POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY AND GOAT YOGA

When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election. We thought freedom and human rights, diversity and respect, different and weird had already won--we still had some unconscious biases to weed out, sure, but we were comfortable enough that at least formally, consciously, aspirationally, America was a country of reason and respect and humanism for us to allow ourselves this kind of kumbaya capitalist decadence. 

Of course it's more complicated than that, but it was my first thought. It falls in line with numerous Rome-analogy pieces like this one from March 2016--disturbingly far in advance of the election--that are taking on a knew significance now, as the hogwash but powerful Mythology of Trump bleeds into full-on garish hyperreality.

Goat Yoga has everything you could possibly want in a news story right now to comfort the reeling elite liberal ego: off-beat intrigue, factual reporting, adjectives like "hummocky"; a hip way to get healthy exercise with a global internet community and a mantra of inclusion (despite its definitionally-expensive actual physical requirements).* It's comfortable and warm; the mere existence of such an article leads us to feel like we're living in a Hillary Clinton world. It's the very feeling that, perhaps, prevented us from actually living in one.

We need a better MacGuffin, sadly, one farther removed from detail and fact. As different as Trump's and Obama's objectives and ideologies, and as measured and pragmatic as the latter has been as President, as candidates, they won the same way: with a general, blanket feeling you could twist to build your own narrative on. It's a rhetorical platform you can use to incite discord as well as harmony, for anger and fear as for hope. They both, notably, tapped into a fervent desire for change. We now need a new mythic counter-mechanism, another unifying, positive emotion with the power to override things like goat yoga for our attention. I'm not sure yet what the the right MacGuffin-myth is--i think, maybe, Bernie hit a chord close to it--but I have my eyes peeled. 

*When I re-read this sentence I realized it sounded like Stefon from SNL reviewing the city's hottest new club, but decided to stand by it, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

STRATEGIC DESIGN AND THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

One of the most important ideas in Dan Hill's Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary is that of a MacGuffin. It's a Hitchcockian appropriation, a critical plot trigger with little to no value in and of itself. Hill explains, first quoting Hitchcock:

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"'A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like. It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.' 

According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the MacGuffin, is 'the engine that sets the story in motion.' In Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s the entirely vague 'government secrets.' There is a long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good example."

Hill then goes on to provide an extended example of how this works in strategic design, recounting a building development project that acts as a MacGuffin for larger, systemic changes, for example, to the Finnish fire codes. 

I thought a lot about Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, strategic design, and MacGuffins specifically reading this Vox article on the deceptively ambitious scope of Hillary Clinton's platform--almost too perfectly summed up in the rhetoric of innovation as "a plan for a minimal viable product of social democracy."

The image of Hillary Clinton as strategic designer, using a collection of incremental fine-print policy changes as MacGuffins that together create a colossal societal paradigm shift, fascinates me for several reasons:

1. MacGuffins tend to be bottom-up strategies, often specifically designed to trigger the powerful into enacting systemic change by those who lack the power and political clout to do so themselves. 
2. It goes against the candidate mythology that's been built up in this election, pitting Clinton as an entrenched "Washington elite" contra Donald Trump as the "outsider who would stir things up." 
3. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is written from a Nordic perspective; Hill is specifically interested in how to allow for the extreme positive outliers you find in US-style capitalist societies while maintaining the Nordic floor. Clinton faces precisely the opposite challenge. (In the Vox article, Lane Kenworthy posits: “I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state.")

Peter Thiel notwithstanding, Clinton is the innovator's candidate. And not just because she's Silicon Valley's choice. She may not be very likable, but she seems like a shrewd strategic designer aimed at the same no-ceiling-high-floor spot Dan Hill describes. As the most powerful person in the world, she might just be able to prototype and pilot it. Given the alternative ("Make America Great Again" is, incidentally, the ugly flip side of futuristic nostalgia), I sure hope she gets the chance to try.