Res Publica and the Red Lip
Every era has its icons. When we think of female icons, we tend to think of heroes, like Joan of Arc, or movie stars, like Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe. There are those other icons, those that appeal to the intellectual, to the feminist: strong, outspoken women like Simone de Beauvoir, Jackie Kennedy, Frida Kahlo.
What made them icons? Their accomplishments, certainly. A lot had to do with their aura of mystique. We didn’t know the underpinnings — sometimes literal — of the icons we revered. Maybe she’s born with it… maybe it’s Maybelline.
Unlike icons, the influencers of today’s pop culture reveal everything, all their secrets and tricks of the trade in an ongoing barrage of TMI.
Capital-P Politics historically sheltered itself from such revealings, preferring to present a poised exterior focused on the Message. Indeed, ad hominem (ad feminem?) was long considered the lowest form of debate; both personal attacks and personal revelations were to be avoided by the serious politician.
This was the playbook of everyone from Napoleon to Roosevelt, and right up to Hillary, whose defeat in the 2016 US Presidential election was in part attributed to the use of an outdated playbook.
Then came the novelty politics of Trump’s Twitter tirades, and AOC’s Guide to Her Signature Red Lip.
What changed, and why didn’t we see that change coming ? (Also, why “lip” and not “lips”? — perhaps a debate for another day.)
What changed, and is constantly changing, is how we consume information. From the dusty days of soap-box speeches to the modern internet era, the tools politicians use to address the electorate have shaped the message as well as determining which voices rise above the noise.
The radio first brought political leaders’ speaking voices into peoples’ living rooms, largely favouring eloquence; the television brought their faces and physiques too, and suddenly good looks became just as important to winning votes. With the internet and Big Data, new tools were developed to hone the message to increasingly narrowly-defined segments of the electorate.
Today’s social media culture which exists thanks to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, allows politicians to speak directly to you, not just in your house, but in the palm of your hand. They talk to you while you ride the bus, wait in line, sit on the toilet. It’s hard to imagine a greater intimacy without them being physically in the room with you — putting on their makeup, for instance, while chatting to you in the bathroom mirror.
As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, the medium is the message (*my emphasis). It’s more than a question of style, or indeed content being adapted to fit the medium — the medium itself is the master of the communication; content is secondary when not entirely irrelevant.
It follows that the question some are asking is: Is it politics if it’s on TikTok? Or is it just… well, another TikTok, in the same category as silly pet tricks and dancing teenagers ? In other words, is there any actual debate happening, or is at all just part of the whirling carnival of entertainment flowing through our screens?
The question is legitimate. Rather than receiving it as a criticism of the politicians using the medium, it should be received as a criticism of the medium itself, and indeed of the apparent lack of modern media conducive to thoughtful, profound, healthy and hearty debate.
The Red Lip
The well-known leftist Democratic Representative that Republicans love to hate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently took to YouTube to publish a makeup tutorial on the Vogue channel and intellectuals everywhere threw up their arms. “Is this truly the End of the American Empire?” they clamoured, seeing in a Congresswoman’s use of a popular forum — the Makeup Tutorial — the death of Serious Debate.
Others saw a media-savvy politician making use of a communication tool at her disposal to reach out to an audience of young women who would likely scroll past videos of talking heads in suits, even if these ever made it past their content filters. What better gateway to reach this audience than where they already comfortably sit? The Makeup Tutorial of today is the beauty parlour of the 1950’s; a place where girls hang out, chit-chat, and exchange gossip on everything from nail colour, to who So-and-So is sleeping with, to what the President said in his televised address.
To be fair, both perspectives are true. Talented communicators have always known they have to go to their audience rather than expecting their audience to come to them.
But it is also true that there is only so much political thought that can be interjected between product applications.
Without rejecting the use of modern communication tools such as tutorials and TikToks, it is important that we continue to create spaces for serious debate — and that we inhabit those spaces.
It is too easy today to shrug off difficult tasks such as intellectual discussion, political debate and civic participation as too time-consuming, too exhausting. It’s so much more gratifying to pour a glass of Chardonnay and flick on Netflix (trust me, I know). But without popular commitment to debate, interest in the res publica will shrivel, and politicians will cease to see the return on investment in these exercises. Hey — if she or he can win 100,000 votes every time they publish a Tweet or a TikTok, why bother putting in the effort it takes to present a reasoned argument?
