Here I am on Meet the Press, shortly after the election back in 2015, explaining to the panel why skilled labor needs a national PR campaign. Aside from the alarming emergence of my bald spot, (which I believe NBC intentionally highlighted), and my complete disregard for NBC’s dress code, (which I intentionally ignored), I thought the appearance went rather well. But along with my follicular and sartorial struggles, I was also struck by some additional similarities between now and then.
Back in 2015, I had predicted on this page that Donald Trump would win the election, which is why Meet the Press invited me on in the first place. (“What does Mike Rowe know that we don’t???”) Not much, really, but on Dirty Jobs, I did have the opportunity to highlight a lot of hardworking men and women all over the country, and I was struck by how many of them told me they felt “forgotten” by elected officials on both sides of the aisle. I remember a factory worker in Michigan saying, “I’m not sure how I feel about voting for a billionaire, but at least Trump sees me. At least he knows I’m here. Nobody else gives a damn.”
I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’d heard the same thing from so many other dirty jobbers. Not about Trump, necessarily, but about the feeling of being “invisible” to their elected officials and “ignored” by the media in general. In fact, I knew that somebody like Trump was going to become president back in 2004, shortly after Dirty Jobs crept on the air and shocked my many bosses at the Discovery Channel by finding a large and very enthusiastic audience. None of them could believe it. I remember the CEO calling me into his office and saying, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mike, but we’re struggling to understand why so many people are watching a middle-aged smart aleck crawl through sewers and septic tanks.”
At the time, I chalked the show’s popularity up to my own endearing charms, but of course, that was not the case at all. Dirty Jobs – and the countless other work-related shows that evolved from it – worked precisely because they spoke to an audience that had been largely underserved by programmers and producers in my industry. It was a classic case of the kind of cognitive dissonance that occurs when a big brand realizes its customers want something they don’t want them to want. Twenty years ago, Discovery didn’t want its viewers to want Dirty Jobs. It was rough around the edges, totally unscripted, slightly puerile, and totally inconsistent with their brand at the time. A lot people way up the food chain wanted to cancel it, but the viewers, God bless ‘em, made that impossible.
I was reminded of all that ten years later, in 2015, when it became clear that the GOP didn’t want its customers to want Donald Trump. But they did, and I’ve been interested ever since in the tension that occurs when big brands, (or big countries) realize that their customers, (or their citizens), feel ignored, underserved, or invisible. And it occurs to me that it’s happening again, in a different way, and on a much larger scale.
Check out the first few paragraphs of this amazing essay by the great Victor Davis Hanson, just published a few days ago. The piece is called “America’s Lab Rats,” and it’s a far more eloquent version of what I tried to articulate on Meet the Press eight years ago. Victor writes…
“Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who couldn’t care less when the experiment blows up. Consider:
Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?
Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?
A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?
Once beautiful downtowns now resembling Nairobi or Cairo, as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy their self-created disaster?
Fast food drive-ins, priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?
In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite.”
Victor goes on to explain precisely how and why half the country feels like lab rats, and sums up the unprecedented gaslighting that so many Americans are claiming to experience today. You can read the whole thing here, https://victorhanson.com/americas-lab-rats/, and I recommend you do, not just because it’s insightful, but because later today, I’m going to interview the author for my podcast, the results of which I’ll share here tomorrow. I’ll be curious to know what you all think.
In the meantime, for those of you still keeping track, I’m headed to DC today, West Virginia on Wednesday, North Carolina on Thursday, Baltimore on Friday, and Atlanta on Monday. Unless Meet the Press calls again, in which case I’ll buy a suit and stick around Maryland.