Last Sunday morning, Angelenos, Californians, basketball fans, and people around the world were shocked by the news of former basketball superstar Kobe Bryant’s death, along with that of his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, in a helicopter crash in LA. Social media users poured out posts with emotional quotes about appreciating life and working hard and loving those around us, coupled with crying emojis and broken hearts, and pictures of Kobe and his daughter. It felt like, along with Bryant’s closest family and friends, untold numbers of people in the U.S. and around the world, were all grieving together.
Yet, I would be willing to bet that only a small fraction of all those who posted something after Kobe passed away were really influenced by him. Kobe, with some exceptions, has become an idea, a TV character, who we root for as a symbol of basketball greatness, fatherhood and mentorship, and hard work and sacrifice. He was no longer just the ex-basketball player who had four kids and a wife, who lived in Orange County, and who in 2003 was charged with rape — although the criminal charges were eventually dropped.
We have developed a cult of personality around professional athletes like Kobe, or TV stars and musicians, politicians, and influencers, who have become essentially modern-day royalty. We love to follow, to praise, and just listen to these god-like figures. We watch their shows, listen to their podcasts and interviews, and follow them on social media just to get more and more content, no matter its value or relevance to our own lives. There’s just something about them. We love them. And it’s all about their personality, and their emotional value to us.
This desire for these larger-than-life characters that we follow and idolize is not new. Thinkers and writers throughout history have often referenced an innate human desire for a god-like figure to be idolized above ourselves. Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, written in 1651, posits that an absolute ruler is best, and that in order for this to happen, the people “authorize and give up [their] right of governing [themselves] to this man.” Sigmund Freud, meanwhile, in The Future of an Illusion, written in 1927, likened this to our subconscious desire to feel watched over or protected by a kind of surrogate parent, an ultimate caretaker or protector both morally and practically. In other words, what we really want is an icon, or in our modern case a TV character, to saturate our everyday thoughts and experiences in a kind of dominance over us.
How is this related to television specifically? President Richard Nixon, in an interview in 1994 in the New York Times, said “the American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television.” That, in a nutshell, is all anyone running for president needs to know about winning the next election. It is the place where everything important and influential happens in American society and around the world today.
President Donald Trump, when running for president in 2016, said over and over that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and we all collectively laughed at the time. How could it be, we thought, that constant embarrassing coverage could actually be good for a candidate? But many of us were wrong about the result of the 2016 presidential election for one simple reason: We discounted the role of media and how much power it has over people’s hearts and minds. Fox, CNN, and Facebook were the top three sources voters cited for news during the election, with 40 percent of Trump supporters citing Fox as their primary source, according to Pew Research. Most significantly, five of the top six sources voters listed were cable news networks. Television has been and is central to the way we have come to understand news events and the world.
We vote for who we know, for who looks presidential, who sounds good and who we’re comfortable with. We vote for who we want to keep seeing on TV.
So, within this understanding of how the American electorate works, who can compete with the TV megastar of Donald Trump in the 2020 election? Who is so big, like Kobe, or like Trump, that people will do anything to defend them, voice their opinions about them, and constantly crave more and more? Only someone with a TV character, larger-than-life, personality to match Trump’s. And that, to me, is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders has the clearest political message in this 2020 race, predicated on fighting for the little guy, and against money and greed and wealth. He has a distinct look and voice, with the white, disheveled hair and glasses, his sharp hand gestures, his furrowed brow and his loud, punctuated speaking style. As the controversial podcast mega-star Joe Rogan recently said about Bernie, “He has been for basically the same ideas his entire life, and that is a powerful structure to operate from.”
Love him or hate him, people know Bernie, what he stands for, who he is, and what they think about him. And that’s how you get people to care about you. And, running against a candidate who is all about bullshit, it helps to have Bernie’s unique intolerance for pleasantries, recently telling the New York Times Editorial Board, “I don’t tolerate bullshit terribly well.”
We are hungry, or desperate even, for this personality, messiah, psychological replacement for a god or for a parent, to follow. That’s what this strong and profound reaction to Kobe’s death teaches us about America, and about people in general. It reminds us what is really important to people, and how we make decisions about our leaders.
And, I am by no means saying that I agree with Bernie’s platform, or think any of it is doable or a good idea. But, despite the Iowa caucus debacle from last night, it appears that Bernie leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire polls, an early indicator of strong enthusiastic support for him in states that matter. Bernie’s, and Trump’s, is the formula for winning American presidential elections today, and it has been for a while. The groundswell of support for Kobe and the ongoing support for Donald Trump remind us of this. In the hopes of actually beating Trump come November 2020, we would do well to note whose personality is doing best on TV.
Martin Kaff is the Opinions Editor for the New School Free Press.