Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television by Betty Kaklamanidou Margaret Tally

Author:Betty Kaklamanidou, Margaret Tally [Betty Kaklamanidou, Margaret Tally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472486042
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

I write from the perspective of the 2016 presidential campaign, which has been dominated by anxieties of ‘declinism’: the growing acceptance that the United States’ brief period as an unchallenged superpower is at a definitive end; that it is more susceptible to the political and economic turbulence in the rest of the world, that its military cannot solve every problem, and the president, the figurehead to whom people have looked to provide some sense that the possibility of solutions do exist, is incapable of doing so. In a fraught geopolitical environment and in a domestic scene crippled by partisanship, many of the US’s most pressing concerns seem destined to remain as such. Two of the frontline candidates for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are indicative of this anxiety. They reflect the widespread mistrust of politicians, as they campaign on anti-politics, anti-establishment tickets in an attempt to appear authentic, unvarnished conduits for the will of the people, channelling a powerful but imagined nostalgia for the stability, purity and purpose of an earlier period. Offering bewilderingly simple solutions to the enormously complex problems that face the United States in the post-9/11, post-recession era (in Sanders’ case, the ideological purity of the ‘true progressive’, taking aim at the multinational corporations and the wealthiest one percent of Americans, and Trump’s desire to retrench the progress made by every major political movement since the 1960s in order to ‘make America great again’) feels, sounds and looks like a Hollywood movie taking place in front of our eyes. There was once a time when film and television provided the necessary release of pressure for our dissatisfaction with reality, indulging our desire for ‘fantasy’ candidates who speak from their hearts in a fictional world where compromise is relegated to the background and clarity and purity wins the day. It seems now that the reverse is true: while ‘real’ presidential candidates preach that the office can change the world and ‘make America great again’, popular culture expresses, if not the opposite, then certainly severe doubt that this is a believable, and achievable, goal.

All of the examples here indicate that the popular perception of the presidency retains a symbolic significance but that it is in decline. In Scandal, the designation of the president as the ‘Leader of the Free World’ is repeatedly reiterated, so much so that it betrays a certain level of anxiety about the sturdiness of this construct. Anne Norton (1993, 87) argued that the president’s function is “first semiotic, and only secondarily executive.” This chapter has demonstrated that the semiotics of the contemporary popular cultural presidency has shifted to such an extent that the figure is now realised through archetypes unimaginable in previous decades: the president is now the damsel-in-distress, the sidekick, the impotent tyrant, and the love interest. He is no longer the hero: that designation can only be left to others if, indeed, it is possible at all. What is somewhat disturbing is that this perceived ‘lack’ within the presidency is still so preoccupied with traditional conceptualisations of masculinity.

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