BAD NEWS: You're on an improv team
You’re on stage. Taking suggestions and doing bits. You’re humorously pantomiming some mundane action. You’re saying, “Yes, and…”
No. It’s not a stress dream. It’s life. It’s what you do when you comment on this post or share it or the next one you read. It’s what you’re doing when you record a podcast or a TikTok. It’s what you’re doing when you add a comment to someone else’s podcast or TikTok, even if it’s just a “😠.”
We’re doing improv all the time. Any time we talk about politics or anything in public, we’re on the improv stage, either advancing the scene with wit, exposition, and drama or stinking up the stage with our dooming or scornful quibbles. It’s odd and nerve-racking. But it can be fun. Or it can devolve into a dogpile of recriminations and backbiting. Or it can be a fun dogpile of recrimination and backbiting. That’s why it’s exciting. It’s a slot machine. You never know what’s going to go viral and get you the validation of your peers or Luke Skywalker or Duckie from Pretty in Pink or your mom.
This constant engagement with others around us and the various ways we inform ourselves and each other now are key parts of our collective sensemaking—that’s the largely unconscious process we use to create our reality, as Kate Starbird, a scholar of online rumors and disinformation, explained in her lecture “A Spotlight on Rumors.”
We all make sense together. But unfortunately, the right does so more effectively, strategically, and intentionally. Because of course Republicans do.
They’ve had generations of motivated moguls and their minions acting with the understanding that politics is a moral battle for the brain. This vast right-wing conspiracy of fashy fundamentalists, corporate cons, and tech authoritarians working independently and as an alliance has invested in the media infrastructure, personnel, and “thought leadership” it takes to make every window an “overton window,” just waiting to be shifted to their convenience.
That’s the vast, mind-melting machine Donald Trump inherited as he took over the Republican Party, which he remodeled with his reality-show sense that everyone can be a star and that all that matters is drama or “ratings”. Meanwhile, into this hell we add algorithmically driven social media intended to atomize our brains, forcefeeding us media that seeks one reaction alone: to propel us to consume MORE media that distracts and enrages us—two qualities that happen to incite “conservative” reflexes of fear and revenge. Multiply that by decades of savaging journalism by attacking the press as biased (while attempting to destroy any outlet that embodies the best of objective journalism). Then put that to the power of a panoply of right-wing media outlets created to shamelessly embody the bias they supposedly despise, but in a way that feels justified, given, you know, all the bias and DEI and beer cans for trans influencers that white men must selflessly suffer. So there are no gatekeepers, no one to shame a lie. Hell, no one can even track all the lies you’re telling or being told. All that stands between you and stardom is restraint, which has been sanded into nothing by decades of symmetrical faces telling you how much danger you’re in.
Suddenly, any Republican or Republican-curious freak is on the team, performing improv on the biggest stages in the world, just waiting for the Don Jr. retweet or for Matt Walsh to read your post on his pod, or the Big Great Grandpa himself to decide you’re so good at this that you get a featured perfomance sitting in the Oval Office next to him as he grins in a way that makes no sense in world where Donald Trump exists.
It’s a recipe for what happened on January 6, 2021.
And then Elon Musk bought Twitter.
After recognizing that alone wasn’t enough to help Republicans win everything in 2022, Elon went to work shifting reality to the right, destroying the few remaining guardrails by inviting all the Nazis back to the site, destroying any sense that credibility matters by selling “checkmarks,” and literally PAYING people to create content only Hitler should love.
And that’s how we got November 5, 2024.
Ok, maybe that’s too simple
The best answer for how we got Trump again goes beyond social media.
It’s something like:
Billions in right-wing dog-whistling propaganda, deployed over infrastructure and neuracircuity built over decades, combined with an anti-incumbent wave, allowing a world-historical con man to smear his way back into the White House.
I’ve spent the last year trying to put this all together because I’m a fool obsessed with the recent past. Obviously, the question that matters most isn’t “How do you prevent that from happening?” You know this because the answer is absurd: it involves a time machine, taking the billions spent on ads trying to persuade swing voters, and putting them into organizing to get Biden/Harris voters actually to show up at the polls. However, would that have even mattered when key voters couldn’t be convinced that Democrats actually meant what they were saying? I mean, why would you believe people screaming about Trump being a fascist when they’re also whining about how Mean Mr. Trump wouldn’t let them pass his wonderful border bill?
As I said, a total waste of time. And it’s irrelevant. The question isn’t how we prevent anything. Preventing time is over. It’s time to save ourselves. Because, as reality reminds us constantly, only we are coming to save us. And, Democrats’ vast media disadvantage, the one that allows the Republicans to improvise their way to fascism, actually generally becomes a Democratic advantage when Trump is in power.
That’s because, in part, the vast majority of Americans—58% in a recent poll—think he’s abusing his power. Any focus on him or his policies by his improv team is geared only to amuse or sustain the improv team, while largely repulsing the swing voters Republicans need most. That gurgling-your-own-backwash approach may work when Trump is on the ballot, but it’s been mildly disastrous for Republicans in every other election that has taken place in the MAGA era.
But that assumes we can just vote our way out of this mess. As this fantastic Minnesotan, drawn to the street to stand up for her neighbors, laments: an election ten months from now is no relief for the intolerable acts of today.
Given the immense power the regime possesses as it grips the reins of the federal government and the vast right-wing fascist machine, we have to do more. If we wait and just assume this all works without us doing more, we’re likely doomed. Instead, we have to use the machines we’ve been given to find new ways to work together, knowing what we know about the master’s tools.
So welcome to the team!
I tell you all this because in this week’s episode of NEXT COMES WHAT by Andrea Pitzer, Andrea—as she so often does—articulated an idea I’ve been obsessing on for weeks. She describes how social media can be an invitation to criticize people you agree with on almost everything, criticisms that can be dispiriting in a moment where what is needed most is motivation to act. As she explained in her newsletter post that inspired this episode, social media could be much more. It could be like the church in Minnesota, where protesters gathered to learn a chant they could sing in the streets:
When it comes to our political crisis, I wish we could make social media a little more like that, particularly in moments of crisis. It’s possible to focus on the big similarities instead of small differences. People can connect to learn and take action together. They can get strong enough in their knowledge and the extent of their shared values and vision that they’re able to combine their voices, navigate their differences, find solidarity, improvise, and carry their beliefs out into the world.
An improv team, but for good. If that’s possible.
That’s what we are, whether we like it or not.
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