
itself into the digital age, using resources that had previously been considered more
valuable in other worlds, so to speak, than in the market polity (Boltanski and Thévènot
78).
This thesis takes the position that economies of attention and money are
interdependent and are essential generative apparatuses for power vis-à-vis realitics.
Accordingly, industries and actors that traffic in the coadjuvant domains of celebrity and
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journalism are tied to those economies. Arianna Huffington is an especially apt subject
because she has become emblematic of, and instrumental in, contemporary schemes
mingling fame, media, and international politics. She is a ‘disruptor,’ to use a go-to term
of her industry, who has been enabled by celebrity journalism and has accrued abundant
capital in attentional and financial economies by circulating between and within zones of
influence.
On a more portentous note, Bill Keller, who devoted column inches in his 2011
New York Times Op-Ed to classifying Huffington as the “queen of aggregation,” is not an
outlier in his assessments of the host of problems precipitated and exacerbated by figures
like her and projects like The Huffington Post. In Keller’s view, Huffington “has
discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid
bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add
a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come” (Keller). Per Keller, party to a
sizable chorus of detractors, Huffington’s site represents one of the more exploitative,
destructive forces to have knocked journalism further off its already wobbly axis since
the advent of the Internet.
All these are critiques that Huffington has not taken sitting down. She has met
such disapproval similarly to how she has run her enterprises—e.g., with tactics
optimized for the domain of realitics, as well as to more traditional electoral politics, to
marketing, and even some that are found in multi-level marketing outfits and alternative
spiritual movements. In numerous instances, she has insisted that her conversions and
iterations (a word she has used repeatedly to describe one of her favored corporate
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strategies), as well as her leadership style and decisions, stemmed from disparate, even
opposing, impulses to those attributed by onlookers.
Conflicting interpretations aside, what is certain is that Huffington recognized the
need for leaders even of sectors previously considered exempt from, superfluous to, or
endangered by the fame game that the Bill Kellers of her world have so vociferously
disparaged to make the performance of a curated public self an integral extension of their
professional enterprise—herself included. Concomitantly, she was furthering a trend
taking shape in new technologies such as social media and blogging that were
increasingly requiring citizens to curate and market their own public selves. Also evident
is that her profile offers multiple inroads, accessible through a broad range of theoretical
options, for any study of realitics aiming to plant itself in terra firma while offering
enough of an expansive view to amount to more than a protracted descriptive exercise.
of which are no doubt commencing as this one concludes.

Arianna Rising
That said, a little description, supplemented with the subject’s own
autobiographical narration and outside commentary, is necessary for further analysis. The
daughter of Greek management consultant and newspaper industrialist Konstantinos
Stassinopoulos, Arianna Stassinopoulos grew up in Athens before moving as a teenager
to Great Britain with her mother, Elli Stassinopoulos, and her sister, Agapi. Her ambition
and keen sense for timing and trends, and for the care and feeding of the public self, were
detectable early on in her resolve to attend the University of Cambridge and become part
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of the blue-blooded British intellectual set despite her status as a recent migrant with
newly acquired and accented English.
Her efforts paid off, and she propelled herself into the uppermost strata of
Cambridge’s exclusive scholarly society. There, in the company of the late Pakistani
President Benazir Bhutto, she cultivated rhetorical abilities and gained exposure as the
third female and first foreign-born president of the Cambridge Union debate society
(Solway). As she recounted in Lauren Collins’ October 2008 New Yorker profile, “The
Oracle: The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington,” the nascent public speaker found her
calling as a key member of that exalted team. “The Cambridge Union became another
cathedral,” Collins wrote, quoting Huffington’s reaction upon encountering that house of
worship: “I was so spellbound by the spectacle of great speakers and people being moved
or angered by their words” (L. Collins).
The spiritual streak referenced in Collins’ piece and captured in the title of her
profile is a component of Huffington’s persona that she has chosen to highlight or
downplay at various points along her career. In her post-Cambridge years, she outwardly
gravitated toward conservative Christianity, of the sort that would gain traction in the
U.S. Republican Party in the 1980s and early ‘90s, while privately continuing to meet
with MSIA creator and alleged cult leader John-Roger Hinkins. The uneasy correlation
between her religious allegiances constituted one of several contradictions that she would
manage to sustain, along with the resulting blowback, for decades to come.
Here is another: following on her prestigious leadership role at the helm of a
highly competitive debate team at a historically male-dominated university, Huffington’s
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next project put some of her more ‘traditional’ beliefs to work in the service of furthering
her career as … an independent single woman. In 1973, she published her first book, The
Female Woman, under her maiden name of Arianna Stassinopoulos; she withstood 37
rejections before a publisher looked at her draft (“5 Things”). In that book, she disputed
the ideas of The Female Eunuch author Germaine Greer and other prominent feminists
while grabbing hold of a live wire of a topic: second-wave feminism and its import vis-à-
vis contemporary (Western) women. Here, Collins’ piece again provides illumination:
Her evisceration of the Women’s Liberation movement led to “The Female
Woman” (1973), in which she argued that men and women should be free to
occupy equal—but distinct—roles. Huffington now speaks of the book as a
harbinger of post-feminism, but it is more reactionary than she may care to
remember. (“Women’s Lib claims that the achievement of total liberation would
transform the lives of all women for the better; the truth is that it would transform
only the lives of women with strong lesbian tendencies.”) In any case, it was a hit,
furthering her career as a budding celebrity contrarian (L. Collins).
Huffington’s contribution to that debate was not indicative of her current stance,
as with many of her views and political affiliations, and requiring unwavering
consistency from opinion leaders of any stripe would make for an unreasonable demand.
That is somewhat beside the point, though, as in the arc of her career The Female Woman
represented an even more crucial feat than becoming a newly minted author and
provocateur. It marked the first time she claimed a position, albeit one she would later
downplay, as well as fashioned and marketed a public persona to go with it, on a volatile
issue situated at a cross-section of numerous societal fissures. Like Sarah Palin and
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Phyllis Schlafly, and perhaps even the Dixie Chicks, the future Mrs. Huffington had
discovered that one way of dealing with the flak she caught for making a living out of
being an outspoken woman in the public sphere was to emphasize her gender as an
integral part of her act.
This transformative impulse and instinct for profitable debate would serve
Huffington well and would provide the materials for her to reinvent herself several times
over during her many ‘lives’ that ensued. In this regard, she differs from the Dixie Chicks
in that her divisive moves have been reliably received as calculated and opportunistic
above all else, particularly when read against the arc of her entire career. However, as
was certainly the case with the Dixie Chicks, Jane Fonda, and Sarah Palin, it bears
repeating that her presence as an ambitious, politically forthright woman in the public
sphere provoked a barrage of disparaging, trivializing, often sexualized remarks and
comparisons from maligners.
When it came to Huffington, those insults took on a certain creative splendor,
drawing literary and celestial inspiration, as in: “the most upwardly mobile Greek since
Icarus,” “Staryanna Comeacroppalos,” “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbing,”
“Mrs. Messiah,” and the “right-wing Lady Macbeth” (L. Collins; Harris; “Mrs. Messiah”;
Andrews). An assortment of slightly less grandiose affronts and intimations would
follow, e.g.: “a woman who changes her politics like Jennifer Lopez switches husbands,”
the “queen of aggregation,” a “pirate” and an “intellectual lap dancer,” “beautiful but
evil,” and “the intellectual equivalent of Paris Hilton” (Andrews; Keller; Lindenberger).
Hits and hot takes on Huffington from within the stream of media chatter she sought to
influence have continued the trend of referencing Huffington’s Greek roots, some adding
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a Mount Olympus-themed spin. Among those gems are the following: “high-grade
Cassandra,” “cultural magician,” “ferocious networker,” “protean self-reinventionist,”
and “the Greek goddess of me, me, me” (Andrews; Grigoriadis; “Arianna”).
None of these sobriquets has seemingly fazed Huffington, even if a couple have
proven hard to shake. In fact, she has embraced the more flattering and wryly repeated
some of the less gracious ones by way of amplifying her publicity through
reappropriation, a.k.a. prolepsis. She used that trick in the same defiant way as the Dixie
Chicks, which can have a defusing effect on the terms themselves while, paradoxically,
empowering the target (Galinsky et al.). In the process, she availed herself of another of
the tenets of realitics: Repetition equals recognition equals relevance equals currency in
the marketplace of attention. According to this rationale, it is viewed as auspicious to be
attacked since, as will come up again in Chapter Six, any publicity is good publicity. That
is, it can be good if the would-be realitician has her wits about her and is versed in the art,
and so long as she works to her advantage the potential for repetition to create the
appearance of truth, or at least to hike up her relevance quotient.
Thus, repetition and exposure can work both ways. If, as Michel Foucault posited,
power is afforded those who take charge of the dominant discourse, then for Huffington
and her ilk, becoming a frequent mention within that discourse, in addition to shaping it,
is a boon.
22
During her post-university and pre-Huffington Post years—“my Icarus
phase,” she joked in a 2005 Vanity Fair article—she sharply gauged public moods as she
transformed from fledgling author to GOP power-wife to political commentator to Web
publishing mogul to self-styled and spiritualized lifestyle guru, often occupying more
than one of these roles concurrently as she progressed (Andrews).
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Along the way, she dropped a series of books like a crumb trail that traced her
political and cultural evolution. Her biographies on Maria Callas, published in 1980, and
Pablo Picasso, from 1988, and compositions on Greek history and culture published in
1983, drew notice. She faced accusations of plagiarism regarding her Callas and Picasso
efforts, which were not to be the only occasions in which she would be suspected of
trading on others’ ideas (L. Collins). Next, she prioritized politics, first from the right side
of the spectrum and then, during the final years of the Clinton administration, banking
left. Interspersed among the more overtly political titles published from the ‘90s
onward—Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are
Undermining America (1997), Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom (1998), How to
Overthrow the Government (2000), Fanatics & Fools: How Politicians are Betraying the
American People (2004), Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America,
Shredded the Constitution, And Made Us Less Safe (2008); Third World America: How
Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Ordinary Citizen (2010)—were works reflecting an
esoteric impulse, such as The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul (1994), and On
Becoming Fearless: in Love, Work and Life (2006), Thrive: The Third Metric to
Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom and Wonder (2014), and
The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time (2015). The latter
grouping demonstrated Huffington’s grasp of the benefits of working a self-help element
into her public corpus, as other channelers of the zeitgeist such as Winfrey had so
gainfully done before her.
Huffington’s oeuvre shifted in tandem with her personal-professional narrative.
She deftly adapted, first, from Cambridge-groomed author to the woman about town who
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ingratiated herself to the crème de la crème of ‘70s Manhattan. In her toast-of-New-York
phase, she counted celebrities like Barbara Walters and high-society fixtures like Ann
Getty among her inner circle. She dated writer and public intellectual Bernard Levin,
whom she has said was responsible for part of her basic training regime. As she put it,
“[g]oing to bed with Bernard Levin was a liberal education” (Skidelsky). It was during
this time that she was schooled in fielding negative coverage and was awarded the
“Icarus” nickname. That backhanded compliment—in that at least she was depicted as
advancing rapidly upward, suggesting relevance—served as another telling marker of her
burgeoning celebrity (Broadbent).
Importantly, in addition to keeping company with Manhattan’s conversation-
starters, she also became part of the conversation. New York City’s news business runs
on its own sycophantic logic, so a curiosity like the young Greek import with Oxbridge
airs splashing around the patriciate was bound to set keen press packs circling, even as
they cloaked their fascination in disdain. What would perhaps be her most memorable,
and again double-edged, profile was published by New York magazine in 1983 and was
recalled in yet another portrait in 2005 by Vanity Fair:
It happened so fast that it took a while for people to figure out how she’d done it.
Just 30, brand-new in New York, and without benefit of wealth or a title, Arianna
was throwing dinner parties at her East Side duplex for her new friends Marietta
Tree, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Mercedes Bass, Lucky Roosevelt, Ann
Getty, Dr. Jonas Salk, Lane Kirkland, and Bill Paley. There were dinners at the
Reagan White House, lunches at Le Cirque, and charity balls, at which Arianna—
in lavish designer gowns and Bulgari jewels—frequently earned a mention in the
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gossip columns. Those columns also printed the rumors (cleverly encouraged by
Arianna, some said) of her relationships with well-known men such as Jerry
Brown and the publisher and real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman. “The Rise
and Rise of Arianna Stassinopoulos” was the headline of a 1983 New York
magazine article that chronicled Arianna’s social climb, noting in particular her
knack for establishing “instant intimacy” with prominent figures and her
willingness to send invitations to people she barely knew (Andrews).
Such was the fate of the ambitious woman of her station. What for men was called
‘networking’ was for her framed as ‘social climbing’; in place of boardrooms were salons
and dinner parties; social contacts were code for business contacts. Huffington could
work with that.
For her next act, she would land in California, a territory big enough to
accommodate her many paradoxes. There, she took up a more conservative mantle as
mother to daughters Christina and Isabella and socialite wife to fossil-fuel millionaire and
Republican California congressman Michael Huffington. She professed a Christian faith
while still reportedly cultivating her interest in MSIA and its charismatic leader Hinkins
behind the scenes. That last connection would fade in and out of focus in Arianna
Huffington’s public plot depending on the circumstances, but traces of the association
have been spotted in certain of her writings, e.g., The Fourth Metric: The Call of the
Soul. It turned up as well in her financial history—in 1994, Vanity Fair journalist
Maureen Orth tracked $35,000 in donations from Huffington to a MSIA-affiliated
organization over the years 1990 to 1993—and later in her oversight of The Huffington
Post and its employees (Orth, “Arianna’s”).
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It certainly did not help her during her tenure as Mrs. Michael Huffington,
California conservative—or, as she was called in the headline of The Economist’s Oct.
15, 1994 fault-finding essay, “Mrs. Messiah.” That play on words was also a nod to her
ties to MSIA, which is pronounced “Messiah,” in part to reinforce Hinkins’ assertion that
he ranked above Jesus Christ in the metaphysical power list, and to Hinkins himself
(“Mrs. Messiah”). Opposition researchers, gossip sheets and political rivals from that
period seized upon her relation to the man known as John-Roger, or J-R, who gained a
rap sheet for allegedly leading a cult. J-R was said to live lavishly in Los Angeles’
Mandeville Canyon after taking a vow of poverty and was accused of sexually abusing
young male followers after taking a vow of chastity. Among the mottos attributed to J-R:
“Use everything to your advantage” (White).
“Thank goodness for Arianna Stassinopoulos,” began The Economist’s “Mrs.
Messiah” piece, “socialite, author, former minister in a Californian religious cult and wife
of millionaire Michael Huffington, the first-term Republican congressman from Santa
Barbara who is out to buy himself a seat in the Senate.” The story was released at the
time Michael Huffington, who had moved to Santa Barbara with Arianna and their
children, had successfully landed a seat in Congress with the help of his wife’s vigorous
promotional efforts. Snipers taking aim from Washington, D.C. circles claimed Mrs.
Huffington’s drive, impeded by her inability to run for president herself due to her
migrant status, compelled her to settle for the next best option of pushing her husband
into ever higher political positions. “Without Mrs. Huffington’s bizarre antics and
vaunting ambition, political reporters in California would be thrust off the front page by
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the courtroom machinations in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial,” the Economist
story continued. “She has arrived just in time” (Mrs. Messiah).
As it happened, her GOP-boosting phase lasted roughly as long as her marriage.
Michael Huffington bid for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat failed in 1994, the same year
that he backed the intensely contested anti-immigration measure Proposition 187.
Meanwhile, his wife drew bad press for allegedly hiring undocumented immigrants as
household staffers, some of whom claimed abuse at her hands. She was lambasted for
aligning herself with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and for championing
volunteerism and charity over government welfare programs while allegedly dodging her
own duties in that regard (Orth). Around 1997, her marriage dissolved when Michael
Huffington elected to come out of the closet as bisexual.
23
She traded in the political
allegiance that had earned her a syndicated column, along with the ‘helmet hair’ worn by
‘90s conservative women, and moved on. Once again, she did so as an independent
woman, in terms of her marital, financial, and party status. Her stated reason for her
break with the GOP: irreconcilable differences over the issue of income inequality
(Andrews).
In 2003, just nine years after her husband backed Proposition 187, Arianna
Huffington ran for governor of the immigrant-rich state as an independent candidate
during California’s recall election. Notably, another prominent realitician, actor Arnold
Schwarzenegger, emerged as the winner of that contest, retracing fellow Hollywood
ambassador Ronald Reagan’s steps to Sacramento and remaining in office until 2011. In
Huffington’s words, the race came down to “the hybrid versus the Hummer,” a scenario
in which she cast herself as the hybrid and Schwarzenegger as the gas-guzzling SUV,
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despite her still-recent marital affiliation with a man who had made his fortune in the oil
business (Cohan).
In short, Huffington’s bid flopped. She pulled out of the race just shy of the
election with a dismal projection at the polls and more bad press. Voters still remembered
her conservative persona and positions, and her self-promotional style won her few fans
in newsrooms. The New York Times’ Charlie LeDuff called the Schwarzenegger-
Huffington face-off the “Arnold and Arianna Show,” a designate that was reinforced by a
fall 2003 incident in which Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, were
photobombed by Huffington as they stopped to pose for press cameras trained on the
couple (LeDuff).
Schwarzenegger had proved a worthy rival in realitics as well as at the polls. He
helped to sink Huffington’s candidacy by pointing out that, despite her rallies for
economic equality, it was discovered that she had paid less than $1,000 in personal
income tax over prior two years. Dubbing the recall a “sideshow,” LeDuff quoted
Schwarzenegger’s biggest zinger in a late-September debate: “Arianna. Your personal
income tax is the biggest loophole. I could drive my Hummer through it” (LeDuff).
Clearly, Schwarzenegger was also versed in the art of reappropriation.
Huffington was undeterred by that defeat, or at least not daunted for long. Taking
solace in the same maternal guidance that she has dispensed in multiple interviews—“My
mother said failure was a stepping-stone to success,” she has told The Guardian and other
outlets—she re-emerged two years later (Aitkenhead). This time, her outing consisted of
the conspicuous debut of The Huffington Post on May 9, 2005. Her personal fortunes, not
to mention the entire journalism industry, were irrevocably changed by her gale-force
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entrée into that chaotic field. summed up according to the operative term of ‘exploiting
contingencies.’

Celebrity Is the Killer App
As media legend has it, The Huffington Post, a.k.a. HuffPo or HuffPost, was
conceived as a calculated political intervention, its raison d’être described time and again
as the Democratic counterpart to the American right’s most influential media outlet of the
late 1990s (Stelter, “Huffington”). This origin story was retold in matter-of-fact fashion
by William D. Cohan in the Sept. 8, 2016 edition of Vanity Fair:
The Huffington Post was not founded to be a business that generated enormous
profits. Before it became the 154
th
most popular Web site in the world, its goal
was chiefly political. Following John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 presidential
election, Huffington and her co-founders, including the investor Ken Lerer and
the digital-media savant Jonah Peretti, conspired to create a liberal version of the
conservative online juggernaut, the Drudge Report (Cohan, “The Inside”).
In January 1998, while Arianna Huffington was striking out on her own and prepping her
post-divorce reboot, conservative media influencer Matt Drudge fired a warning shot
signaling that the days of legacy media dominance were numbered, as were the days of
high-powered politicians’ relative insulation to the forces of celebrity gossip, while
nearly abbreviating President Bill Clinton’s tenure in the Oval Office by breaking the
news about Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. From that point
on, Internet-based journalism, with its structural impact on the pace (as in, the news cycle
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never ends), format (blogging is king; make everything grabby, shareable, and viral) and
basic requirements for participation (your garden-variety wired device and publishing
software), would gradually come to test the dominant market positions of broadcast, print
and other legacy media formats while challenging the most powerful gate-keepers in, and
prized conventions of, the journalistic trade.
In early stages, these changes appeared as welcome developments that would
bring about a more level playing field for media producers and map out new spaces for
independent and ‘citizen’ journalism. In the long run, however, the industry-wide
upheaval that was partly caused by, and partly coincided with, the rise of online
journalism also provided openings through which corporate and other powerful interests
could lay claim to the new territory in correspondingly creative ways. As one ready
example, the Drudge Report, although independent in terms of ownership, has
consistently maintained close affiliations to the Republican Party. Matt Drudge and his
colleagues have aired right-wing viewpoints on issues ranging from climate change to
abortion to gun control to immigration while buttressing platforms for GOP candidates on
the local and national levels.
As journalist and Game Change co-author Mark Halperin commented in an Oct.
1, 2006 ABC story on Drudge and his signature site, “Matt Drudge is not doing stories on
policy, on welfare, on healthcare. He’s doing stories on the most salacious aspects of
American politics.” According to Halperin, Drudge’s tilt toward things salacious has paid
off in spades: “When that drives the dialogue, that’s where the country heads, that’s
where our political coverage heads.” Drudge demurred, rejecting affiliations except for
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one in his self-description as quoted in the same ABC piece: “I’m a sucker for a good
story,” he said. “I go where the stink is. I’m a partisan for news” (Halperin).
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Drudge was not the only one in his industry with that strong sense; nor was
Halperin, for that matter. Among Huffington’s most noteworthy plays in the post-Y2K
online journalism scene took the form of the star-studded lineup of characters she
assembled for Huff Post’s launch. As part of her brain trust, she called upon liberal media
specialist Peter Daou, who had aided 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s
effort, and would go on to lead the digital team for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 White House
run. Huffington enlisted Democratic consultant James Boyce, too, and on Dec. 3, 2004,
Daou and Boyce showed up at her home in L.A.’s tony Brentwood area, where she had
worked the networking skills that had made her New York gatherings into media events
and assembled a room of more than two dozen Left Coast power-progressives, many of
them hailing from “the industry.” Counted among them were Hollywood producers Brian
Grazer and Norman Lear; studio executive and media magnate David Geffen; actress
Meg Ryan; West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin; and comedian Larry David and his
then-wife Laurie David, future producer of political documentary An Inconvenient Truth
starring former Vice President Al Gore (Cohan, “Huffing”).
Huffington also sought the guidance of Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report right-hand
man Andrew Breitbart during that formative phase (Cohan, “Huffing”). Like Daou and
Boyce, Breitbart would later claim credit for coming up with the premise for The
Huffington Post; Daou and Boyce took that claim to court in a lawsuit that was filed in
2010 and settled in 2014. Daou and Boyce alleged that they drafted and distributed the
memorandum that contained the key ingredients for what became Huffington’s site, after
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which point Huffington ran with their ideas, raising $1 million without their knowledge.
Huffington denied any theft and attempted to fight the suit before settling (Gardner).
Meanwhile, Breitbart told Wired in 2010 that it was he who had “drafted the plan” for
HuffPost, and the others had “followed the plan” (Cohan, “Huffing”).
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In better days, Daou and Boyce contributed blog posts along with their combined
energies to the site’s growth. The aforementioned “savant” Peretti, who helped officiate
The Huffington Post’s launch, is still cited as a co-founder, and had a hand in its early
successes before becoming co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, had a strong sense for
what he thought Huffington, and only Huffington, brought to the table. Michael Shapiro
relays Peretti’s impressions of his former colleague in a way that could not be better
attuned to this chapter’s themes in his 2012 Columbia Journalism Review tour de Huff
Post, “Six Degrees of Aggregation: How The Huffington Post Ate the Internet”:
He had already seen how effectively he could spread content. But the networks he
created did not last. Arianna Huffington’s networks did. He had watched her
move between networks she had created—no one, he believed, worked harder at
it—all the while connecting people in a way that made them feel a part of
something. It was not merely making weak ties into strong ones: “She makes her
weak ties feel like strong ties.” And that, he recognized, “creates a large network
of all kinds of people who feel close to you. That’s really important for power.”
To succeed, he concluded, the site that was to become Huffington Post would
have to be both viral and sticky. People would have to feel a connection that
brought them back. They would also need to have things they could share with
other people. And what better way to take fullest advantage of the blogging boom
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than to have famous people do it? The blogging world might well hate it, but
“they wouldn’t be able not to look,” he later said. “Even the haters would come
every day” (Shapiro).
Huffington’s gift for recruiting celebrities showed up in flashing lights on The
Huffington Post’s homepage. Starting when the site went live, Huffington trotted out a
long list of well-known friends and acquaintances, using others’ fame to amplify her own
by virtue of their shared online space. Her name on the masthead floating over their
bylines, the image of her face displayed in a headshot next to her marquee column above
the fold, implied proximity and personal association. She had quite literally built the
transitive property of realitics into the layout of her site; indeed, Vanity Fair described it
fittingly as “part Internet salon” and, “on the day it launched, the biggest burst of star
power ever to hit the blogosphere” (Andrews).
Huffington further innovated through her emphasis on blogging—the blend of
reporting, opinion writing, and journaling that was becoming a common practice by the
time HuffPost was ready for primetime—as a predominant journalistic form on the site.
She also repurposed her celebrity associations with regard to the content covered in the
articles on HuffPost and her ability to offer a view into celebrity dioramas in which she
participated as one of the same privileged set. She was not the first to pick up on that
trend, but she definitely cornered the market on the contentious and asymmetrically
rewarding business of celebrity blogging. Her most unique, and consequential,
contributions to a field already ransacked by celebrity are evidenced by how the earliest
editions of her publication were so proportionally packed with content written by famous
people. Under Huffington’s banner, ‘celebrity journalism’ took on a new meaning, as
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stars from multiple milieus joined her digitized network. Actress and author Jamie Lee
Curtis; writer Nora Ephron; top Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel; writer, producer and
actor Larry David; actors Warren Beatty, Alec Baldwin and John Cusack; former and
later California Governor Jerry Brown; politician and activist Tom Hayden; playwright
David Mamet; actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Louis-Dreyfus; Norman Lear; self-
help and health guru Deepak Chopra; and onetime Newt Gingrich aide-turned-right-wing
commentator Tony Blankley would try their hands as Huff Post’s bold-faced journalists.
(More hybrids.)
Consequently, readers were invited to become fans, and fans readers. Cele-
bloggers became VIPs in Huffington’s computer-generated diorama, as well as bait in a
virtual fishbowl, enticing readers with a false sense of accessibility by offering
themselves up in the form of calculatedly candid texts, avatars who appeared to linger
just on the other side of the screen. As with other forms of social media, the HuffPost
screen acted as a portal, a camera, a mirror, and the slight, transparent membrane
separating the famous from their fans. According to the woman at the switchboard, the
lure was harmless at worst, enlightening at best. In fact, from where she sat, celebrity
could even be beneficial for democracy, and her site a force for the general good.
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Adweek’s Robert Klara caught on to this argument and relayed it in her words:
Huffington prefers to characterize HuffPost as a media-democracy machine, one
that gives bloggers a huge audience they would not otherwise have, and one
whose broad mix of content—news and commentary, politics and sports, black
voices and gay issues—delivers “the best of the Web” (Klara).
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Readers who stumbled onto the Huffington Post looking for, perhaps, Alec Baldwin’s
latest essay or paparazzi-style “sideboob” shots of famous women might just click around
and learn a thing or two on one of the scores of verticals housed on Huffington’s Hydra
of a site, including several featuring professionally reported and edited stories. HuffPost’s
Politics section happened to be one of those. Come for the celebrity skin, stay for the
politics.
In making her case for Huff Post’s dizzying variety, and in addressing any number
of other applicable contexts, Huffington has dispensed advice in the form of one of her
favorite catchphrases, again passed down from her mother: “Change the channel, darling”
(Aitkenhead). There was something for everyone, and if visitors did not like an aspect of
the site, they could switch it up and find another story or section more to their taste. As
Huffington told television talk-show host Wendy Williams in a 2014 appearance on The
Wendy Williams Show, “I believe human beings like everything. They like lowbrow and
highbrow and everything in between.” She then attempted to enlist Williams on her
sitelet for people 50 and over; “you have to write for it, please,” Huffington told Williams
(Wendy Williams).
Given that it was deliberately hatched to provide a counterpoint to the likes of
Drudge Report, it is not a stretch to say that Huff Post was especially intended to be good
for the Democrats. If the website, with the help of its army of famous names, could make
fans into readers, it might also turn them into voters, another kind of alchemy, and
recruitment, that realitics can abet. It also assisted in the cultivation, as did other sites and
news sources, of what I would call communities of belief. Realitics helps to create
communities of belief and organizes people according to parameters that may or may not
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have to do with those aspects of their demographic profiles that have historically been
considered significant. Similar to fan bases, these communities tend to revolve around
shared enthusiasms—celebrity and politics being two possibilities, with respect to
HuffPost. Unlike communities of people in the offline realm, they are not necessarily
organized geographically, although they can be, nor do they necessarily cohere within
family or clan units, and individuals may belong to several different conflicting,
contradictory or even directly antagonistic communities of belief.
Huffington herself played a key role in the recruitment of readers/fans/potential
voters within the domain of her eponymous news outlet. Her personal brand, and by
extension The Huffington Post’s brand, was connected to her own success and fame, as
well as to her famous connections. She needed to be cast as the switcher who brought
everyone together in her virtual salon, which Vanity Fair’s Suzanna Andrews memorably
characterized according to an image from Huffington’s Manhattan heyday, adding a
clever flourish in her reappropriation of gendered language and reworking of gender
dynamics. “With the Huffington Post,” Andrews wrote in 2005, “Arianna might finally
have it all—attention, influence, and the chance to showcase her ideas and those of her
interesting friends in the biggest dinner party she’s ever thrown” (Andrews). Once again,
fame and partisan politics had found a new way, and a new medium, in which to mix;
once again, celebrity is the killer app. summed up according to the operative term of
‘exploiting contingencies.’

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Mixed Reception
Huffington’s large-scale deployment of celebrity in service of the democratic (and
Democratic) cause was not met with universal praise, to say the least. The risk of mixing
celebrity and politics had long complicated matters for American candidates on the
stump, for elected officials, and for advocacy campaigns of all kinds that sought alliances
with stars for their mutual benefit. Similar hazards awaited Huffington as she rolled out
The Huffington Post.
Naturally, several of the initial assaults on Huffington’s creation came from the
right. “Is the HuffPost Toast?” wondered The National Review’s Catherine Seipp just 10
days after the big unveiling (Seipp). Ned Rice followed suit on May 25 in the same
publication, christening HuffPost “The Drudgery Report,” calling the site Huffington’s
“latest elaborate ploy to write off her cocktail parties as a business expense” and joking
that her term for her chosen format, “a ‘group blog,’” is tantamount to “calling it a
personal journal-by-committee with all the charm, originality and integrity that that
implies” (Rice; Barrett).
Not content to stop there, Rice sized up HuffPost’s earliest offerings and sniffed,
“it feels mostly like a groupthink tank … I’m predicting it’ll be at least as successful as
Arianna’s last campaign for governor and you can quote me on that” (Rice). Powered less
by schadenfreude than by fear for journalism’s future was syndicated columnist Cal
Thomas’ write-up for Tribune Media Services, “The Blog That Ate Real Journalism.”
After speculating that The Huffington Post “would have delighted P.T. Barnum,” Thomas
sounded a note of warning while chalking blogs up to a faddish phase that he hoped
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would pass before journalists and readers returned to their senses and to the support of
“real journalism”:
The problem with blogs such as The Huffington Post is that they divert our
attention from real and serious journalism … With blogs, we do not know if what
we read is true. For most blogs, no editor checks for factual errors and no one is
restrained from editorializing … Blogs have no checks and balances … I
suspect—and hope—that once the bloom is off the blogs, serious people (and they
seem to be an endangered species) might still crave real journalism and be able to
remember what it looked and sounded like (Thomas).
Thomas’ cautionary column augured some of the criticism that would plague HuffPost,
particularly about editing and fact-checking as publishing standards were seemingly
relaxed. Also of interest in Thomas’ lament is the familiar implication, one frequently
associated with celebrity journalism, that blogs distract from and are dangerous to real
journalism, as well as his sense of foreboding about the long-term repercussions that
could result from the proliferation of blogging and other newfangled forms.
The most searing critique of HuffPost in its infancy came from the legendarily
acerbic journalist Nikki Finke, who enjoyed a long reign of terror in Hollywood while
writing for several outlets, The Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly among them, before
presiding over her own Internet-only trade publication, Deadline Hollywood. Finke
issued a gleefully blistering review of The Huffington Post in an L.A. Weekly column
published on May 12, 2005, a mere three days after HuffPo’s unveiling, in which she all
but resorted to pyrotechnics to make it clear that, as far as she was concerned, Huffington
and her flashy band of celeb contributors should not quit their respective day jobs. Some
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selections from Finke’s vitriolic barn-burner, which lives on in infamy as an ironic bit of
Web 2.0 history, merits reprinting in full here. Its original headline was “Celebs to the
Slaughter: Why Arianna’s Blog Blows”:
Judging from Monday’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity
blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has
undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of
herself. What her bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree right-to-left
conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t
accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This
website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. Her blog is
such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s
Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina
Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar.
No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the
consequences. It seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a
card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she has
served up liberal celebs like raw meat on a silver platter for the salivating and
Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. I hear that prominent
liberals in L.A. and N.Y. and Washington D.C. are aghast not just that she’s
encouraged jejune rants by their liberal brethren, but that she’s also provided
yet another forum for select right-wing blowhards. They don’t understand why
Arianna has saddled progressives with that “Hollywood elitist” branding
(Finke).
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Included in Finke’s dishy onslaught were revelations about startup woes that
Huffington had ostensibly encountered. Movie producer David Geffen’s alleged dis of
Huffington’s project, said Finke, took the form of a refusal to blog for Huff Post, after his
name had been floated as part of the site’s promotional blitz, and the insistence that she
stop overselling her contributors’ lineup by using his cachet to bolster her own, again
tainting Huffington with the gauche mien of the social climber. Finke also railed about
Huffington’s inclusion in her advisory team of “Drudge Report aide-de-camp” Andrew
Breitbart, who with Mark Ebner had co-authored an anti-Hollywood screed with the self-
explanatory title Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon—The Case Against
Celebrity (Breitbart and Ebner). Over the next decade, his Breitbart empire would
become an even more influential online publication than The Drudge Report.
Finke’s burn went way past the scorching point, but through a combination of
sympathy and notoriety, her takedown did not ultimately take. In fact, TheWrap’s Sharon
Waxman and other media-watchers including Breitbart himself, who called Waxman
nearly six years later to relive that moment, came away with the distinct impression that
Finke’s column had had the opposite effect. Affirming that controversy is its own kind of
currency, and that being in the conversation is its own reward, they agreed that the
skirmish had boosted Huffington’s profile and prospects. As Breitbart said, “it granted
Arianna sympathy at the exact moment she needed it” (Waxman). In both form and
function, Waxman’s February 7, 2011 column, “The Internet Remembers: Nikki Finke’s
DOA Verdict on HuffPo,” again illustrates the nonsequential quality of realitics that
inflects the cultural production of meaning in the Internet age: Time does not always
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follow a one-way, linear progression, and the significance of events can be reconfigured
long after the fact.
Or, sometimes all it takes is a year. In that short span, Finke reversed her stance
on Huff Post, calling the site “essential” reading; Time magazine featured Huffington in
its annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people (Matt Drudge, Columbia
Journalism Review’s Michael Shapiro noted, was also on that list); Huffington’s fund-
raising team had rustled up another $5 million; and advertising revenue, like the site’s
traffic, was robust (Shapiro). By July 2009, the Columbia Journalism Review had
declared The Huffington Post to be “a success in the financial sense” (Dellamere).
Subsequent indicators that Huffington and Huff Post had registered in its industry took
the form of awards, including more than a dozen Webby Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.
27

David Wood, then working as senior military correspondent, landed the latter honor in
2012 for a10-part series Huff Post ran the previous October about the struggles of
American veterans who had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan (Calderone). The
Pulitzer win put The Huffington Post on the map as a force in news and shored up the
new medium against lingering skepticism on the part of some legacy media institutions
toward web-based sources.
Meanwhile, Huffington became a sought-out commodity as a new media expert,
as a featured speaker, and as a commentator operating on multiple channels and platforms
in addition to her home base. She held forth about the news business, plus politics,
current events, entertainment—whatever was trending. Her regular Huff Post pieces
offered fodder for conversations and debates in and about the media. She put the know-
how she’d gained from her Cambridge Union years, and from decades since, to work in
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asserting, branding, promoting, and at times defending herself and her ideas in various
arenas. She responded to Keller’s column from the start of this chapter, for example, with
her own fighting words, as encapsulated by the headline of her March 10, 2011 blog post,
“Bill Keller Accuses Me of ‘Aggregating’ an Idea He Had Actually ‘Aggregated’ From
Me” (Huffington, “Bill”). Their public match became fodder for public consumption and
for commentary by their journalistic peers.
A professed interest in reinvigorating liberal political discourse in the online
space in response to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection may have set The Huffington Post
in motion, but the publication did not lose momentum once neoconservatives running the
government from the right side of the aisle were obliged to make way for new leadership
under President Barack Obama in late 2008. The Huffington Post’s fortunes surged with
Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s, starting with a ritzy inauguration weekend event
sponsored by the site on January 19, 2009. “The HuffPo Ball” took place at the Newseum
in Washington, D.C., the same day that former Vice President Al Gore was also in town,
presiding over the Green Inaugural Ball. The Oprah Winfrey Show recorded a sold-out
special episode at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, L.L. Cool J and
Russell Simmons held court at the Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball, and Michelle Obama hosted a
children’s concert featuring Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers and dedicated to military
families (Huffington Post/AP).
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Cultural signs that the site and its acknowledged creator were part of the zeitgeist
also appeared in the form of parodies of Huffington’s speech and self-presentation
style—in order to be caricatured, she had to be easily, and commonly, identified. She got
the Saturday Night Live treatment from three different cast members—Rachel Dratch,
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Michaela Watkins, and Nasim Pedrad, heavy on the accent and unsparing with the
“dahlings.” In a 2014 sketch, Pedrad, channeling Huffington as at once driven,
mellifluous, chichi, and canny, caught the qualities for which her subject was known in
her incarnation as peak-Huff Post Arianna. From the desk of her Brentwood manse,
Pedrad-as-Huffington hyped the site’s analytics. “Let’s start with traffic,” she said; “we
are now up to 119 million unique visitors. And since I know around 100 million of them
personally, I can tell you, they’re very unique” (HuffingtonPost).
Pedrad benefited from her Arianna routine in kind.
29
SNL clips of those skits were
regularly written up as blog items on Huff Post, including an especially disorienting
instance from 2013 in which Pedrad, in character as Huffington, appears as a featured
guest on the mocked-up set of CNN’s Piers Morgan Live talk show to preview a series of
network television shows starring Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state had
recently left her post in the Obama administration and was looking for her next job;
Clinton was played in succession by SNL’s Vanessa Bayer and Kate McKinnon and pop
star Miley Cyrus (SaturdayNightLive). The Huffington Post’s Ross Luippold posted the
clip on the site with the accompanying text: “Arianna showed a few possible looks ahead
at the Democratic presidential candidate if—oh, who are we kidding, when—she decides
to run for president” (Luippold).
Huffington’s rival in the 2003 California gubernatorial election, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, did his own rendition of her in a 2012 interview before a studio
audience with Washington Post Live, reviving old antipathy and throwing the transitive
property of realitics into reverse, or at least playing it as a zero-sum fame game, seeking
to elevate himself at her expense. According to Schwarzenegger, “whiny woman”
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Huffington “played right into” his plan during the campaign by attempting to engage him
on issues, while he attributed much of his victory to how he had read the room more
skillfully than she had and led with showmanship in his pitch to voters. “My strength was
not my policy in 2003; my strength was me,” he said, adding that his “humor” had
worked in his favor, particularly when he had incensed Huffington by suggesting he’d
cast her as the “female Terminator” in Terminator 4. “Personality wins over the details,”
he concluded (“Schwarzenegger”).
If she didn’t know how to lead with her personality in 2003, by the time her site
was in its prime, Huffington had made the business of being Arianna into its driving
premise. Her extensive contacts—weak and strong ties alike—had provided the content
to get her up and running, and many of her own relationships, interests, and campaigns
continued to provide the basis for verticals and projects that showed up on Huff Post. She
had taken some of her earliest skills and influences and become the consummate
networker, in the vernacular sense of that word, and in sense that Castells would use it.
Luckily for Huffington, she was at the top of HuffPo at a time when technology
was catching up with how “news is inherently social,” as one of the site’s editors by the
name of Donovan told the Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s not that we want to be the
cool dinner party,” Donovan told CJR’s Michael Shapiro. “We want to be the table
itself.” (Shapiro). Huffington’s training from dinner parties of years past, coupled with
inspiration from her favorite literary “aha moments” from her Cambridge days—E.M.
Forster’s famous line, “only connect,” from Howard’s End—had found purchase in the
form of the media empire with her name on it (“Arianna Huffington”). In bringing her
real-world network into the virtual space of online media, she did what many other Web
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2.0 tech companies like Facebook also had—she institutionalized and monetized human
connection and communicative practices.
According to one of her many media profilers, Adweek’s Hephzibah Anderson, a
significant part of Huffington’s winning strategy consisted of her sexual presentation;
more specifically, how she used the “seductive and tantalizing tricks of a modern-day
courtesan” in order to put “a brave new world under her spell.” Considering that
Anderson’s article ran in Adweek in 2011, at the height of Huff Post’s self-propelled
success, this frame is not the setup for a hatchet job or an article-length slut-shaming
exercise. In fact, Anderson calls Huffington a “sex symbol” in her lede, and notes that
Huffington has “called herself ‘a regular cyberslut.’” The Adweek article really gets
interesting, however, when Anderson switches her subject’s avatar from courtesan to
cyborg: “while many say she makes you compelling, others note it’s a performance—
another possible plus in tech circles.” That is because, the author explains, “a
performance can be copied and programmed, which chimes with the Web’s egalitarian
ideals” (H. Anderson).
Sarah Banet-Weiser describes to the letter the kind of subject Huffington
presented and encouraged in elucidating what she calls the “interactive subject”:
This interactive subject, like the postfeminist subject, realizes self-empowerment
through her capacity and productivity I define the interactive subject as an
individual who can move between and within media platforms with ease, and who
can produce media online, whether in the form of videos, blogs, or even through
comments and feedback. Interactivity here also implies the design of the
technology that is engaged. That is, the interactive subject participates in and
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through interactive technology; she “finds” a self and broadcasts that self, through
those spaces that authorize and encourage user activity. These two cultural
formations— postfeminism and interactivity— both enabled by advanced
capitalism, make self-branding seem not only logical but perhaps necessary.
Postfeminism and interactivity create what I would call a neoliberal moral
framework, where each of us has a duty to ourselves to cultivate a self-brand
(Authentic™ 56).
If that “self-brand” is constituted in part by the kind of data, practices, networks,
and sensibility provided by sites such as The Huffington Post and Facebook, then terms
like ‘online community’ begin to assume more literal shadings, as well as greater
significance. summed up according to the operative term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

Uberize It
Over the course of The Huffington Post’s first six years, with growth and
continued funding came expansion. As of 2011, he site boasted nearly 25 million unique
users per month (Pitney). She grew her site by paying a group of staffers to edit, report,
blog, and aggregate, and she cultivated a small army of unpaid bloggers and citizen
journalists, offering them ‘exposure’ in exchange for their free content. They got to say
their work ran on the Huffington Post, link their names to hers, and plug into her
network. While it was not making money hand-over-fist—CJR’s Shapiro in 2012 tallied
a “modest $30 million in revenue”—and it was not always successful according to legacy
or new media standards (when something was not working, “it iterated,” Shapiro said of
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the site), it had gone a long way on the strength of the network upon which it was built
(Shapiro).
The Huffington Post also had hit its mark of becoming a go-to online hub for left-
leaning news and commentary as a rejoinder to The Drudge Report, so it was surprising
when, around that same period, Huffington began characterizing the political orientation
of her site differently. “It’s time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and
right,” she announced during a Feb. 2011 appearance on PBS’ Newshour. The
Washington Post’s Dana Millbank wrote of another time when he’d heard that kind of
talk from Huffington: “That is almost exactly what Huffington said in 2000, when she
was making her last ideological transformation,” he said (Millbank). This time, her
change was not about switching political teams; instead, at that moment the ink was
drying on America Online’s purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 million, of which
Huffington reportedly pocketed $21 million in cash and stock options (“Huffington
Haul”).
With expansion came backlash. Keller, Schwarzenegger, Finke, and select
journalists for The National Review and affiliated news entities were not the only
disparagers of Huffington and her online enterprise. Though she did not invent the
practices for which she was most forcefully censured—blogging, celebrity and citizen
journalism, valuing quantity and speed over quality and thoroughly vetted copy—she had
taken them to particularly visible and prolific heights. With the sale of Huff Post, she had
made a small fortune as well, which brought new questions and critiques and amplified
existing ones. In short, to her adversaries, it was not only contingencies that Huffington
was allegedly exploiting.
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Before AOL bought the site, there had already been calls for Huffington and Huff
Post top brass to rework their business model to accommodate payment for their
community of bloggers, which was said to number as high as 100,000 (“The Media”).
Following the sale, a group of some 9,000 contributors filed a class-action lawsuit,
arguing that they deserved $105 million for supplying content that had made Huff Post
worth buying for that price, but a U.S. district judge tossed the suit in March 2012 on the
grounds that bloggers agreed to the openly stated terms and had not been led to believe
they would be compensated (Stempel).
That was the decision of a district court; famously, the court of public opinion, in
which the media is implicated, formulates its own standards and rulings. Keller
represented one voice in that unofficial tribunal about Huff Post, and many others from
the press and public judged the news source and its creator accordingly. The New
Republic’s editors combined forces for a column on March 2, 2011, titled “Aggregated
Robbery,” in which they wrote, “HuffPo does a great job of drawing traffic to its excerpts
of other publications’ pieces. Which is to say, it has become quite adept at reaping
traffic—and profits—from other people’s work” (The Editors). Their sentiments were
echoed by Keller’s comment that “taking words written by other people, packaging them
on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the
originators of the material” was known by another name in another part of the world. “In
Somalia this would be called piracy,” he said, thus invoking a host of other
considerations about race and imperialism while positioning Huffington as a rogue,
unwelcome outsider from an uncontrolled land (Keller). (Somali pirates were not
generally known for reposting stolen Web content, either.)
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All the same, the pirate image stuck, as did the concerns about the directions in
which the journalism industry was headed, and not without reason. The sale was not only
about one relatively independent news site going from scrapping it out against the
corporate news giants to becoming part of a big conglomerate—one that already owned
Patch, a locally targeted, networked news operation that had been dubbed “the Walmart
of news” for moving in on business conducted by smaller, homegrown outlets
(Rothman). If Huffington had been talking the talk about the importance of online
communities and encouraging Huff Post bloggers to do their own recruitment for the site
by promoting it to their own networks of personal contacts, which she had, only to turn
around and profit from their work and relationships, how was anyone to know that was
not the plan from the start? Also, if her talk of moving beyond left and right was really
for the good of the nation, which she had said in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic—
timed around the release of her book, Third World America: How Our Politicians Are
Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream—why did she appear
to begin rolling out that message roughly when Huff Post was entertaining potential
buyers (Gorney)?
More pushback from within journalistic ranks came from Truthdig columnist
Chris Hedges, who weighed in at the time of the sale with a piece called “Huffington’s
Plunder,” in which he stated that if “Huffington has a conscience,” she would pay “every
cent” of the check from AOL to people who worked for little or no pay since Huff Post
began. “Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological
veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class,”
Hedges said. “Dust off your Karl Marx” (Hedges). In The Guardian, Frédéric Filloux
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called Huff Post the “grand master” of “blurring the line between advertising and
editorial” by configuring its format to allow brands to directly engage readers and
commenters (Filloux).
The New York Times’ Andrew Goldman cornered Huffington on the “beyond
right and left” question in an April 1, 2011, interview that reportedly ended with
Huffington hanging up on her interviewer. When Goldman remarked how Huffington had
been “saying recently that The Huffington Post is not a lefty publication,” Huffington
responded that she had been saying “beyond left and right” for three years. Goldman
pushed further, telling her, “it’s as if you’re trying to tell me that Smurfs aren’t blue” and
that he was “amazed” that she seemed to be saying that the site “wasn’t started as a lefty
blog.” She replied, “I’m not trying to tell you anything. I’m telling you things. I’m not
trying, O.K.?” (Goldman)
At issue was a set of concerns with implications that ranged far beyond
Huffington, her deal with AOL, and even the journalism industry and spoke to larger
issues about the future of work in an American labor market in which the middle class
was, as Huffington detailed to The Atlantic, becoming hollowed out and the gap between
the super-rich and the lower echelons of the population was widening precipitously.
Regardless of her intent, Huffington had proven to other news and new media companies
that it was possible to enlist users to provide content for free, dangling the lure of
‘exposure’ as companies before the dot-com bust of the early noughts had dangled ‘stock
options,’ and to spread that content to their personal networks. Attempted lawsuits and
harsh talking-tos from her peers had not stopped her, and she had sold the site for a profit.
What was to stop other outlets and networked businesses from doing the same?
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In past instances in which other businesses had pulled off loosely similar feats
involving free or low-cost labor, the leveraging of personal networks, and the
disproportionate enrichment of those on top, they had been accused of running pyramid
schemes. Was it that easy to dress up a pyramid in the fancy idealistic and futuristic
terminology of the tech world and make off with the cash? These concerns dovetailed
with burgeoning, societal distress signals from the Internet age about privacy, user-
generated content, and compulsory self-marketing by the “interactive subjects” from
Banet-Weiser’s apt description.
Realitics presents models for consumer citizens to offer private lives up for
consumption and their labor for less, for free, or for returns that may never materialize.
The promise of ‘YouTube celebrity,’ becoming ‘Twitter famous,’ a star Huff Post citizen
journalist, or its equivalent according to the platform, reality show, or medium in
question, along with the attendant financial rewards, is held out as an ideal outcome that
is constructed as being more freely available to more participants, but very few end users
receive anything close to a living wage for their efforts. Meanwhile, their capital,
measured according to time, labor, attention and other currencies in this configuration,
flows upward to the owner, top shareholders, and executive levels, who do not need to
employ (fully, or at all) or give benefits to a percentage of their labor force, all in a setup
that does not conform to the usual optics of a sweatshop.
The broader labor structure thus becomes more ‘Uberized,’ freelance-oriented,
atomized—e.g., workers operate in their own personal ‘bubbles,’ thus competing with
each other as mini-enterprises unto themselves, without the space or opportunity to
organize—and intern-ized. These factors amount to an outcome in which corporations
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such as Huff Post, as well as rideshare and homeshare companies like Uber and Airbnb
altering the relatively more secure employment apparatus of prior decades and enabling
other businesses to do the same. Security is diminished for workers, their work is worth
less, and there is a steady stream of alternative sources from which to draw content and
labor if some do not want to participate.
In one of their most prescient passages, written around the turn of the new
millennium, no less Boltanski and Chiapello spot on the horizon an ascendant figure they
name as the “networker.” The development of “new network mechanisms,” they note,
has created the conditions for the “emergence and development of an original form of
opportunism which is different from market opportunism and more extensive—that is to
say, able to find a place in a wide variety of situations, of which market transactions are
only one possible scenario” (355). Looking closely at the “opportunistic networker,” the
authors note that he increases his own profit by “multiplying connections” but at a cost
that damages “two types of actors.” His “dual exploitation” impacts the “entity he
depends on,” which could consist of a firm, institution, project, etc., as well as “the less
mobile actors whose exploitation he increases and whose exclusion he furthers” (377).
The most adept networkers and agents in the zone of realitics—Arianna
Huffington, Facebook executives, YouTube stars—represent rare examples of
choreographed, at times manufactured, and spectacular success (e.g., million-dollar
Survivor bounties, earnings gleaned from the many Kardashian-family franchises). Yet
just those same examples are hyped to their full extent and presented as attainable to the
average person. This is an important move that is required and designed to propagate the
myth of meritocracy in an era of growing inequality and to justify the extraction of
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resources that are necessary to sustain the status of the elite classes while appearing to do
the opposite.
Thus, a kind of pyramid scheme is enabled by realitics, in that the illusion of
universal opportunity is leveraged for purposes of recruitment. Mass buy-ins are effected
on the basis of speculative, often deceptively packaged, promises and improbable future
returns, and failures are chalked up to luck or personal incompetence. Those in the
topmost positions are let off the hook in terms of accountability. Paradoxically, their
individual successes are couched as well-deserved resulting from extraordinary qualities,
yet somehow not closed off to the average end user. This is a form of a ‘long con.’
Given the stakes involved, it was not that surprising that Huffington was
personally the focus of so much heat. In addition to the concerns about business practices
and the AOL sale more generally, she also was the subject of a steady stream of negative
reports, particularly regarding her leadership style. Among them were stories about
editors at Huff Post being instructed to aggregate in ways that practically erased
identifying information and links back to original sources; if there were complaints, the
stories would be altered to include more evident attribution. The media-world gossip site
Gawker—which in 2016 was dismantled by billionaire Peter Thiel, himself the subject of
negative coverage on the site—posted several items before and after the AOL sale that
contained stories of bad treatment of Huff Post employees by Huffington (Grove,
“Peter”). “The ultimate priority at HuffPost is making the dictator look good,” said one
anonymous Gawker poster in a 2015 piece with the unambiguous title “Hell Is Working
at the Huffington Post” (Anonymous).
Another claimed that she foisted her spiritual beliefs on employees, strongly
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encouraging more than one to attend extracurricular seminars affiliated with her favored
organization. “Why would Huffington tie her enterprise, which depends for its continued
success on access to celebrity contributors and other influential people, to a controversial
organization like MSIA?” asked Ryan Tate in a Gawker article with the headline,
“Arianna’s Mandatory Cult Meetings.” The suggested answer: “Perhaps because making
the Huffington Post a faithful reflection of her personality has worked so well thus far”
(Tate). Vanessa Grigoriadis picked up the spiritual vibe in a November 2011 piece for
New York magazine called “Maharishi Arianna,” which carried the teaser line: “Atop
AOL, hiring and borrowing freely from the old media, a new age news guru is building
her grandest temple yet” (Grigoriadis). summed up according to the operative term of
‘exploiting contingencies.’

Arianna Unplugged
Ultimately, Huffington would spend five more years at the helm of The
Huffington Post before parting ways in August 2016 and working full-time on her newest
venture, Thrive Global. Before she left, she presided over the debut of several
international editions of Huff Post, as well as the launch of the World Post section of the
site in January 2014. That kick-off coincided with the yearly confab in Davos,
Switzerland known as the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, and it was plugged
by members of Huffington’s high-powered network, including her World Post
collaborator, Berggruen Institute founder, and billionaire Nicolas Berggruen; Virgin
honcho Richard Branson; and Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. As
Huffington writes in a Huff Post blog announcement, the initiative meets “the need for a
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global platform that can bring together a mix of perspectives, from world leaders to
young people whose voices might otherwise go unheard” (Huffington, “Covering”).
By late 2014, Huffington was busy preparing for another conversion. Rumors
about her imminent departure from Huff Post began filtering into the media chatter upon
which she had built her business and to which she so regularly contributed. According to
The New York Times’ David Segal, in 2012, not long after the site was sold to AOL,
executives at Huff Post’s new parent company “were quietly strategizing about ways to
ease her into a kind of ceremonial role,” a secret operation which was given the nickname
“Popemobile” (Segal). Ostensibly, that vehicle would also be equipped to roll her out the
door at AOL.
Whether or not Huffington was aware of those plans, she had her sights set on her
next venture, which eventually became Thrive Global. She hit the road in 2014 with
MSNBC anchor Mika Brezynski to lead a series of talks focusing on how women can
find more balance in their successful, but stressful, lives. The consciousness-raising
sessions for lady bosses were held under the banner of “Thrive Symposium.” The
Washington Post’s coverage said the symposium taught women “the wonders of life
outside the office” and instructed them on “how to breathe, eat right, get more sleep,
volunteer and, the hardest task of all, turn off their cellphones” (“Thrive”).
Just like that, sleeping and unplugging had taken priority in Huffington’s world,
or at least in her business model. In 2016, The Huffington Post announced that its founder
and star networker would be leaving to run her new venture full-time. “We are very solid
in our DNA, what we stand for,” Huffington said as she left (Calderone, “Huffington”).
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She went on to focus her energies on Thrive Global, which describes itself as “the global
hub for the conversation about well-being and performance, with an emphasis on action
and featuring original, expert, and community content.” At Thrive, corporations and
consumers can seek out “science-based digital products” to “improve well-being and
performance,” as well as to “build a healthier relationship with technology.” A corporate
program is part of the suite of solutions available to Thrive users, which offers workshops
and tailored package programs to infuse businesses with healthy practices and promote a
“thriving corporate culture” (“About Thrive”). In the “Products” section, frazzled
consumers can buy the “Phone Bed Charging Station,” a miniature wooden bed into
which they can tuck their smartphones before calling it a night themselves (“The
Phone”).
Arianna Huffington’s versatility as a practitioner in the mode of realitics is
bolstered by the range of existing theoretical options that are readily applicable to her
story. Here, she not only serves as an exemplar in how she has embraced and transformed
the mode of realitics to suit her own career purposes, but also for the role she has played
in altering how the media operates in a way that impacts the journalism and entertainment
industries, as well as the national and even global political spheres. Like the main actor in
the next chapter, Huffington is suitable for Bruno Latour’s challenge, posed in We Have
Never Been Modern, of pursuing the “creatures” of any satisfactorily complex study—
those which may “cross all three spaces” of “epistemology, the social sciences, the
sciences of texts”—using a suitably multivalent approach (Latour, We 5). Ideally, such an
approach, like its subject, would be able to challenge long-held distinctions between
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different worlds, or even show those worlds to be not so much discrete as mixed and
dynamic.
Huffington is a power broker par excellence, drawing from her past incarnations
to aid in cultivating whichever enterprises are in her purview at present. She shifts
quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, exploiting trends and contingencies and
making sure she appears on the right side of issues, press and opinion cycles. During each
phase of her career, she beta-tested different possibilities for future pursuits, spinning out
franchises and package deals from many of them that included book deals, online
ventures, and press tours. She never let the grass grow under her feet when she prepped
for another shift, often overlapping her campaigns and playing on several different fields
at the same time. She was astute enough to see that Drudge Report and Fox News had
mobilized and exploited communities of belief, as well as nurtured and bolstered them
through a host of corollary entertainment products, and to attempt a similar feat using the
tools she had close at hand, starting with her star-studded Rolodex.
Over the course of her 11-year tenure as editor in chief of Huff Post, Arianna
Huffington presented herself, as so many tech leaders have done before and since, as a
for-the-people figurehead on a mission to revolutionize and democratize her corner of the
business. Her considerable wealth, much of which she amassed before Huff Post but
augmented substantially while at the publication, was not commonly referenced as a
contradiction or a hindrance to her role. Rather, she was held up to be emulated and
celebrated, if she had anything to say about it—and she did. Her success with Huff Post
was gauged in terms of tangible standards like site traffic and accolades as well as vaguer
indicators such as political impact and cultural impact. What could not be easily
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measured or pinpointed could be claimed as a victory anyway, a hype-based practice of
realitics at which she was particularly adept.
During a 2016 interview for Time, Huffington reflected on what she wished she
knew at the age of 20. She worked in a plug for unplugging, and by extension for Thrive
Global, musing how she would let her younger self know that her performance would
improve if, in addition to working hard, she committed to “recharging and renewing”
herself. When asked which motto she lives by, she cited a quote from Rumi: “Live life as
if everything is rigged in your favor” (Lasher).

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Chapter Five: Global Realitics, The Davos Diorama, and Clooney-plomacy
Owing to his political allegiances, actor-director George Clooney would likely balk
at the suggestion that Sarah Palin’s movements within and between mediated arenas of
influence—entertainment and politics, for starters—would have any bearing on his own
brand of celebrity advocacy. However, despite surface differences, successful
mobilizations of celebrity capital by prominent agents such as Palin and Clooney serve to
make the boundaries between realms more permeable. Their feats of cross-pollination
create further opportunities for hybridization with regard to the go-betweens themselves
and the spheres that lend their roles significance, as increasingly mobile agents add new
contours and charges to those interdependent ideological spaces. Thus, though they might
be equally reluctant to accept such a proposition, Palin and Clooney enable each other.
Realitics makes strange bedfellows. It would not be possible for even ‘prestige’
realticians like George Clooney to be taken seriously in particular circles without the
groundwork and footwork having already been handled by those before them. Some
predecessors may appear upon first glance to have little to do with their more current
counterparts, whether gauged in terms of their political leanings, career trajectories, claims
to fame, or stature in the different orbits in which they circulate. The achievements of one
can lay the groundwork for others to follow, as they are part of a privileged, media-enabled
class whose members are collectively creating a new mode of elite communication.
Realitics is also going global. It only follows, since mechanisms that prove effective
in securing and maintaining power are bound to become noticed in a globalized, networked
scheme. It also follows because power brokers—i.e., switchers and programmers such as
Clooney, Arianna Huffington, and others to be featured in this chapter—are often able to
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gain entry not just into elite groups on a national level but also internationally. One
example of that phenomenon can be found in the yearly World Economic Forum meeting
in Davos, Switzerland.
Previous episodes showed how an actor accrues celebrity capital from multiple
spheres by successfully negotiating the rules of a specific sphere and also by parlaying
capital from one to another and back again. Rather than diluting her importance, this
activity can amplify the actor’s cachet, as well as her ease of access to the spheres in
question, which she has the potential to change from within as well. This chapter will take
that process a step further to examine the ways in which celebrity capital, once thus
accumulated, can be mobilized to bring about discernible changes in zones far beyond the
actor’s customary purview. These transformations can be observed in the industries and
institutions that initially propelled the actor’s rise to fame but are not necessarily limited to
or circumscribed by them.
The idea that politics in a globalized, neoliberal scheme, is moving beyond right/left
and into have/have not distinctions has been the subject of intense debate. Celebrity is
being used as a way to rationalize, even simplify, complex and controversial structures and
discourses that serve the powerful—even if, as just one of the dubious premises of realitics
reinforces, there is a greater sense of democracy with regard to who can become famous.
Among those institutions and systems that stand to benefit are neoliberalism and
capitalism. Using the examples that follow, I will argue that celebrity is a crucial driving
force in the most current manifestation of what Boltanski and Chiapello call the prevailing
“spirit” of capitalism in this era. Additionally, realitics is key in challenging, but also
reifying, structures of power, even as realiticians such as this chapter’s protagonist, George
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Clooney, insist on maintaining their outsider status vis-à-vis certain expressions of politics.
By looking closely at Davos and Clooney, it is possible to begin to understand how realitics
is reshaping not only national electoral politics in the United States but also making an
impact on the global stage.
The latter half of this chapter will cover Clooney’s international exploits. The first
half will focus upon the Davos diorama, which is specific to the World Economic Forum
conference but also is intended as a figurative stand-in for a roving global forum
inhabited by realiticians, as well as more orthodox politicians, business leaders, policy
makers and the like, that can manifest in a number of spaces. In addition to Davos, other
sites that may qualify are the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, certain
foundations and NGOs—e.g., the ONE campaign, Not On Our Watch, amfAR—and the
V.I.P. events at which they hold fund-raisers, awards presentations, networking
luncheons and other gatherings. High-priced political fund-raisers hosted by famous
people in the U.S. and abroad would also pass muster, as would film festivals, the
Olympics, and, as one set piece incorporated in this chapter will demonstrate, even the
odd occasion staged at a Manhattan nightclub. summed up according to the operative
term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

The View from Davos
Coverage of the 2014 convergence of the World Economic Forum Annual
Meeting—the yearly save-the-world summit held, ideologically speaking, at the
crossroads of influence and affluence, and geographically speaking at a ski resort in the
mountains of Davos, Switzerland—was curiously presented in the London Evening
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Standard newspaper. In a breathless account of the elite, star-powered confab she
witnessed at high altitude, reporter Anne McElvoy, writing for a conservative,
establishment publication, treated the reader to the sort of material more commonly
encountered in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices. The piece was printed in the paper’s
Lifestyle section, a framing clue that hinted at the nature of the content, further teased by
a wordy headline that broke with economical headline-writing conventions for purposes
of maximizing name-dropping potential: “Breakfast chez Arianna, Mark Carney for
lunch, then clubbing with Mary J and Idris Elba: it must be Davos 2014” (McElvoy). An
awkwardly Photoshopped ensemble of well-known figures beamed from both sides of the
accompanying image, superimposed over a stock photo of the snow-blanketed village of
Davos on a clear wintry day.
The Evening Standard’s lineup featured an eclectic array of Davos grandees who
share at least one important trait in common: fame. Those pictured, including actress
Goldie Hawn, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde,
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt; Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating
officer and author of the best-selling pop-feminism-meets-self-help book Lean In:
Women, Work, and the Will to Lead; actors Matt Damon and Idris Elba; singer Mary J.
Blige; former British Prime Minister David Cameron; and new media baroness Arianna
Huffington represented only a small corps of celebrities taking in the rarefied air at a
series of power huddles comprised of panels on urgent global issues (Sandberg and
Scovell). Their stated aim was to set the international agenda for the year and beyond,
pausing only for more leisurely networking events and extravagant late-night fêtes at
Davos 2014.
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That explains what all the famous people were doing there, but what was the point
of the curious product of the London Evening Standard’s involvement? McElvoy’s
fittingly dramatic presentation offered those not able to attend a glimpse of a kind of
high-flown diorama of international influencers, from elected officials to tech titans to
hotshot financiers to entertainers whose publicists would no doubt insist were all
members of the “A-list” (their presence at Davos being but one more indicator of that
status). Unlike other press accounts of bold-faced types going about their business, those
seeking to forge meaningful imaginary connections between the anonymous many and
the illustrious few by publishing photographic evidence of famous people engaging in
prosaic activities, McElvoy’s write-up made the most of the sense of loftiness provided
by her setting and her subjects. This approach was evidently encouraged by her editors,
as the subheadline read, reinforcing the author’s take, “This week the global elite met in
the Swiss mountains to talk poverty, the environment and world finance. But, intones
Anne McElvoy, the other agenda is what to wear and where to party …” (McElvoy).
A glance through the resulting copy promptly confirms how that “other agenda”
also informed the Evening Standard’s agenda in this instance. In short, McElvoy had
been dispatched to write a gossip column about the Davos symposium. Fleeting mentions
of internationally significant matters to be confronted over the course of the WEF
symposium were quickly dispensed with in order to make room for the meat of the
matter, consisting of protracted and descriptive passages meticulously cataloguing the
social practices and blasé displays of status glinting among the assembled influencers.
McElvoy told of how “the style wars rage discreetly” among invitees, how “Hermès
boots are the upmarket choice for Davos Woman who often wield a large bag by
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Mulberry or Burberry. Multi-carat rings flash casually on little fingers: wealth is worn
light” (McElvoy).
Also striking is how any mentions of heavier material, such as income inequality
and environmental justice, or protesters thronging outside in the cold, came off as so
much connective tissue to introduce still more fashion chatter and a description of a much
less consequential kind of stratification. Even the International Monetary Fund’s
Managing Director Christine Lagarde made a startling cameo, receiving praise for her
sartorial, rather than her financial, sense:
Equal access is one thing: the informal pecking order another… Christine Lagarde
is the bees knees of the forum. The modest combination of running the IMF and
being a designer-clad but approachable woman gives her maximum kudos. As a
result, the poor woman cannot proceed 10 metres along the promenade by the
grandiose Belvedere hotel without some adoring senior executive shouting her
name and demanding triple kisses (McElvoy).
The writer’s close attention to the accessorizing regimes of the Davos set also extended to
the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, whose choice of “the chicest slip-on
snowproof shoes, with elegantly corrugated rubber soles” also won him column inches.
“You can tell the veterans by their grasp of the Davos footwear situation,” McElvoy
concluded, thereby tacitly attesting that she, too, was a veteran (McElvoy).

What is to be made of all this? McElvoy could have been writing her column as a
send-up of celebrity news by giving such unlikely figures the gossip treatment. If so, she
did not include sufficient cues to tip readers off that her piece was intended as satire.
Furthermore, it is not as though media coverage of Davos ought never take note of
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culture or ritual. Readers can seek out more serious stories, and other commentators can,
and do, use the elitism apparent in accounts like McElvoy’s as fodder for vigorous
critiques of Davos decadence. Of most significance in this context is the idea that Davos
has become gossip-worthy, that the outfit choices of the IMF director would be
scrutinized and written about as though she were a model on a haute couture runway, and
that celebrity conference-goers would become so conspicuous at what is intended to be a
diplomatic and policy-oriented intensive.
Some part of this curious state of affairs could have come about due to
environmental or tangential influences. Among its many other associations, celebrity has
become known as an efficacious and time-tested draw for NGOs, foundations and other
organizations to use in order to attract curious members of their communities, thereby
ensuring that important meetings and fund-raisers are well-attended. Additionally, I
would contend that there is an ideological equivalent that has to do with the transitive
property of realitics, which can be expanded to include the accouterments of fame—
things matter—as well as famous people themselves. That is, the aura or “halo effect” of
celebrity
30
that interpersonal association can lend to peers and to ‘civilians’ can also be
invoked when select people are linked with entertainment news, fashion coverage, luxury
products, paparazzi attention, and other signifiers and mechanisms of fame.
Pushing this point further, I would argue that through this process of
celebrification—here, of Lagarde and other Davos denizens—they become figures of
envy and admiration, just like their more strictly show business colleagues populating the
diorama. Those who are admired in this particular fashion are held in a different light,
and treated in a different manner, than a dyed-in-the-wool IMF bureaucrat. Once again,
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audiences are invited to become fans, and fans treat the objects of their fandom
differently from, say, a head of state, diplomat, or policy wonk of the more conventional
variety. Realitics rationalizes.
Bearing in mind these propositions, even fluffy press accounts of the Davos
diorama such as McElvoy’s take on a more consequential feel. Her Evening Standard
story placed heads of state, actors, captains of industry and spiritual leaders on an equal,
bold-faced plane, giving the sense that once they have all attained the status of Davos
invitees, they are more or less interchangeable—unless, that is, particular scenesters are
known to be in charge of the most coveted guest lists for the nightly party tourney. “It’s
like a very cold Fashion Week for global titans,” McElvoy trilled in the lead paragraph,
“with a smattering of Matt Damon glamour and a meditating Goldie Hawn.” She
continued:
The Huffington/Sandberg breakfast drew the crowd at a ghastly 7 am yesterday.
Patek Philippe watches were discreetly checked to see how that left the plan to
hear the Googlemeister Eric Schmidt. Iran’s President Rouhani looked promising
for the afternoon but was competing for attention with a very bronzed Damon—
accepting an award for his humanitarian work but causing a rare outburst
of Davos hilarity by styling it as an Oscar-acceptance.
Ms Hawn, meanwhile, added colour and calm with a session advocating stress-
reduction through meditation. The global elite were united in a moment of
relaxation led by a rainbow-robed Buddhist monk.
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( . . . ) At a McKinsey-hosted lunch, a bunch of the world’s best-known
entrepreneurs sit, buffet plates on laps, listening to Mark Carney explore whether
we will be prosperous or paupers in the next few years (McElvoy).
Though she did not specify as such, the columnist again implied that she was one of the
“we” about whom Mr. Carney was talking during the luncheon. Adding that detail that
may have tipped her hand as to her approach to covering that milieu and hinted at the
imagined audience, or “second persona,” per Edwin Black’s rhetorical theory, for whom
she was writing (Black).
Of further interest in the above passage is the juxtaposition of a “very bronzed
Damon,” who facetiously followed the etiquette of awards shows prescribed by the
highest echelons of the industry that had granted him passage to this transnational coterie,
with a “promising” Iranian President Rouhani. The intimation, printed in a mass-market
publication, that Damon posed a serious challenge of any kind to the chief executive of a
nation located in one of the world’s most contested regions, at a meeting ostensibly
convened for the purposes of sorting out global problems, serves as justification for this
dissertation in and of itself. In a moment of fleeting sociopolitical insight that clashed
with the overall tone of her column, McEvoy suddenly broke the fourth wall: “you might
argue that the overall global economic model isn’t much challenged here (and you’d be
right: the assumption is that things can be fixed with good ideas and money)” (McElvoy).
Clearly McEvoy was not there to do much challenging, either.
What this all points to is the direct identification of one of the most important of
the overlapping currencies and economies in circulation among the crème de la crème
jostling for primacy on high in Davos and comparable sites: the economy of attention.
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Money and political power are vital, of course, but attention has progressively become a
key component, even a determinant, of those. As evidenced by the cross-cultural,
transnational institution of celebrity itself, attention can be converted into both of the
others and can allow actors to get around the usual gatekeepers and credentialing systems
associated with both.
The kind of scene described above, that of the high-voltage celebrity diorama in
which fame is a common calling card for entry and is gained through an eclectic
assortment of channels described nearly interchangeably, has been in effect in prominent
zones of influence for decades. In cosmopolitan nerve centers like New York City, for
example, public relations professionals will draw heavily on their impressions about the
economy of attention. They use subjectively determined ranking systems in their press
releases to list names of well-known people expected to attend press events in order of
perceived importance at that moment. Celebrities’ stock rises and falls depending on a
number of factors including but not limited to: occasion, venue, who else is invited and
considered likely to actually appear, as well as who else is invited and probably will not
turn up (but whose name will still be dangled as bait for journalists to entice them, at
least, to come). Boltanski and Thévènot describe this process of judging relative values
based on interpersonal comparison as follows: “In the polity of fame, the construction of
worth is tied to the constitution of conventional signs that condense and display the
power generated by the esteem people have for one another, and thus make it possible to
weigh persons against one another and to calculate their respective value” (Boltanski and
Thévènot 99).
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Take this stock-in-trade publicity riddle: could, say, Ellen DeGeneres’ name ever
be dropped before Jay-Z’s, and if so, when? In the case of the GLAAD Media Awards,
that might be likely, but probably not at the White House Correspondents’ Association
gala, unless DeGeneres was the emcee comic for the evening. Would a Bill Clinton be
listed before a Lupita Nyong’o? At a film industry event, maybe not, but Clinton would
come first on the press list for a promising Democratic candidate’s fundraiser to build
momentum for a New York City mayoral run. In still another context, they might all be
upstaged by a pop singer making her first public appearance after having a baby, getting a
divorce, or getting out of rehab, making photos and interviews featuring her particularly
valuable. The economy of attention runs in part on impression and suggestion and is
bound up with financial and other associated influences.
Tangible traces of these kinds of value negotiations that help shape the celebrity
marketplace are apparent in the practices and artifacts, official and not, of an eclectic
array of professional contexts. They range from the expected—the Rolodexes of personal
and event publicists, fashion editors’ wish lists, mentions in gossip columns, charity
foundation administrators’ donor recruitment strategies, film festivals’ guest lists—to the
less obvious—e.g., member rosters of the Council on Foreign Relations, stacks of
accepted applications for coveted condos in Manhattan high-rise developments,
Congressional speaker schedules, nominees for United Nations ambassador positions.
They are also evident in the rotating collections of actors who occupy the same physical
spaces in a host of privileged and protected venues: Oscar parties and roped-off VIP
sections at film festivals from Toronto to Berlin to Sundance to Cannes; restaurants in
Washington, D.C.; the front rows at Wimbledon tennis matches and NBA playoff games;
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the Aspen Institute’s annual Global Innovation Summit (or “Davos for Doers”); summer
mixers in the Hamptons (Hwang).
In those hybridized settings, rules that customarily delimit interactions do not
always apply. Politicians mix with their rivals, with lobbyists, and media figures who on
their jobs are constitutionally entrusted with the public service of keeping close, even
antagonistic, watch in order to “afflict the comfortable,” particularly those who possess
economic and political power in greater measure, and “comfort the afflicted.” Literary
fixtures mingle with flashes-in-the-pan from the social media realm. Tech titans park
their super-yachts next to Hollywood producers, corollary figures from the “celebrity-
industrial complex,” while on holiday in the south of France. Wall Street’s captains of
industry rub shoulders and sip top-shelf liquor with Russian oligarchs, movie actors,
Saudi princes, the odd socially aspiring leader from an African nation, or the president of
a former Soviet bloc country in Manhattan nightclubs.
Those two last examples are, as it were, ripped from the headlines. As for the
African mention, I was on the job as a New York Daily News reporter at Manhattan’s
upscale Lotus nightspot, located in the quickly gentrifying Meatpacking District, on June
28, 2001, when the entire bottom floor of the venue was taken over by Swaziland’s King
Mswati III and his entourage. The club’s basement had been temporarily transformed into
an impromptu exhibit space for the occasion. Prototypes of Swazi garb and headwear
worn by heads of state, along with other topical artifacts, were displayed museum-style
under glass on podiums marked with informative note cards and lit by overhead
spotlights. Upstairs, the club’s more typical rituals were being observed, as bouncers
carefully hand-picked the evening’s cast of civilian patrons according to their own
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subjective measures of value, and managers patrolled the floor, tending to the needs of
any film stars, high-rolling businessmen, models, socialites, famous athletes or
musicians, and an in-house disc jockey mixed hip-hop and dance singles from the
podium.
That was one of several public appearances the King of Swaziland made around
New York on his visit, which had been arranged for an internationally impactful and
diplomatic cause. However, as in the Davos episode, The New York Times’ James Barron
and Jayson Blair made quick work of that fact before treating the reader to a who’s-who
list from Lotus in a story published the following day. Their segment of “Boldfaced
Names,” the gossip column the Times had somewhat reluctantly launched after the turn of
the millennium to compete with The New York Post’s powerful “Page Six” column and
rival “Rush & Molloy” at The New York Daily News, merits reproduction:
Cocktail, Your Majesty?
Once the United Nations General Assembly's three-day session on AIDS
ended, KING MSWATI III of Swaziland went partying. The crowd that
filled Lotus, on West 14
th
Street, included ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.,
STEVEN SEAGAL and MARY J. BLIGE. It was a crowd that worried about
etiquette. How does one address a king, anyway?
"I asked somebody and they said you say 'Your Majesty,' " reported CHUCK
MANGIONE.
"He seems like a very normal, average guy dressed in a suit. A very nice
business suit."
And trailed by 15 security guards.
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LISA LING, a co-host of the daytime talk show “The View,” said she was
impressed by the king, except that Her Royal Highness was right next to him.”
Ms. Ling said that she did not mind that the king had eight wives. “I just don’t
want to be one” (Barron and Blair).
Of course, Barron and Blair were tasked, like McElvoy, with writing a gossip
column. Conventions of gossip, primarily set by tabloid newspapers like The New York
Post and The New York Daily News and then taken up, in no small part for financial
reasons, by more highbrow outlets like The New York Times. But just as those prestigious
news sources were goaded to play the celebrity game in order to remain relevant in an
attention-driven economy, so have politicians been. So, to varying degrees, have CEOs,
and chefs, and journalists, tech industry leaders, real estate agents, auto mechanics, and
medical doctors. So has Christine Lagarde, authority on haute couture and international
finance, though not necessarily in that order—unless McElvoy is in control of the frame.
Before switching subjects, it is worth pausing to consider how this mash-up of
institutions, industries, and practices can be disorienting. From a more optimistic vantage
point, we are presented with the tantalizing vision of—there it is again—a more level
playing field if once heavily policed boundaries are becoming less prohibitive. A Sarah
Palin can come within a stone’s throw of the presidency without jumping through all the
usual hoops (or being a man). Owing in part to the kind of ambition that had driven many
enterprising men in her midst without comment, an Arianna Huffington can start an
online media empire despite having little experience in that industry. An actor can
become a politician—at least for a week or so each winter in Switzerland.
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The fantasy flourishes and trickles down into mass culture. Any number of
average Americans can become YouTube stars, reality television stars, Twitter famous,
or “citizen journalists,” or so it seems. But as each of these ostensibly freeing prospects
emerges, it is accompanied by another swarm of questions. For whom is the ground
actually becoming more level? If authority can be granted on such varying terms, which
ones are most valid, and who gets to decide? Who benefits from the chaos that ensues
when former systems of influence are altered, even to the point of obsolescence, so
rapidly?
Consider the topsy-turvy, world-salad confusion induced by this strangely
prioritized snapshot of the Manhattan diorama, published Sept. 29, 2008 in New York
magazine’s “Gossipmonger” column:
Jermaine Dupri Puked in Janet Jackson’s Lap
. . . Jermaine Dupri got so drunk at his 36th-birthday party at Tenjune that he
threw up in girlfriend Janet Jackson’s lap. Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni had
lunch at an outside table at Amaranth while bodyguards stood by. Georgian
president Mikheil Saakashvili partied with models at Cipriani Downtown while
wearing a plaid shirt and khakis (T. Murphy).
The point at present is not to grant too overestimate gossip columns or assume that their
value systems seamlessly correspond to the ‘real’ world; more likely is that they
simultaneously reflect and shape the societies in which they are situated. Rather, it is to
trace through material artifacts the progression of what I am calling realitics in highly
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visible and mediated spaces that, not by chance, are also where new and old forms of
power converge and are merging.
The more pessimistic or cautionary implications of these movements have to do
with what may fall by the wayside—or what might be demanded as the price of
admission, or even just relinquished without incident—when trends that seem to be
working very well for the uppermost classes are presented as attainable, viable options
for everyone else. As has been hinted at in several instances detailed in this thesis, there
is a sense of deceit endemic to the setup under consideration that may be summarized as
the mystification property of realitics. It has to do with how appearance trumps facts and
is bound up with the utilization of glamour, gossip, prestige, consumption, confidence,
repetition, inversion, and the avoidance of accountability and of mortification. It evokes
Marx, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Debord, Boorstin, and a host of cultural studies
theorists in suggesting that the maintenance of economic and power hierarchies may be
implicated in the emergence of realitics.
More recently, those thinkers are joined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, who
in The New Spirit of Capitalism posited that capitalism by dint of its makeup causes a
series of displacements and ruptures that give rise to critiques of two kinds—social and
artistic—that then must be accommodated in order to prevent the critical interventions
from bringing the entire system to a halt. Once challenges to the primacy of capitalism
are absorbed, new ones emerge and demand acknowledgment in a dialogic back-and-
forth that has persisted through several cycles (Boltanski and Chiapello 346). More recent
iterations, or “spirits,” of capitalism have made room for at least the guise of freedom and
a relative lack of hierarchy to be held up as ideals in the workplace, but as Wallace Katz
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noted in his review of Boltanski and Chiapello’s book, this is one of many falsehoods
promoted by the twenty-first- century reboot of capitalism in more developed western
countries such as France, upon which the authors singularly focus, and the U.S.
“Boltanski and Chiapello emphasize that the new capitalism is, despite its affirmation of
authenticity, extremely inauthentic,” Katz writes, observing that the revamped workplace
is not the “haven of freedom, autonomy, and ‘creativity’” as promised, but rather
demands employees’ loyalty above all else and esteems individuals’ qualities based on
their use value to the corporation (129).
So long as these trends continue, so will the ruse, and its potential consequences are
not limited to the workplace and the role-playing it engenders. Sarah Banet-Weiser argues
that it gets far more personal than that in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in
Neoliberal Times: “As the neoliberal moment is witness to ever-sharper delineations of the
marketplace as constitutive of our political imaginaries,” she writes, “our identities, rights,
and ideologies are ever more precisely formulated within the logics of consumption and
commodification rather than in opposition to them” (8-9). Meritocracy, celebrity, and other
ideological building blocks of realitics have long been accused of functioning in
contradictory and obfuscating ways as well, but now the scale, pace, and number of screens
on which it is happening is ramping up exponentially. Realitics fuses and offers
rationalizations for a number of mechanisms at work in sustaining capitalism,
neoliberalism, and the other entwined formations and social logics mentioned above.
Bearing in mind these possibilities, the Davos diorama, as well as the
accompanying face-pressed-to-glass media coverage of the Swiss convention exemplified
by McElvoy’s treatment, can be seen to fulfill a different kind of requirement than the
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action items discussed by the Bill Gateses, David Camerons, Richard Bransons, Matt
Damons, and Christine Lagardes who swoop in every year on private jets to reassess global
predicaments—climate change, income inequality, conscientious capitalism, terrorism—
from five thousand feet up. Dressing to impress is not the answer, nor is putting on an
“orgy of excess,” as the WEF event has been called, as well as “Wealthstock,” a “hangout
for globalists,” the “Superbowl of Schmoozing,” and as JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO
Jamie Dimon phrased it, “where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class feels”
(Allon; Bremmer; Blodget; Freed). Those aspects are all implicated, as is the ritual of
public rubbernecking modeled by outlets like the London Evening Standard and Time, the
latter of which published a ‘listicle’ article as Davos 2018 began in January titled “The 5
Things to Watch at Davos 2018.” Number four on the list is “[t]he year Davos finally takes
structural inequality seriously,” for which reason the conference “becomes more relevant”
(number five) (Bremmer).
31

Instead, a more important purpose of the snowbound spectacle in the Alps is to
provide a theater for the performance of ethical responsibility on a global scale by
international elites from business, government, technology, and other influential realms –
or, to again invoke Boltanski and Thévènot, from the market, civic, and industrial polities
(as well as the inspired polity, counting the Dalai Lama). Taking into account the celebrity
element, Hollywood’s envoys to Davos, of course adds members of the fame world into
their midst, but to what end? Surely it is not just for mutual ego gratification, to make all in
attendance feel more important and all not in attendance feel like everyone who is must be
more important, and to ensure better guest lists, photo ops and après ski parties.
Surely not. Instead, celebrities are imported to Davos and exported around the
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world as global brand ambassadors for a kind of abstract conglomerate, a particular brand
of leadership, of the sort whose deputies show up in spades at sites like Davos. Arianna
Huffington is a member of this club, as is Lagarde, Dimon, Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Nicholas Berggruen, Virgin boss Richard
Branson, the Dalai Lama. They subscribe to, and help construct, a certain vision of what is
wrong and right with the world, one that is not always spelled outright but that can be
pieced together from evidence presented in texts such as the Davos diorama. Celebrity
recruits gain entry to these rarefied gatherings, learning the language and carrying the
message to their various avenues of influence: red carpets unfurled at film premieres and
festivals around the world, awards shows, charity functions, campaign fundraisers, press
interviews, the White House.
Thus, these high-level entertainers-turned-realiticians become recruiters
themselves—globe-trotting attachés for the global elite. They practice prestige realitics,
and one of the most prominent, fully expressive agents of this mode on the international
stage is the second main character in this chapter: George Clooney. He is, like Huffington,
a “switcher” in Castells’ terminology, an agent who connects multiple networks, and he is a
power broker able to raise the profiles of those with whom he comes into contact, from
political candidates and leaders to film producers to United Nations delegates
(Communication 429). In his role as a concerned global citizen in contested areas such as
Darfur, Sudan, he brings the spotlight, along with its potential drawbacks, to causes and
crisis zones and encourages others to follow his lead.
Entertainment celebrities in the mode of prestige realitics also serve to mark out
territories, symbolic and physical, such as Davos as exclusive provinces that require a
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certain clearance to gain entry and as spectacles held up to a mass viewing audience of
outsiders. Increasingly, fame and media meta-capital, per Couldry, afford carte blanche-
level access to their surrogates, making the trappings and tell-tale signs of celebrity
desirable accessories for even the head of the IMF to want to display in what until
recently may have seemed unlikely settings (Couldry). Two-way, resonant associations
between celebrities and top representatives of governments and industries, amplifying
each other’s relevance and granting each party passage to spheres of influence they could
not have reached on their own. Realitics provides the ingredients to enable the mixing
and hybridization of these agents and the merging of their domains. Clooney’s example
will be explored beginning with his early moves in the entertainment realm, followed by
the global political arena, and then how he fused the two in what I call pastiche politics.
summed up according to the operative term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

Prestige Realitics
The prior two chapters discussed how an actor accrues celebrity capital from
various spheres by effectively negotiating the rules of a particular sphere and also by
parlaying capital from one to another and back again. These activities may have the net
result of heightening the actor’s status, as well as her ease of access to the spheres in
question, which she has the potential to change from within as well. This chapter will take
that formula a step further to examine how celebrity capital, once thus amassed and
enriched, can be mobilized in unique ways to enact discernible changes. These
transformations can be observed in the industries and institutions that initially facilitated
the actor’s rise to fame but are not necessarily limited to nor constrained by them.
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In Clooney’s situation, the celebrity capital he acquired by prudently navigating the
complementary spheres of politics and entertainment, as well as by playing the markers of
prestige he secured in one sphere off the other to enhance his reputation and create further
opportunities for influence in both, has afforded him power in the ‘real’ world—i.e., the
ability to influence institutions and even global events. In this manner, celebrity capital
does not just make good currency in the showbiz arena, like Monopoly money or Disney
dollars that have no use beyond a purely imaginary domain. As will be reviewed later, it
can be used to affect even life-and-death situations involving people in other countries who
are not directly implicated in entertainment or electoral politics in the United States.
Ultimately, currency of any kind does not get much more real than that.
Before getting to the point where we are able to fully explore and understand
Clooney’s brand

of influence as it functions in the current sociopolitical climate, it is
necessary to first consider how some specifics of his backstory have especially contributed
to his ability to occupy his current position. Through his acting, directing and producing
efforts, as well as through his “extratextual” pursuits, as P. David Marshall characterizes
the off-screen aspects of a star’s public image, he has created a politically infused character
that is greater than the sum of its constituent parts (Celebrity and Power 85). A brief
accounting of the most pertinent from among those parts thus follows below in order to
make the big picture, as it were, more intelligible.
George Clooney is one of few leading men in Hollywood whose stardom has
increased along with the size of the screen on which his image has appeared. He capably
transitioned from television to the movies starting in the late 1990s, when he made the
small-screen appeal he cultivated by playing Dr. Doug Ross in 109 episodes of the long-
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running TV drama ER work for him in a varied, well-regarded, and lucrative film career.
His efforts in that phase included a couple misfires (1997’s Batman & Robin looming
largest among them), but by the early 2000s, his A-list standing was established via
prestigious collaborations with well-regarded directors—e.g., Out of Sight (Stephen
Soderbergh, 1998), Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999), O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000), among others—interspersed with commercial hits like The
Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Petersen, 2000), Spy Kids (Robert Rodriguez, 2001) and Ocean’s
Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001).
The release of Clooney’s second directorial effort, Good Night, and Good Luck, in
2005 coincided with the actor-turned-auteur’s shift toward a more concertedly political
stance in his principal and auxiliary

professional pursuits. His first outing as a director,
2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, included some politically tinged material but
focused most intently on the sensational antics and pyrotechnic personality of its subject,
Chuck Barris, host of the long-running TV talent contest The Gong Show and self-
described CIA trigger man (Confessions). By that moment in his career, Clooney could
afford to take a calculated risk without squandering the air of respectability he had attained
through a series of heedful choices. By placing the widely esteemed CBS newscaster
Edward R. Murrow at the heart of Good Night, he teased a strain of nostalgia less fraught—
by dint of the time frame and people concerned—by partisan rifts and the complexities of
the present-day media landscape. The film’s denouement consisted of the 1954 clash
between Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of McCarthy’s notorious
show trials targeting alleged American communists. Thus, Clooney was able to
accommodate an oblique critique of the politics and mainstream media narratives in play in
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2005 as the surface plot unspooled. In Murrow, he had chosen an admired and
distinguished journalist whose legacy was secure and was not likely to split moviegoers too
sharply along party lines.
Good Night, and Good Luck screened in theaters during a protracted moment of
rupture in U.S. politics that created openings for contestation in the public sphere.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil and extending well beyond
the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, the tone set by the administration and promoted by the
mainstream media was one of unquestioning patriotism. As months turned into years, it
became apparent that President George W. Bush had spoken too soon when he staged his
May 1, 2003 “Mission Accomplished” media event aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in
San Diego. The failure of the international effort to locate the weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs) that the U.S. government had accused Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of
stockpiling, and which the Bush administration had used to justify the onset of military
aggression, intensified unrest at home and abroad. Added to that volatile state of affairs
was the eventual exposure of the role that journalists such as The New York Times’ Judith
Miller had played in strengthening the Bush administration’s case for the invasion.
Notably, the film also appeared at a time when politically charged incidents in the sphere of
arts and entertainment, such as the Dixie Chicks’ ordeal, made dissent a hazardous activity
for some artists.
Although Clooney’s media morality tale did not announce itself as a forthright work
of protest, certain parallels are detectable on a thematic level that brought Good Night, and
Good Luck out of its retro, black-and-white sensibilities and into the moment in which it
was released. To begin with, there were likenesses in the climate of the two eras. In both
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cases, a president occupied the White House—Dwight D. Eisenhower

in the latter stages of
McCarthy’s protracted moment, and George W. Bush at the time of the film’s debut—who
was accused of systematically restricting Americans’ civil liberties and sanctioning media
censorship. In the latter case, the Bush administration was denounced for playing power
games with the press, in itself a compulsory practice of all administrations, to an
unprecedented degree. According to this critique, the Bush White House effectively forced
journalists to stay on-message by controlling access to administration members, as well as
by watching and punishing critics. It took advantage of the nation’s post-9/11 impulse
toward unity by equating unquestioning support of the government with patriotic duty
(Auletta).

Given this volatile stew of cultural elements, film critics such as New York
Magazine’s Ken Tucker noted the wistful edge to Clooney’s championing of Murrow as he
took up the mantle of the Fourth Estate and spoke truth to power, dealing a substantial blow
to Sen. McCarthy’s juggernaut of a campaign against freedom of speech and artistic
expression. The title of Tucker’s review, “Where Is Edward R. Murrow When We Need
Him?”, sets the tone for a discussion of the film, pronounced “George Clooney’s paean to
the slayer of right-wing demagogues,” before Tucker’s detailing of a feisty exchange that
had just occurred between Clooney and Fox News’ onetime ratings draw Bill O’Reilly.
During that contretemps, Clooney had sent in a written rebuke to The O’Reilly Factor host
in which he used line borrowed from Murrow, about how television was a mere “box of
light and wires,” that actor David Strathairn delivers as Murrow in Clooney’s film
(Tucker). It is difficult to get much more meta than that.
Tucker clearly thought he heard Clooney speaking through the screen in Good
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Night, and Good Luck. What came across was a deliberate indictment of the journalism
industry right at the time Tucker was part of it; his article was published in New York’s
Sep. 26, 2005 edition. Also evident was Clooney’s watchfulness over the powerful actors
and institutions that journalists are mandated to keep in check:
Optically and metaphorically, it’s a black-and-white film: It glows with Clooney’s
stark outrage that Murrow’s brand of advocacy TV journalism, which focused on
the helpless and the helpless and the oppressed, may well be gone forever. . . .
Clooney wants to remind his audience that, once upon a time, TV reporters felt
some responsibility to expose inequities and injustices, an impulse unthinkable
today, except at those rare moments when crisis and emotion intrude (Tucker).
Tucker’s review was not the only example of this kind of reception to Good Night,
and Good Luck. “DC” from Time Out London echoed, in a short write-up for that
magazine’s Nov. 3, 2005 issue, “. . . it’s hard not to equate McCarthy’s paranoid rants with
the current President’s obsessions (as is surely Clooney’s aim)”. Similarly, The Christian
Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer registered his awareness of Clooney’s apparent
purpose in an appraisal published on Oct. 7, 2005, in which he argued that the somewhat
two-dimensional Murrow isn’t supposed to be a “character” so much as “a beacon for
others to follow.” What’s more, Rainer delved into the minds of the filmmakers, whom he
said “clearly . . . believe [Murrow’s] example is worth following.” Pulling back farther,
Rainer took a panoramic view, concluding that, “Although Clooney doesn’t overdo it, we
are obviously meant to draw parallels between the timidity of the press and the climate of
fear, then and now” (Rainer).
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The stated intentions of a filmmaker and how a film is viewed and interpreted do
not have to align directly in the making of meaning. Stuart Hall maps out in his seminal
essay, “Encoding/decoding,” intention and reception can nonetheless be read in relation to
each other. “The broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a
meaningful discourse,” Hall posits, and the impact of a message depends upon its being
“appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded,” which then allows
the message to issue “into the structure of social practices” (Hall 130). Following this
model, then, the process of meaningfully decoding Clooney’s second film plays out in part
in film reviews such as Tucker’s, and New York Magazine and other publications are part
of the social “structure” Hall identifies. According to interpreters like Tucker, Clooney’s
Good Night message is rendered in black and white, and any protestations the actor-turned-
filmmaker might make about his political transmissions through that medium should be
assessed accordingly.
At the same time, the film does not directly attack a presidency but functions as an
invitation to allegory; that, is dramatizing a story now to be like a story then. With regard to
his aims as a filmmaker, Clooney mostly demurred from claiming any direct political
affiliations or aspirations while doing press for Good Night, and Good Luck as it screened
in theaters around the world. During an interview with Michael Bonner for the British
magazine Uncut, Clooney described the initial impetus for his film as a tribute to his
“hero,” his broadcast journalist father Nick Clooney, whose own idol is Edward R.
Murrow.
When Bonner point-blanked his subject about whether the film was intended as “an
attack on the Bush Administration and the right-wing press,” however, Clooney begged off
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of claiming any precise targets for his cinematic critique:
I’ve certainly been outspoken about my arguments with this administration, but this
film wasn’t designed as a specific [protest] against anyone. It was a film about a
moment in time, and there are certain similarity issues we have right now, but it
wasn’t designed to be a political statement. Actually, when you start pulling out
Murrow’s speeches, it makes you feel really patriotic. They remind you of the things
you love about this country (Bonner).
Bonner also queried Clooney about any goals the actor-auteur might have been harboring
to follow in Ronald Reagan or Clint Eastwood’s footsteps by running for public office,
which produced a response that was picked up and reprinted in numerous other news
outlets. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” Clooney insisted. “Drank too much, did too many drugs.”
He also added that he would be too “stubborn” to make the kind of compromises required
in that line of work, and thus he would be a “horrible politician” (Bonner).
A director’s intent and politics for a film is one thing; citizen participation is
another. Realitics thrives on such disjunctions. In his public life, as well as through using
his “voice” as a filmmaker, Clooney did own up to taking an active role in electoral
politics. “I’ve been involved in social and political things my whole life,” he told Bonner
(Bonner). Yet while describing his attitude toward American electoral politics in a one-on-
one discussion on November 12, 2005, with The New York Times’ Lynn Hirschberg at AFI
Fest in Los Angeles, he said, “You have to participate in one way or another” (Clooney).
Whether he would characterize his filmmaking efforts as forms of overt participation
himself only counts as part of the equation; per Hall et al., the meaning of his work is in
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some measure a negotiation in which moviegoers, film critics, and other contributors also
participate.
Following the release of Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney continued to
direct, produce and act in additional feature films that take up political themes, including
Syriana in 2005, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, The
Good German (2006), Michael Clayton (2007), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), The
Ides of March (2011), and The Monuments Men (2013). In collaboration with director
Steven Soderbergh, Clooney has produced films

through their Section Eight production
house as well as with Participant Media, which describes itself as “the leading media
company dedicated to entertainment that inspires and compels social change” through
content that “combines the power of a good story well told with opportunities for real
world impact and awareness around the most pressing global issues of our time” Participant
Media was founded in 2004 by former eBay president Jeff Skoll (“About Us”).
After Soderbergh and Clooney shut down Section Eight in 2006, Clooney
launched another production company, Smokehouse Pictures, with producer Grant
Heslov that same year. Smokehouse was behind such politically inflected titles as The
Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), The Ides of March (2011), Argo (2012) and The
Monuments Men (2014). Argo, for which Clooney and his co-producers received an
Academy Award for Best Picture, featured a particularly apropos plot for the present
discussion, as it revolved around a plan, concocted in Hollywood, to evacuate a group of
six American hostages in Tehran in broad daylight by staging a phony movie location-
scouting expedition in the midst of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81. The fantasy-fueled
world of film in that dramatic instance created a more literal form of escape than usually
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found at the multiplex, and Clooney, Heslov and producer/director/star Ben Affleck had
the opportunity to champion their industry while sounding a strong note of patriotism that
bordered on pro-American agitprop. Argo was embraced by Hollywood. summed up
according to the operative term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

Pastiche Politics
Clooney’s domain as a political actor extends far beyond the films in which he
performs and which he creates. He is not confined to articulating his politics through that
medium and in related appearances on the red carpet, in interviews, promotional events,
and so on. Rather, his career as an actor, director, and producer increasingly disposed to
take on political projects, provided the initial means and momentum for him to accumulate
enough celebrity capital to propel him into contingent spheres of power. His eminence in
Hollywood still lends him an aura of glamour in whichever he happens to be operating, but
his ability to move between them and gain traction within them is not significantly
curtailed by his primary means of propulsion as a movie star.
In fact, it enables him to function in all his chosen domains as something more than
the sum of his constituent parts. His reputation as a “serious” actor in highly regarded and
important projects infuses the political action he has taken, which then doubles back on his
film career, as the story of his exploits inflects his day job and makes him not just another
Hollywood actor. His brand becomes international and free-floating in a sense that it is not
solely defined by his film work nor his political work but both—merged into the same,
dapper package. Since his 2014 marriage to human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, who
takes on high-stakes cases stemming from the world’s most troubled zones, George
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Clooney has become part of a political power couple with even more range, visibility,
glamour, and access.
As of early 2018, George Clooney’s extratextual and strictly entertainment---
business personae and pursuits have become increasingly high---profile and politically
oriented both in the American and international arenas. His trajectory, in terms of his
mode of celebrity advocacy, spans from low---key activist to political dramatist to out---
and---out campaigner. As his involvement in supporting causes and candidates has
scaled up, so have his range and visibility as an advocate. His efforts have also been
bolstered by the support of prominent figures from political and humanitarian
institutions in the U.S. and abroad, to which he can offer reciprocal value by
association, starting with his name and face and frequently involving some form of
that somewhat hazy activity commonly referred to as “raising awareness.”
Thus far, his dealings have not forced him to choose between his main act in the
film business and his side projects, although during a certain phase of the early years of
the George W. Bush presidency he felt targeted by right---wing pundits to the point that
he feared his statements criticizing U.S. involvement in the Iraq war might have
endangered his career. Rather, gaining authority in one arena has largely aided him in
others (though not in every instance), in some measure owing to attributes specific to
him and because the grounds have shifted enough to allow him to venture into new and
highly specialized enclaves without losing his foothold in his home turf.
Detailing precisely when and how all the relevant shifts occurred could produce
enough material to comprise a series of additional studies. When it comes to the more
manageable task of tracking entertainment celebrities’ mass ingress into the arena of
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American politics, several versions of that extensive and complex backstory have been
thoroughly chronicled, as indicated in the literature review. A summary of the array of
symbiotic contributing factors might include, but is not limited to: structural changes in
the entertainment industry; the rise of entertainment media and its significant presence
in and impact upon hard news; the advent of the Internet, social media and new
technologies and platforms; various inroads made by politicians into the realm of
celebrity and vice versa; flashpoints, crises and the ‘greatest hits’ moments in celebrity
advocacy that offered new models of performative politics; plus evolving publicity
strategies that attempted to accommodate all of the above. How and why George
Clooney in particular was able to gain passage between the interconnected worlds of
fame and politics—for many, not only impenetrable in and of themselves, but mutually
exclusive—will be considered below. First, a survey of some relevant details from
Clooney’s off---screen political history

will provide the basis for that discussion.
Clooney was raised in Kentucky with of two prominent media figures in his
immediate family: his broadcast journalist father, Nick Clooney, and his aunt, singer
Rosemary Clooney. They were engaged in political and social causes and aligned with
the Democratic Party, and the younger Clooney’s political involvement preceded his
own renown. As his fame grew, any gestures he made that were intended, or taken, as
political would also be magnified in kind, and though his opinions about whether and
how to most effectively position himself as a political performer changed, his
visibility in that capacity has only intensified following a crucial turning point early in
the new millennium.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City
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and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001, Clooney was a main force
behind the star--- studded “America: A Tribute to Heroes” benefit, which aired live on
Sept. 21, 2001 from New York, London and Los Angeles on more than 35 television
outlets and was streamed online. That event, which featured famous musicians and
entertainers—including Tom Hanks, Neil Young, Alicia Keys, Julia Roberts, Will
Smith, Cameron Diaz, U2, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, the
Dixie Chicks and Mariah Carey—performing and raising money, served as a
fundraising telethon as well as a musical tribute and drummed up more than $100
million for organizations that supported the targeted cities (ABC News).
In January 2003, Clooney ventured into chancier territory by adding his voice to a
chorus of high--profile dissenters who spoke out against the impending U.S. invasion of
Iraq. Giving a sly nod to his chosen profession, he accused then-President George W.
Bush and his administration of taking a page from a fictional Mafia boss’ book with their
leadership style, declaring on PBS’ Charlie Rose talk show, “The government itself is
run exactly like the Sopranos.” He also accused President Bush of making backroom
deals with leaders from Russia and France in order to remove possible roadblocks within
the United Nations Security Council so that its members would be compliant when "we
go into a war and kill a lot of innocent people.” Of the sitting president, Clooney said,
“Let’s face it: Bush is just dim” (Caro).
Clooney’s anti-war expressions caused blowback; he was branded a "traitor" by a
tabloid magazine and a “Wacko Liberal Nutcase” by Celebpolitics.com, as well as
heckled on Fox News and other right-leaning outlets. A playing card displaying a
caricature of the actor was included in the "Deck of Weasels" set created by the
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conservative site NewsMax to ridicule Hollywood's vocal opponents of the Bush White
House’s foreign policy (“Deck”). Joining Clooney as fellow Hollywood “weasels” were
Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Barbra Streisand, among
others. Despite his outspokenness on certain issues, Clooney tempered his impulses to
make visible movements in an increasingly mediated, polarized and, vis-à-vis celebrities,
cross-pollinated political environment when it came to lending his name and image to
assist candidates running for office in the 2004 election. That stance would soon change;
in fact, his reticence in that regard effectively expired with George W. Bush’s tenure in
the White House. While it lasted, the actor believed that an outright endorsement on his
part would only spell trouble for any candidate he attempted to help in that manner at the
time.
One such candidate in 2004 happened to be Clooney’s own father, who ran for a
seat in the House of Representatives and whom he assisted mainly in behind-the-scenes
efforts. That Nick Clooney’s clan was referred to by a local Democratic operative as
“the Kennedys of Kentucky”

might have enhanced their collective allure, but that kind
of association was not likely to help the elder Clooney win over voters in his home
state’s predominantly conservative Fourth Congressional District. His bid was ultimately
unsuccessful, and his defeat was likely attributable in some measure to his opponent's
strategic invocation of the term "Hollywood versus the heartland," which linked Nick to
his son on a general level and more specifically referenced George's fundraising efforts
on his father's behalf (Crowley).
Stars came out for Nick Clooney, including Kevin Costner, Paul Newman, Renée
Zellweger, Drew Barrymore, Michael Douglas, Salma Hayek and Kevin Spacey; as well
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as industry executives DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and Universal
Studios President Ronald Meyer; and directors Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh;
by making financial contributions. Some attended a campaign event George Clooney
held at his Los Angeles-area home in March 2004. All in all, more than 100 donors with
ties to Hollywood gave funds to the tune of $170,000 to the elder Clooney's coffers, and
Nick Clooney's overall fund drive produced record-breaking results in his district (Ryan).
The inverse effect that so much goodwill and monetary backing could apparently have,
simply by virtue of its source, demonstrates how the associative power of celebrity does
not always ensure a predictable or positive outcome.
George Clooney demurred from openly stumping for then-Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry for similar reasons, which he detailed in an interview
with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program on October 18, 2005, telling the show’s
host that, while he did some “fundraising” for his father, he did not technically campaign
for either him or Kerry because he would “damage” them. Clooney also told Gross that
“to get on board a train and yell about my liberal beliefs” would have been detrimental
to Kerry and “only gives people something to point at” (T. Gross).
However, a shift evidently occurred for Clooney between that election season and
the 2008 cycle, either with respect to his own sense of how to most effectively blend his
celebrity with his activism or due to the change in the national zeitgeist that laid the
groundwork for Barack Obama to assume the country’s highest office—or some
combination of those and other factors. His moves in the political arena, by then, were
proliferating, becoming more varied and increasingly connected to institutions and
structures of power. His apparent ability to be taken seriously in those forums, in turn,
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lent him value and an air of gravitas that aided his smooth entry into other zones of
influence.
In early 2008, as Barack Obama, freshman senator from Illinois, was well on
course to become the U.S.' 44th president, George Clooney, seasoned movie star, was
stepping up his own political game. The future president had seen his fortunes turn early
in his national career through a combination of native talent, which was on full display
during his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and promotion at the
hands of star--makers from the political and entertainment worlds—most notably, in the
latter case, Oprah Winfrey, who had lent the then--senator some measure of her
considerable wattage by featuring him in the November 2004 issue of O, The Oprah
Magazine (“Oprah Talks”). Meanwhile, Clooney had cut his teeth in international affairs
by pulling together an array of entertainment personalities for a January 15, 2005
telethon to benefit victims of the South Asia tsunami
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on December 26, 2004 and later
by becoming highly active in an ongoing man-made disaster in Africa. That their paths
would cross, and that each would benefit from contact with the other in one of the most
fortuitous and complementary instances of power coupling in recent history seems
practically inevitable given their respective trajectories and the commingling of their
professional fields.
In one of the most aptly, not to mention symbolically, realized instances of all the
various components of the apparatus of political celebrity conspiring to announce the
arrival of a new era, Clooney was in the picture that became the basis for artist Shepard
Fairey's iconic "Hope" image that would be used in the future president's campaign
materials. Fairey came up with that viral portrait, after soliciting and receiving support to
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do so from Obama's team, in the weeks before the "Super Tuesday" primary elections on
February 5, 2008, but the scene from which it was derived had occurred nearly two years
prior. Clooney and Obama were actually photographed by Associated Press
photographer Mannie Garcia while sitting next to each other at the National Press Club
in Washington, D.C. in April 2006 for a panel discussion about the humanitarian crisis
in Darfur, Sudan-a factor that would become at least as important in Clooney's political
career as was his connection to the ascendant politician seated to his left (N. Cohen).
Perhaps most significant, however, is how Clooney was by then not just gaining
acknowledgement and influence in already existing institutions but was also starting to
create his own politically charged spaces and structures. Thus, the goal was shifting for
him, in some key respects, from one of assimilation to one of assertion. A new
administration was about to take over the White House, which may have allowed for a
greater sense of freedom for left-leaning celebrities to more openly stake their political
claims. In terms of electoral politics, the notion of siding with what was increasingly
looking like the winning team could well have played a role in drawing stars out for
Obama's sake, even those who had previously been reluctant to make politics part of
their act before. Once again, Oprah Winfrey might be the most super-powered celebrity
case study from that set at that time.
Although Clooney would come to be linked to Obama in a directly invested sense
as a strong supporter from the would-be president's considerable array of Hollywood
backers, the actor's concern about the crisis in Sudan first brought him into Obama's
orbit, and vice versa, in a substantial way. It was also the cause that would most compel
Clooney to use his influence on an international scale and, in so doing, would amplify his
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stature on the local level as well, thus enabling him to eventually take a more entrenched
role in the Washington D.C. scene without being immediately categorizable as yet
another dilettante from Hollywood who plays at politics for the duration of a given
campaign, earnestly reading lines fed from glowing TelePrompTers and obliging
publicists until ballots are tallied and checks are cut. summed up according to the
operative term of ‘exploiting contingencies.’

Going Global
Clooney went public with his involvement in the crisis in Sudan in spring of
2006. In April, he took a 10-day sojourn to Sudan and Chad with his father—he was
willing to openly advocate for this cause with Nick Clooney—to film the documentary A
Journey to Darfur, about the plight of refugees displaced by the conflict in their region
(“Documentary”). On April 30, he joined thousands of demonstrators, including other
celebrities, elected officials, religious and community leaders, for an event held on the
National Mall in Washington, D.C. to spur the Bush administration and fellow
Americans to take action to stop the human rights catastrophe in Darfur. George and
Nick Clooney brought their recent impressions from the African war zone to bear at the
rally, where George, as the Associated Press reported from the scene, "said the United
States' and United Nations' policies are failing."
Positioning himself in a liminal space—somewhere between concerned citizen and
famous person, face in the crowd

and featured speaker, establishment player and
maverick, glitzy movie star and serious documentary filmmaker—he spoke as one aware
of the shortcomings in the available legislative and diplomatic bodies and determined to
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operate beyond them all if they could not effectively intervene. "This is in fact the first
genocide of the 21st century, but there is hope: all of you . . . Every one of you speaking
with one voice, every one of you," he told the audience (Associated Press,
“Celebrities”).
Clooney's considered stance as the V.I.P. civilian, which he adopted at the Sudan
rally, is one he would apparently find the most suitable for ongoing use, allowing him to
downplay his importance and eligibility to occupy legitimate positions of power while at
the same time marshaling, effectively, the kind of power that those positions afford. In
this blended role, he is at once an insider and an outsider and able to reap the benefits of
both. Despite his carefully presented attitude of populist egalitarianism mingled with
winking self-deprecation, it all requires a very specific set of credentials to pull off—and
not just any Hollywood charmer with a cause can run with the kind of crowd that counts
Clooney as a card-carrying member. (Some outsider.)
From that juncture until President Obama's first inauguration, Clooney continued
to raise his profile, and the stakes, with regard to his involvement in the Darfur crisis. In
September 2006, the actor appeared before the United Nations Security Council along
with Nobel prize--winning author Elie Wiesel, urging the U.N. to push for a resolution in
the region. In December of that same year, Clooney, along with fellow actor

and Darfur
activist Don Cheadle, met with government officials in China and Egypt in an attempt to
influence those administrations' relationships with the Sudanese regime. Continuing his
streak of globetrotting diplomacy, in March 2007, Clooney penned an open letter to
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, entreating the European Union to show solidarity
with his cause by taking "decisive action" (Kleinman). Then, on September 13, 2007, the
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Associated Press consulted the actor for an article about a visit held in Rome the
following day between Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, then-Pope Benedict XVI
and then-Italian Premier Romano Prodi.
The AP’s report matter-of-factly presented commentary from Clooney about how
he supported the meeting, despite detractors’ concerns that meeting with controversial
figures like al-Bashir was tantamount to endorsing them, because “[t]he policy of not
talking to [Sudanese leaders] because they’re unsavory hasn’t been very effective.” The
article also included a mention near its conclusion that Clooney “has a villa on Lake
Como,” which serves simultaneously to establish the protagonist as a famous part-time
resident with geographical interest in the political scene unfolding in Rome and to flash
his wealth-based credentials to aid in the construction of his worth as a local authority
whose opinion on matters of global significance is appropriate to solicit for news reports.
It was another instance in which the diorama was glimpsed and solicited from the
outside (Associated Press, “Clooney”).
Clooney also drew attention to the Sudan conflict in two additional ways in 2007
that used his film background as a point of departure into international politics. One
move involved joining forces with fellow actors Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt and Matt
Damon—all of whom co-starred with him in the Ocean’s Eleven franchise—to establish
the Not On Our Watch project. The wording of the organization’s mission statement
maps directly onto the broader themes of this chapter:
Drawing upon figures with powerful voices, we develop projects and campaigns
that bring global attention to forgotten international crises. We target mass media
and global policy-makers. We encourage governing bodies to take meaningful,
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immediate action to protect the vulnerable and create consequences for the
perpetrators of war crimes and their accomplices. Drawing on our history of
providing humanitarian assistance, we now focus on addressing root causes to help
bring an end to complex conflicts in the regions of the world not typically
prioritized by the international community (“What”).
Given this framing, it is possible to make a few germane inferences about how Clooney
and his fellow famous global stewards view and position themselves in this particular
instance. Of particular interest in the group’s statement is the assertion, without
immediate qualification, of its members as arbiters of what constitutes “war crimes,” as
well as “meaningful” action and the recognition and prioritization of complex conflicts.
They are a part of, yet apart from, the “international community” and “governing bodies”
in this rendering. Interestingly, Not On Our Watch creates an impression of the kind of
power it wields as being less encumbered, less entrenched and for those reasons more
effective than various powerful regimes around the world and able to make departures
into some sort of celebrity vigilante justice activities (meanwhile, those governments are
presumed to be open to their interventions).
The Not On Our Watch group’s invocation of the image of “figures with powerful
voices,” brings up one of the most extensively employed tenets of realitics which
Clooney was occupied, along with Angelina Jolie, Paul “Bono” Hewson, and scores of
other stars: Realitics co-opts the cachet of the artist and enlists it in the service of elite
political, diplomatic, commercial and social agendas. At times, more than one agenda can
be running simultaneously in the same initiative, as is the case in the production of
message-driven films. As a reporter for the New York Daily News, I spoke with a group
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of well-known activists who gathered on the pier in Malibu, California for the “Paddle
Out Protest” on October 23, 2006, asking them for their thoughts about celebrity
advocacy. As planned, their presence at the pier drew media attention, and they used the
opportunity to register their disapproval of plans in the works to build a natural gas
facility off the Pacific Ocean coastline near their neighborhood.
As actors, they were thoroughly media-trained, and their answers reflected their
skill in redirecting the interest in their fame toward the issue at hand. “Once you put your
toe in that water, the ripple effect is enormous, and there’s no going back,” actor Pierce
Brosnan commented. “I have a voice, I have a profile, and you use it, hopefully to the
best of your abilities, with some responsibility” (Brosnan). Daryl Hannah downplayed the
idea that celebrities’ voices may be louder than those of civilians, saying, “I don’t think
much of it,” in response to my query about star-powered action. “I just think that
everybody has to get out, and I don’t care what job you do,” she added, preparing to
paddle out on her surfboard to form a human chain off the pier. “People need to start
speaking up and realizing that if they do, their voice will be heard. … it doesn’t matter if
you’re a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker” (Hannah). Dick Van Dyke was more
inclined than Hannah to acknowledge the contribution of celebrity to his brand of
advocacy, averring that “it does draw attention, gets some press, and makes people think”
(Van Dyke).
In a March 3, 2009, interview, director Oliver Stone took Van Dyke’s and
Brosnan’s argument a few steps further. “I feel that entertainment is the best way to get
into someone’s mind,” he said. It’s very subversive, that act of entertainment”
(Stone).
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Later in 2007, Clooney also brought his ability to traffic between realms while the
world watches to bear on two documentary projects: Ted Braun's Darfur Now, in which
he and Cheadle both appeared, and Paul Freedman's Sand and Sorrow, a project for
which he served a narrator and a co-executive producer. Barack Obama is also included
in the list of well-known establishment figures featured in the latter film, as is Samantha
Power, who would later become President Obama's choice for U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, along with Elie Wiesel, actor and Darfur Now producer John Prendergast
and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. These would serve at the very least as
proof that Clooney could indeed focus attention on the African crisis; whether that
actually translates into action, or action of anything like a predictable or beneficial nature
in the estimation of those he intends to help, is another matter.
By this stage in Clooney's diplomatic arc, his interactions and associations with
international figures and institutions were not one-sided, as powerful people and
organizations were actively seeking to engage and even align themselves with him in
turn. On December 13, 2007, Clooney and Cheadle were given the 2007 Man of Peace
Award, artfully symbolized in the form of a bronze statue they each received by Italian
artist Oliviero Rainaldi, at the World Summit of Nobel Laureates for their efforts to
secure peace in Sudan. At a news conference in conjunction with the ceremony, which
was held in Rome, Clooney downplayed the impact of previous efforts to direct the
important resource of ‘awareness’ while playing up the possibilities of strategies he was
helping to roll out in the near future: “We do concerts, rallies, where thousands of people
show up and say how terrible it is,” he said. “But the truth is not one single thing has
changed. Now it’s time to turn that corner.” The Associated Press, again covering
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Clooney’s moves in and around Rome (and again working his Lake Como villa into
another report), noted that one very concrete way in which Clooney was using his
amped-up influence in diplomatic circles was by attempting to convince United Nations
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to send 24 helicopters to protect some four million
vulnerable Sudanese people. By that point, the article added, the Not On Our Watch
project had raised more than $9.3 million, which was earmarked for that particular
region (Associated Press, “Hollywood’s”).
Other significant points along Clooney’s trajectory as budding global diplomat
include the full underwriting of the most prominent international institution in the West:
the United Nations, which in late 2008 tapped him to be a U.N. Messenger of Peace. In
early 2009, Clooney linked up to another high-profile media networker, The New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who could definitely be said to have recruited
Clooney in kind. The two men struck out to Africa for a series of multimedia-enhanced
pieces about the plight of embattled populations in Chad and Sudan at that juncture.
In his lede for a New York Times story published on Feb. 18, 2009 (headline:
“Trailing George Clooney”), Kristof makes allowance for the dazzling element that
Clooney added to the expedition, using a tone that attempts to rise above the hoopla
while also participating in the gawking that he tacitly derides. “I was going to begin this
column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee,” Kristof
begins, “but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another
person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney” (Kristof). Having gently
chided the reader while blatantly using Clooney as bait in a kind of journalistic
humblebrag, Kristof goes on to describe what she or he really ought to be more
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interested in, laying out the complex and dangerous problems boiling over in the area.
The piece as a whole performs a more general play on celebrity advocacy, positioning its
star as a lightning rod for drawing the precious interest of onlookers long enough to
allow them to be informed, and better, inspired, while they’re also busy ogling People
magazine’s two-time Sexiest Man of the Year (1997 and 2006).
Clooney’s constructive joint venture with Kristof represented one of a few
intertwined connections that would offer the actor a big leg-up in his climb to becoming
a force to be reckoned with—at least insofar as that force would blow open certain
doors. In October 2010, having helped carry off yet another successful star-studded
telethon on January 22—this time for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti ten days
prior, as well as having been chosen to become a lifetime member of the influential
Council on Foreign Relations that June—Clooney returned to South Sudan accompanied
by John Prendergast.
Like Clooney, Prendergast is his own kind of hybrid agent, with hooks into the
zones of entertainment, diplomacy and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). On his
biographical information page for the anti-genocide organization the Enough Project, for
which he serves as Founding Director, Prendergast is described as a “human rights
activist” and “best-selling author” who has “worked for the Clinton White House, the
State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council,
UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of
Peace” (“Founding”). Like Clooney, Prendergast became capable of operating as an
insider/outsider, and mingling with others of this kind, by first working firmly as an
insider within the most established channels of power. And like Clooney, as well as
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Barack Obama, to pull in an earlier thread, Prendergast’s subsequent career moves
following his formative years suggested an enduring belief that continuing to lean
heavily on those establishment connections and power centers was beneficial. The
question for all three actors is: beneficial for whom, exactly?
In the short term, Prendergast and Clooney’s main focus took on the kind of
headline-grabbing magnitude that Hollywood studio heads would kill for while also
taking a form that would make nonprofit executives, elected officials and U.N. envoys
sit up and take notice as well. Their South Sudan visit included prime media placement
in the form of a week’s worth of televised exposure aided by then-Today show anchor
Ann Curry, who trailed the pair as they visited a series of important sites. Curry
commented, in the course of their travels, about how Clooney was getting involved in
that risky conflict when he could be “sipping wine in Italy,” but the actor was ready for
his close-up: “If you knew a tsunami or Katrina or a Haiti earthquake

was coming, what
would you do to save people?” he asked (Serpe).
Curry’s gloss aside, the most important result of that trip was that Clooney and
Prendergast together hatched the Satellite Sentinel Project. The initiative drew upon the
founders’ combined influence, as well as from funds that Clooney had amassed while
shooting Nespresso commercials that aired outside the U.S.—a formerly déclassé
practice that A-list entertainers once kept under the radar before the Internet age—to
arrange dedicated satellite surveillance to be aimed at Sudan and surrounding territories.
The greater purpose: monitoring day-to-day events on the ground in Sudan by tracking
the movements of pro-regime forces who might be enacting genocidal violence in part
because other modes of intercession were not successfully forcing them to comply with
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international peacekeeping agencies’ standards or to be held accountable for their
breaches of protocol (“Our Story”).
Once again, as the SSP’s tagline indicates, Clooney and his team of satellite--
enabled vigilantes make their belief in the power of a particular strain of attention clear
in their tagline for the project’s website: “The world is watching because you are
watching” (“Our Story”). The initiative is about more than just installing an eye in the
sky to follow Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir; SSP also employs various research
techniques to gauge the status of relevant hotspots and to alert onlookers from within
and without official organizations about potential trouble. However, as Clooney himself
made clear in an interview with The Guardian, he thought that a certain kind of force
that has kept close tabs on his own movements, the paparazzi, could be repurposed to
suit the goals of the Satellite Sentinel Project:
Most of the money I make on the [Nespresso] commercials I spend keeping a
satellite over the border of North and South Sudan to keep an eye on Omar al--
Bashir. . . . Then he puts out a statement saying that I’m spying on him and how
would I like it if a camera was following me everywhere I went and I go ‘well
welcome to my life Mr War Criminal’. I want the war criminal to have the same
amount of attention that I get. I think that’s fair (Siegle).
In another gesture of service to the African continent and beyond, Clooney worked his
connections with the top brass at Nespresso to develop its corporate sustainability
practices and generate jobs for people living in places where Nespresso grows its coffee
for the gourmet pods that Clooney heats up and serves so suavely in the commercials
(Siegle).
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In the years since he launched that highly conspicuous co-production with
Prendergast, it has been unclear how much positive impact Clooney’s brand of diplomacy
has had. On the most immediate level, the situation in Sudan and the newly established
South Sudan could easily be said to have become direr, and some have even speculated
that Clooney himself has caused upticks in violence in specific zones simply by virtue of
drawing that rarefied attention he had courted and channeled (Shearlaw). How much of
an effect in either direction could be specifically attributed to Clooney is nearly
impossible to gauge, but that is not reason to let such celebrities with causes off the hook.
The Guardian asked Sudanese citizens for a piece published Dec. 11, 2014
whether they believed his considerable efforts have paid off. One interviewee identified
as a “North Darfuri” remarked that though “Clooney might be doing something fantastic”
by “tracking the movements of Sudanese troops and militias” with the SSP and via other
means, “I don’t see that it has halted, or even reduced, the genocide. The killing,
displacement, sexual assaults and rape never stopped.” What’s more, according to that
source, the al-Bashir regime has adjusted its strategy according to the limits imposed by
outside interlopers (Shearlaw). Other Sudanese citizens, including a youth organization
called “Not In Our Name,” urged Clooney, in an open letter dated March 18, 2012, to
focus his efforts on helping the region according to the needs and direction of those who
know it best (“Sudan”).
Despite the difficulty in measuring impact in terms of the people of Darfur—or,
for that matter, of Kiev, whom Clooney also attempted to help by aiming his beam of
attention on their bid for democracy via a December 2013 video address—the
significance of his actions with regard to realitics is perhaps clearer. As mentioned
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above, another approach to this issue is to examine how these maneuvers have added to
Clooney’s own stature. The goal in so doing is not to speculate about how accruing
international power is Clooney’s actual, secret aim, but to move the focus away from
complex quandaries about effects and toward considerations about how his films,
alliances, maverick NGOs, U.N. credentials, commercials, New York Times Op-Ed
pieces, Nespresso-fueled satellite spy operations, campaign-trail cameos, protest arrests,
and trips to Africa all aided in the construction of a new political player on the global
stage.
Realiticians may employ pastiche politics, or a combination of moves,
qualifications, and markers of influence, that add up to a total profile that commands
power, as opposed to moving along a prescribed and more commonly traversed route.
The particular individuals’ profiles are idiosyncratic, not easily duplicated, and develop
in relation to a host of forces and factors that cannot always be anticipated (e.g., a
significant challenge for the actors themselves, as well as for the many ancillary players
in their networks whose own professional interests are bound up with the main figure).
However, once established in this less conventional manner, stars who are able to
command this kind of power can also potentially avoid some of the rules and restrictions
to which those who have gone the more established routes are subject.
In Clooney’s example, this figure is capable of deploying a certain kind of media--
enabled power that not only grants him access to the most exclusive spaces of
international influence without forcing him to choose one at the exclusion of others, but
it also seems to be enhanced by frequent, though not always predictable or positive,
exposure to those others. It also enables him to become a power broker in his own right,
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continuing the trend he established with Sudan and other pursuits to influence outcomes
on the individual, institutional and governmental levels. Finally, he is actively
participating in the ongoing creation and refinement of global realitics, which draws
upon larger forces and structures for significance even as it transforms their meanings
and configurations.
Since their marriage, George and Amal Clooney have started a family, along with
the next most logical joint venture for a married pair of international celebrity activists.
In 2016, they established the Clooney Foundation for Justice with the goal of “advancing
justice in courtrooms, classrooms and communities around the world” (Clooney
Foundation). On February 20, 2018, CNN reported that the Clooneys had cut a $500,000
check to contribute to the March for Our Lives, the March 24, 2018, protest against gun
violence that was organized by high-school students who survived the February 14
shooting in Parkland, Florida. George and Amal Clooney said in a statement about the
“groundbreaking” event, “Our children’s lives depend on it” (France).
The previous January, the Clooneys stopped by the 2017 World Economic Forum
meeting, as Amal Clooney had some business there. She was honored at the “Women of
Impact” dinner at Davos, along with a Nobel-nominated client who had endured sex
slavery as a prisoner of ISIS (Overdeep). Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown
presided over the dinner, and outgoing Vice President Joe Biden was also in attendance.
The British magazine Hello! reported that “George looked typically dapper in a smart
grey suit,” but ultimately “it was Amal who stole the show in an ivory sequin
embellished dress from Chanel’s spring/summer 1963 collection” (hellofashion.com).

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Chapter Six: The “Golden Wrecking Ball” Swings for the White House

"In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail;
without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who
enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be
executed.”― President Abraham Lincoln

A kind of peak moment in pop-political culture occurred on August 28, 2015,
when 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin interviewed fellow Republican and
2016 U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump as part of her weeklong hosting stint on the
One America News Network. The televised Palin-Trump encounter seemed so inevitable
as to hardly require human assistance for its realization. Their exchange amounted to
little beyond the expression of mutual admiration, synchronized affirmations of
communal values and an implicit invitation for viewers to model themselves according to
the prototypes presented on the screen. In a few prophetic moments that could have been
dismissed as boilerplate Palin-speak or on-screen schmoozing, the former Alaska
governor praised Trump as an “anti-politician politician,” the leader of a “movement,”
and declared his campaign to be “avant garde” (R. Carroll).
The symbolic import of that event surpassed its content, and though the
‘lamestream media,’ to use one of Palin’s stock catchphrases, would not catch up for a
beat or two, Palin’s take on Trump was not entirely inaccurate in retrospect. At that time,
though, sharing the screen was at once a risky and an obvious maneuver for each of the
self-styled iconoclasts. Trump’s own track resembled Palin’s, albeit on a scale involving
higher financial and political stakes. Both were viewed as polarizing, supersized
characters from the American right. Both had built reputations that ranged from straight-
shooting rebels out to transform the nation to dodgy swindlers out for themselves,
depending on the political coordinates of the appraising party.
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Though Trump stood to gain followers, fans, and maybe even voters from among
Palin’s right-leaning One America viewership, he was betting on the premise that he was
associating with the Palin that had emerged as a leader and a voice in her own right since
the 2008 election and who had brought CPAC 2015 audiences to their feet that February,
not the Palin who had been part of a losing presidential ticket and had vacated her
governor’s post. Meanwhile, Palin was aligning herself with a wild card who was even
more ‘untested’ than Barack Obama had been when she criticized his lack of executive
experience during the 2008 season. Trump was also fresh off of issuing a blistering insult
in the same breath that he had announced his candidacy that could cost his campaign, not
to mention his party, millions of votes from the Hispanic community. If that divisive
tactic was part of what Palin found to be “avant garde” about Trump, others might, and
did, counter that it seemed more like a throwback the world had seen before.
Like Palin, Trump had entered the public eye through conventional means, in his
case as a real estate tycoon, granting him executive experience of a different sort. Like
Palin, he had endured several professional trials, failures, and personal scandals, and he
had made a show of an idealized representation of himself, marketed as a his most
authentic self, through reality television.
33
As Palin had done, he amplified his influence
through savvy, personality-driven manipulation of the news media via various platforms.
He, too, was able to capitalize on news and reality media, and then social media, during
times of greater and lesser exposure in other arenas and in ways that might have proven
detrimental to his contemporaries or even to Trump himself in earlier phases. Like Palin,
Trump changed the game, but thanks in part to Palin, the game had also changed prior to
his campaign in ways that could accommodate his mode of politicking, making the feat
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less of a personal triumph and more the outcome of a number of forces with distinct
chronological, economic, political, and symbolic properties working in concert. Certain
elements had to be in place for Trump to take on the persona and the power he was able
to assume, and it was not, for all his vocal devotion to the American ideal of
individualism, a one-man job.
Palin and Trump also shared the ability to mobilize vast swaths of the Republican
voter base while alarming GOP loyalists wary of stoking a dynamic in which the display
of flashy personalities supersedes the need to advance collective priorities. Despite their
capacity to upend the established order by doing end runs around it or barreling through
it, and by interacting directly with audiences, one advantage for the establishment of
cautiously bringing these charismatic figures into the partisan fold was that they dazzled,
recruited, and galvanized voters more effectively than their tamer counterparts could.
Although the two unlikely leaders styled themselves as nonconformists who played by
their own rules, and though they frequently veered off-script to the vexation of their
peers, they might alternately be seen as working to reinforce the same party lines, in
terms of both narratives and boundaries, from which they purposefully departed—the
rebel’s paradox. Thus, in a best-case scenario, they could potentially boost their side’s
chances of winning major elections.
34

Or perhaps the Trumps and Palins of the 2015 scene were essentially
inconsequential hustlers, repeat pretenders who were grandstanding in order to raise their
stock in corollary realms such as entertainment or enhancing their profiles on the national
political stage so as to reap the perks of running. Seeking office, after all, had become an
ever more gainful endeavor to which victory at the polls was increasingly irrelevant. So,
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the logic went, these figures represented a somewhat concerning but tolerable side effect
of the lucrative business of professional campaigning in the new millennium. Among
other contributing factors, the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs.
FEC ruling opened the floodgates for record amounts of money to enter the political
arena, in which ad hoc career paths were being plotted. Bouncing between public and
private sectors, elected office and cabinet posts, television gigs, think tanks, university
chairs, lobbying firms, corporations, and foundations was suddenly not only possible but
profitable.
As still another option, their roles could be understood as being about articulating
and extending the bounds of their party’s stances on key issues, irrespective of their
actual investment or intent to push them through official legislative channels. In other
words, they could infuse public discourse with ideas that were thought to be politically
expedient but dicey and that their straight-laced colleagues could not get away with
saying out loud. They were covertly given the go-ahead to expand the outer limits of the
“Overton window,” or the array of topics conceptualized within a “window of political
possibility” and acceptability at a particular moment (Lehman). If the Trump types went
too far, or so the logic went, others would seem reasonable by comparison for taking
hardline but not fringe positions. Worst-case scenario: the outliers could be repositioned
as bad cops, pied pipers, or if all else failed, outcasts.
Had the above passages been composed in 2015, like many other onlookers I
would have run with the second rationale attributing the interlinked Palin-Trump
phenomena to (mostly) toothless opportunism. I make that conjecture despite having
tracked Palin’s movements in the capacity of a journalist and a scholar for years before
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Trump’s big crescendo. From what I observed, Palin was neither a creator nor a chief
instigator but rather a fairly adept populist rabble-rouser. That is, the rabble—i.e., the
combined economic, sociocultural, political and other factors that led to the growth of
groups like the Tea Party in the late noughts—was already there for her to rouse. If
hadn’t come down to her to stir it up, someone else may have done so reasonably well
instead. In sum, she was not all that indispensable or unique, except in how she stitched
together the foundational material of realitics into a pattern that others could recognize
and follow, and in how she made it all work for her. Generally, people do not talk as
though there were a clear division between America before and after Palin appeared on
the scene.
They certainly do with regard to Donald Trump. He is Palin’s match and then
some; like her, he has proven to be an astute interpreter of restive sociopolitical forces,
and he is a master provocateur. He caught similar flak as Palin had for being an
inexperienced, unpredictable outsider who swapped in crude populism for proper
statesmanship. Tactically, their shared affinity for sowing dissonance and angling for
relevance through social media is easily apprehended. If he took any tips from Palin—
and from his own written record, it appears he was well ahead of her in some respects—
by June 2015, it was clear that the student had far outstripped the teacher. As he shocked
his way into the news cycle and proceeded to dominate it from that point forth, it became
harder to deny that Trump was onto something.
Paradoxically, and contrary to the established logic of formal political publicity,
the sense that he was ‘onto something’ was directly proportionate to the degree of scandal
that he generated. As his outré march toward the White House progressed, it was evident
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in the surges of support he garnered through his outlandish ploys, contumacious attitude
and revivalist speeches at rallies. What struck opponents as the stuff of delusion, or a
mass-scale act of absurdist performance art, had been accepted, even celebrated, by
scores of Americans who either believed Trump’s shtick or did not necessarily buy it but
backed him anyway. To his antagonists, he had not only made the unspeakable speakable,
but he made it into a rallying cry, leveraging difference in the form of racism, religious
intolerance, authoritarianism, misogyny, and populism, perfunctorily gussied up as
something else when a dash of plausible deniability was needed. To many of his
followers, he was a crusader armed with the singular ability to articulate truths that
needed to be said aloud and the vision to “make America great again” (Poole). Trump,
himself, was something else.
The exact nature of that ‘something’ varies, once again, depending on the
evaluating party. The same can be said of the je ne sais qoi that enabled Trump to snatch
victory from not only the jaws of defeat but from the entire Republican establishment;
more than a dozen trained GOP rivals; and a formidable Democratic opponent with a
slick campaign machine, a convincing air of fatalism, and a gargantuan war chest behind
her. In addition to being a channeler like Palin and a lightning rod in a more studied
manner than the Dixie Chicks, Trump was also an instigator and a macher in his own
right, not least when it came to controlling the terms of the discourse as well as the media
frame. He was a walking, speechifying media event, as well as a spectacle in and of
himself. Somewhere along the way, this had become an asset for American politicians.
Resisting the urge to treat Trump using the kind of hyperbolic terms to which he
is inclined, and which he tends to evoke, here he will be considered in the same light as
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subjects of other chapters–i.e., in terms of his significance to a broader study of realitics.
Granted, he is the most powerful realitician to date, and he stands at the center of a
perfect storm of indicators of (some might say risk factors for) realitics. Trump would
seem to represent the inevitable denouement, even the Lacanian real,
35
of this project; to
those less generously inclined, he might be the Frankenstein monster of realitics. Either
way, he still is not the star of this show. If I were to fixate overly on Trump, I would be
betraying my own efforts from previous chapters to argue how many distinct forces
produce realitics in a given instance as well as how it is not an object, innate quality, or
scarce resource to be monopolized by any one person.
So, I will leave it to others to write the definitive story of how Trump rose to
power and to draw conclusions about his character and presidency, as viable explanations
including accident, authoritarian mania, disaster capitalism, the fall of the American
empire, Russian interference, and so forth continue to be bandied about (Klein,
“Naomi”). Realitics is bigger than the sum of its parts, even one so “bigly” as Trump.
Instead, this chapter will cover the ways in which realitics aided the development of
Trump and vice versa, while grappling with the implications of realitics upgrading from
sideshow to center stage in American electoral politics. The level on which the arguments
to be laid out will operate will avoid some of the flashiness that is abundantly available
on the surface level of Trump’s narrative in favor of exploring the undercurrents and
underpinnings without which the rest would not be possible.
As previous chapters exhibited, realiticians, like garden-variety 21
st
-century
celebrities, are compelled to treat publicity as an unceasing task and to see themselves as
agents constantly promoting their own brand. They are connected to many other actants
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and networks, but they are first and foremost CEOs of their own company of one. This
scheme may not seem too discordant with regard to people heeding the justificatory
regime of the “market polity” like Arianna Huffington, or entertainers like Clooney who
hail from the “fame polity” (Thévènot and Boltanski). When it comes to elected officials,
however, much of this arrangement runs counter to the purported ideals and best practices
of public service. What happens, then, when realitics becomes the norm on Capitol Hill?

Trump’s Foundations
Donald Trump did not suddenly materialize in June 2015 fully formed and ready
to storm Washington, D.C. Despite the ease with which he has triggered comparisons to
various despots, folk heroes and film plots, his rise to power is not tantamount to a
predestined consummation of unstoppable forces. Suggesting that certain aspects of his
profile and entries from his playbook are comparable to historical leaders of charismatic
and authoritarian types, and that many environmental conditions made room for
unorthodox prospects, is not the same as declaring his presidency inevitable. That would
amount to yet another example of correlation-causation conflation, and though it makes
for snappy headlines and book titles, it is not in keeping with the thesis statement of this
project.
Provisos aside, it is possible to say that Trump is a consummate realitician. This is
so because of the many types of privilege built into his position, as well as owing to an
aptitude that Trump has evidenced for exploiting contingencies. It is also accurate to state
that a conducive backdrop was in place to abet his ascent. In order to appreciate the
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impact of his party-crashing presence, it is useful to know more about the party in
question, and here that word stands for more than just the ‘grand old’ variety.
The ingredients for celebrity influence were deeply instilled and had been since
well before even the storied era of the Founding Fathers and before the heyday of
colonialist settlers marking the territory eventually known as the United States of
America. As Leo Braudy outlined in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History, there is
ample cause to view Trump as a modern-day revisionist playing on any number of
historical trends reaching back to ancient Greece and Rome: sophistry meets soft fascism,
bread and circuses combine with trolls and tweetstorms online (116-120). More recent
and more localized narratives continue the buildup to the present. The Founding Fathers
are associated with myths that played on their own preordainment and played down
blights on their records, from their active participation in the institution of slavery to their
systemic support of white and male supremacy as encoded in vital documents such as the
U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. On a less impactful scale, even
the quaint cherry tree fable dramatizing George Washington’s love of truth was a
fabrication, as the official website of the first president’s Mount Vernon estate
acknowledges (“Cherry Tree”).
Well-documented contributors to the formation of realitics in the 20
th
century
include key components such as former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909-1910 tours
of Africa, Europe and South America. His fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt made
sure to invite Hollywood ambassadors like Gene Autry, Olivia de Havilland and Mickey
Rooney to his birthday parties and official events. Additionally, FDR was well-known for
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his participation in the mediated construction of his own celebrity vis-à-vis the American
public through his weekly “fireside chats” on the radio (Walsh 34).
John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s definitive presidential debate on
September 26, 1960, marked the first time that rival American candidates faced off on
television and irreversibly revamped image-oriented campaigning. By day’s end, then-
Senator Kennedy had been transfigured from lesser-known upstart into bona fide star
(Webley). Marilyn Monroe’s breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday,” sung to a fully
realized celebrity President Kennedy in May 1962, was instantly added to the annals of
Hollywood-meets-Washington intrigue. In 1980, actor-turned-Governor-turned-President
Ronald Reagan’s leap to the nation’s top office in itself represented an especially
seamless merger between the two worlds. Reagan even brought the machinery of
Hollywood with him in the form of his image-making crew, which set the tone from the
very start of Reagan’s term, as The Washington Post’s Pete Earley described in January
1981:
President-elect Ronald Reagan’s four-day inauguration that officially begins
Saturday will be the most expensive in history—an elaborate production with top-
hat pageantry and gee-whiz gadgetry straight from Hollywood.
Laser light shows, two hug[e] fireworks displays, performances by dozens of big-
name entertainers and nine invitation-only inaugural balls telecast across the
nation via satellite are some of the events during the $8 million-plus celebration.
The plans are so grand that Reagan inaugural officials are running out of
superlatives to describe them. Every event, they claim, is the biggest or best ever
held in Washington (Earley).
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In June 1992, candidate Bill Clinton sounded out Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak
Hotel” on the saxophone as he played up his cross-demographic appeal on The Arsenio
Hall Show (“Arsenio”). His successor George W. Bush also understood the importance of
showmanship, as evidenced by his May 1, 2003 “Mission Accomplished” tableau aboard
the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, during which he declared the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq an
outright success mere weeks after the initiative had begun—and many years, as it
happened, before it truly concluded. Bush’s big-screen inspiration, which functioned as a
tacit stylistic framework for the occasion, was reported to be the 1986 hit movie Top
Gun, starring Tom Cruise as a renegade U.S. military fighter pilot with a noteworthy
handle: “Maverick” (Cline). Another Bush II stand-up had happened in 2002, when
George W. Bush made a speech in front of Mount Rushmore, and his handlers made sure
that photos from the event would show his head lined up with those of the four
presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham
Lincoln—carved into the South Dakota mountainside at the memorial (Hinckley).
John Dean, former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, said while
talking about George W. Bush during a 2006 interview, that “the presidency really has
become saturated with celebrity.” Noting that at the Nixon Library, the most sought-out
photo is the picture of President Nixon with Elvis Presley (“Elvis brought a gun with
him,” Dean observed, when he met with Nixon), Dean said that celebrities “have access”
to restricted spaces in government. As for Bush in particular, Dean said that the then-
president’s aides “stage everything he does” (Dean). The second President Bush was also
the focus of Stephen John Hartnett and Jennifer Rose Mercieca, co-authors of a 2007
academic article on the “death of presidential rhetoric” published in Presidential Studies
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Quarterly, in which they pointed to a baleful blend of factors, namely, “the explosion of
mass media,” and “the disastrous extension of U.S. imperial ambitions,” which resulted
in a “new age of political deception.” Hartnett and Mercieca posited that “the peculiar
communicative habits of President George W. Bush,” when folded into that mixture,
ushered in “a post-rhetorical presidency” (Hartnett and Mercieca 599). As striking as the
severity of their tone in reference to Bush is the authors’ implication that “presidential
rhetoric” was comparatively straightforward before blights such as the Vietnam War
boondoggle revealed in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and more recent
mutations caused irrevocable damage. These contentions and their repercussions will be
reevaluated in passages to come.
There are dozens of other examples that could be called up to illustrate how
presidents and candidates have made fame work for them, but it is also important to
mention some cases in which the synergy between politics and celebrity backfired in
ways that were amplified by a media corps well-versed in the art of showcasing—at
times, manufacturing—public downfall and disgrace. The ‘build-‘em-up-to-tear-‘em
down’ axiom no longer pertains solely to the media’s treatment of the strictly showbiz
set, and its more democratic application in the political arena represents one of many
costs of becoming a bold-faced name as well as a public servant. Dishonorable mentions
from a lengthy historical hit list include Richard Nixon, the has-been counterpart to John
F. Kennedy’s 1960 shining debate debut; former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, whose
White House hopes were dashed by The Miami Herald’s1987 revelation that the married
Democratic candidate had had an affair with model Donna Rice aboard a yacht christened
“Monkey Business”; and of course, President Bill Clinton’s own 1998 extramarital
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scandal featuring White House intern Monica Lewinsky (McGee et al.). In 2007, Sen.
John Edwards, another Democrat with an eye on the nation’s highest office, saw his own
presidential chances undone by reporters from The National Enquirer, as Hart’s had also
been two decades prior. The scandal-seeking tabloid broke the news of Edwards’ illicit
affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, with whom he had a “love child,” as
the Enquirer’s headlines trumpeted (admin). On March 23, 2016, echoing the Hart and
Edwards episodes, the Enquirer attempted another takedown of a presidential hopeful
with its report claiming that “pervy” Republican candidate Ted Cruz had been “caught
cheating with 5 secret mistresses” while married to wife Heidi Cruz (Taylor).
Any survey of notable instances in which American politicians tumbled from
favor, and oftentimes from power, due to an unfortunate combination of off-message
behavior and the wrong kind of media attention should also include former Vermont
governor and then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s onstage “scream”
during the Iowa caucuses in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 19, 2004. In one second, owing in
large part to the nascent online phenomenon of the meme as well as to more traditional
news coverage, Dean’s image was permanently transformed and hyperlinked to a single
overproduced utterance of enthusiasm (Kim). What began as an attempt to promote an
energetic, firebrand image, as well as to surpass the noise level in the venue, swiftly
became grounds for Dean’s dismissal from the presidential contest. It also presented an
opportunity for journalists to critique the scene as though it were a theatrical performance
or, in a review by Newsday’s Verne Gay, a World Wrestling Entertainment event (Gay).
Describing Dean’s appearance as “fist-shaking” and “red-faced,” with “sleeves
rolled up and face twisted in determination,” Gay set the stage for Dean’s “strange”
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denouement, which occurred after he delivered “a concert-tour-like list of states where
his insurgent campaign would rebound” after he had come in third in Iowa:
“And then we’re going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House!” he
shouted. Then, he ended with a guttural yell.
In the process, he left this important question hanging: Did he lose or did he
win? (And this one too: Is he running for president of the United States or
commissioner of World Wrestling Entertainment?)
The experts are divided. “Man, it was a little too close to a wrestling speech for
my taste,” said Mick Foley, a best-selling author, pro wrestler and former
commissioner of the (yes) World Wrestling Federation (as WWE was previously
known). “If he had leveled with the people, saying, ‘I am disappointed, (and)
things are going to be tough down the home stretch . . .’ Instead, we got a full-
fledged WWE wrestling promo, and that’s not what I’m looking for in my
president (Gay).

Gay concluded the Newsday article with input from one Chris Widener, Seattle-area
“motivational expert,” who also believed Dean had fatally overreached, with not only
catastrophic implications for Dean himself but also for the country he was hoping to lead.
Giving his take on “the downside of screaming,” Widener offered “that it gets down to:
The guy with the nuclear football is given to emotional tirades. We want him to be even-
tempered and regal” (Gay).
So, although a sitting president mimicking Tom Cruise was evidently still within
the bounds of acceptable pop-cultural allusion for presidential P.R., WWE-style
wrestling—considering its associations with “lower-class habitus and artifice, along with
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what Roland Barthes famously called its “spectacle of excess” in Mythologies—was not
(Barthes 3). Not yet, anyway. Although Dean did not want his move to be read that way,
the media narrative had ranged out of his control. Indeed, Dean initially couched his own
account of the scream story in terms of the “passion” he felt he owed his constituents, but
he apparently lost faith in his own ability to get a word in edgewise when it came to that
national conversation. He later altered his account to that of “a crazy, red-faced rant”
during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, as USA Today noted in
ranking Dean’s scream at number seven, “Campaign calamity,” on its May 7, 2007
roundup of the “25 biggest public meltdowns.” Also making the paper’s list were O.J.
Simpson’s televised June 17, 1994 car chase following his alleged murder of ex-wife
Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman (“Slow-speed pursuit,” number
five); Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping declaration of love for Katie Holmes on Oprah on
May 23, 2005 (“Jumping Jack Tom,” number six); Gary Hart’s in-flagrante-“Monkey
Business” moment (“Rice on the side,” number 11); and pop singer Britney Spears’ pre-
rehab head-shaving episode (“Britney’s un-doing,” 23) (“USA TODAY”). Ultimately,
the Dean scream meme had legs that carried it far beyond its immediate setting, as it was
immortalized in a series of remixes and was invoked with regard to the campaigning style
of other presidential candidates like Republican Rick Perry in 2011, Democrat Bernie
Sanders in 2016, and, courtesy of Republican candidate Donald Trump, GOP rival Ted
Cruz in 2016 (Madison; Kilgore; E. Collins).
Another harbinger of change in the overlapping arenas of media, politics and
publicity occurred on August 11, 2006 in Breaks, Virginia, in the midst of a “listening
tour” that then-Virginia Senator George Allen was conducting as part of his bid for
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reelection in his home state. During his speech at that tour stop, Sen. Allen, a white
Republican, singled out a 20-year-old Democratic campaign tracker of Indian heritage,
S.R. Sidarth, who was filming the event for the opposition, and addressed him using the
racial slur “Macaca” twice:
My friends, we’re gonna run this campaign on positive, constructive ideas, and
it’s important that we motivate and inspire people for something. [Pointing] This
fellow here, over here, with the yellow shirt, ‘Macaca’ or whatever his name is,
he’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s great;
we’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film, and it’s great to
have you here, and you show it to your opponent, because he’s never been there
and probably will never come. . . . his opponent [sic] right now is with a bunch of
Hollywood movie moguls. We care about act, not fiction. So, welcome—let’s
give a welcome to ‘Macaca’ here. Welcome to America and the real world of
Virginia (“George”).
Of note in Allen’s above comment is his assertion that he is insisting on “positive,
constructive ideas” before singling out Sidarth as an outsider, implying that the “real
world” and a more authentic America was to be found in the location and population in
which Sidarth was an interloper, and in Allen’s differentiation between his fact-oriented
campaign and “Hollywood” fiction (“George”). Footage from their confrontation quickly
made the Internet rounds via YouTube, and in what would only become an increasingly
common occurrence, a story that sparked online, in this and many other cases by a citizen
journalist, caught fire and spread through multiple media platforms.
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Although Allen apologized and tried to contain the fallout by claiming, “I don’t
know what [macaca] means,” his use of a racially charged epithet that relates to a word
for “monkey,” as well as to connotations of linguistic violence against people of African
descent in some parts of Europe, was difficult to play off as a crime of ignorance at worst
(Craig and Shear). Allen’s “macaca moment,” as it came to be known, may have cost him
his seat to Democratic challenger Jim Webb in 2006. Later, Allen fell short of reclaiming
that post, despite another mea culpa moment for a new election cycle; in the 2012
contest, Virginia’s current Democratic Senator and 2016 Democratic vice-presidential
nominee Tim Kaine prevailed (McMorris-Santoro).
As with Howard Dean’s scream, George Allen’s “macaca moment” became a
meme, as well as a means for classifying instantaneous and potentially career-
endangering gaffes that have since occurred. It entered the realitics lexicon and aided in
the interpretation of ensuing episodes. A cursory Google news search yielded several
analogous results. The Jewish website Forward featured a story posted on Sept. 18, 2013,
in which reporter Ron Kampeas called out the Republican chairman of Virginia’s Tenth
District, John Whitbeck, for making an anti-Semitic joke while introducing GOP
gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. The headline of Kampeas’ story: “Virginia
Candidate John Whitbeck Has Anti-Semitic ‘Macaca’ Moment” (Kampeas).
Another, written by Kerry Howley for the libertarian magazine Reason and posted
on June 19, 2007, pointed to “Obama’s Macaca Moment,” as the headline called it in a
racially loaded parallel, in light of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s own
mixed-race background. The inciting incident that drew Reason’s negative coverage had
to do with the Obama campaign’s distribution of a memo criticizing rival Hillary
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Clinton’s engagement with Indians and Indian Americans at an implied cost to American
laborers. Howley phrased it as “the spectacle of a Kenyan Kansan would-be president
deflecting criticism from pro-trade Indian Americans” (Howley). Still another, fresher
example comes from the conservative website WND on Dec. 22, 2015, in which reporter
Douglas Ernst noted GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comment, delivered at
a campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that Democratic front-runner Hillary
Clinton “got schlonged” by Barack Obama in the 2008 election, was defined by media
outlets “as a ‘macaca’ moment” (Ernst). Given the outcome of Trump’s campaign, the
outlets Ernst cited were wrong insofar as they presumed that that sort of moment, if that
is indeed what it was, would prove as costly to Trump as it had to Allen. Trump was
effectively immune to the “macaca moment,” if not in application then in outcome.
What Dean’s and Allen’s object lessons have in common with each other is the
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suddenness of their shifts in fortune and the new media
developments that hastened their downfalls. What those two had in common with the
other negative publicity stories mentioned above is that the protagonists somehow failed
to grasp how a change had already occurred that had permanently recoded the operating
system of American electoral politics. Dean and Allen were not alone in that oversight.
As Lawrence O’Donnell—onetime aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, staff
director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and of the U.S.
Senate Committee on Finance, The West Wing writer and producer, and MSNBC
commentator—pointed out during a Media and Society class at USC’s Annenberg School
for Communication and Journalism in 2007, Bill Clinton’s biggest professional error in
the Lewinsky-scandal era was to assume he would still be treated by the Washington
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press the way his predecessors had. More specifically, according to O’Donnell, Clinton
expected to be granted the same White House-issue carte blanche as John F. Kennedy,
who, according to O’Donnell, was “screwing Marilyn Monroe in the back room” during
his time in office:
These modern presidents get into trouble with scandals. . . . You are now being
given to believe that, if you work in Washington, at some point you are going to
have to hire a lawyer. It’s not just that there’s more investigative energy [on
presidents], there’s been a change in the rules. [The press] didn’t think they were
covering up; they just thought that’s private business.
What happened is that the rules changed. Ted Kennedy on Chappaquiddick . . .
there was not a single minute of Senate Ethics Committee on that. That same
thing now? Ted Kennedy would be expelled from the Senate and probably
indicted.
The rules changed on [President Bill Clinton]. In politics, when they change
the rules, nobody tells you. The press changed the rules [around the time of Gary
Hart’s scandal]. In politics, you have to presume from that day forward that those
are the new rules. Clinton was too stupid . . . he didn’t notice that the rules
changed. All he noticed was in 1992, when Gennifer Flowers came forward, he
got away with it (O’Donnell).
In every presented case and many others, either the style of media coverage was
novel—e.g., politicians’ sex lives were considered newsworthy in a manner that had been
principally reserved for entertainers, a presidential candidate’s five o’clock shadow
abruptly added semiotic heft, and so on—or the channel through which it materialized
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was new. Or, as in the Sidarth-Allen scandal, an emergent medium simultaneously
established the space for viral, amateur content to take on news-making proportions and
aided in the ongoing configuration of the citizen journalist. If “the medium is the
message,” as Marshall McLuhan stated in one of the most widely cited contributions
from communication theory, then part of the “personal and social consequences”
introduced by the online “extension of ourselves” has to do with the instantaneity,
consistency, actual 24/7 opportunity for exposure and the proliferation of production sites
that have revolutionized politics (McLuhan). The fishbowl effect has become virtually
all-encompassing, and those cited above were just a few who blinked and missed their
key moment—but the cameras did not. It follows, then, that competent participation in
the contemporary American political scene requires an ability to decipher and exploit
these trends. Enter the realitician.

Trial Balloons
While those developments were occurring in the electoral realm, Donald J. Trump
was building his brand along with his business. Though the Manhattan corporate world
was his base of operation during the period from the late 1960s through the first three
years of the twenty-first century, his appreciation for working the press and retaining
control of his own narrative was evident early on. During the same time that he was
cultivating his media skills and his celebrity image, Trump was reportedly mulling a
future career in politics. In his high-flown fashion, he wanted to start from the top by
running for president.
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Starting early, Trump traded on his personality as well as on the business acumen
he constructed through his background as the scion of his real estate developer father,
Fred Trump, who is said to have helped launch his son’s career by floating more than the
million-dollar loan Donald Trump has publicly stated he accepted in the mid-1970s
(Stanek). He demonstrated several techniques that would be familiar to a 2018 audience,
starting with his insistence that he graduated at the top of his undergraduate class at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, a claim that has since been
questioned by student reporters from his alma mater (Rabin and Tan).
Trump came into view for much of America during the 1980s, when the mood
was bullish, yuppies and conspicuous consumption were dominant, bringing swagger,
extravagance, and power suits into popular awareness. Tabloid news and gossip were
well-suited for an era of unabashed excess, and “Wall Street” anti-hero Gordon Gekko’s
creed that “greed is good” became the go-to slogan for a generation of financiers
apparently unconcerned with the either the moralistic tone of that film or with the fact
that it was director Oliver Stone’s intention that Gekko’s bluster be taken as ironic and
abhorrent (Weiser). The ‘80s provided fertile formative material for realitics, what with
the first realitician in the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan, selling the public on trickle-down
economics while aiding in the growth of income inequality. President Reagan began
challenging welfare and public assistance programs in place since the days of FDR’s
New Deal and kicking into motion the transformations that would make the Republican
Party what it had become by the time Trump took office.
Reagan worked in concert with organizations like the Heritage Foundation, struck
deals with the religious right, and initiated the “war on drugs.” He supervised the passage
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of legislation that would lift regulations designed to curb corporate ownership and
consolidation in the media sector and to ensure that media outlets were powered in part
by considerations of public interest along with the profit motive. All this Reagan
accomplished in no small measure by employing publicity and image-building strategies
lifted from Hollywood. Significantly, he enacted recruitment strategies and sought
political gain by playing on the public’s emotions, religious beliefs, and values via the
incitement of the culture wars and the cultivation of wedge issues, which conservatives
viewed as a necessary push-back against the influence of the New Left counterculture
from the ‘60s (Bartee). Both of the latter moves invited citizens to engage, in and through
cultural channels, with polarizing issues like abortion, drug use, violence and obscenity in
entertainment products, homosexuality, gun rights, and many more; they also produced
such epochal terms as “welfare queens,” “family values,” “just say no,” and the “religious
right.”
Reagan’s opponents accused his administration of reifying whiteness, as well as
Christianity, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, capitalist, imperialist, and neoliberal
economic schemes. Regardless of how they were packaged, critics argued, Reagan’s
policies deliberately misled voters and targeted a number of already vulnerable
demographics, including but not limited to: LGBTQ+, African American, Latinx, lower-
income groups, single mothers, ethnic and religious minorities of many descriptions, as
well as members of labor unions, and feminists. He evidenced an understanding of
realitics in that he was able to promote policies that cloaked their aims through the artful
use of language and argumentation methods. Reagan’s detractors decried the loss of the
public safety net and checks on privatization and corporatization, and they lambasted him
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for his inaction and silence about the AIDS crisis. Meanwhile, his supporters championed
him for cracking down on big government and on “entitlement” programs. President
Reagan still serves as a revered model for contemporary Republicans three decades after
leaving office.
Reagan’s legacy and popularity, along with his trail-blazing efforts in the
emerging mode of realitics, also explains why Donald Trump’s path to the White House
began in earnest during the latter years of Reagan’s tenure. This phase of Trump’s
political career may not have been apparent to Americans outside of a particular milieu—
e.g., Republicans in the country’s northeast on the lookout for rising stars, as well as
select New Yorkers and journalists with reason to pay attention—until news reports
surfaced during the 2016 cycle detailing early signals that gained significance in
retrospect. One such account was written by Politico’s Michael Kruse and published on
February 5, 2016, with a headline that tacitly acknowledged how the content of the piece
was likely to surprise: “The True Story of Donald Trump’s First Campaign Speech—in
1987” (Kruse).
According to Kruse, Trump’s speech, delivered on October 22, 1987 to some 500
people at a Portsmouth, New Hampshire Rotary Club luncheon, offered a “sneak
preview” of the Trump who seemed to burst in out of nowhere to rattle Republicans’
cages during the presidential primary season that commenced in 2015. In fact, from
Kruse’s read, that vintage Trump event refutes the notion that the future president was a
politically labile neophyte when he entered the White House, as consistencies in style and
substance were apparent between the younger and more seasoned version under closer
examination. The 41-year-old Trump proved to be a compelling speaker who made an
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impression with his cautionary and animated, as well as largely extemporaneous, talk
peppered with now-familiar phrases and ideas. His monologue contained nativist and
isolationist elements; he claimed that other nations were “laughing at us,” Kruse
observed, and he sketched out a vision of America teetering on the brink of disaster due
to ineffectual leadership and trade agreements that compromised the country’s global
standing. Audience members called him “flamboyant and dynamic” as well as “brash”
and “very egotistical,” and his performance drew a standing ovation from the crowd
(Kruse).
Yet it still was not Trump’s time; he demurred at the prospect of running in 1988
after the exploratory rally in Portsmouth. He had done the same in a 1980 televised
interview, when he said of high-level politics, “I think it’s a very mean life.” Again in
1984, in comments he made to The New York Times for, Kruse reported, “a cover story
that served as a seminal boost to his fame,” Trump cited the “false smiles” and “red tape”
of the political life as deterrents (Kruse). Still, he continued to involve himself in
conversations that extended beyond the bounds of even an international businessman’s
standard purview. The month before he visited Portsmouth, he had gone so far as to pay
just shy of $95,000 to place an ad in three major-market newspapers—The New York
Times, the Boston Globe, and The Washington Post—that read more like a candidate’s
statement on how he would change foreign policy than a concerned entrepreneur's
targeted intervention.
The “open letter” was published with the headline “There’s nothing wrong with
America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” and in it, Trump
again invoked the image of America being the laughingstock of other countries. This
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time, he claimed that Japan and other nations had “been taking advantage of the United
States” by calling on the U.S. to defend them and “protect their interests.” The solution,
he said, was to charge the other countries “for the defense of their freedom” instead of
having Americans foot the bill (Ben-Meir). The Associated Press had caught wind of
rumors that Trump was considering his options at the time, as the news service included a
remark in its coverage of his open letter that “Trump’s name has been mentioned for
various public offices, including mayor of New York City, governor and the presidency,”
but Trump’s publicist insisted that his client had “no ambition to seek office of any kind”
at that moment (Shanahan).
Evidently that press liaison’s status report was accurate, as George H. W. Bush
succeeded Reagan, and Trump sidelined any designs on the White House for the next
dozen years before reconsidering in 2000, 2003, 2011 and then 2015 (TV GuideNews).
Like George Clooney, Trump initially expressed an aversion to the idea of holding office,
and like Clooney and Palin, he operated politically from what he considered to be outside
of the formal political realm. This allowed him to assume a sort of diplomatic immunity
to, and to refuse to be hemmed in by, the justificatory and personal requirements of that
world. The celebrity trajectory proved to be more immediately rewarding, and as it was
derived directly from his business, he did not have to jump tracks as such.
In 1987, he released his manifesto, The Art of the Deal, which established once
and for all the bombastic character Trump would inhabit and hold up for admiration and
emulation. The bestseller, co-written by Tony Schwartz,
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was not so much a practical
guide for helping readers reach similar heights that Trump was avowing in the real estate
trade. Instead, it was a book-length declarative statement that would function as his
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touchstone in future ventures, including reality television and electoral politics. Several
aphorisms from its pages read as though they describe lessons distilled from a lifetime’s
worth of swashbuckling adventures in high-stakes tycoonery, but they were more future-
oriented in their utility. They served as a way of describing the Trump that fans,
adversaries, business associates, and eventually, presidential rivals were most likely to
encounter in various situations.
In this manner, The Art of the Deal exhibited the declarative property of realitics,
in which time frames and tenses are blended in order to produce a desired outcome. An
episode from the past is referenced as proof positive of future results before they happen,
or as a discrediting maneuver, a past episode is affixed to present circumstances as a
means of tarnishing reputations and deep-sixing future prospects. Trump’s Art worked to
take control of his past narrative, establish himself as a force in the present, and define
how he was to be viewed—and branded—from that point onward. The man who had
written the playbook on successful dealing positioned himself as the one in control of
every frame, and thus the one to prevail in every contest. The New Republic’s Alex
Shephard noticed this quality in a Sept. 18, 2017 story marking the 30
th
anniversary of the
book’s release, remarking that it “has long served as [Trump’s] calling card—evidence
that he’s the greatest negotiator ever to live, and proof positive that he’s fit to be
president” (Shephard).
Those familiar with Trump’s campaigning style would recognize signs of things
to come in selections from his 1987 work. To wit: “good publicity is preferable to bad,
but . . . bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short,
sells” (Trump and Schwartz 176). Of his “style of deal-making,” Trump said in the
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opening to Chapter Two (title: “Trump Cards”), “I aim very high, and then I just keep
pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after” (45). As for his empirical
sensibilities, under the subhead “Know Your Market,” Trump offered that he did not
consult “a lot of number-crunchers,” and was not inclined to “trust fancy marketing
surveys”—instead, he said, “I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions” (51).
Among the standouts regarding Trump’s take on press and image management was this
easily substantiated maxim: “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little
outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write
about you” (56). If any passage from The Art of the Deal could be taken as a synecdochal
stand-in for the entire volume, as well as for Trump’s modus operandi, it would likely be
this one:
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People
may not always think big themselves, but they can get very excited by those who
do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that
something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular (58).
Fantasy, notably, is an indispensable component of celebrity and of Trump’s playbook,
along with hyperbole and spectacle. More in keeping with that flight of imagination will
be examined in the next section.
First, there are a few more trial balloons to follow through Trump’s timeline. As
his base of operations until 2017 had always been in Manhattan, he worked within a
specific media environment that was primed for, and predicated on, coverage of people
with the kind of influence Trump had at his disposal from birth. New York news outlets,
and eventually national and international sources, could ridicule him, sling any number of
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insults at him, and declare him passé, but an industry fueled by gossip, real-estate ‘porn,’
and Wall Street prospecting, and existentially dependent upon wealth and celebrity, could
not ignore him. He was unabashed about the tabloid-friendly attributes of his persona,
from his three marriages and salacious details from the breakdowns and breakups of the
first two, many of which he talked about openly with shock jock Howard Stern (Delkic).
He was even said to have called in tips at times about himself to newspapers posing as his
publicist (Fisher and Hobson).
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As he cultivated notoriety through the press, he also
formed alliances with media linchpins such as Stern, David Pecker of The National
Enquirer, and as he approached his 2016 White House gambit, Sean Hannity of Fox
News (Storey).
Trump’s proclivity for gossiping about his own life would double back on him on
more than one future occasion, such as his rash quip that he would “date” Ivanka if she
weren’t his daughter, delivered during a 2006 appearance on ABC’s The View morning
show (Withnall). Another indecorous tale that eventually boomeranged on Trump
consisted of first wife Ivana’s allegation that Trump had raped her in 1989 while they
were married; in 2015, by the time Trump was in serious competition for the presidency,
she owned that she had once used that term but added that she did not want her “words to
be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” Ivana Trump added that she thought her ex-
husband would make a great president (Perez). In that regard, she and her ex-husband
held something else in common along with their two sons, Eric and Donald Jr., and
daughter Ivanka.
Still, as long as it seemed to serve its intended purpose, which was upping his
chances that the public would assume his preferred impression by injecting information
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into the media bloodstream himself, Trump kept publicizing on his own behalf. Onetime
New York Daily News gossip columnist A.J. Benza has claimed that Trump gave him
dirt on the Manhattan nightlife scene in exchange for labeling him a billionaire.
“He wanted to be paid back in a particular way, regardless of what you mentioned,”
Benza recalls in an episode from Dirty Money, a documentary series released on
Netflix in 2018. “He never really cared as long as you said the word ‘billionaire’
(Herbst). This attitude squares with two tenets of realitics: the mode is often ends-
oriented and entails the use of post-hoc ethics. These qualities, as well as Trump’s
embrace of them, would become more significant in direct proportion to his power.
Trump typically attempted to use even the most problematic of his former
peccadilloes and alleged transgressions to his advantage. Divorces, extramarital affairs,
alleged marital rape, accusations of sexual harassment and worse by 19 additional women
over several decades were treated in a distinctive and consistent fashion. Whenever
possible, he would deny, downplay, or find a way to take advantage of bad press about
his personal and professional life; mortification was never on the table. The four times
one of his businesses declared bankruptcy, when passed through a Trumpian filter,
became markers of success, and accounts of questionable behavior with women became
signs of his sexual prowess.
To wit, he said of his brushes with bankruptcy, “I used the law four times and
made a tremendous thing. I’m in business. I did a very good job” (Carroll and
Youngman). Negative press became its own kind of inoculation against future
opprobrium. What could possibly come out—of news reports, of Trump himself—that
would surprise anyone? Trump’s approach to bad publicity, coupled with the content of
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the publicity itself and his ability to weather it without career-ending consequences,
eventually earned him the nickname “Teflon Don,” which he shares with a previous
honoree: the late New York crime syndicate boss John Gotti (R. Evans; D’Alessandro).
Another calculated revelation from The Art of the Deal applies: “. . . from a pure business
point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. . . .
The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very
valuable to your business” (Trump and Schwartz 57).
When that business consists mostly of casinos, real estate, branded clothing,
hotels, a namesake university, assorted luxury items, a beauty pageant, and a reality
television franchise, that which is counted as “very valuable” corresponds with free-
market ideology. The economic gain of owners, board members and shareholders of an
enterprise is of paramount importance. As Boltanski and Thévènot postulated in On
Justification, the market polity encourages individuality and downplays the kinds of
personal ties and obligations prized in the domestic polity. Instead, interpersonal relations
are negotiated through the exchange of goods, and greed is indeed good in that the pursuit
of wealth, tempered by the ‘invisible hand,’ is seen as beneficial to all income brackets
(79). Conflicts are resolved through market tests, and the market always has the final
word, which explains Trump’s emphasis on winning, staying in business, garnering
ratings, and basing success on what works best in the masculinist, corporate world.

Reality on TV, Fantasy in D.C.
When The Apprentice producer Mark Burnett first pitched Donald Trump on the
idea of a reality show starring the entrepreneur as an exaggerated version of himself, by
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many accounts, Trump had been struggling to level out financially and with regard to his
business enterprise. He had devoted energy and capital to gambles that had not gone his
way, although the finer details about his losses were kept relatively under wraps. Through
licensing agreements, Trump had attached his name to a number of ventures, making his
brand travel farther while not requiring him to run all of the businesses himself.
Writing for what would become one of President Trump’s least valued
newspapers, The Washington Post’s Michael Kranish claims in a January 19, 2017,
account that though “most viewers didn’t realize it,” The Apprentice made the success out
of Trump that it appeared to document. “For millions of Americans,” Kranish writes,
“this became their image of Trump: in the boardroom, in control, firing people who
didn’t measure up to his standard.” The fabulous wealth and all its trappings that were
constants for TV Trump were not as reliable for his extratextual double, and nor was the
foregone conclusion that he was the big boss in control of the frame (Marshall). Then
something rather remarkable happened: as though stepping into the screen, through The
Apprentice, Trump was able to occupy the version of himself projected by the NBC
series. Over the course of 14 seasons, Trump reportedly earned $214 million, effectively
building the world around him that the show had created for his character. Quite a
turnaround, as well as a portal in his own network of connected realms that he almost
missed. As Kranish details, Trump almost refused to do the show on the grounds that, as
he believed at the time, “reality television ‘was for the bottom-feeders of society’”
(Kranish).
Instead, he devoted his name and his time to Burnett’s licensing deal. The
Apprentice debuted on NBC in 2004, and The Celebrity Apprentice launched four years
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later. “You’re fired!” became one of Trump’s distinctive catchphrases, and audiences
tuned in, season after season, to hear him say it as he jabbed his finger at the latest sad
sack to get the boot. They switched on The Apprentice to watch Trump pantomime the
role he ostensibly had played so well, before much smaller crowds in the offices of his
New York high-rises, that it got him to the point of being able to pantomime it on
television for millions of viewers. Contestants such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman and
Bill Rancic from the civilians’ seasons, and celebrity competitors like KISS singer Gene
Simmons, Poison’s Bret Michaels, comics Joan Rivers and Andrew “Dice” Clay, and
reality TV crossover cast member Khloé Kardashian took Trump’s direction and his lead,
often delivering over-the-top performances in an effort to be entertaining while trying to
stay hired week after week. It seemed that the appeal of The Apprentice had to do with
Trump in particular, as The Apprentice: Martha Stewart (2005) with the titular domestic
doyenne as the show’s host, and The New Celebrity Apprentice (2017) with Arnold
Schwarzenegger, lasted one season each.
Trump’s once-faltering enterprise was revitalized, along with his brand, by the
work he did on the show. His celebrity capital made for more than just positive name
recognition vis-à-vis the businesses tied to his brand name—new ones cropped up, and
existing ones benefited from the show’s ratings, media coverage, and awards-season
attention, including nine primetime Emmy nominations. In another feat of reality TV-
meets-real life stunt work, Trump hired The Apprentice’s season one winner Bill Rancic
to supervise his Trump Tower Chicago project; Rancic married E! celebrity journalist
Giuliana DePandi and made his way back to reality television in time. Other Trump
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properties were looped into the show’s plot, further blurring the lines between TV Trump
and his analog self.
When his trade turned from being, and playing, an entrepreneur to campaigning
for president, he evidently saw little reason to change his style. As it turned out, nor was
he obliged to change. The way had been prepared, through the transformations in media,
government, and commerce that co-produced realitics, for someone just like him to make
the American presidency into his business. The market, fame, and civic worlds, with their
differing and sometimes incompatible value systems and mechanisms, already
precariously combined in the person of Donald Trump, were about to come to a head in
the Oval Office.
By June 16, 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy for president by delivering
one of the most contentious public addresses of its kind in American history, it was not
yet fully apparent whether the real estate mogul and reality star had accurately gauged
either the rhetorical situation at hand or the national mood on the subject of immigration,
the first of many volatile topics he would use as framing devices for his vigorous speech
performances. It was clear that he had put his proficiency in attracting press coverage, as
well as his knack for generating and exploiting controversy, to good use insofar as he was
able to insert himself into the national discourse and become the subject of intense
discussion and debate in the national and international media. He had field-tested an
especially relevant skill set beginning in 2011 via his “birtherism” campaign, a social
media-based attempt to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency by questioning the
Obama’s status as an American-born citizen, successfully tapping into the animus and
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prejudice some Americans harbored toward the president as well as playing upon their
more policy-oriented concerns.
On June, again using innuendo and playing upon discriminatory themes (while
denying racist motives), Trump made another appeal to would-be supporters by making
the volatile topic of immigration into the initial ideological launching pad for his
campaign. More specifically, his comments about immigrants from Mexico attracted a
media spotlight trained on shock value while drawing scrutiny, scorn, and even praise:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending
you. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing
those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards, and
they tell us what we are getting” (Neate).
The time was finally right for Trump to run, nearly three decades since he first teased the
idea. He had since had made a second career for himself as mogul of his own reality
franchise, and he was about to use the success of that franchise, itself based on the
character he played on television being cast as a success in the boardroom, to carry him
to success at the polls.
In a matter of minutes, Trump took over the national political conversation and
showcased the audacious persona that would ultimately take him all the way to the White
House. As he had done with his birtherism bid, Trump recruited a following using what
would widely be referenced as “dog-whistle politics,” a linguistic conceit that is not
monopolized by any politician or party and involves speaking in code to relay a thinly
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veiled message to a desired audience while avoiding saying something overtly
incriminating or impossible to disown (Vega).
Much of the time, though, Trump did not even need the whistle. Curiously,
though he drew widespread outrage from the moment he began his White House bid, as
far as his supporters in the media and the voting public were concerned, he did not have
to restrain himself or disguise his manner of speaking by much. His go-big-or-go-home
attitude gave fans, voters, and pundits a macho model to hold up, take up, and rally
around—and rally they did, in droves. Nor was he strenuously pressed to back up his
claims to career performance that had merited the stature he and Apprentice producers
like Mark Burnett had granted him on the series. Multiple attempts, sometimes
accompanied by great fanfare, by press sources to retrieve and publish detailed
information about Trump’s tax returns over the years only yielded piecemeal results.
In a sequential ritual of self-fulfilling prophecies that Trump progressively
ramped up, he was a success because he said he was (just read The Art of the Deal); he
was the boss because he played one on TV. Next, he was going to be the nation’s top
executive, a job for which he was optimally suited because he said he was. Even more
curiously, he was correct, in that selling a successful narrative, drawing crowds, winning
debates, and talking like a president was ultimately all that was needed for him to become
president in 2016. He did have executive experience, after all—as a businessman. He is
proof positive of how realitics is a leveler of prestige, an equalizer of experience and a
mechanism by which setting, content, quality, and other contextual details are secondary
to the signifier and apparatus of celebrity.
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Trump’s entrepreneurial mein certainly struck some voters as a desirable quality
in a president. Yet it was his overall attitude and outsider status that first won him
attention and media coverage, then fans and followers, then the (somewhat reluctant)
backing of the Republican Party, and finally the election (Reicher and Haslam). Repeated
efforts to use his reality television history as a slight—coming at him initially from the
lineup of more than a dozen more technically qualified Republican candidates during
primary season, then from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and perpetually from the
oppositional “fake news media,” as he would brand it—did not hobble him (Coll).
One by one, the lineup of fierce critics from the GOP attacked him and found
themselves on the receiving end of his below-the-belt tactics—name-calling, interrupting,
jeering. The press was there for every minute of it; networks like CNN ran
advertisements before big debate events that looked and sounded more like the kind of
advertisements designed to build excitement before a major boxing match. As Trump
continued, almost entirely through his performance style, to pick off his challengers,
some Republican presidential hopefuls—Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie
among them—conspicuously adopted an attitude suggesting that if they couldn’t beat
Trump, they would endeavor to get in on his future administration. For those defectors,
the primary campaign stage transformed from a platform upon which to audition for
voters, deep-pocketed backers, or Fox News talent scouts, into a space in which to
audition for Trump and his followers. Few rivals, like Ohio Governor and GOP
presidential candidate John Kasich, maintained their hardline antagonism.
Meanwhile, some of Trump’s constant backers from among the political class,
such as Sarah Palin, kept stumping for him, taking their own acts up a notch as it became
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more evident that their early investment could pay off richly. Palin, still on the speakers’
circuit—her representation at APB speakers’ bureau describes her as a “GOP kingmaker”
as well as “one of the earliest endorsers of President Trump,” but kindly requests that
interested parties inquire about rates—turned up at the politics-meets-entertainment
conference, Politicon, on June 26, to talk him up in his absence (“Sarah”). Palin showed
up in character for the occasion, alighting on the Pasadena, California podium after
embracing her “friend,” CNN commentator Sally Kuhn, thanking her for the introduction,
and inviting her to come “sling some salmon in Alaska.” Palin announced the title of her
speech, “Your Garden Variety Everyday Pissed Off American,” and got to the business
of selling Trump (K. Anderson, Politicon 2016).
“So why is Trump winning?” Palin asked. Pointing to the then-GOP frontrunner’s
“earned income that is due respect,” she claimed it had to do with how Trump as “not
palling around with crony capitalists, in bed with special interests . . . screwing the
American worker.” Instead, he was “a builder,” Palin enthused; “he looks up and he
builds big!” In her estimation, Trump did not deserve the “ugly, ugly charge of racism”
he had been hit with by the considerable opposition, and he understood that “men in
denim built this country,” and that “D.C. suits, and pantsuits, destroy it.” The pantsuit
zinger gave Palin a chance to work in a dig at presidential competitor Hillary Rodham
Clinton, who had just pulled ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to secure the
Democratic nomination. As Palin was confident the Politicon audience would see, Trump
was a “golden wrecking ball” who had “knocked the crap out of” the establishment (K.
Anderson, Politicon 2016).
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Another conservative woman who had also stood by Trump from the outset was
right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter, who had made a name for herself
writing a series of books with combustible titles like Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is
Endangering America, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, and
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. Like Palin, Coulter knew how to
use polarizing displays of personality and hyperbole to profitable effect. She had
managed to maintain her celebrity status over the course of several presidencies through
her deep appreciation for the value of shock, making herself consistently notorious on
social media, as a guest on politically themed shows and networks, and by doing in-
person appearances. As Trump’s political star rose, she, too, came out for him, adding a
book called In Trump We Trust to her library of published works and making the rounds
at venues like Politicon. At one point, she even took credit for the future president’s
opening salvo that had set him on his course from New York’s Trump Tower to the
White House. During an October 2015 taping of The Flipside, a conservative television
show, at Politico 2015 in downtown Los Angeles, I watched and recorded as Coulter told
host Michael Loftus that Trump had pulled “that spicy stuff on Mexican rapists” from her
book, Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole
(K. Anderson, “Politicon 2015”).
Coulter and Palin may have become recognized realiticians ahead of Trump, but
by the fall of 2016, like so many others on the right, they were bit players in what was
definitely Trump’s biggest show yet. All the celebrity capital he had stored up over years
in the public eye before his second career began as the television version of his first,
combined with the windfall he received when those two professional trajectories merged
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in tandem with his on- and off-screen personas, was about to gain purchase in the realm
of politics. As he won over crowds at rally after rally, firing up crowds with populist flair,
funding from public donations and Republican Party backers followed public enthusiasm,
which in turn had followed his celebrity. Once he had the ratings, carried over from The
Apprentice and then supplemented by the televised smack-downs he delivered over a
series of campaign debates, other kinds of qualifications, from endorsements to party
nominations, also followed.
Mark Burnett and The Apprentice had made a production out of Trump the
business boss, which in turn enabled Trump the candidate, along with a campaign team
that included several of his family members and Breitbart editorial maestro Stephen
Bannon, to produce a new kind of president. Realitics blends the machinery of one of its
constituent industries or realms with others and is another of the many alchemical aspects
of realitics, related to the blending of fan bases, voting publics and consumer audiences
as previously described. A President Trump would lead with his personality and make
decisions based on his gut, as he had demonstrated in the reality-TV boardroom. He
would use social media to conduct important, unfiltered communication campaigns and
seek to score ratings wins. Drawing huge crowds to his rallies would be the political
equivalent of a ratings hit, as though the simple fact of large number of people watching
his performance was tantamount to meeting the standards of effective political speech.
The formula appeared to be a salutary one, as the ‘Trump train’ picked up
momentum through the fall of 2016 and Trump fixed his sights on besting “Crooked
Hillary” Clinton, as he maligned the Democratic candidate whom he had once counted as
a guest at his own wedding. He continued his pattern of taunting and baiting, and added
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the gendered flourish of looming over Clinton physically, during contentious face-offs
over a trio of debates, which were once again covered according to media templates best
suited for major sporting events. Clinton was favored to win by wide margins according
to several polls, but seas of red “Make America Great Again” hats at Trump rallies and
Republican conventions, and a growing list of indicators that Trump’s leadership style
was catching on in other respects, made her victory less than certain.
Clinton’s most stunning setback, just 11 days shy of the election, occurred when
FBI Director James Comey went public with the news that he would be reopening an
investigation into her alleged use of private email server for State Department purposes
during her tenure as President Obama’s secretary of state (McLean). That news,
combined with confidential emails and campaign information released via WikiLeaks the
same month, presented a crisis that no amount of skilled message repair maneuvering
could surmount. Clinton commented later that she thought that the “Comey letter” cost
her the election, and that there were sexist undercurrents to how she was treated and
targeted during that time (Savransky).
Ironically, an eleventh-hour incident that nearly cost Trump the election happened
in part because of The Apprentice. On October 7, 2016, a month shy of Election Day, The
Washington Post published leaked video footage from a 2005 episode of Access
Hollywood, in which the celebrity journalism wing of the Bush political dynasty, as
represented by former Access Hollywood on-air host Billy Bush, was heard joking with
Donald Trump during a promotional interview for The Apprentice. In the clip, Bush and
Trump were inside a tour bus preparing to disembark as microphones picked up their
conversation. Trump was recorded joking, as Bush laughed along, that being a “star”
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enabled him to approach women and “grab ‘em by the pussy” without their consent. The
clip was filmed after Trump had married his current wife, Melania. The Access
Hollywood tape leak turned into a full-blown scandal, introduced the word “Pussygate”
into national news headlines on the subject. and resulted in Bush being fired from his
hosting job. Though Trump’s backers initially backed away, many apparently decided the
fallout would not be bad enough to sink Trump at the polling booths (Drum).
Either way, Trump had a contingency plan, if author Michael Wolff is to be
believed. In an account from his dishy book Fire and Fury, released a year after the
election, Wolff details the post-election strategy that Trump and Fox News chief Roger
Ailes had been concocting:
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal,
after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he
had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger
Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in
television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating
rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this
campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold
opportunities (Wolff).
If this all seems fantastical, it is. Fantasy, according to a cadre of thinkers I will now train
on Trump, is a significant component of his narrative and his appeal.

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POTUS, Inc.: Selling Trump’s America
It is not possible to fully comprehend the reasons behind Trump’s rise without
closely examining his rhetoric. Trump’s meteoric ascendance to the world’s most
powerful elected office was due in great measure to economic, cultural and sociopolitical
forces beyond his control, and he inherited a great deal more than his lofty position in
New York City’s business scene. He was the product not only of his family’s privilege
and fortune but also of the discourses, structures, institutions and other material and
symbolic conditions that shaped him. This is a study that does not, and could not, include
all of those tributaries within its scope; however, focusing on the rhetorical contributions
to his brand of realitics makes for a manageable, and in fact essential, project.
During and after his presidential campaign, as his profile as a would-be head of
state took shape in public view, Donald Trump was compared to a number of world
leaders past and present in favorable and disparaging ways. Once he had secured the
White House, heedful onlookers from the U.S. and overseas were privy to his actions as
president, as well as his words as a candidate, to consider in making their assessments.
After the election, the name-that-authoritarian trend proliferated to such a degree that at
least one observant journalist, Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR), kept a running commentary on the subject on his Twitter thread, which he was at
times compelled to update several times daily. The following represents only a partial list
of comparisons coming from a number of sources from around the world: Russian
President Vladimir Putin, China’s Chairman Mao Zedong, American President Richard
Nixon, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (to whom, according to Johnson, Trump was compared
in the media at least 16 times), North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, Italy’s Benito Mussolini (in
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some censorious circles Trump was referred to as “Mango Mussolini,” referencing his
orange-hued hair and skin), Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev,
Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, the Taliban, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Antichrist
(@adamjohnsonNYC).
Other Trump-watchers occupying various media perches tellingly looked to pop-
cultural figures for their own associations, which ran the gamut from “Trump as Lady
Gaga”—the verbatim headline of The Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henniger’s
Dec. 7, 2016 article—to Trump as a memorably contentious character from The Gilmore
Girls, as comedian and Full Frontal host Samantha Bee cast the president; to “Charlie
Sheen on crack,” actor Jack Black’s take; to “President Tony Soprano” (Pulver). Here is
Henninger’s explanation for his iconic choices:
How is it possible that a man who selects Jim Mattis for Defense
[Secretary] on Thursday can be in a tweet smackdown with Alec Baldwin
Sunday morning?
The answer is coming into view. Donald Trump is Lady Gaga.
He is a performance artist.
He is challenging what we think is normal—first for a presidential
campaign and now for the presidency.
He’s Andy Warhol silk-screening nine Jackie Kennedys. You can’t do
that. Oh yes he can (Henninger).
In light of the lessons offered by copious episodes in this thesis, such a
treatment of Trump is not unique. The tendency to make sense of one prominent figure
through associations to others, whether from the realm of politics, show business or other
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zones of renown, is itself a defining property of realitics. It is also a means by which
Trump’s foes could try to work the same magic on him that he had with his prolific
nicknaming spree, in which “little Marco” Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz and “Crooked
Hillary” Clinton were slapped with labels that stuck and traveled vexingly well (Lee and
Queally). (Even more than Palin, Trump was virtuosic in throwing down the
catchphrases.) Also, aside from the ease with which correlations to other famous people
could bring attention to, say, a news article, the association becoming grounds for a story
in and of itself, the goal was clearly to sound the alarm and use the transitive property of
realitics to tar Trump in the eyes of those upon whom his power depended. After all, who
wants to vote for Mango Mussolini?
For his part, Trump did not always downplay those comparisons, even to the likes
of Putin. To the contrary, he raised eyebrows and alarms by speaking favorably of Putin
and of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, both portrayed by critics in the West as
thugs or even murderers who threatened the civil liberties, if not the lives, of those they
were charged with serving. In fact, President Trump’s initially congenial relationship
with Putin, marked by mutually complimentary statements and gestures across the
Atlantic and back, and the Russian government’s alleged interference in the 2016
presidential election became the subject of heated debate in the aftermath of Trump’s
win. Strongmen notwithstanding, a less divisive leader from history to whom Trump and
his campaign team forged key rhetorical connections is Abraham Lincoln, and not just
because Lincoln was the first Republican president. More useful to Trump’s cause was to
take several pages from Lincoln’s playbook by deploying similar homegrown
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mythologies and arguments that helped “Honest Abe” become the nation’s sixteenth
president.
In his business, entertainment and political ventures, Trump had cast himself, in
the spirit of American individualism with distinct populist, capitalist, and masculinist
emphases, as a singular and unprecedented force. All the same, the vision he presented
his followers of a nation in decline and the requirements necessary to bring it back from
the brink was inflected with themes and elements that linked him to broader rhetorical
traditions. Despite his prized outsider pose and claims of straight-talking spontaneity,
Trump leaned heavily on what Ernest Bormann in his influential work on fantasy theme
analysis, The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream, referred to as the
“restoration fantasy type.” That prototype had also been taken up with success by Lincoln
and more recently by another heavy hitter from the Republican pantheon: President
Ronald Reagan (3-4).
Per Bormann, a fantasy type is “a stock scenario repeated again and again by the
same characters or by similar characters” deployed with the aim of achieving symbolic
convergence and, ultimately, unity among a group partaking in the meaning-making
activity of “consciousness-creating communication” (6-7). Through sharing fantasy
themes and types, Bormann posited, participants “may integrate them into a coherent
rhetorical vision of some aspect of their social reality,” stitching together “various
scripts” comprised of types, narratives, “symbolic cues,” gestures and slogans, “which
gives the participants a broader view of things” and meets a psychological need (7-8, 4-
5). There are a number of fantasy themes to consider from the Trumpian collection, but
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the best-known and foremost of them also happens to be distilled in his shrewdly chosen
campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.”
The restoration fantasy type is a potent and enduring ideological template for
conservatives in particular to revisit. It combines the dignity and prestige that Lincoln’s
legacy affords the GOP as one of the party’s primogenitors with the grandeur and sanctity
of the American origin story as enshrined in the mythology of the Founding Fathers and
their primary texts. As the term “conservative” implies, that which Republican leaders
from Lincoln to Trump have characterized as in need of restoration includes a certain
perspective on the intended meaning and interpretation of ur-texts such as the U.S.
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as well as a sensibility for how that
understanding applies to the proper size, structure, and mechanics of government. It also
encompasses a social component that places ‘traditional’ values at its core and upholds
the nuclear family, Christian morality, patriarchy, respect for law and order and top-down
authority systems, free-market principles, property ownership and small government
among its defining ideals (Heywood 97-9).
Additionally, since the latter half of the twentieth century, it has also taken on
connotations that are not always expressed or acknowledged outright but that, particularly
in the estimation of critics, correspond to several sub-variants of bigotry, with sexism,
racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and classism
figuring among the most frequently cited repeat offenders. These virulent strains of
encoded social violence, or so goes the critique, have infiltrated American conservative
discourses through years of media exposure—particularly via specialized conduits like
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Fox News and right-wing talk radio—as well as channeled through political and religious
leaders among the neoconservative set and the “Christian Right.”
The power in fantasy themes lies in their ability to create through the
communication of dramatic narratives a social reality that invites participation and
identification. That last term is particularly essential in understanding Trump’s allure at
the time and place in which he ran for president, as what his followers stood to gain from
buying into his “rhetorical vision” and participating in his extended “rhetorical
community” had to do with more than just the usual pre-election promises related to the
mundane sphere (Bormann 7-8). More important, he offered them a specific sense of
identity and a vision of their future, which took shape from a shared conception of the
country’s past and transcendent significance. Those left scratching their heads, or
gnashing their teeth, over the electorally affirmed attraction of President Trump, and who
dismiss as mere rhetoric the kinds of themes at work in the “community fantasies” he
spins and the subjects they beckon audiences to become, are missing a good deal of his
success story (3-4).
At his boisterous rallies, Trump performed live his most popular slogans and
catchphrases of the moment, tried out new material, and took aim at his favorite targets,
including members of the press in attendance. Writing for Scientific American, Stephen
D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam explain the popularity of Trump’s rallies, not to
mention the president himself, in terms with which Bormann, not to mention Benedict
Anderson, would agree. “Donald Trump’s rallies enacted how Trump and his followers
would like the country to be. They were, in essence, identity festivals (Reichar and
Haslam).
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To many supporters, he presented as the corrective for widespread economic
hardship, made worse by the “Great Recession” that metastasized near the end of George
W. Bush’s tenure in the White House and persisted during Barack Obama’s presidency.
He also appeared to supply the antidote for the government corruption he condemned
with his catchy campaign refrain, “Drain the swamp!” What’s more, his brash, trash-
talking, high-rolling enactments of hyper-capitalist machismo, which adversaries
slammed as personality-driven politicking at best and symptomatic of an intractably
flawed, even malignant character at worst, were held up by admirers as indicators of
authenticity, relatability, and potency. These same traits were also celebrated as proof
positive that, despite Trump’s membership in the billionaire class, he shared his
constituents’ outsider status with regard to the Washington, D.C. power elite.
Repurposing the restoration fantasy type provided Trump with his first invitation
to would-be followers: to share in his vision of a once-great nation gone astray, which
could only be saved by means of “purification through rebirth and restoration” (3). On
offer was a narrative that provided the means for his audience to rationalize the economic
and social challenges so many of them had encountered, particularly since recession had
enervated the national economy. Through Trump’s lens, the sources of their problems
were to be found outside of themselves instead of resulting from personal failure or,
importantly, from systemic inequalities in need of government oversight and correction.
That lattermost explanation corresponds to the Great Recession origin story that
candidate Trump’s onetime Democratic rivals Sen. Bernie Sanders, and later, following
Sanders’ lead, Hillary Clinton took up in their own stump speeches.
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Instead, Trump placed the blame for his supporters’ collective misfortunes
squarely on others—or rather, Others. In so doing, he availed himself of a tactic that
conservative commentator S.E. Cupp recognized in March 2016 using a word that
sounded nearly identical to a term associated with more left-wing and academic circles:
“otherizing” (“With”). While for thinkers like Franz Fanon and Edward O. Said the
concept of “the Other” stemmed from colonialist practices and attitudes, Trump wielded
othering, or “otherizing,” as a tool less rooted in any specific discourse and without a
fixed subject on the disempowered side of the semantic divide. In turns, Mexican
immigrants, John McCain, ‘violent’ African-Americans in Chicago, Hillary Clinton and
Democrats, refugees, his Republican presidential rivals, and scores of others took their
turns being otherized by Trump (Lee).
Realitics plays on the social malaise (what sociologist Emile Durkheim called
“anomie” in its early-twentieth-century permutations) caused by displacement,
globalization, uncertainty, ontological shake-ups of contemporary life by offering
simplified recipes for success often based on the same variables that caused the problems
in the first place (Durkheim). Part populist rallying cry, part all-purpose panacea,
Trump’s use of the strategy enabled him to draw lines between himself and his foes, and
between his followers and the causes of their troubles, as well as to map out the
ideological ground that they would co-create and populate. It also served the purpose of
expunging contaminating forces, and ultimately persons, from their shared physical and
conceptual space, to create their version of a purified America. “Red state,” after all,
refers to a state of mind first and a geographical region second.
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The critic’s work, according to Bormann, is to look for clues that “a symbolic
convergence has taken place” and that “groups of people have shared a fantasy” (5-6).
The 2016 election results provide a uniquely quantifiable and concrete set of such clues;
one need only tally up ballots and #MAGA hashtags to conclude that symbolic
convergence has indeed occurred. That connection had much to do with Trump’s ability
(helped by his aides) to effectively spin fantasies and sell them to the crowd: “Much of
what has been thought of as persuasion can be accounted for on the basis of group and
mass fantasies” (Bormann 8-9). In addition to the strong lure of fantasy, he had
identification on his side; like Palin, he was positioned as a model to emulate as well as a
representative. Trump’s fantasy work extended into the virtual space as well; as a Twitter
provocateur, he was skilled at coalescing communities of belief around his online
campaigns. Virtual communities could then be transformed into voter communities.
Unlike screamin’ Howard Dean and Sen. George “macaca moment” Allen, Trump
could withstand, even draw juice from, being associated with the World Wrestling
Federation and from being accused of bigotry. Due to a combination of a change in
societal expectations and his unique capacity to use out-and-out denials, deflections and
distractions whenever bad news could not just be shrugged off, Trump was able to
withstand perceived missteps and ensuing media pile-ons that had fatally sunk the
chances of his forerunners. He even weathered the kind of sexual scandal that, as
Lawrence O’Donnell observed, had sullied many a political career before Trump’s own
took shape. A sea change had occurred again in public expectations for presidential
behavior—this time because Trump himself had changed it. Patti Solis Doyle, a
Democratic strategist and onetime Hillary Clinton campaign manager, was quoted in The
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Hill on March 28, 2018 registering that shift aloud; she said Trump’s track record with
women is “widely known,” and thus he has fortified himself against future problems on
that front. “We heard him bragging about it on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, and he got
elected anyway,” Solis Doyle told the Washington, D.C. news outlet (Parnes).
Importantly, Trump successfully sold bespoke visions of the nation’s past to
followers, even about events and information that were not beyond the public’s ability to
witness and verify. This allowed Trump to convince his followers that the nation was, in
fact, in urgent need of being made great again, that his political opponents and media
critics were part of the problem, and that he was uniquely capable of restoring the country
to its former magnitude. Trump’s tactic of revising or denying facts that could be
corroborated externally allowed him to cast derision on an institutional level, as the entire
journalistic trade and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI came under fire, even
when evidence, including video and audio recordings, could be produced to counter
Trump’s accounts.
Worse, according to adversaries who warned of neo-fascist dangers, this
uprooting of reality positioned Trump as a figure upon whom followers were not only
dependent for their sense of self but also dependent for their understanding of the world.
This could lead to information silos and fractured populace, especially when coupled
with the already walled-off effect of cherry-picked news communities. His attacks on the
“fake news media” and other potential sources of information including White House
spokesperson Kellyanne Conway’s infamous defense of “alternative facts” (Associated
Press, “Kellyanne”). Bormann provides an explanation for how Trump’s followers may
take his cues to rationalize happenings in real time: “By portraying the new experience as
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an instance of an archetypal drama, the rhetoricians explain and evaluate the new events
and bring them into line with the overall values and emotions of their rhetorical vision”
(7-8).
Most of all, Trump’s fantasy-based activity created a space as big as the U.S.A.
for his followers to inhabit and to see themselves as he saw himself, as they saw him, and
as he saw the country. American exceptionalism can be taken up as an individualistic, as
well as nationalistic, ideology; i.e., inhabiting a winning nation by definition creates a
winning subject position that each individual is invited to embody.
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In this way, national
identity and subjectivity become conflated, and Trump himself could become
synonymous with country’s future. This self-fulfilling, visionary coupling was confirmed
at the polls on Nov. 8, 2016. Trump, according to some commentators, leveraged populist
and divisive rhetoric while presenting himself as a charismatic winner—one who simply
could not fail, or else he would move the goalposts—at a time when economic and
industrial breakdowns were decimating formerly productive parts of America.
Trump’s traducers, by contrast, came away from his public displays of ambition
with starkly different interpretations, reading him alternately or entirely as a faux
populist, misogynist, racist, oligarch, demagogue, con artist, and/or proto-fascist.
Throughout the entirety of the 2016 presidential cycle, resisters in and via the media
hammered away with negative pronouncements and indicated that they, not Trump’s
followers, were uniquely capable of recognizing him for what he truly was. In their
struggle to manage public perception, and by extension the outcome of the election, they
advanced narratives that, whether explicitly or by inference, laid claim to some core,
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‘real’ story for which Trump’s smoke-and-mirrors dissimulations and incitements of
volatile sociopolitical issues collectively served as the tell.
Yet Trump seemed impervious to the slings and arrows of his indignant and
increasingly flummoxed challengers. Over the course of the 17-month span between his
campaign launch and his victory at the polls, he put his critics and rivals in a bind: if they
ignored him, there might be no one to object, stand in his way, or potentially reach
impressionable and undecided voters in order to set their minds against him. At the same
time, responding to his provocations by employing all the tools of political debate,
pushback, appeals to morality and so forth that had worked in bygone phases—e.g., fact-
checking, demonstrations of moral outrage, protest, ridicule, parody, satire—only seemed
to help him. He appeared to be energized, along with his base, by even the most
excoriating put-downs, to which he pointed as further evidence that he was so different
from, and so much more successful than, his foes that they had to keep attacking him. In
the new political climate that he was helping to cultivate, even more detrimental than
being thought of as a possible tax cheat, philanderer, sexual predator, or shady
businessman was to be labeled boring or “low-energy,” as he called the Republican rival
who initially seemed most likely to succeed in 2016: Jeb Bush (Chavez and
Stracqualursi). His constant and not infrequently outrageous tweets worked in a similarly
paradoxical fashion, adding to his charm for those inclined to approve of, even lionize,
him.
Anti-Trump factions formed their rhetorical blockade all the way up to the White
House by highlighting aspects of his personality and comportment that, to them,
evidenced his unsuitability for the presidency (Krauthammer). In a few cases, such as
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those of his 2016 election rivals Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, they resorted to
adopting his signature moves, such as name-calling, in ultimately futile stabs at beating
Trump at his own game. Despite their combined efforts, the deal he had struck with his
believers to give the nation a restorative reboot in exchange for votes, was his biggest
coup yet; fantasy proved more powerful than even the combined force of elite squads of
professional fact-checkers.
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The fact that Trump was identified as a member of
privileged race, class and gender categories, and Clinton and Rubio, as well as
Republican challenger Ted Cruz, were constructed as Others who historically had not
enjoyed the same access to full citizenship or to participation in the public sphere, also
helped him. As for the blowback from the press he had once keenly courted, Trump
wagered that being treated with contempt and considered the ‘liberal’ media’s idea of a
national disgrace would not sink his battleship, as it were, and would ultimately work in
his favor. He gambled, and he won.

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Chapter Seven: The Long Con(-versation)

There are myriad other people and instances that could be included in this study
of realitics; indeed, the list grows daily. Encountering too many options while mapping
out a rapidly growing theoretical space is an auspicious challenge and generally the right
kind of problem to have. Results from an informal study conducted over the last decade
and using a subject pool of one—or what might be most accurately called the results of
my own subjective observations—indicate a significant uptick in the frequency and
number of artifacts and events that qualify for further research under the heading of
‘realitics.’ New episodes emerge, even as I write, that build upon and transform what I
have only just managed to articulate. In an effort to keep pace, a survey of more recent
occurrences that take up threads and themes from previous chapters will comprise part of
this conclusion.
In closing, I will explore two last organizing metaphors relevant to the mercurial
mode of realitics: the long con and the long conversation. The former deals more in
pessimism and declinism, as its phrasing suggests, while the latter makes room for
resistance, possibility, even positivity. In the course of following these two tracks, I will
also take into account additional theoretical aids to understanding realitics in its current
iterations before sketching out future horizons for scholarly inquiry. Lastly, I will give a
brief setup for the first appendix, a list of excerpts and essential take-aways from a
recurring feature that has popped up in every chapter. The resulting compilation
represents a cheat sheet of sorts, as well as a field guide that has led me through the
process of research and writing, and a conceptual underpinning for the entire thesis. The
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word that best describes it, along with a brief background about the term, will be revealed
before the final frame.

Realitics as Long Con
The Dirty Money documentary series that dropped on Netflix in early 2018 was
overseen by documentary director and producer Alex Gibney, who made his name with
projects that had delved into elaborate cover-ups and scandals from the recent history of
U.S. politics (Taxi to the Dark Side), business (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)
and religion (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). The argument advanced
in the episode centered on Donald Trump, directed by actor Fisher Stevens, is described
by mainstream consumer entertainment publication People magazine, not typically
known for its searing sociopolitical commentary, thusly: “It contends that Trump the
tycoon is really a myth created by the infamous self-promoter, his visibility spread wide
with continued mentions in articles, TV commercials and network interviews.” The
write-up includes a quote from The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt: “What we did, that
was a scam. That was an entertainment” (Herbst). The title of the Trump-themed
installment: “The Confidence Man.”
The 2016 U.S. presidential contest confirmed that the mode of realitics has taken
hold in the domain of American electoral politics. This development has produced
ambivalent and negative reactions in camps that had backed Donald Trump as their
chosen candidate as well as those that had not. Since he assumed office in January 2017,
President Trump has demonstrated on several occasions that realitics will continue to be
an indispensable feature of his governing repertoire, disproving a popular contention
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from the lead-up to Election Day that he had been pulling out all the stops with his
showmanship in order to get into the Oval Office, but he would become more
‘presidential’ upon arrival.
Not so, or at least not in the expected manner, but then Trump has gone out of his
way to be atypical, as singularity is central to his brand. True to form, once in the White
House, Trump has continued to stir up controversy, creating conflict with members of his
administration, and with assorted constituencies at home and abroad. His prolific
tweeting has not abated, despite the reported efforts of various staffers to decrease his
output, or at least to let them vet what he puts out on that platform; more than one
diplomatic crisis has been incited via Trump’s two Twitter accounts.
“Chaotic” has figured among the U.S. press’ go-to adjectives for describing the
mood and mechanics of the Trump administration in its early stages. In March of 2018,
mentions of the words ‘chaos’ and ‘chaotic’ crested in mainstream news coverage,
particularly in reports by sources quick to criticize the president. CNN even went so far
as to consult one Professor James A. Yorke, mathematical pioneer of chaos theory, for a
piece with a headline that works hard to hide clickbait behind impressive scientific
credentials: “Chaos theory pioneer: Trump is actually hyperchaos” (Wolf). Whatever the
network’s intended purpose—presenting incontrovertible proof of Trump’s
unacceptability, engineering outrage, scaring voters into booths, goosing traffic—all that
chaos talk apparently struck President Trump as another opportunity to hit Twitter while
hitting out at the press. "The new Fake News narrative is that there is CHAOS in the
White House. Wrong!” he tweeted. “People will always come & go, and I want strong
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dialogue before making a final decision. I still have some people that I want to change
(always seeking perfection). There is no Chaos, only great Energy!" (Wolf)
Since taking over from President Obama, Trump has carried over more than just
the mood of his campaign. He has renewed his push to build a wall between the U.S. and
Mexico. He has enacted stringent anti-immigration measures, authorized with a flourish
during flashbulb-heavy signing events held in the Oval Office, which opponents have
condemned as racist, Islamophobic, and protectionist in a way that betrays the inclusive
ideals upon which the country was founded. He has even persisted with his attacks on
Hillary Clinton.
As president, Trump has also kept up his campaign-trail custom of holding
boisterous and showy rallies. Continuing this practice after winning the presidency may
seem redundant or gratuitous—if, that is, the function of a rally is only considered within
the framework of campaigning for office. Once realitics enters the picture, Trump’s
ongoing rallying ritual can further illustrate how post-election campaigning is now a
feature, not a bug. For realiticians, campaigning, thought of both as a status or mindset
for politicians to maintain and as an activity, has become an end unto itself.
Trump’s trope about fake news, which he has called up frequently in reference to
media outlets and reports he disdains, has made for a very effective form of inoculation.
Anything construed as potentially damaging to the president can be written off as fake
news, and future news breaks about events that might actually be true can be deflected in
advance. Communities of belief have congealed around a set of news sources aligned
with Trump—Breitbart, Fox News, and InfoWars among them— that prize brand over
party loyalty. Religiously based communities of belief, Christian Evangelicals foremost
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among them, whose values and justificatory regimes should have ruled out the on-paper
version of Trump on sight, have stood by him through trials that by many indications
should have felled him. Persistent rumors about “Russiagate” have plagued him, as have
rumors of infidelity with adult film star Stormy Daniels, and the emboldening of the
#MeToo movement has brought periodic reminders that the president, too, has been
accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and worse. In late March 2018, Trump
declared that April would be “sexual assault awareness month,” triggering a Huff Post
burn with the headline, “President Who Bragged About Groping Women Declares Sexual
Assault Awareness Month” (Herreria).
Other standouts from Trump’s early presidency have included frequent trips to his
Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which have prompted accusations of truancy and of abuse
of presidential privilege for flying on the taxpayer’s dime. Though he made a successful
pitch to lower- and middle-class Americans during the 2016 campaign, presenting
himself as their ally and a fellow outsider bent on draining the swamp, that message got a
bit muddled on the flip side. As president, he hired Wall Street insiders to head up key
administration posts, explaining that he would not want to entrust the task of
safeguarding the economy to “a poor person” (Pramuk).
Trump has also appointed family members, including son-in-law Jared Kushner
and daughter Ivanka Trump, to administration posts that require the highest level of
security clearance and, typically, specialized training. The pattern of hiring members of
his close circle, regardless of experience (that throwback term from the Palin-Obama
2008 era) has extended to several other positions as well. He has tapped divisive figures
like onetime White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon from Breitbart; former
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Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault-
Newman from The Apprentice and two spinoff shows; and financier Anthony “The
Mooch” Scaramucci, who as White House Communications Director had barely wrested
the microphone from his beleaguered predecessor, Sean Spicer, before flaming out during
a startling interview with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza (Lizza).
Over the tumultuous expanse of his first year in office, Trump has fired in quick
succession a number of high-ranking government staffers, including Bannon, Manigault-
Newman, Scaramucci, and Reince Priebus, who had switched from running the
Republican National Committee to running interference as White House chief of staff.
Most consequential of those pink-slipped thus far is former FBI chief James Comey, as
circumstances surrounding his firing became more fodder for an ongoing probe into the
Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian operatives in light of allegations that the
Kremlin had “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. election (Shane). For Comey’s canning and for
“Russiagate,” Trump was hit by blowback in the form of an inquest led by special
investigator and former FBI chief Robert Mueller. Impeachment speculation has become
a staple feature for news outlets like CNN, which changed things up from its pre-election
approach by continuing to focus with laser-like intensity on Trump, retaining panels of
commentators for spirited verbal jousting sessions, just with more of a ‘Resistance’ feel
to the proceedings. As he knew well, and pointed to as proof of his validity and efficacy
in the nation’s highest office,

Trump was good for ratings, full stop.
The suggestion that bringing into the fold members of the same elite that
candidate Trump had railed against could jeopardize his credibility, or that multiple
firings of close aides might create public unease and emit hints of instability from the
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White House, has not seemed to trouble the president to the point of provoking a major
change, even as it has rattled those around him. For his part, Trump has claimed to find
limited practicality in assuming a “presidential” mien, which amounts to another vaguely
demarcated role, another instance of ‘you know it when you see it.’ An impressionistic
definition might combine unspecified proportions of dignified comportment with
restrained-yet-inspiring speeches and showings, swirl in ribbon-cutting and glad-handing
élan, and undergird it all with the baseline requirement of maintaining an elusive state of
equilibrium while coloring within specified party lines. Addressing a crowd at a post-
election rally in Youngstown, Ohio arena in late July 2017, Trump told the audience,
“It’s so easy to act presidential, but that’s not going to get it done,” followed by a tribute
to another eminent figure from the last chapter. “With the exception of the late, great
Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s held this office,”
Trump declared in his signature hyperbolic fashion (Westwood).
Again it comes down to style. If Trump spoke in earnest, he made as though he
could put on a proper act if he felt like it, which makes the business of presidential
comportment seem like a trivial, as well as optional, matter. But again, Robert
Harriman’s contention that style is not at all inconsequential in politics deserves mention.
It was largely Trump’s style, in concert with the content, of his speeches and actions that
set him apart from his competition; to an extent, the same could be said of Palin’s style,
and Obama’s as well. It certainly was not Trump’s track record in office or proven mettle
as a political negotiator that won him votes. Similar to how rhetoric can be dismissed as
“mere rhetoric,” style can fly under the radar while commanding serious firepower. Ann
Crigler, Kathleen Jamieson, Betsy Sinclair, and other scholars have tracked the
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significance of related contributing factors such as affect, political advertising, and peer
affiliation in considerations of political choice (Crigler and Hevron).
40

This is all leading to the first key term in this conclusion chapter: the long con.
Traces of this theme were planted in Chapter Seven, as well as in the three that preceded
it. Filmmaker Alex Gibney obviously made the rather short journey to connect the image
of Donald Trump as his antagonists have repeatedly categorized him—i.e., “Don the
Con”—and the idea of the con man. But again, this dissertation is not designed to be a
referendum on Trump’s disposition, and again, affixing the long con theme on the person
of Trump would be tantamount to overlooking the true main act of this production:
realitics.
In short, descriptions of his actions and words since taking office, and before
doing so, are included here as particularly fresh and pertinent illustrations of how realitics
is functioning in contemporary U.S. politics. I am interested in Trump insofar as he has
activated, and wielded, the mode of realitics in such a way that it is apparent, accusations
of chaos and impulsivity aside, that he has some awareness of and appreciation for what I
am calling realitics, as well as for what it can do for him. What’s more, so long as he can
apprehend and leverage the mode, so can—and, I would suggest, so will—those who
come after him. So will those who take up political posts and postures while he is still
serving as America’s top executive. In that spirit, I will now take a last look at the White
House’s current occupant in light of the broader project of realitics, with the goal of
studying Trump’s use of the mode and considering possible ramifications of how he has
set the tone at the top.
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As of early 2018, numerous headlines had run strengthening the impression that
there was a pre-Trump and a post-Trump America, many of which cast the latter
permutation in darker tones. “Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?” asked The
Atlantic’s Jack Goldsmith in the magazine’s October 2017 issue, accompanied by an
ominous sub-head about how President Trump “disdains the rule of law,” is busy
“trampling norms of presidential behavior,” and is “bringing vital institutions down with
him” (Goldsmith). In that same issue, Eliot A. Cohen published a piece with the headline
“How Trump Is Ending the American Era” and the thesis statement arguing that, “[f]or
all the visible damage the president has done to the nation’s global standing, things are
much worse below the surface” (E. Cohen).
The Washington Post, outfitted with the post-election tag line “Democracy Dies in
Darkness” and leading the charge in The Resistance against Trump, released alarming
headlines on a regular basis, such as “A year of Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda has
radically changed the U.S. role in the world” (Witte and Birnbaum). Inundated with
reports like these, it would seem that the “new phase in American political life,” about
which Hartnett and Mercieca warned during the George W. Bush presidency and in
which “lying is less a strategy employed in particular situations to achieve particular
aims, and more of a cultural constant necessitated by the strains empire puts on
democracy,” was fully in effect. If so, as the authors predicted, “ours is an age of imperial
deception, cheerful dissimulation, and deadly distraction (600).
Yet the chorus of press prognosticators have not univocally told of a time of
gloom and doom—not by a longshot. Many counterarguments came from right-leaning
outlets, and Trump’s success has been cause for celebration among conservatives who
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did not declare themselves “Never Trump”-ers. Yet regardless of where they fall along
the political and opinion spectrum regarding President Trump, many would subscribe to
the premise that this was not a situation in which outcomes could be explained according
to politics as usual. Everything from Trump’s manner of performance and speech to the
sociopolitical effects he has seemed to bring about has qualified post-Trump America for
its own epochal designation. As coined by Campbell, epochal rhetoric is defined as “an
era so marked by a strategic, stylized symbolism that it divides history into a ‘before’ and
‘after’” (227).
It is most accurate to say that the leap from a pre- to post-Trump era is not so
much about one man himself and the (overdetermined) power allotted him. Instead, I
would argue, it is realitics and not Trump that should be awarded the most credit for the
changes in which he and other realiticians throughout this project have assisted. Trump
has accessed the most power of any individual realitician, but much of that comes from
the office he has attained and not from Trump himself. So, when people attribute epochal
change to Donald Trump the person, “Trump,” in a way, is a catch-all for many forces
and societal developments. He is another famous body through which many disparate and
conflicting discourses appear to coincide and be reconciled, recalling Richard Dyer’s
contention in Chapter Two.
Though flush in the symbolic currency of fame by the time he ran for president in
2015, Trump represents more a benefactor and exploiter of a rich tradition than an
inventor as such. Without a star system predicated upon capitalist tenets of competition
and meritocratic accomplishment, bolstered by media and entertainment industries that
not only allow but profit from approved forms of political expression and marketable
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rebellion on the part of celebrities, it would not be feasible for actors to use their celebrity
capital as a means of gaining access and influence in the realm of politics. Without the
fragmentation, deregulation, consolidation and celebrification of the news business,
specialized channels such as Fox News and CNN would neither exist in their present-day
form. Nor would they assist in creating a balkanized media landscape riddled with
ideological “echo chambers” isolated from each other and populated by consumer
citizens who share increasingly few sensibilities except the recognition of fame as a
means by which their attention, identification, and allegiance might be secured.
41
What can be read from the multifarious text that Trump represents can also be
read against others included in this study. Several of the episodes and main characters in
this dissertation have offered vivid portrayals of the idea of the long con, catching
realiticians in the act of saying one thing and doing another, or describing their actions in
terms of denial—or terms that would be more accurate if turned on their heads. Take, for
example, Arianna Huffington building her Huff Post enterprise on the idea of connecting
before ‘pivoting,’ to use industry parlance, to carrying Thrive Inc. based on the need to
unplug. Or, Huffington talking a big game about democratizing the journalism of the
future while doing her part to make livable wages for journalists a thing of the past.
I am far from alone in noticing certain dodgy inconsistencies and put-ons in these
featured realiticians’ performances. Writing in Newsweek in early 2017, Alexander
Nazaryan’s takedown of Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global “pop-up store” in New
York City barely stops short of calling her a snake-oil saleswoman, starting with the
header: “Arianna Huffington Peddles Miracle Cures to Manhattan at her Thrive Global
Pop-Up Store. How do we thrive and sleep in this crazy world? By buying stuff from
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Thrive Global.” In case that banner left any room for doubting what Nazaryan’s review
might hold, he dispenses with the mystery immediately, getting in a dig at America’s
commander in chief and validating my choice of subjects for at least two chapters while
he’s at it:
Thrive Global, a wellness website that went live on the last day of November
with indispensable life advice from the likes of actor Ashton Kutcher ("I Don't
Bring My Phone Into the Bedroom") and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ("Why
Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon Shareholders"). You can also take
an online wellness course, which features "instructors" like Kobe Bryant. As far
as that goes, the website anticipates, and answers, a rather obvious question:
"What do Arianna Huffington and Kobe Bryant have in common? They are both
meditators, and they both value the power of sleep." OK, then. I'm enrolling as
soon as I finish my course work at Trump University (Nazaryan).
Then there is Sarah Palin making appeals to “common sense” and everyday folks
while pocketing $100,000 speaking fees, or Palin departing early from office as Alaska’s
governor shortly after slighting Barack Obama for his lack of executive experience. Or
Clooney talking like an outsider while operating as quite the insider and the power broker
on many fronts: as one of Hollywood’s wealthiest and most influential actors, in Latour’s
sense of the term; as a kingmaker in his own right in the promotion of Obama’s
presidency; as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the
Davos diorama. Or, take this description from the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein
about a media figure that was an important ‘thought leader’ in Arianna Huffington’s
narrative as well as Sarah Palin’s and Trump’s. In Goldstein’s March 1, 2012 story,
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“Andrew Breitbart: Media manipulation as an art form,” the author marks the death of his
subject while remarking on one of Breitbart’s most significant discoveries: “His genius
was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets
far more attention than being authoritative” (Goldstein).
In sum, the interests of very few powerful people appear to be served the most by
the recruitment and self-branding, hybridizing and publicizing practices of realitics.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the long-con hypothesis is valid, each scenario
takes on shadier hues once it is applied. For realiticians running for office, fans and
voters are there to provide relevance so that they can continue to receive money from big
donors and organizations. For leaders of technology companies and online media outlets,
writers and end users are there to populate pages with free content while owners profit
from their time and effort. The real work Clooney and his cohorts accomplish as
advocates has to do with celebrity being deployed around the world to secure popular
consent for neoliberal and imperialist causes.
Pushing further, realitics itself can be seen to carry the potential for, and
accommodate, deceit. Its duplicitous capacity can be traced to its systemic and
ideological roots. Meritocracy, celebrity, consumer culture, hegemonic white and male
supremacy, heteronormativity, and to no small extent, U.S. electoral politics are all
reliant upon contradictions, exclusions, and euphemisms in order to perpetuate
themselves and maintain power relations in the interests of dominant groups while
appearing to be fair to as many people as possible. As Boltanski and Chiapello note, the
capitalist model has proven especially adaptable and resilient, as well as able to
accommodate rebellion. Andrejevic makes a similar connection in this observation:
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“Thus, the emergence of so-called flexible capitalism interestingly co-opts the critique of
industrial capitalism in order to propagate itself” (28). Still, this line of analysis fails to
account for the productive qualities that realitics has expressed. A few final episodes,
some elucidating more positive and constructive aspects of realitics, will be rolled out
below by way of performing the second driving metaphor of this chapter.

Realitics as Long Conversation

The nonsequential potential of realitics, which can mean that narratives do not
always play out in a linear fashion, and past and present episodes can play off each other
in manners that mutually reconfigure them, has been at work in some way in each of the
chapters in this thesis. The common exercise of associating one realitician or episode
with another represents this practice at its most basic, and it comes with built-in benefits
and drawbacks. Being called the “Kennedys of Kentucky,” as George Clooney and his
family were, or being compared to Jane Fonda like the Dixie Chicks have repeatedly
been, at best grants a sort of legitimacy based upon the association while obscuring the
uniqueness of each of the paired parties and sets of circumstances (Crowley). At worst, as
would apply if the target audience for the Kennedy-Clooney link were comprised of
voters harboring deeply negative feelings toward the Kennedys, the newcomers to the
proverbial party would be immediately and perhaps irreversibly tarred before they had a
chance to differentiate themselves.
This kind of logic has underpinned attack ads and smear campaigns for
generations of American politicians and their aides-de-camp. It was clearly behind the
George H. W. Bush team’s famous Willie Horton advertisement, officially called “The
Revolving Door,” which went a long way to undermine Democratic rival Michael
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Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign. The ad evoked race-based anxieties while linking
Dukakis’ national image with a rape that Horton, a prisoner serving a life sentence for
murder in Massachusetts, had allegedly committed while on a weekend furlough
sanctioned by Massachusetts Governor Dukakis (“Top 10”). Similar dynamics were used
in the 2008 presidential contest, when media sources and political groups homed in on
Barack Obama’s relationship to his onetime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, from whom Obama
eventually distanced himself (Pearson).
Certainly those worried about the decay of presidential rhetoric and the downturn
in public political discourse are seeing plenty of signs of a slide into ruin. In a story
published on Mar. 4, 2018 in The Guardian with the ominous headline, “How Populist
Uprisings Could Bring Down Liberal Democracy,” Harvard University lecturer and
author Yascha Mounk cites Canadian political theorist Michael Ignatieff while
pinpointing how dominant styles of governance in the U.S. and other countries have
flipped from “a politics of adversaries” to “a politics of enemies;” the latter of which is
based on scorched-earth tactics and the abandonment of deliberative democracy
(Mounk). Hartnett and Mercieca mark the Pentagon Papers era, in which leaks by
American military analyst Daniel Ellsberg challenged official rhetoric from President
Lyndon Johnson’s administration regarding the Vietnam War, as one moment of serious
rupture before the time of their main focus: the George W. Bush presidency. In Hartnett
and Merceieca’s view, it was the second Bush administration that brought about the
“death of presidential rhetoric” (600).
Yet some Americans may be surprised to hear that opposition research and
mudslinging have been part of the country’s tradition since its inception. In Dirty
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Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy, Kathleen Hall Jamieson unearths a
number of insults and sabotage attempts aimed at none other than the U.S.’ third and
sixteenth presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. One of Jefferson’s
opponents, “Yale president Rev. Timothy Dwight,” warned that if Jefferson took over the
White House, “the Bible will be burned, the French ‘Marseillaise’ will be sung in
Christian churches,” and citizens’ wives and daughters would become sex workers.
Lincoln was called any number of epithets including, as an 1864 edition of Harper’s
Weekly rounded up, “Liar, Thief, Monster […] Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Fiend,
Butcher, Land-Pirate” (43). In short, Jamieson concludes, [s]uch verbal and visual
telegraphy has been a mainstay of U.S. politics” (44).
Tabling for the moment the question of whether Trump, or any of the others
mentioned here, have introduced an especially destructive element that makes it difficult
to continue supporting the presumption that there is nothing new under the sun even in an
age of reality TV and social media, there are conceivable upsides worth noticing as well.
There have been instances in which the potential for resistance, invention, and
productivity, even progress, can be entertained. Just as it is too reductive to dismiss out of
hand the possibility of anything good coming out of celebrity or popular culture writ
large, it follows that the same could be said of realitics, being that it is derived from those
other two.
The malleability of meaning and temporal fluidity distinctive to the mode of
realitics brings unexpected rewards. At times, failures are reversible when celebrities
strike out anew. Publicity has the potential to later be converted in an image-based
economy. Investments in renown, or celebrity capital, circulate into opportunities for
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transformation. The meaning of an incident itself and public perception of the subject
together become recreated. Even a resounding flop can be repurposed to become prime
material for a familiar show-business trope: the comeback story.
Some individual comebacks are significant beyond an individual’s own purview.
Trump again presents the most conspicuous example; the apparatus of celebrity, and
specifically of reality television, has been credited with effecting perhaps the most
significant 180-degree turnaround in recent history. Take, for example, this summary of
what reality television did for Trump from biographer Timothy O’Brien, author of
TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, as told to People magazine in 2018: “The
Apprentice overnight repositioned him in the American imagination as the embodiment
of deal making [sic] savvy, capable entrepreneur, and business success” (Herbst). All it
took was a little imagination, Mark Burnett, and a prime Thursday night, “Must-See TV”
time slot on NBC.
It is also impossible to comprehend Trump’s success without taking into account
what his supporters view as the refreshing, necessary, and even revolutionary qualities he
brings to his current office. It is precisely because he deviates from the norm in so many
respects and comes from such a different professional background that he won and
retains some voters’ loyalties. The Washington Post’s James Hohmann interviewed a test
pool of Pennsylvania voters and published his findings on March 13, as the balloting
underway for a special election to fill a seat in Congress for the state’s 18
th
Congressional
District (Democrat Conor Lamb eventually prevailed). One Trump supporter drew sharp
distinctions between the president and his politics, inferring that character traits and
fitness for office can be evaluated separately: “Do I like him as a person? Hell no,” the
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man said, adding that he finds Trump “disgusting,” “obnoxious,” lacking in manners, and
possessed of “the worst haircut in the world.” However, “he gets things done,” the man
said. “He cut taxes” (Hohmann).
Trump’s presidency has set the tone from the top in many respects, politically and
culturally speaking. One of the many ways in which his move to the White House has
caused discernible ripples can be found in the number of unusual candidates for various
offices around the world whose bids have been floated or confirmed in the months since
Trump’s campaign began picking up momentum. In December 2017, 31-year-old
Sebastian Kurz, who since May of that year had been heading up the Austrian People’s
Party (ÖVP), became Chancellor of Austria; The Washington Post observed on Jan. 3,
2018 that a Luxembourg’s foreign minister had “compared Kurz to Donald Trump”
because of his stance on immigration and other issues (Weisskircher). In November 2017,
as Kircher was closing in on his new post in Austria, Newsweek was clocking Mexican
politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who quoted Mexican writer and commentator
Francisco Martín Moreno as saying López Obrador had employed “the same populism as
Trump,” albeit from the left, and had “divided Mexicans” the same way Trump caused
rifts in the U.S. (Lopez).
In the first quarter of 2018, Russian reality TV star Ksenia Sobchak, whom NPR
referred to as the “second most famous person in Russia” after President Vladimir Putin,
ran against Putin in Russia’s presidential election and lost. In early February, Sobchak
did a press tour in the U.S. in anticipation of the March 18 balloting, and Trump’s
presence registered in All Things Considered correspondents Monika Evstatieva and
Mary Louise Kelly’s report. The 36-year-old Russian reality star and journalist “is trying
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to channel President Trump,” they wrote, but in a different manner. “Liberal things that I
say, they’re as shocking as saying [in the U.S.], ‘You’re a nasty woman,” Sobchak told
NPR. “For Russians, when you say ‘we want freedom of speech, we want the rule of law’
. . . this is the same kind of radical shock,” she added (Evstatieva and Kelly).
Two European career politicians who have been in circulation for some time,
France’s Marine Le Pen, a member of parliament (MP) and President of the National
Front, and Dutch MP and Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, have also been
compared to America’s 45
th
president. Talk of Trump in the same sentence as Le Pen or
Wilders typically has to do with their hardline anti-immigrant and anti-Islam views, as
well as their nationalist, populist, anti-elitist rhetoric. Newsweek’s Tara John spotted
some additional similarities shared by Trump and Wilders, whom she said “gained the
nickname of the ‘Dutch Trump’ for his ability to court controversy, his effective use of
social media, his demonization of immigrants, and his peroxide blonde bouffant
hairstyle” (John).
Closer to home, Missouri’s Courtland Sykes, running for a Republican Senate
seat in his home state, openly hitched a ride on Trump’s coattails, and closely mimicked
his brash style and swagger, in a campaign video released in January 2018. Sykes
appeared in the spot with slicked-back hair and an unbuttoned shirt, telling would-be
voters, “If you like President Trump, then you and I see eye to eye.” (Trump, on the other
hand, informally backed another contender for the seat Sykes was seeking.) Sykes also
drew media attention by posting on his Facebook page that he wants “to come home to a
home cooked dinner at six every night,” hopes his daughters don’t become “career
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obsessed banshees,” and believes that feminists have “nasty, snake-filled heads”
(Watson).
The Detroit Metro Times Editor-in-Chief Lee DeVito called Sykes “Missouri’s
answer to Trump,” and likened Sykes’ candidacy to Detroit native Kid Rock’s 2017 U.S.
Senate campaign, which turned out to be performance art that the eclectic musician used
to promote his new album and to punch up his live act (“Missouri’s”). At the height of
the post-2016 election panic about “fake news” and amid ongoing unrest about Trump’s
presidency, Kid Rock, née Robert James Ritchie, decided to see how far he could take his
ploy, even as he faced possible fines for flouting campaign finance law and stirred up
trouble on tour. Fittingly, he owned up to his elaborate prank on Howard Stern’s
SiriusXM radio show. De Vito offered details in the Detroit Metro Times of Rock’s hoax
and of Metro Times’ reporter Jerilyn Jordan’s conversations with credulous voters at his
fall 2017 concerts:
“It’s the worst advice I ever gave myself, but it’s been the most creative thing I’ve
ever done,” he told Stern. “And I’ve gotten to see everyone’s true colors.”
Indeed. But who was the joke on, in the end?
. . . Each night, part of Kid Rock’s set involved a mock ‘stump speech’ that
included digs at transgender people and national anthem kneeling protesters. And
based on the speech, plenty of people Jordan spoke to at the shows said they
would definitely vote for Kid Rock. One woman told her, “We hope he runs for
Senate . . . I think people are fed up and taking matters into their own hands
(“Kid”).
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Kid Rock may be sitting out the next election, but other celebrities could soon
enter the ring; in fact, it could get rather crowded. In March 2018, Sex and the City star
Cynthia Nixon announced that she was running for New York governor; just after she
went public with the news, a photo circulated online of Nixon accepting an Emmy Award
for the HBO series from the boss of The Apprentice, Donald Trump (Fallon). In 2015,
Rapper Kanye West, who is married to one of the biggest reality stars in the world, Kim
Kardashian, began floating the idea that he would run for president in 2020. His venue of
choice for that announcement was, naturally, the MTV Video Music Awards. West’s
White House talk caught the attention of then-President Obama, who showed up at the
same Democratic fundraiser at which West was slated to perform in October of that year.
Obama took a moment at the podium during the San Francisco event to advise West,
more presciently than he probably realized at the time, that in order to be president,
“you’ve got to spend some time dealing with some strange characters who behave like
they’re on a reality TV show” (Blair).
West may encounter some competition from at least two film stars who have
expressed the same long-range ambition. Will Smith is one of them, having hatched the
idea after staying, as a guest of then-President Clinton, in the Lincoln bedroom of the
White House. Smith wondered aloud later, during an interview with the New York Daily
News, “[i]f Ronald Reagan can become President, then why not Will Smith”?
(Nicholson) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is another, forming an unlikely triumvirate
with Jesse Ventura and Donald Trump with their ties to both electoral politics and the
World Wrestling Federation. GQ’s Caity Weaver wrote in a May 2017 profile in that
magazine, “Johnson doesn’t hesistate when I ask him whether he honestly might one day
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give up his life as the highest-paid movie star on earth to run for president. ‘I think that’s
a real possibility’” (Weaver).
Other names that have been mentioned as possible presidential contenders are
Red Sox baseball MVP Curt Schilling, one of a relatively small cadre of conservative
celebrities, who talked presidential plans with Esquire magazine in 2017 after
announcing the previous year that he would try for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren’s seat in 2018 (Bella). Billionaire businessman and Shark Tank reality star Mark
Cuban has teased the idea of running for president on several occasions. Meanwhile,
Oprah Winfrey put an end to the sudden and apparently unwarranted explosion of
presidential chatter that had reverberated since the 2018 Golden Globes by stating, more
than once, “it’s not in my DNA” (R. Evans, “Oprah”).
These kinds of statements from famous people could be more reflective of an
interest in garnering publicity than in holding office, particularly since that line of
commentary no longer sounds as outlandish as it did before the 2016 election. There are
some, though, who have taken additional measures to realize their political goals. Actor
Antonio Sabato, Jr. has officially commenced his run for Congress in California’s 26
th

District. Among the facts and trivia listed on his official website, VoteAntonio.com, is
information about how he had immigrated to the U.S. in 1985 before gaining recognition
in modeling campaigns and films like The Big Hit, and the assertion that “[h]e has not
been shy about his political views in the face of his Hollywood peers and is proud of his
early support for President Donald J. Trump” (“Meet Antonio”). Stacey Dash, best
known for her role in the 1995 film Clueless, has also filed paperwork to initiate her own
run for Congress, this time for California’s 44
th
District, the post once held by the late
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singer Sonny Bono. Like Sabato, Jr., Dash is a person of color forging a career in
conservative politics in Trump’s America (Hamedy). They follow in the footsteps of
California office-holders Reagan, Schwarzenegger and former Carmel-by-the-Sea Mayor
Clint Eastwood, all right-leaning celebrities. Other stars from across the map and the
political spectrum who have also made bids for office include American Idol performer
Clay Aiken, who ran and lost in a contest for North Carolina’s Second District in 2014,
and ‘90s talk-show host Jerry Springer, erstwhile mayor of Cincinnati (Bort).
These unorthodox contenders for elected office collectively represent what could
be one of the most impactful forms of Trump-triggered realitics, though gauging such
effects is a tricky endeavor. Still, it seems equally difficult to argue that these and many
more instances are not linked to Trump’s narrative. Surely all of the perceived parallels
could not have been fabricated by journalists looking for a catchy angle for their stories.
Donald Trump, though an outlier in many respects, is not the only relevant
contestant in this association game. For each of the major episodes and figures included
in this study, at least one analogous situation has since occurred that has echoed,
reinforced and even altered the meaning of the original. With respect to the Dixie Chicks,
it is possible to suss out a couple different rhetorical and symbolic heirs apparent, starting
with the recent and significant movement, referenced in the above Kid Rock passage, of
African American athletes using their platforms to make statements on and off the field.
The trend of black athletes, and minority athletes more generally, speaking and
acting in support of their politics is not itself new. Legendary boxer Muhammad Ali,
1968 U.S. Olympic runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and baseball great Jackie
Robinson helped bring the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements into national focus
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in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In the early 1990s, NBA sharpshooter Craig Hodges criticized his
contemporaries Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen for not speaking out about racial
violence and inequality in the U.S. after the attack on Rodney King, the African
American taxi driver whose beating by Los Angeles police officers was caught on
videotape, sparked uprisings and protests. Hodges even penned a letter to then-President
George H.W. Bush about his concerns. He paid a price for his political activism in that he
was subsequently dropped by the Chicago Bulls at just 32 years old and was not picked
up by another team (Hsu).
The more current group of athletes taking a stand were activated in part by an
uptick in demonstrations and national discourse about race, as brought to the fore by the
Black Lives Matter movement and by a series of high-profile incidents involving the
deaths of African Americans Trayvon Martin, Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice,
Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Shelly Frey, and many
others whose killings were considered racially motivated. In a show of solidarity and to
memorialize the life and 2012 death of 17-year-old Martin, NBA basketball players
LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and a group of their Miami Heat teammates posed for a
photo James tweeted out on March 23, 2012, in which the athletes were pictured, heads
bowed, in hoodie sweatshirts like the one Martin had worn when he was spotted and shot
by neighborhood security guard George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. James also
wrote “R.I.P. Trayvon Martin” on his shoe and wore it during a game against the Detroit
Pistons. An ESPN report about James’ actions and their meaning was titled “The Heat’s
hoodies as change agent,” and the lede read, as did a hashtag in James’ tweet, “We are
Trayvon Martin” (Hill). The journalist who wrote the article was Jemele Hill, whose
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2017 firing by ESPN comprised one of the short episodes mentioned in the introduction
chapter and who had made the intersection between sports and politics one of her beats.
As Black Lives Matter became a full-fledged national movement, it inspired a
sequence of additional displays of realitics along similar lines. In December 2014, James
continued his messaging work by warming up for a game with his Cleveland Cavaliers
teammates in T-shirts emblazoned with the message “I Can’t Breathe,” recalling Eric
Garner’s last words from five months prior, spoken before he died while being held in a
chokehold by a New York Police Department officer. The episode in this conversation
most likely seen by the largest number of people around the world was Beyoncé’s 2015
Super Bowl halftime performance, during which the chart-topping singer paid
unmistakable tribute to Black Panther-era activism, marching onto the field dressed in
black with a bandolier of bullets and accompanied by backup dancers in signature black
berets, their hair worn in Afros.
It was out of this climate that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick
emerged in August 2016, touching off another several rounds of national debate about
political athletes, as well as about the issues upon which Kaepernick was staking his
livelihood. Those were, again referencing his brief appearance in the introduction
chapter, systemic racism and violence upon which the U.S. was founded and through
which injustices are currently being perpetuated—through mass incarceration, police
violence, racial profiling and other practices. Soon after he began “taking a knee,” or
kneeling instead of standing as a gesture of dissent, as the American national anthem
played before games, Kaepernick’s football career flagged, following a similar trajectory
as Craig Hodges’ in the NBA, in that he was marked for having crossed a line by getting
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political and disrespecting his country, or so went the complaint. He opted out of his
49ers contract in March of 2017 and was not picked up by another league team; as of this
writing he is still listed as a free agent.
Kaepernick’s move polarized onlookers and stirred lengthy public deliberation
through typical and less customary channels. He even prompted the country’s most
prominent Twitter commentator, President Trump, to hold forth in September 2017 that
the NFL “fire or suspend” players who disrespect “our Flag & Country” and that fans
boycott games in the meantime (Davis). In turn, players on the professional and amateur
levels, even some high school athletes, made a point of locking arms or kneeling in
solidarity with Kaepernick and in defiance of what they considered a repudiation, from
the nation’s highest office, of their constitutional right to exercise free speech and to
openly call attention to problems at the governmental, institutional, and social levels.
Though he remained unattached and was effectively disclaimed by powerful
people from the field in which he had come up, Kaepernick put together a second career
as a result of his public show of protest. It is in this regard that the Dixie Chicks become
pertinent. Though there are obvious and subtle differences in the stakes, racial and gender
dynamics involved, as well as in their respective professions, both the Chicks and
Kaepernick were penalized for mixing entertainment and politics. They drew censure
from, and attention to, those who considered themselves rightfully in command of certain
privileges and forms of power and the authorities on if, how, and under what conditions
that kind of power was to be claimed and used by (O)thers. Again, the question arises: if
what the Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick did was truly inconsequential, why the
boycott? Why would the Chicks be told, as they were, to “shut up and sing,” and political
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athletes be told to “shut up and dribble,” as Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said on the air to
LeBron James in February 2018 (E. Sullivan)? Notably, Ingraham may have been using
the James episode as a means of repurposing one of her own catchphrases; in 2003, her
book Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting
America, hit the shelves.
The two examples can also be thematically likened in that their protagonists
became lightning rods and human stand-ins for displaced arguments. As debating about
what the Dixie Chicks said about President George W. Bush was in essence arguing
about the Iraq War in 2003, only a step or more removed, so was disputing about
Kaepernick and his peers a way of jostling over power and control of the discourse in a
society predicated on racial and other forms of inequality.
42
The displaced-argument
phenomenon can be a distancing technique that allows coded discussions to happen about
‘third-rail’ subjects that cannot be talked about openly for many reasons; alternately, it
can serve as a means for perpetuating power imbalances while hiding, or denying, that
that is what is in fact being effectuated.
Or, it can allow an influential white woman such as Laura Ingraham to chide a
black man such as LeBron James on national television, telling him he does not have the
right to speak while implying that she always, already does. If pressed, she would be able
to reject any proposition that race played into her message, since that was not what was
explicitly said (there’s the dog whistle), and perhaps to characterize such a suggestion as
yet another sign of the rampant ‘political correctness’ stifling public discourse. Granted,
it is not only athletes of color who historically have spoken out on any number of
subjects, but would she have been compelled to tell former California Gov. Arnold
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Schwarzenegger to ‘shut up and pump iron?’ Or would she instruct onetime Minnesota
Governor Jesse Ventura, who worked his way into that office after making a name for
himself in the World Wrestling Federation, to ‘shut up and wrestle?’
Kaepernick has been careful to keep steering the discussion back to the issues that
started his protest in the first place, and he has been well supported by his allies in so
doing. There are many possible explanations as to why his segue into his second,
politically infused career has arguably been steadier than the Dixie Chicks’ switchover
was. His messaging strategy has been more consistent; he has not attempted, as the DXC
did, to apologize with or without conditions, nor has he tried to placate various, even
opposed, groups. He has maintained his original stance and has not qualified it since he
began his campaign. As a black man, he contends with additional challenges to what the
Dixie Chicks faced in coming back from a perceived mistake, even if he would not view
“taking a knee” as such. David Leonard explained in Playing While White: Privilege and
Power on and off the Field that the privilege of whiteness affects how players are
regarded, no matter the setting, and black athletes are routinely “demonized,” considered
selfish teammates, and subjected to “the ‘thugification’ of black bodies” (17, 107). In
contrast, white athletes, even those who have run afoul of the law or taken performance-
enhancing drugs, are coded and treated differently by virtue of being granted the
“inoculation of whiteness” (108).
Kaepernick’s efforts have been successful in more important respects; he has
become emblematic of a moment as well as an icon in the black community. As of March
2018, he had taken up his leadership and activism in a more official capacity. He
launched the Colin Kaepernick Foundation, through which he organized a million-dollar
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campaign in which he donated that amount incrementally to an assortment of causes, and
for which he was joined by famous associates matching individual installments of his
total endowment (“Million”). Through his foundation, he offers a free instructional
“Know Your Rights Camp,” which his site says works to “raise awareness on higher
education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement
in various scenarios” (“Know”). In November 2017, GQ magazine named him “Citizen
of the Year,” an honor that came with a cover story entitled “Colin Kaepernick Will Not
Be Silenced,” and the tag line “Celebrating the man who became a movement”
(Schoeller). In December 2017, he was recognized by his chosen industry when Sports
Illustrated named him the recipient of the “SI Muhammad Ali Legacy Award,” which the
magazine established specifically to commemorate political athletes. Beyoncé made a
surprise cameo to present the award and thank Kaepernick for his “sacrifice;” in his
speech, he pledged, “[w]ith or without the NFL’s platform, I will continue to work for the
people, because my platform is the people” (Nyren).
In a March 2017 survey article published in The New Yorker, “The Political
Athlete: Then and Now,” journalist Hua Hsu observed, “Athletes have always been
political. But until recently they rarely possessed the means to explain themselves so
directly to their fans” (Hsu). What changed to grant them those means, besides
technology such as social media, is that the combined efforts of realiticians, including the
reality TV star in the White House, has made formerly prohibitive boundaries between
worlds more passable. CNN’s Christine Brennan, who serves as a sports analyst for the
network, credits Trump as having done more than just break new ground for actors with
disparate backgrounds seeking to ascend to elected office. “I think because Trump is so
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controversial and because the things he’s saying and doing run counter to what many
people believe,” Brennan said, “athletes are finding their voice in a way that is
reminiscent of the 1960s” (Zaru).
To make good on my project-wide mission of eschewing taxonomic
equivalencies, I will reiterate that it is not as though Kaepernick can simply be folded into
the same case file as the Dixie Chicks under the heading, ‘Shut Up and _____.’ There are
important and abundant particularities, as I showed on a more granular level in Chapter
Two, that make the defining characteristics of any one episode difficult to uproot and
graft onto another. Rather, drawing parallels here has been about exploring resonances
and noticing loosely thematic repetitions that can yield insights about these different
episodes and figures. Additionally, a built-in tendency of realitics is to refer to past
episodes and realiticians while encountering new ones. In that spirit, below is a brief
array of recent happenings that resonate with those described throughout this
dissertation—another indication that realitics is a growth industry, as it were.
Beginning with another resonant link between Kaepernick and the DXC, there
have been many situations involving some kind of crisis, disturbance, or repeated pattern
attributed to a particular celebrity that have later been summarized by adapting that
person’s name, or some other word related to his or her story, into a neologism or
concocted phrase. Realitics traces and articulates discrete incidents that feature
apparently shared elements by, for one, repurposing celebrity names and brands as
umbrella terms to invite interpretation of each situation by itself and as part of a broader
scheme.
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Here are just a few rounded up from news reports, followed by an indication of
the person(s) implicated when their names are not included: “the Weinstein effect,”
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“Dixie Chicked,” the “Trump bump,” “take a knee” (Kaepernick), and “Omarosa” used
as a verb.
As the earlier vignette about Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global pop-up spelled
out, the diorama is alive and well. The Nation’s Jon Weiner spoke with fellow journalist
Amy Wilentz about a curious occurrence from July Fourth weekend, 2017, in the tony
Hamptons region of New York’s Long Island, one of the more popular summer
destinations for elites. Wilentz coined a useful phrase, “biparty-san,” referring to an event
attended by the “supra-elite,” or in Weiner’s words, the “international jet-setting class
that transcends partisan politics.” Wilentz set the scene as follows:
Jared and Ivanka went to a party given by Lally Weymouth on July 4th weekend
in the Hamptons. Lally Weymouth is a socialite, but she’s also the senior
associate editor of The Washington Post, because of nepotism. Her mother was
the editor and publisher of The Washington Post: Katherine Graham. Republicans
were there: In addition to Ivanka and Jared, Kellyanne Conway, and David Koch
of the Koch brothers. Also Dina Powell, the deputy national-security adviser in
the Trump White House. On the other hand, Chuck Schumer was also there, along
with top Democratic funders George Soros and Stephen Spielberg. Various
members of the global financial community were also there—all at this party,
sipping champagne together, side by side—making you wonder who’s running
the world (Wiener).
Later in the interview, Wilentz said that the interests of the supra-elite “transcend the
divisions in Congress,” and that this clique circulates at such a high altitude, they are
“beyond patriotism and nationalism; they’re functioning in another world, a bigger
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world” (Wiener). So, perhaps the “beyond left and right” catchphrase is right—when you
are Arianna Huffington, that is.
Two more short takes before giving credit where it is due for the phrase “the long
conversation”: First, Paul “Bono” Hewson was one of the members of the international
elite exposed in the sweeping “Paradise Papers” leak of 2017. Hewson was discovered to
have used loopholes to avoid paying taxes on his considerable fortune, which tarnished
his do-gooder image as a crusader against poverty in Africa, among scores of additional
causes with which his brand is linked (“Paradise”).
Next comes a scene from a February 2018 airing of CBS’ long-running reality
show Celebrity Big Brother, during which Omarosa Manigault-Newman and The Cosby
Show alumna Keshia Knight-Pulliam pondered the #MeToo movement in light of their
respective former bosses Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, both of whom have been
accused by multiple women of sexual assault. Newly fired by the man who had made her
a star, Omarosa was asked by another castmate for reassurance about where the country
was heading. She told him, and the entire viewing audience, that “it’s not going to be
O.K.” with Trump in the White House (Poniewozik). The title of Celebrity Big Brother,
in which strangers are put together to live and create drama in a closely monitored house,
alludes to 1984, George Orwell’s classic novel about an invasive, duplicitous, double-
speaking state and its effects on civil society.
One of the more surprising developments that may be in part attributed to
Trump’s rise is the public vindication of Anita Hill, who in October 1991 underwent one
of the most vigorous excoriation rituals at the hands of government officials charged with
vetting her claims of sexual harassment by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, then
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under consideration for his seat. Though she gained a base of defenders around the
country, some of whom wore buttons and T-shifts displaying the phrase “I believe Anita
Hill” in solidarity, the rounds of graphic testimony she endured about her past work
experiences with Thomas ultimately did not derail him en route to the nation’s top court.
Cut to October 2017, when #MeToo momentum was building in response to the
revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein mentioned in the opening
scenes of this dissertation, and in response to Trump’s election to the presidency. The
latter event had given rise to highly conspicuous shows of resistance, hashtagged as the
#resistance, and had sparked a dedicated movement that began just after Trump’s
inauguration in the form of the Women’s March; hundreds of thousands of people
marched in the streets of several U.S. cities on Jan. 21, 2017 and again the following year
(Hamblin). Hill’s allegations of harassment, and the treatment she received after speaking
up about it, took on new inflections 26 years later, and her public reinvention was
enacted. Notably, it was one that she could not carry off, at least by that point, on her
own; it took several sociocultural shifts, plus Trump’s election and the ensuing push-
back, as well as the group of accusers who came forward about Harvey Weinstein’s
alleged abuses, to reconfigure her cultural significance. She was invited to speak about
her experience and the Me Too movement in a number of forums, and was chosen to
lead, in tandem with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, an anti-harassment
commission based in Hollywood (Buckley).
In an October 15, 2017 interview, Hill reflected on the two connected moments in
which she was in the spotlight, starting with her first exposure. “I think one of the reasons
1991 was so impactful was how public it was,” she said,” adding that “it was almost like
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a long conversation about how these things play out.” Hill used the same phrase in
addressing the so-called “Weinstein effect”: “This Weinstein story feels like a long
conversation too,” she said, “with different parts getting developed and different people
being brought into it” (Noveck). During a December 2017 panel in Hollywood on sexual
harassment, she called up another, familiar image that linked her narrative with that of
Martin Luther King, Jr. “I don’t think of 1991 and 2017 as isolated moments in history,”
said Hill; “I see them as part of an arc, and an arc that has been bending towards justice”
(Lopez).

Parting Glances and Future Horizons
Hill’s turn of phrase in her use of the “long conversation” could not be more
suitable for this project. It provides a sense of continuity while allowing for fluidity and
revision, as well as for cross-temporality. Realitics is nostalgic, mixing past and present
through a kind of sampling or temporal hybridity. Previous tropes and themes from the
past, as well as entire episodes, can be picked up and used as rerun material. In a manner
similar to how a sample from a ‘70s-era song dropped into a current single sounds
different and carries different connotations in its new context, the rerun of a scene from
realitics past invites fresh interpretations. By virtue of the passage of time and a kind of
reflexivity that accompanies the self-conscious inclusion (on the production end) of the
past message in the present communicative instance, as well as the savvy recognition (on
the reception side) of both the original material and its significance in its new packaging,
the revision is something more than the sum of its parts.
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Another conversation was happening between and among the theorists whose
work is featured in this dissertation. Hopefully, the many different theoretical
contributions to this conversation have served to prove my earlier point that the domain
of realitics represents rich ground deserving of further scholarly attention. There are
openings for inquiry along both the long con and long conversation lines of argument, as
well as into each component of the machinery of realitics. Concomitant with considering
the long-con angle is establishing a better understanding of how citizens, consumers, and
scholars, might expose its inner workings in order to avoid falling for it in the future.
There has arguably been more of a trickle-up phenomenon occurring with regard to the
benefits—measured in terms of money, indicators and effects of power—of a scheme
increasingly enabled by realitics. Cultivating chaos and confusion may produce a
disoriented public with a greater potential for compliance and manipulation.
Anita Hill’s episode serves as proof that realitics is not a universally corrosive
agent cheapening the public political sphere. At the same time, it did not spring from
nowhere; it emerged from specific systems and people and contexts through specific
channels and acting upon specific subjects. By inference, it will take on some of the
attributes of its origins. Without a star system predicated upon capitalist tenets of
competition and meritocratic accomplishment, bolstered by media and entertainment
industries that not only allow but profit from approved forms of political expression and
marketable rebellion on the part of celebrities, it would not be feasible for actors to use
their celebrity capital as a means of gaining access and influence in the realm of politics.
Trump, though flush himself in that symbolic currency by the time he ran for president in
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2015, was more a benefactor and exploiter of a rich tradition than he was an inventor as
such.
In a 2017 interview, I spoke to longtime activist and 2000 Green Party
presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who lamented the celebrified state of the American
mainstream media. Though he expected Fox News and CNN to “sell every grunt from
Trump,” those outlets had helped cultivate a race-to-the-bottom phenomenon that Nader
considers a form of “self-censorship” that is “strangling even the best of the media.”
Celebrity news dominating the airwaves “excises 90 percent of the important news in the
world,” Nader said. “They don’t want to put on the air or in the newspaper anything that
doesn’t connect with today’s lurid headlines” (Nader).
The argument that celebrity is inconsequential fluff unworthy of study is no
longer defensible, and the infusion of realitics into global political networks is not trivial
either. For this and many reasons, it has been the subject of my research for as long as it
has, and I would submit that it should be taken up by as many different thinkers from as
many different disciplines and points of view as possible. I would predict that, though
individual realiticians such as Donald Trump may come and go, the mode itself will
remain dominant for several election cycles to come, and it will not be restricted to
American electoral politics in its range. Already there have been several episodes from
other countries that realitics is becoming an international sign language.
By way of a quick illustration of how the study of realitics can be taken up by
scholars from numerous backgrounds using diverse approaches, I have picked an episode
that has not been mentioned in prior chapters. On May 21, 2018, The New York Times
and other outlets reported that former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle
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Obama had signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to produce entertainment, both
television shows and films, that would “highlight issues and themes the president pursued
during his eight years in office” (Shear). With the debut of “Higher Ground Productions,”
the Obamas jump-started their newest vehicle for celebrity advocacy while confirming
the validity of more than one entry from the realitics playbook. The name they chose for
their joint venture evoked one of Michelle Obama’s most popular speeches, in which she
denounced behavior she saw as lowbrow coming from political opponents—specifically
from Donald Trump’s camp before and during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential
election. Obama told a crowd of cheering Clinton supporters at the Democratic National
Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 24, 2016, that when faced with
negativity, she and Barack Obama told their daughters, Sasha and Malia, “our motto is,
when they go low, we go high” (Abcarian).
The Obama-Netflix story constitutes one of the more conspicuous and
straightforward examples of realitics in recent American history. It also presents several
immediately apparent points of entry for academic inquiries from any number of fields.
Communication researchers could track the media reception of the initial announcement
across various outlets, as just one of many options. Political science scholars might
situate the Obama-Netflix episode within a broader conversation about political
messaging by and about political officeholders, or they might look at how Obama’s latest
strategy compares to those of former presidents after they left the White House. Film and
television studies scholars could take the content produced by the deal under
consideration, in terms of how it functions on semiotic as well as more practical levels
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such as ratings and revenue generated by those entertainment products. Economics
specialists could also conduct such business-side evaluations, and so forth.
The project of defining and understanding realitics that has been initiated with this
dissertation represents a generative and critical intervention. It offers a multidisciplinary
set of tools and a way in to complex political-cultural sites of study and combines not just
the ‘real-world’ domains of politics, entertainment, and journalism, but the symbolic
systems they generate and perpetuate. Such interventions are likely to be necessary for
some time to come; as long as the people, parties, industries, and institutions that have
profited from some aspect of realitics are able to persist unchallenged, Americans can
look forward to more of the same. Writing in The New York Times, Juleanna Glover has
fixed her sights on elections to come, and she offers a few candidates for the next
presidential contest, only a few of whom are career politicians:
Another possibility: a business executive with a record of sound leadership, moral
authority and a quick wit: the financier David Rubenstein, Ginni Rommety of
IBM or Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, perhaps? How about a centrist
Republican governor like Larry Hogan of Maryland, John Kasich of Ohio or
Charlie Baker of Massachusetts? And then, of course, there’s Oprah.
In the post-Trump world of American politics, there are all kinds of potential
candidates who make sudden sense. Those quixotic enough to daydream about a
new political party aren’t foolish enough to envision a candidacy driven by policy
papers or party platforms. Personality and principles—either adoration or
abnegation thereof—will propel the election of the next president (Glover).
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In all likelihood, as James Poniewozik ruefully sums it up in the same publication,
television will continue to be a “fourth branch of government,” perfect for an era in
which “politics and reality TV have become inseparable and indistinguishable”
(Poniewozik).
Not only will American politics continue to register the changes ushered in by
Trump, his influence will reverberate well after he is out of office, in terms of the policy
changes he has made and the style of politicking he has made possible. Yascha Mounk
believes that actors like Trump who break established rules create the incentive, and open
the floodgates, for others to follow suit. “While some of the most spectacular attacks on
basic democratic norms have come from political newcomers,” he suggests, “the
representatives of old, established parties have also become increasingly willing to
undermine the basic rules of the game” (Mounk).
Epilogue: The Playbook’s the Thing
The playbook, together with realitics, is an ascendant genre in the age of Trump.
More accurately, it is an indispensable tool for those seeking power in any era to practice
the art of influence as they attempt to outmaneuver the opposition and fight off the
competition on their way up. Once their goal is accomplished, it helps them justify their
position. Thus, the word ‘secret’ frequently accompanies ‘playbook,’ whether stated or
inferred, as the tradition of the playbook dovetails with that of the secret society. It also
resonates with related forms such as the playbill, hailing from the theater, the field guide,
and the handbook, the latter of which has strong ties to the rhetorical tradition (Parry-
Giles and Hogan). The playbook carries a sneakier and less accessible connotation than
those close cousins.
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Would-be practitioners of the darker arts often catalogued in playbooks may be
aware of, but generally do not expose, one another, as that may bring about their own
exposure. Sophistry and double-dealing in the interest of keeping up the appearance of
candor and worthiness while minimizing detection are their ultimate aims. For the
opposition—e.g., critics, journalists, any groups disadvantaged as a result of the
privileged party’s attainment and exercise of power—the playbook is a target to be
tracked down with the determination of a bounty hunter. Their hope is that once the
blueprint is found and revealed, the jig will be up. As power relentlessly looks for ways
to perpetuate and extend itself, its antagonist always in hot pursuit, only the pace and
techniques involved ever really change.
This dynamic drives the capital-R Resistance movement challenging President
Trump. As concern and outrage over Trump’s actions has grown within its ranks, so has
the sense of urgency to do something about a problem that, in their view, emanates from
the person of the president. Impeachment may be their ultimate goal, but exposing what
they believe is an elaborate hoax of a presidency, a joke played for Trump’s advantage
and at the expense of the American people, would make a good start. This sensibility
stands in contrast to an equal and opposite belief expressed by Trump’s followers,
including a few quoted in this thesis, that the president is one of few politicians able to
tell it like it is, regardless of who might be offended in the process.
It also explains the proliferation of playbook-themed discussions in the media that
has accompanied Trump’s rise. Everyone seems to suddenly have come across a
playbook, or else is trying to use one for nefarious purposes. The following is only a
limited snapshot of a much bigger arena that contains yet another set of realitics-oriented
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studies waiting to happen. Columnist Thomas Friedman issued a piece on March 21,
2018, called “Trump and Putin’s getting-away-with-it playbook.” Obviously, the hope is
that they would no longer get away with it once Friedman had done his part (T.
Friedman). That same day, The New York Times’ published Lisa Friedman and John
Schwartz’ story, “Borrowing G.O.P. Playbook, Democratic States Sue the Government
and Rack Up Wins,” stating the goal of any playbook as part of the headline (Friedman
and Schwartz). Then there’s The Daily Beast’s exposé, “Leaked: The Alt-Right Playbook
for Taking Over YouTube,” Time’s “Stormy Daniels Is Borrowing From Donald Trump’s
Playbook,” also unleashed in March 2018 (Weill; Beckwith).
Turns out Barack Obama also has a playbook, as the U.K.’s Spectator discovered,
judging by this headline: “Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook is straight from
Obama’s playbook” (Gray). So do the high school students who survived the deadly
shooting on February 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida, according to The Post and Courier
out of Charleston, South Carolina: “Parkland students are rewriting the gun debate
playbook” (Pitts). Finally, two abstract domains have also tussled over a playbook,
according to a San Francisco, California CBS affiliate, which somewhat confusingly
reported the outcome in yet another March 2018 header, “Social Media Upends Politics
Playbook” (“Social”).
With this many playbooks in circulation, it is almost as though a playbook is
needed in order to make sense of them all. Luckily, I have just the thing. Though it may
not touch on every issue mentioned in the above headlines, it delves below the surface-
level details to get at the forces that shape them. Ideally, the playbook that caps off this
study would offer insights and perhaps scholarly inroads to further expeditions into the
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domain of realitics. If nothing else, it will at least serve to substantiate the many claims I
have made throughout, including my claim to the mode itself.

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Appendix: The Realitics Playbook

1) Realitics is an emergent mode of communication that has been co-produced by
the rise of reality and social media forms and platforms, as well as by preceding
and concurrent shifts in news and entertainment media, and by the ongoing
merger between the domains of celebrity and politics. It is a mode practiced by
elites in and beyond the professional realms of entertainment, journalism, and
politics, but it is not to be misapprehended as the sole province of notables from
any implicated field, nor of the deliberately political.

2) Realitics is comprised of a fluid set of performative practices that can be taken up
and enacted by just about anyone, and with varying degrees of cognizance. Even
those cited here as realiticians may move in and out of that mode depending on
the circumstances.

3) Realitics is episodic. It lends itself to rhythms and strategies of the entertainment
industry—e.g., up-fronts, junkets, seasonal releases, franchises, reboots, pilots,
and so on.

4) Realitics traffics in popular culture—as both a point of reference and the primary
coinage of the realm. The mode is articulated, understood, and contested via the
spaces, physical and figurative, and the vernacular of popular culture. (Like many
other aspects of realitics, this pop property may make it more democratic yet
subject to the vagaries of show business.)
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5) Realitics can operate on multiple platforms, as well as sites and time frames,
simultaneously or consecutively. In addition to augmenting Twitter, Facebook,
and Snapchat blitzes, realitics stands out in catchphrases and slogans, as well as
shareable, viral multimedia snippets and memes, film references, cartoons, late-
night comedy sketches, and other formats.

6) Realitics functions well within the scaffolding of the campaign. The term
‘campaign’ can accommodate many connotations, from an aspiring politician’s
concerted run for office to various kinds of advertising and social media drives
instigated by an array of sponsoring parties in order to promote a cause, product,
or message. A campaign might also entail the reinvention of a public persona,
such as an entertainment celebrity’s sundry attempts to be taken seriously as a
“thought leader” in hopes of building a second career, plus other forays into
synergistic fields or reversals of course out of contrition, defiance, or simply
necessity. Also: the campaign never really ends.

7) Relevance is the sine qua non of realitics. It is one of the main forms of currency
in the economy of realitics and is valued above just about all else. Choices that
may seem disadvantageous in the short run can make sense in light of the
superlative goal of maintaining relevance across contexts. Relevance may register
monetarily but can also be tracked according to attentional metrics such as media
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coverage, television ratings, votes, attendance at speeches and rallies, and
followers on social media.

8) The “celebrity diorama” is a conceptual space in which famous people of all
descriptions from around the globe circulate, network and boost each other’s
celebrity stock through the transitive property of realitics. Everything from
advertising campaigns to celebrity endorsements of politicians to Twitter
algorithms to film, news and other industries is powered by the transitive
property, which is a means of amplifying one’s perceived worth through actual or
inferred associations with celebrities, at times just by physical proximity to them.
The transitive property epitomizes the semiotic logic behind the celebrity photo-
op, the brand ambassador, superstar nonprofit advocate, political campaigner,
product pusher, and the sale of autographed merchandise. The diorama is at once
an abstract attribute of the apparatus of celebrity and can be found wherever bold-
faced names converge. It is a kind of roving, global VIP section, at times
outwardly visible, and sometimes occurring in virtual settings or behind closed
doors.

9) Realiticians seek to gain and maintain relevance by staying in circulation,
engaging in campaigns which overlap and allow exposure to the public at large, to
other stewards of fame, and to symbiotic fields and industries. Once in the flow,
seeking out openings and points of reinsertion will allow the realitician to cash in
on celebrity capital accrued through more or less concerted efforts and channel it
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into another point of reinsertion—i.e., a structured foothold in the form of an
institutional appointment, show-business role, contract, elected position, or other
assignment.

10) The mode of realitics is evidenced less by its surrogates in and of themselves than
by the dynamics they exhibit—e.g., enactments of markers, gestures, practices,
and technologies—as well as by their relationships to the apparatus of celebrity,
audiences, and other corollary parties.

11) Like reality television, realitics represents a contested ideological zone fueled by
conflict and often spoken about as though its meaning were stable, self-evident,
and proof positive of the precipitous decline of the more legitimate field from
which it arose.

12) Another crossover feature of realitics from the reality TV realm is a heightened
sense of opportunity, however accurately gauged, for aspiring realiticians. The
reality media model supposedly offers greater ease of use when it comes to
producing shows of various descriptions and to entering the field of entertainment
more readily than was possible before. The space of reality programming, like
that of realitics, purportedly challenges top-down power structures within the
related enterprises because of the comparatively less stringent requirements for
admission.

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13) The construction of the realitician is made possible by leveraging productive
tensions within and among many overlapping spheres and discourses, and by
cultivating and capitalizing upon what for the vast majority of players turn out to
be false hopes.

14) Realitics is discursive. Though certain figures have demonstrated particular
inventiveness or range in their usage of the mode, and differences relating to
relative wealth, visibility, occupation, time in office, career longevity and other
variables may distinguish some exemplars from others, each extends into a bigger
framework that she herself did not single-handedly construct from the ground up.
Realitics operates within a vast and interconnected discursive scheme in which
class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, cultural milieu, language, perceived
skill, technology, ability, age, and a host of other countervailing influences are
also in play. The discursive aspect of realitics also concerns mimesis, repetition
and resonance.

15) Realitics clusters ideas and gives them reality and resonance. While no two
instances are alike, they form resonances between each other. Jane Fonda’s take
on realitics made the Dixie Chicks’ own make sense and offered the Chicks a
language to work with. Anita Hill commented on the Harvey Weinstein scandal in
2017, using the term “the long conversation” to describe her idea of how
historically discrete controversies resonate with one another and help shape each
other’s significance (Noveck)
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16) Realitics is nonsequential. This quality may reinforce, and is reflected in, the
uprooting of historical and current events from their immediate contexts—an
increasingly common practice that can be observed on American mainstream
press outlets, particularly broadcast outlets. Such attempts at decontextualization
can be, and has been, exploited for political purposes. All these factors contribute
to the chaotic and contested public climate that would be widely referred to after
the 2016 U.S. presidential election as the “post-truth” or “fake news” era.

17) Meaning is malleable in the zone of realitics. The meaning of an event, viewed
through the lens of realitics, isn’t a fixed property of the event itself; nor is it
necessarily decided democratically or subject to control primarily by the
protagonist of or most powerful figure in a given scene (cf. “Macaca moment”). It
might be decided by bit players, by people discussing the situation on social
media, etc. long afterward—or meaning may be contested indefinitely after the
fact.

18) Time is not linear in the mode of realitics. The power to name ongoing struggles
and debates is associated with the ability to direct communication flows and
narrows the field of possible outcomes, so reaching into the past offers familiar
footing in moments of upheaval and uncertainty, as well as new material derived
from preceding episodes to use in making meaning in the present.

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19) The episodic and resonant aspects of realitics enable the formation of chains of
signification that can become tautological—i.e., internal coherence between and
within episodes takes precedence over external validity. This process assists in the
development of a kind of self-referential sign language that can uproot itself from
reality.

20) Realitics is nostalgic and mixes past and present through a kind of sampling, a
capacity stemming from its temporal liminality and hybridity. Previous tropes and
episodes from the past can be taken up and used as rerun material. See: Colin
Kaepernick getting “Dixie Chicked;” George Clooney in 2005 commenting
obliquely on American politics through the decades-old story of Edward R.
Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck; the Dixie Chicks facing “Hanoi Jane”-
style sexualized censure after their March 2003 anti-Bush moment on the London
stage, and so on. Reruns of a scene from realitics past invite fresh interpretations.
By virtue of the passage of time and a certain reflexivity that accompanies the
self-conscious inclusion (on the production end) of the past message in the current
communicative instance, as well as the savvy recognition (on the consumption
side) of both the original material and its significance vis-à-vis its new packaging,
the rerun is something more than the sum of its parts.

21) Exploiting contingencies is key in realitics. Those most adept in the mode may
not be especially creative or even all that coherent in terms of message and image,
but they are good at spotting, and unafraid of using, any and all available
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opportunities. The most hard-core practitioners might even adopt a “by any means
necessary” attitude, which is where social and other types of contracts, as well as
conventions, better judgment, common sense, and common decency may be
sacrificed in favor of predacious ends. This is also the point at which realitics
becomes a dark art; propaganda is ascendant, and a shared sense of baseline
standards and even reality is in danger of being lost.

22) Realitics is often outcome-oriented. This is partly because the mode manifests in
‘co-dependent’ realms like politics and celebrity, in which adjusting to meet
others’ expectations is fundamental to the entire enterprise. It is also because it is
well-suited to performance-, aesthetic-, and emotion-based styles of leadership
and publicity that do not always need to undergo validity or reality testing in order
to be effective.

23) One of the foremost aims and raisons d'être of realitics is recruitment. Like the
social media in and through which they accrue fame and circulate, realiticians
also encourage self-recruitment of audiences-turned-fans-turned-voters into a
hegemonic political economy that reinforces the corporate-subsidized, two-party
political setup in the U.S., and that supports neoliberal globalized business and
corporatized media agendas.

24) Recruitment is accomplished via a number of possible means: through
identification, through various practices of self-branding and -promotion, and by
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offering package deals to consumers. These packages may include actual
products—e.g., health, lifestyle, beauty and other goods, plus television shows
and other entertainment products, down to specialized apps for smartphones and
goods and services they may not directly produce through their own companies
but officially endorse. Alternately, the package deals may relate more to a set of
interrelated ideological ‘products’ that may be incorporated into consumers’
worldview and that serve realiticians’ ends.

25) Optics are often more important than facts in realitics—unless, of course,
factuality is a crucial part of what is being sold.

26) Realitics assists in the cultivation of communities of belief and organizes people
along parameters that may have little to do with those aspects of their
demographic profiles that have historically been considered more significant.
Similar to fan bases, these communities tend to revolve around shared
enthusiasms. Unlike communities of people in the offline realm, they are not
organized geographically, although they can be, nor do they necessarily cohere
within family or clan units. Individuals may belong to several different
conflicting, contradictory or even directly antagonistic communities of belief.
Though political affiliation has been found to correspond to inclusion in particular
social groups, with the rise of the internet, social media and other communication
technologies, it is now possible to belong to political networks that have little to
do with one’s immediate milieu.
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27) In the mode of realitics, the subject frequently becomes a brand.

28) Realitics offers a model for consumer citizens to put their private lives up for
consumption.

29) In the declarative property of realitics, time frames are mixed and tenses are
blended in order to produce a desired outcome. An episode from the past is
referenced as proof positive of future results before they happen, or as a
discrediting maneuver, a past episode is affixed to present circumstances as a
means of tarnishing reputations and deep-sixing future prospects. Donald Trump’s
Art of the Deal is an example in which episodes from the past are defined
according to how the subject wished to be branded in the present and viewed in
the future—in other words, as a kind of declarative statement to remain constant
across time.

30) Realitics is an expression of how the capitalist system, and by extension the media
and political systems in the U.S., has been able to accommodate new changes and
challenges to its prior permutations (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello). While different
economies and currencies can assume more authoritative positions within
different examples of realitics, at a foundational level is the strictly or
traditionally defined (financial) economy. This is because capitalism and free-
market values are intrinsically bound up in the industries and social/professional
milieus that help shape the mode of realitics.
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31) Realitics explores and exploits liminality and hybridity. It is the domain of the
self-proclaimed outsider who in many ways is unquestionably part of the inside
yet who gets to plunder the outsider pose for all it is worth while also benefiting
from his or her insider status. It is more difficult to critique realiticians such as
Donald Trump according to normal parameters for politicians, because they keep
insisting they are not trying to be insiders.

32) Realiticians are not solely in control of which aspect(s) of their hybridized
personas are ‘read’ as the source of their words and actions in a particular
instance. Even when they insist that they are speaking from the position of an
everyday citizen, or as a political operative or entertainer, for that matter, the
significance of that episode is partly determined by their audience, as is the source
–i.e., from which interests and facets of that figure the gesture has originated.

33) Realitics operates through catchphrases. This was the case long before Twitter
instigated its 140-characters-or-less format.

34) Realitics is always on. It does the work of keeping would-be voters engaged with
the brand of a politician in between election cycles. It is no longer sufficient to
check in with the entertainment media every four years to, for example, do the
obligatory People magazine cover story. What is good for the relevance of an
individual actor in the sphere of realitics is also good for priming consumer
citizens to choose that actor’s brand when the time comes to vote.
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35) The realitician communicates directly, or at least appears to, using social media
and other channels to convey a sense of authenticity and to make a show of
accessibility and rebellion against prior, more rigorously managed methods of
interaction between famous people and the public.

36) Realitics need not involve individual actors speaking to one another in order to
communicate a message or hash out an issue. Debates and conversations can take
place between entertainment artifacts, as they can between the various parties
promoting and contesting those texts, as well as between individuals interested in
sponsoring a message.

37) Realitics benefits from media convergence. See: Sarah Palin taking to Facebook
with talk of death panels; Dixie Chicks using entertainment media to stage a
response to their scandal; George Clooney making news about his international
and national politics through the films he directs and promotes as well as through
news interviews.

38) Building and maintaining power in the political economy of realitics, in which
attention figures in so significantly, requires the repeated enactment of a conceit
in which actors play as though they are simply professionals going about their
business while burdened with, and highly ambivalent about, the trappings of
fame—paparazzi attention, fashion-police scrutiny, Entertainment Tonight sit-
downs, photo-ops with other famous people, paid appearances and speeches—as
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if those same trappings did not constitute an ever-burgeoning share of their
enterprise.

39) Realitics is a multivalent association game. Just as celebrities can use causes to
raise profiles (and awareness for causes), it is possible also for big NGOs, United
Nations, etc. and corporations to use celebrities for ends of which the stars
themselves may not be aware. Corporate owners and media barons indoctrinate
celebrities at Davos-style klatches, and then they are sent out to attract public
attention on an international level to those regions and causes. On the flip side,
opponents can be devalued by linking them with the wrong crowd as well.

40) Realitics is best described and theorized as a mode. Though for the sake of brevity
it has been referred to throughout this project as though it were a contained
phenomenon, a ‘thing’ that is identifiable and relatively static across different
temporal, spatial and other contexts, in practice it is more complex and is more of
a verb than a noun, as it were. Far from being the sole province of the famous, the
mode of realitics is available to anyone. Likewise, even those cited in this thesis
as realiticians move in and out of that mode depending on the circumstances.

41) Realitics is discursive. Though certain figures have demonstrated particular
inventiveness or range in their use of the mode, and differences relating to relative
wealth, visibility, occupation, time in office, career longevity and other variables
may distinguish some exemplars from others, each feeds into a broader
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framework that she herself did not single-handedly construct from the ground up.
Accordingly, realitics operates within a vast and interconnected discursive scheme
in which class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, cultural milieu, language,
perceived talent, technology, ability, age, and a host of other countervailing
influences are also in play. Additionally, the discursive aspect of realitics deals
with mimicry, repetition and resonance; as with any codified social practice,
patterns, tacit and overt rules, contextual cues and other factors delimit the
possible range of expression from one case to another.

42) The mystification property of realitics is one that Sarah Palin understood well.
Appearance is more important than facts, so the use of glamour, confidence,
insistence upon being right even in the face of evidence to the contrary, etc. are
also key. This also explains why Palin, and later Donald Trump, would not
apologize or admit mistakes. It is potentially beneficial to draw upon classic
propaganda moves such as repeating slogans, making something true by repeating
it until it is accepted, and appealing to emotions rather than reason.

43) The realitician flips the script. Concomitant with the rise of the realitician was a
dramatic reworking of the behavioral norms and qualifications for elected leaders.
While no one individual can be credited with bringing about the conditions that
enabled such a systemic reboot, certain realiticians have proven so adept at
spotting and exploiting potential and actual opportunities for innovation that they
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have pushed them farther and faster than commentators, adversaries and other
affected parties can match.

44) Realitics turns politicians into avatars rather than, or in addition to,
representatives. According to some commentators, Trump leveraged populist and
divisive rhetoric while presenting himself as a charismatic macher—one who
simply could not fail, or else he would move the goalposts—at a time when
economic and industrial breakdowns were decimating vast swaths of America.
Obama, on the other hand, struck some analysts as the embodiment of
sophisticated cool, a harbinger of societal transformation, or as a way for white,
liberal Americans to (further) appropriate blackness and invoke the canard of
post-racialism. Sarah Palin was to some a cypher for a strain of down-home,
stereotypically feminine, Christian-right conservatism. Emulation, along with
recruitment, is bound up with realitics.

45) The campaign never ends. Campaigns overlap with and gain momentum from
each other (see: Arianna Huffington, Sarah Palin), potentially enriching several
different side pursuits all at once. How one enters the celebrity diorama is no
longer so important; what is paramount is keeping up circulation, seeking out
opportunities and points of reinsertion. Parlaying and upcycling in this manner
allows the realitician to cash in on celebrity capital accrued through various,
scattershot and/or less structured means and convert it into a recognizable form,
institution, role, etc. Celebrity is a starting point, offering the ability to leverage
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media capital in a number of different settings and grant entrance into an elite
club as well as access to power in other arenas if leveraged skillfully.

46) Realitics encourages actors to take up a permanent branding exercise. Just as the
Christmas shopping season seems to start earlier each year, the news cycle is
24/7, and political campaigns have become perpetual-motion machines,
realiticians are obliged to constantly seek out opportunities to grow and promote
their brands.

47) The realitician takes advantage of multiple avenues of exposure, not only during
key points in the election cycle. Rather, she takes advantage of scheduled
publicity prospects while purposefully seeking out opportunities to create others
of her own making.

48) Scandal becomes a way of advancing an agenda. This can be effectuated in a
number of ways: by creating a distraction, cultivating notoriety, adding an air of
danger to a realitician’s persona, or giving her something to go on late-night TV
and spoof herself about. In certain circumstances, being viewed as disreputable or
changeable is secondary in importance to disseminating a message or opening up
a new avenue for promotion.

49) Absolution is available via late-night TV: as onetime White House Press
Secretary Sean Spicer demonstrated at the 2017 Emmy Awards, it’s possible to
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use platforms like SNL and other talk and/or variety shows to do damage control,
repurpose even virulent public criticism by becoming ‘in on the joke,’ and form
associations that would infuse his reputation with newfound relevance and allow
him to trade off of, and ideally repurpose, his former disgrace.

50) The mode of realitics can be deployed as a way of mobilizing public opinion
without enlisting one particular actor through which a specific message is
consistently delivered, although that method is also available and need not cancel
out other options. Documentary films and feature-length productions that contain
fictional plot elements, for example, or dramatized re-enactments of historical
occurrences have been strategically released to influence public perception of
politically loaded figures and events.

51) Realitics privileges performance over experience and expertise. This notion is tied
to the episodic property of realitics as well as to the mode’s symbolic roots in
reality television. With regard to the episodic element, fortunes ride on individual
enactments to a far greater degree than they did just one political generation ago.
‘You’re only as good as your last big hit’ is a maxim that no longer chiefly refers
to pop singers or film directors; it now extends to include aspiring office-holders.

52) Realitics is not uncommonly associated with fraud.

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53) Realitics rationalizes ideologies, contradictions, and changes happening on the
macro-level.

54) Realitics is capable of operating in multiple time frames and on multiple
platforms simultaneously.

55) Relevance (and the maintenance thereof) is one of the main forms of currency in
the economy of realitics and is key above just about all else. Choices that in one
situation seem disadvantageous may make sense in light of the supreme goal of
staying relevant across various contexts. Relevance is partly measured in terms of
money, but other gauges and currencies, such as attention, media coverage,
television ratings, votes, attendance at speeches and rallies, followers on social
media, and so on matter too.

56) Realitics is exploitative.

57) Repetition equals recognition equals relevance equals currency in the marketplace
of attention. Repetition and exposure can work both ways. According to this
logic, it is perceived as auspicious to be attacked, since any publicity is good
publicity. That is, if the would-be realitician has her wits about her and is versed
in the entire art, and so long as she works to her advantage that repetition can also
create the appearance of truth.

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58) The most adept brokers in the zone of realitics—Arianna Huffington, Mark
Burnett, Donald Trump, Facebook executives, YouTube stars—represent rare
examples of choreographed, manufactured and spectacular success (e.g., million-
dollar Survivor bounties, dot-com IPO windfalls, earnings gleaned from the many
Kardashian-family franchises). Yet it is the very same singularity and
unattainability of their status that is somehow held up as reproducible and
accessible to the average person. This is an important move that is required to
propagate the myth of meritocracy in an era of growing inequality and to justify
the extraction of resources that are necessary to sustain the status of the elite
classes while appearing to do the opposite.

59) Realitics is a theoretical hybrid that operates from the “ground” of a capitalist
global economy. That is to say, the financial economy is predominant as it
intermingles with other types or levels such as the economy of attention; it
consists of the imposition/infusion of practices and conventions of the fame world
(cf. Boltanski & Thévènot) into the civic, industrial, and market worlds; and it
relies and thrives on the “network society” (cf. Castells). Rhetoric offers tools to
assist in understanding the roles of symbols, gestures and languages in the
functioning of realitics, as well as how the notions of the public sphere and others
are impacted by realitics. Cultural studies brings to the table ideas about
subjectivity, ideology, consumer citizenship, and media reception and production,
identifying sites of resistance and providing insights about how race, gender,
class, and other identity markers are implicated.
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60) Realitics is not the exclusive province of the famous or the deliberately political.
The local newspaper journalist who deliberately couches her coverage of a
presidential campaign as though it were a play-by-play of a World Wrestling
Federation showdown; the voter who holds a presidential candidate’s choice of
musical acts featured on the campaign trail against him; the British mother who
buys her pre-teen daughter an Arianna Grande album in solidarity with victims of
the May 22, 2017, terrorist attack at a Grande concert in Manchester are all
engaging in a form of realitics. Realitics can be taken up by anyone.

61) Realitics is opportunistic and retains loyalty to few things, people, or ideas
besides its base operating system (e.g., driving constructs such as neoliberalism
and capitalism). Realiticians often reposition themselves, remarket themselves
and reinvent themselves according to what will best keep them in circulation and
remain true to what, if abandoned, might diminish their influence.

62) Realiticians are seen, and often encourage themselves to be seen, as alchemists.
They combine the processes, rhetoric, and dynamics of fandom, publicity,
advocacy, representative democracy, and consumer choice in a bid to transform
large populations from fan bases into voting publics attuned to certain political
and/or social causes. Realiticans are thus viewed as potentially able to coalesce
attention and mobilize action in the interdependent electoral and consumer
spheres around a particular effort.

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63) Realitics is propagandistic.

64) Realitics can act as a leveler of prestige, an equalizer of experience, and a
mechanism by which setting, content, quality, and other contextual details are
secondary to the signifier and apparatus of celebrity.

65) Realitics can create a space in which a displaced argument about contentious
issues is able to occur on a local, national, and/or global scale. Much attention and
ink has been devoted to the notion that coverage of celebrities is taking over the
news business, in the sense that gossip and trivia about celebrities have been
dominating air time and column inches, with the implication that more important
information is thus crowded out of mainstream outlets’ news lineups. Yet realitics
can incite public conversations in oblique or coded language about controversial
subjects that, for any number of reasons, are not included in the range of topics
that can be discussed or debated overtly.

66) Realitics is paradoxical. At times the most power, attained through and amplified
by various associated kinds of capital, goes to the least qualified, or even
approved, individual. An early analogue from the entertainment industry would be
reality TV star Paris Hilton, widely derided as a stark example of someone who,
in addition to coming from a wealthy family with global name recognition, was
considered ‘famous for being famous.’ (Later, Donald Trump would provide a
fitting political follow-up to Paris Hilton’s act). Still, for several years she
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commanded the spotlight and built a cottage industry out of traits and
performative vignettes that would have spelled disaster for a different generation
and style of celebrity.

67) Realitics makes strange bedfellows. It would not be possible for even ‘prestige’
realiticians like George Clooney to be taken seriously in particular circles without
the groundwork, and legwork, having already been handled by many before them.
Some predecessors may appear at first glance to have little to do with their current
counterparts, whether gauged in terms of their respective political leanings, career
trajectories, originating claims to fame, publicity styles, or stature in the different
orbits in which they circulate, but they pave the way for each other.

68) Realitics forms synergistic linkages across temporal, geographic, professional,
and other categorical boundaries.

69) Realitics employs post-hoc ethics. This is bound to be the case in an ends-oriented
mode. Also, since relevance is key, anything that needs to be said or done to
maintain it and achieve desired ends will be said and done. Cleanup happens later,
if at all.

70) Realiticians may employ pastiche politics—a combination of moves,
qualifications, and markers of influence that add up to a composite profile that
commands power, as opposed to proceeding along a prescribed and more
358
commonly traversed route. Particular individuals’ profiles are idiosyncratic, not
easily duplicated, and develop in relation to a host of factors that cannot always
be anticipated. This less conventional path presents unique risks. However, once
established in this less conventional manner, stars who are able to command
power can potentially avoid some of the rules and restrictions to which those who
have gone the more established routes find themselves subject.

71) Modes of celebrity are not necessarily divided into discrete instantiations or
career stages in the domain of realitics; they can be carried out simultaneously.

72) Realitics co-opts the cachet of the artist and enlists it in the service of commerce
and elite political, diplomatic, and social agendas.

73) Realitics is enabled by a networked society.

74) Realitics blends the machinery of one of its constituent industries or domains with
that of others. This is another of the alchemical capacities of realitics, related to
the merging of fan bases, voting publics, and consumer audiences. Donald Trump
mentioning how his reality shows and presidential rallies had huge ratings, as
though the size of the audiences watching his performances were tantamount to
his meeting the standards of effective political speech, provides a recent
illustration.

359
75) Realitics traces and articulates discrete incidents that share elements in common
by, for one, repurposing celebrity names and brands as umbrella terms to invite
interpretation of each situation by itself and as part of a broader scheme. Thus,
we see the proliferation of the now-ubiquitous “—gate” suffix, taken from the
Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in the early 1970s,
applied to any number of high-profile scandals in the political and/or
entertainment, business, etc. spheres. This property gives rise to phrases such as
“Russiagate,” the “Trump bump,” “the Weinstein effect” and “Dixie Chicked” to
link, explain, or even construct narratives and incidents in public circulation.

76) Realitics plays on the social malaise (what Emile Durkheim called “anomie”)
caused by displacement, globalization, uncertainty, and various ontological shake-
ups of contemporary life by offering simplified recipes for success often based on
the same variables that caused the problems in the first place (Durkheim). This is
evident in Donald Trump’s successful pitch to lower- and middle-class Americans
during the 2016 presidential election campaign, during which he presented
himself as their ally and a fellow outsider vis-à-vis the elite class, bent on tackling
Washington corruption and income inequality while playing down his billionaire
status. Once in office, he included Wall Street insiders among his advisory team,
explaining that he would not want to entrust the important task of running the
economy to “poor people.”

360
77) Realitics upholds the meritocratic ideals celebrated in durable constructs such as
the American Dream, a key component fueling the “celebrity-industrial complex,”
and exports them worldwide (Orth, The Importance). These ideals may be
embedded in the plots of exported entertainment products and/or form the
originating narratives of the products themselves, as in competitive unscripted
shows in which talent as judged by expert panelists, popularity as gauged by
audience members, etc. provide the basis for the cast of characters to be narrowed
down to a winning party.

78) The paradoxical quality of realitics allows agendas to be pushed while the pushers
claim to do the exact opposite—e.g., Arianna Huffington opening up a platform
for people to express themselves actually entails getting content onto HuffPost
without paying writers. Trump leads followers in chants of "drain the swamp!" on
the campaign trail and then, once in office, hires Wall Street fixtures to lead his
economic team, etc.

79) Realitics traffics in the speculative. A kind of pyramid scheme may be enabled
by realitics, in that the illusion of universal opportunity is leveraged for purposes
of recruitment. Mass buy-ins are effected on the basis of speculative, often
deceptively packaged, promises and improbable future returns, and failures are
chalked up to luck or personal incompetence. Those in the topmost positions are
let off the hook in terms of accountability. Paradoxically, their individual
361
successes are couched as well-deserved resulting from extraordinary qualities, yet
somehow not closed off to the average end user. This is a form of a ‘long con.’

362
Notes

1. The Golden Globes also opened up space, following similar breaks created by
the Black Lives Matter movement begun in 2014 and conversations sparked by #MeToo,
in which the heady term “intersectionality” could cross over from academic parlance into
mainstream use, relatively speaking. As one example, on the eve of the 2018 Golden
Globes, The New York Times’ fashion editor Vanessa Friedman published a trenchant
critique of what her colleague Bonnie Wertheim would call “the red carpet industrial
complex” in an article entitled “The Red Carpet Is Its Own Economy” as part of the
paper’s crackdown on awards-season frivolity (V. Friedman, Wertheim).
2.

In his essay “The Subject and Power,” Foucault states that it is his “objective”
to “create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are
made subjects.” He pinpoints “three modes of objectification” that accomplish this end:
first are “modes of inquiry that try to give themselves the status of sciences.” Next comes
“objectivizing of the subject” through what Foucault calls “dividing practices” (e.g.,
sane/insane, man/woman, etc.). Last on his list is “the way a human being turns him- or
herself into a subject” (327).
3. Cf. Ways of Seeing (Berger).
4. The “attention economy” is a term that is getting plenty of traction in
contemporary scholarship. See, for example: Goodwin, Ian, et al. “Precarious Popularity:
Facebook Drinking Photos, the Attention Economy, and the Regime of the Branded
Self.” Social Media Society, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. Social Media Society, 2016, Vol.2(1). Zulli,
Diana. “Capitalizing on the Look: Insights into the Glance, Attention Economy, and
Instagram.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2017, pp. 1–14. Beller,
363
Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production : Attention Economy and the Society of the
Spectacle. Dartmouth College Press : University Press of New England, 2006.
Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy : Understanding the
New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press, 2001. Richard A. Lanham,
The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, U Chicago
Press, 2006.
5. USC Annenberg Professor Paolo Sigismondi’s dissertation, TK, speaks of the
“glocalization” of entertainment products and to developments such as the proliferation
of non-scripted programs that have the ability to challenge the existing setup in a
competitive media landscape (Sigismondi).
6. In his essay “Culture Jamming,” Kalle Lasn refers to Situationists as inheritors
of a long and rich tradition of “spontaneous defiance toward the established order.” What
was new about them, though, is how they “first applied that spirit of anarchy to modern
media culture,” and how they understood “how the media spectacle slowly corrodes the
human psyche.” Lasn thus considers the Situationists “the first postmodern
revolutionaries” (415).
7. Cf. Jonathan Crary’s “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory” in the Autumn
1989 edition of October (Crary).
8. Here it should be pointed out, as Latour himself takes the trouble to do in this
essay, that “the actor-network theory . . . has very little to do with the study of social
networks” (ibid). The study to which he is gesturing will be referenced in the next
chapter.
364
9. Demi Moore’s pregnant Vanity Fair portrait shot by Annie Liebovitz in 1991
qualifies; as does Janet Jackson’s 1993 Rolling Stone picture taken by Patrick
Demarchelier, in which the pop star posed topless, her nudity partially covered by the
strategically placed hands of her then-boyfriend Rene Elizondo; and numerous Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue images in which makeshift swimwear was painted onto
models’ bodies.
10.

“Throughout his later ‘genealogical’ works . . . Foucault constantly reminds us
of the primacy of practice over belief. Not chiefly through ideology, but through the
organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our
bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of
selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity” (Bordo 165-66).
11. Violaine Roussel and Bleuwenn Lechaux’ Voicing Dissent: American Artists
and the War on Iraq surveys the anti-Iraq War celebrity scene from a number of vantage
points and incorporates narratives about and from the likes of actors Mike Farrell, Ed
Asner, Tony Shalhoub, and musical group Ozomatli (Roussel and Lechaux).
12. However, it should be noted that that EW story was expressly written to report
the news that Swift had, in fact, gotten political on March 24, 2018, as the singer had
taken to Instagram to show her support for high school students and other activists around
the U.S. who were marching that day for the cause of gun control (Lenker).
13. Thomas Rickert’s concept of ambience, as he describes it in Ambient
Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, shares sensibilities with what I am
referring to as resonance in this project. He provides specifications for “what tending to
ambience might entail” in introducing the topic, which amounts to no less than “the
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dissolution of the subject-object relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories
of language, an appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and the process of emergence, and
the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction,
including the rhetorical arts.” Also in keeping with this thesis is his goal of “expanding
and realigning rhetorical theory as a situated art (i.e., embodied and embedded) . . .” (xii).

14.

“We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits
deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge
(consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable
invention. Assemblages may group themselves into extremely vast constellations
constituting "cultures," or even "ages"; within these constellations . . .” (Deleuze and
Guattari 406).
15. Thévènot and Boltanski point out in On Justification that something like an
assemblage can be detected in a famous work of political philosophy—no less than Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. The pair of contemporary sociologists point out
that Maurice Halbwachs, in writing a mid-20
th
-century commentary on Rousseau’s
classic and using a Durkheimian sensibility, posited that, per Rousseau, “the general will
… is not the sum of individual wills” and “[the body politic] is more than the sum of
these units. It is of another nature” (Thévènot and Boltanski 111).
16.

The Old Hollywood legend of the soda-fountain discovery began with the
popular narrative about how Lana Turner (née Judy Turner) was spotted in 1937 at the
Top Hat Café on Sunset Boulevard by R. (Billy) Wilkerson, founder of The Hollywood
Reporter. Turner, then 16, had cut class at the nearby Hollywood High School;
Wilkerson, instantly charmed, recommended her to agent Zeppo Marx (Wilkerson).
366
17. “According to columnist William Safire, the first published use of bork as a
verb was possibly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of August 20, 1987. Safire
defines to bork by reference ‘to the way Democrats savaged Ronald Reagan's nominee,
the Appeals Court judge Robert H. Bork, the year before.’” That fact is featured the
Wikipedia page dedicated to Bork (“Robert”).
18.

Cf. Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (Goffman).
19.

The conventional warning against media commentators maintaining positions
that could pose conflicts of interest also has to do with making sure news organizations
do not lose credibility with audiences for attempting to disguise anything from marketing
ploys to government propaganda in what consumers believe to be objective news reports.
As one example, The New York Times made the explosive discovery in 2008 that a group
of military “experts” who were frequently called upon to comment about the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq had been actively groomed by the Pentagon to deliver carefully
crafted and Department of Defense-approved talking points starting as early as 2002—a
revelation that put various media outlets, including NPR, in an embarrassing position
(Folkenflik).

20. In 2017, Heilemann said he was “flabbergasted and shocked” when news
emerged of Halperin’s own scandal: Halperin had been accused by several women of
sexual harassment during his time working at ABC, resulting in Halperin’s firing from
the network and the scuppering of his and Heilemann’s planned book project about
President Donald Trump (Bowden).
21.

Greene’s gymnastic piece draws upon several other theorists’ work that
deserves mention here as well, including: Barbara Biesecker’s “post-structuralist reading
367
of the rhetorical situation”; Cherwitz and Darwin’s 1995 work on “rhetoric as
performance,” which also grapples with the generative potential for rhetoric to create
worlds; Kenneth Burke’s identification theory; Edwin Black’s “second persona,” which
in Greene’s estimation still works within the frame of rhetorical effectivity but includes a
constitutive sensibility; and Michael Calvin McGee’s work from 1975 on the idea of the
“people” working to position subjects instead of identifying them as they naturally occur
(Greene 19, 21).

22.

Per Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “Discourses are practices
that systematically form the objects of which they speak. . . . discourses are not about
objects, they don’t identify objects, they constitute them and in doing so, they conceal
their own invention” (49).
23.

Michael Huffington eventually came out of the closet in late 1998, a year after
his divorce from Arianna Huffington. He became an LGBT activist, donating $140,000
that year to the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University
of Southern California to be allocated to a program engaging the subject of sexual
orientation and the media (Examiner).
24.

Here it must be noted that as of Oct. 2017, Halperin suffered a major
professional setback as a result of salacious details from his personal-professional life
emerging and circulating in media discourse, as multiple women accused the man whom
The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove dubbed “one of the most fêted Beltway pundits” of sexual
misconduct while they worked with Halperin. Also significant is how Grove describes
Halperin’s brand of journalism in the same Daily Beast piece: “As a deeply sourced
reporter and later political director for ABC News for nearly two decades before he left
368
for Time magazine in 2007, Halperin carried out—and in a sense, invented—a form of
journalism that elevated entertainment values, personal celebrity, and the oracular gloss
of secret insider knowledge over meat-and-potatoes reportage and cautious
interpretation” (Grove, “What”).
25.

In a choice bit of art-versus-life confusion, Cohan noted in his Vanity Fair
story, “Huffing and Puffing,” about Daou and Bryce’s lawsuit, that the litigious duo had
filed after reading Breitbart’s claim in Wired. Cohan also did the math and figured out
that they filed just weeks after the release of the film The Social Network, in which an
analogous situation was portrayed involving twin brothers Cameron and Tyler
Winklevoss, who had alleged that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their
idea for a social networking site based out of Harvard. The Winklevoss twins won $65
million in their lawsuit. The Social Network’s director and screenwriter was Aaron
Sorkin. Cohan also relayed Huffington’s retort to Breitbart: since, she said, he was not at
the Dec. 2004 gathering at her home, he could not have been the source of the
germinating ideas for Huff Post (Cohan, “Huffing”).

26.

In a piece for Adweek commemorating that magazine’s pick of Huffington for
its 2015 “Brand Visionary” award, writer Robert Klara quoted Huffington’s onetime
chief of staff Dan Koh as saying, “Arianna really sees The Huffington Post as having
potential to be a positive force in the world . . . If she can put her own editorial voice on
what’s happening, it can be used for good.” Also significant is Adweek’s attribution of the
original plan for Huff Post as Huffington’s brainchild; the article’s headline is “How
Arianna Huffington’s Idea for a Blog Changed the Media Industry Forever” (Klara).

369
27.

Huffington has served as a judge for the Webby Awards for several years and
is described by the Webbys’ sponsoring organization, the International Academy of
Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), as “a long-time IADAS academy member and friend
of the Webbys” (“5 Things”).

28.

Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama in 2007, marking the first time the popular
talk-show host had taken that official a political stance and had “thrown her brand
behind” a candidate, as The New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny wrote in May of that year
(Zeleny).

29.

In yet another example of how, per Peretti, Huffington made weak ties feel
like strong ties, Huffington later befriended Pedrad, told her she “loved” being sent up,
recognizing the value of parody in general, and SNL in particular, in granting her
relevance. Pedrad told fellow SNL alum Seth Meyers, now host of his own late-night
show, that not only had she made it onto Huffington’s contact list, but Huffington had
nominated Pedrad in 2014 for the viral “ice bucket challenge” (itself a type of contagious
media, to use another of Peretti’s chosen terms), in which online spectacle circulated in
the interest of raising money and awareness about amotrophic lateral sclerosis (Fox,
LateNightSeth).
30
“Small scale/large scale: the notion of network allows us to dissolve the micro-
macrodistinction that has plagued social theory from its inception” (Latour, “On Actor-
Network” 371).

30.

Curiously, a study out of Cambridge University, conducted by Rolfe Daus
Petersen and Carl L. Palmer and published in fall 2017 in the journal Politics and the Life
Sciences, claims that there could be a link between “halo effect” of attractiveness and
370
partisan politics. “Controlling for socioeconomic status,” the authors wrote in their
abstract, “we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels
of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings
suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications
for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics” (Peterson
and Palmer).
31.

In Time writer Ian Bremmer’s defense, he does focus much of his article on
the pressing problems that were on the agenda at Davos 2018, including income
inequality and the enormous disparities between “globalization’s winners” and the rest of
the world (Bremmer).
32.

Bill O’Reilly and George Clooney once again crossed swords in January 2005,
this time over how the funds would be handled from the celebrity-driven telethon put
together to help the December 2004 tsunami victims. Clooney wrote O’Reilly a note,
insincerely signing it “Your fan,” and telling O’Reilly to “put your considerable money
where your considerable mouth is” by joining in the telethon effort. O’Reilly told
Clooney that he and his Fox News program associates would be “watching to see if the
money gets to the tsunami victims. If it does not, there will be trouble.” O’Reilly had
criticized Clooney previously for what the Fox News host considered to be an ineffectual
fundraising protocol after the telethon in which Clooney and other celebrities participated
following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington,
D.C. (“Clooney”).
33.

Explicit references to Donald Trump’s professional challenges are
forthcoming in the body of this essay. His personal trials were covered by Marie Brenner
371
in a September 1990 Vanity Fair article, and more recently in The Daily Beast by Brandy
Zadrozny and Tim Mak. (Brenner; Zadrozny and Mak).
34.

Donald Trump's Sept. 3, 2015, show of allegiance to the Republican cause,
which took the form of his signing loyalty oath to the GOP, was in part a response to
these kinds of anxieties churning from within his sponsoring organization, even as he
performed it in the manner of a classic ‘you-need-me-more-than-I-need-you’ power play
(Robinson).
35.

In Sean Homer’s discussion of Lacan’s notion of the real, the real is one of
three orders that also includes the imaginary and the symbolic. The real is transposed
against the other two, as that that which lies outside the imaginary and the symbolic (51).
36.

There have been conflicting reports about the extent of Trump’s involvement
in writing The Art of the Deal. Tony Schwartz has alternately been described as the
book’s “co-writer” and “ghostwriter,” and other reports have attributed the book in its
entirety to him (Gaffey).
37.

In 2001, while reporting for the New York Daily News, I was on the receiving
end of a tip about Miss France Elodie Guisson. A controversy was supposedly brewing at
the Miss Universe pageant, started by a rumor that the French contestant had been born a
man. According to the Miss Universe publicist who called me, the tip had been cleared
for planting in the press by the highest levels of the pageant’s leadership, which included
the pageant’s owner at that time, Donald Trump. The hearsay about Guisson was not true,
but the publicist and pageant higher-ups evidently saw value in alerting the press. In
2012, the Miss Universe organization announced that transgendered women could
compete in the annual contest (Coleman).
372
38.

In addition to the editorial staffers at hundreds of international media outlets
who were charged with keeping track of candidate Trump’s statements, organizations like
PolitiFact and FactCheck.org devoted entire wings of their websites to the task.
39.

See also Benedict Anderson’s classic, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, for a comprehensive exposition on how
contemporary Eurocentric notions of national identity came into prominence (B.
Anderson).
40.

Sinclair comes right out of the gates in her book The Social Citizen: Peer
Networks and Political Behavior, with the assertion that citizens’ political actions depend
closely on their social interactions” (1). The exact nature of that dependency is difficult to
pinpoint, as researchers such as (MacKuen and Brown) have asserted that peer networks
do not affect party affiliation, and others (P.A. Beck) have argued that they do.
41. That is not to say that famous political figures are “read” in the same way by
different demographics by virtue of their being celebrities. To that point, on Nov. 4, 2016
then-President Obama made a pre-election appearance on HBO’s Real Time With Bill
Maher, in which he lamented the “balkanization” of the news media in so many words
and told Maher, “Look, if I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either” (G.
Evans).
42.

Concomitant with the upsurge of the Black Lives Matter movement have been
releases of influential films, books, essays, and other works on the subject of systemic
and deeply ingrained forms of racism still very much in effect in America. For example,
Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, published in 2012, quickly became a
cultural happening in its own right, as did Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me,
373
published in 2015, and Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13
th
, which was released on
Oct. 7, 2016—one day before Election Day (Alexander, Coates, DuVernay).
43.

On a related note, the proliferation of the now-ubiquitous “—gate” suffix,
taken from the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in the early
1970s, has been applied to any number of high-profile indignities in the political,
entertainment, business, and media spheres. This property gives rise to phrases such as
“Russiagate,” used in reference to the accusation of, and investigation into, possible
interference by the Russian government in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as
allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives in order to gain an
edge over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. (See also: “Pussygate.”)
44.

For more examples of the link between rhetoric and handbooks, see: Ross W.
Winterowd’s Structure, Language, and Style; A Rhetoric-Handbook; Laurent Pernot’s
“Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. – A.D. 400”; and
The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (Winterowd; Pernot; Lunsford)

374
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