Hilarious (terrifying, actually) reading all these X accounts who are genuinely puzzled about why there were so many fewer votes this time around compared to last time. I’m talking about the 2024 Presidential Election that produced a resounding rejection of Democratic presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris by American voters. Why these accounts aren’t puzzling over the many more votes last time round than the time before that validates Guy Debord’s Spectacular Society.
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967, is a critique of contemporary capitalist culture focusing on how social relations are increasingly mediated by commodities and images. Debord argues that modern society is dominated by the “spectacle”—a pervasive system of representations that distorts reality, substituting direct human experience (what we’re calling “common sense”) with mediated representations. He describes the spectacle as a social relationship between people mediated by phantoms, meaning that people no longer directly experience—or control—their lives, but instead view their existence through a filter of commodified symbols that direct their days.
The spectacle serves to reinforce and perpetuate capitalism. People are enticed into passivity, lulled by the endless consumption of commodified identities and entertainment forms (templates) rather than actively engaging in authentic social relationships. In this way, the spectacle creates a situation of alienation where individuals are disconnected from each other and from their own lives. It’s a system that reduces human life to a (vicious) circle of consumption, where one’s identity, meaning, and even purpose are bought and sold.
The spectacle obscures economic, political, and social realities, fostering a culture of distraction that keeps people from questioning the conditions of their own subjugation. Debord argues that the spectacle is not just advertising, consumer culture, and the mass media, but a larger social system that pacifies individuals and prevents collective social change by manufacturing consent and stifling dissent. Frequent visitors to my blog, Freedom and Reason, will know this as a theme in my critiques of late capitalism (see Supper in the Spectacular Café; Wait Until You’re Older; Widening the Shot—Seeing Behind the Scenes; Celebrating the End of Chevron: How to See the New Fascism.)
Debord’s critique also concerns the cult of celebrity—an aspect of contemporary culture even more relevant today, with the rise of digital media and the increasing role of the internet in shaping social identity. The obvious example, and a performer in the present spectacle, is US Vice-President Kamala Harris, who paraded before voters a menagerie of celebrities. Her rallies were free concerts targeting the intersectionally-conscious cultivated by the Culture Industry.
I assume the so enraptured could never entertain the thought that Trump won the popular vote in 2020. But subtract 15 million from 81 million and rerun the numbers. See what you see. As it is, Trump only slightly underperformed his 2020 numbers compared to his 2024 ones (and they’re still counting votes). Here are the adjusted numbers for 2020: Biden 66.3 million; Trump 74.2 million. This leaves Biden with roughly 47 percent of the vote (roughly the same percentage Kamala is received this past election) and Trump winning nearly 53 percent of the vote (he won 51 percent this past election).
I chose 15 million rather than the 18 million widely reported because the count is still ongoing. There may be more outstanding vote that I have considered here; if so, I will return and correct the numbers. Voter turnout in Presidential Elections after 2000 has been 60%, 62%, 58%, 59%, and 66% through 2020. That last number is an outlier. Indeed, one has to go back to the dawn of the twentieth century to find that robust of a turnout. So far, turnout appears to be about 18 million votes shy of the 2020 total. More importantly, at 67,978,219, Harris is presently 13,305,282 million shy of Biden’s 81,283,501 votes. What happened to those millions of Democratic voters? (See How I Knew Trump Would Win.)
You didn’t expect the simulation you’re scheduled to live in to be rolled out all at once, did you? There was a world before Winston. Winston could never know that for sure because those who came before him didn’t fight hard enough for the truth, but he suspected as such since it was his job to curate fake news for the Ministry of Truth. But you are in a position to know. At least for now, those of us who know Winston’s fate did fight hard enough. Let’s keep fighting!
It needs to be said that in this struggle not all sides are the same. One side wants a system wherein the result arrived at is one of honest effort and process. The other side wants power whatever it takes. They want a one-party state. This is the side that wants democracy to be a black box, wherein the result is contrived (and democracy dies in darkness I’ve heard). This side is blue.
Even with numerous states not requiring proof of citizenship or identity, the right side prevailed. But, as we know from only four years ago, this outcome is not guaranteed. So let’s get this on the agenda: proof of citizenship to register to vote and same day in person voting with photo IDs. There’s only one reason not to do this.
There are many items on the agenda.
Debord advocates a form of resistance he calls détournement (hijacking, rerouting)—the disruption and subversion of dominant cultural narratives, signs, and symbols. By creating situations that disrupt the spectacle’s hold on consciousness, he believed individuals can reclaim genuine human experience and foster revolutionary consciousness—for us on the populist left, this means the revolutionary consciousness that founded the Republic.
Corporations not only control labor and the economy but also infiltrate cultural and social spaces, reshaping how individuals perceive themselves and the world around them. The social logic of corporate statism lies at the source of the puzzlement I noted at the start.
Soon, those in control who grasp the implications of the solution will come round and stop the subalterns from realizing it.
But we are not the subaltern.
freedom and reason 