Wakeup Call?

     Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
                                              First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States



    My brand became more famous as I became more famous, and more opportunities presented themselves.
                                                             Donald Trump


    It doesn't matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say.  There's no one else who can say what I can say.  It doesn't matter what I live.
                                                             Newt Gingrich


    Money is the mother's milk of politics.
                                                            Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh


    I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.
                                           Attributed to  P.T. Barnum and various others.   

    
   The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
                                                           Plato            



     Viewed whole, the Constitution's guarantee of press freedom is a citizens' right, not an institutional right.
    The founders could scarcely have foreseen the newspaper empires of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Less could they have known that television news would introduce the values of show business. And who would have guessed that, in the equivalent of a wink, the Internet would transform communication, and turn the news of the day into a gumbo of fact, propaganda, vaudeville and gossip?
    In the new information age (here we'll tolerate today's loose use of the term "information") retail commerce and politics have undergone a similar change.  In both realms, vendors can bypass traditional brokers and reach the consuming public directly.
    Being unable to lick 'em, traditional brokers have had to join 'em.  On political fronts, mainstream news outlets cover a blizzard of tweets, blog blasts, Facebook rants and cable news flaps. Major newspapers carry regular features auditing their own content and advising readers that some of what they've already reported is, upon examination, simply not true.  Nowadays, not only Alice's Wonderland Queen may have occasion to believe six unbelievable things before breakfast.
     If money has long been the mother's milk of politics, money does not alone control in the new age.  Publicity has emerged as a staple. Not traditional news coverage but mere notice, even notoriety.  The kind that passes muster if only they spell your name right.  The kind that can be ginned up by any performance vivid enough to attract attention.
    In this storm of unfiltered noise, a certain kind of candidate can better thrive.  They are brazen in exploiting publicity, sometimes for publicity's sake. Newt Gingrich was one of these. Shown to be scorning in personal life the values he preached on the stump, Gingrich simply basked in the extra attention.  His faltering presidential run morphed into a thinly disguised book tour.
    Donald Trump is another of the sort, with tactics that would make Barnum gag.  And the high-octane gall of such campaigns is matched by their cynicism, for the candidates need not care fundamentally about winning. Even a failed presidential candidate can look forward to a lucrative career of political celebrity.  Voters who get into bed with such as these may wake in the morning to find themselves alone.
    Trump and Gingrich are not the only ones whose campaign style has suggested a cordial awareness of Plan B. Mike Huckabee comes to mind, among others. All have this in common: Their tactics telegraph a very low opinion of the voters.  Bunco artists depend on the marks' not paying informed attention. While this is too often true of the American electorate, proper leaders would seek to remedy the circumstance, not to exploit it.
     Current  Republican candidates cannot be accused of pioneering this low road. Partisan chicanery has been the stock in trade of the national Republican leaders for years. In turning the primaries into a guttersnipes' squabble, this year's candidates have simply taken the model to logical if sordid extremes.  They have been taught by example that politics is a wildly unprincipled game,  even among those who are tasked with governing in the better interest of all the people.  And so they've said devil take the hindmost, among their opponents -- and among the voters.
     Thus, in an odd way, the new information age brings us full circle to speech rights as people's rights, to be used, or abused ...
     Or neglected.
     At heart the First Amendments simply means that American citizens may have conversation among themselves without obtaining the government's permission. The notion of conversation necessarily presupposes listening as well as speaking.  If free speech is truly to matter, someone must be paying attention.  American voters are notorious world-wide for not reliably doing so.
     Into the resulting vacuum may step the likes of Trump, redolent of grubby ethics, rapacious self-seeking, feral aggression and questionable accomplishment.  To make headway in today's climate, this sort need not display ability of any kind. They need only be loud and shameless. Trump fits the bill on all counts. Amid Republican bouts of dog-whistle bigotry, he hasn't bothered with the whistle. And consider his caricatures of women and minorities. They are stick-figure crude. They would be laughable were they not so cruel. Even as a bigot, Trump is a stumble-bum.
     Yet there he sits, atop the heap.  Television newsies -- cue the furrowed brow -- say voting is heavy. Their cameras show us lines stretching out the polling-place door.  And yes, say settled voices, in primary election terms voting is indeed heavy. On the Republican side, it's the highest since 1980.
     And how high is that?
     It isn't high. It's pitifully low.
     Through the primaries so far, Republican turnout has been 17.3 percent of eligible voters, according to Pew Research. In other words,  about 83 percent of eligible voters have not bothered.  An even among those who've bestirred themselves, whopping majorities have consistently voted against Trump. But the field is badly splintered, and he manages to do better than any other single candidate. He thrives -- so far -- by inflaming a minority faction within a minority turnout of a minority party.  Neither Trump nor Ted Cruz (let's not leave out the other remaining mountebank) has yet faced anything remotely resembling a fully formed audience, even among Republicans.
    Emerging signs suggest that Trump's ranting has backfired by waking the larger electorate early from its traditional primary-season nap. We must hope that the nap habit can be permanently broken. The new information age has sharply elevated the importance of diligent citizenship.