Barry Gilheany ✒ The global threat posed to democracy in what Moses Naim describes as the Triple P era, the era of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth,[1] has almost paradoxically been heightened by apparent democratizing trends in the media and information worlds. 

The internet has enabled an explosion of new and supposedly media; the boundaries between traditional and citizen journalism has been steadily eroded; the proliferation of new media outlets has challenged the hegemony and legitimacy of what their critics deride as “the mainstream media”; the growth of open source reportage and the activities of whistle-blowing bodies such as WikiLeaks is reckoned to have shown a bright light on the murky goings on in the global corridors of power and the postmodernist dream of the deconstruction of metanarratives has seemingly been realised by the ability of the blogger to by-pass traditional publishing regimes by self-publishing on the Web. 

However, this apparent “levelling-up” of the established media world and culture has proved to be a massive boon for today’s autocrats particularly those with a media background, most famously Donald Trump. Rather than enabling more noble citizenship traits such as healthy scepticism and informed deliberation; the 21st century media landscape has sedimented modern tribes into their silos of media echo chambers in which tribe adherents seek out and republicise the information they wish to hear in the same way that football fans flock to the message boards of their teams. It has facilitated the “politics of fandom” [2] in which the charismatic leader speaks directly to their followers cementing their loyalty in this “in your face” way while by stealth removing the layers of accountability which are the pillars of democracy.

The Political Entertainment Complex

Modern day autocrats are, unlike those in previous eras, visible, inescapable, and familiar. They are, in contemporary literary jargon, accessible. Their ubiquity has been in no small measure by the changing media landscape and the nexus it has facilitated: a nexus between entertainment, celebrity, and politics. Writing about the right-wing ecosystem in the USA, the author and former speech writer for President George W. Bush David Frum coined the phrase “conservative entertainment complex.”[3]. I describe The Political Entertainment Complex or PEC as a sui generis environment for that nexus of showbiz, fame, and politics which putative autocrats of all ideological hues fully exploit. The PEC encapsulates the culture of fandom. It facilitates the transfer to or projection onto of the tribal devoted following of sports teams, pop idols and the celebrity with millions of ‘likes’ and followers on social world onto the modern charismatic political “stars” of today. In such an atmosphere, political opponents can become delegitimised as central to the identities of many sports and not too few music fans are rivalries with other teams and groups that become bitter enmities. The patterning of today’s political cults on the entertainment values of our age thus sharpens polarisation which within the Triple P framework is accentuated and globalized by digital media and by the intense activism of social groups such as “left behind “white working classes who feel alienated from the old order and who relish the chance to take the fight to those who live on the opposite pole; be they liberal or banking elites or multicultural advocates. The consequences of these culture wars are writ over post-Trump America and Brexit Britain.

The exemplar of the triumph of the entertainer over politics is, justifiably in the opinion of many, is ex-President Donald J. Trump. The route from the world of entertainment to a Presidency or State Governorship had been negotiated before, in the cases of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger from the cinematic arena. But in their cases, reinvention was a lengthy and laboured process. Not so in the case of Donald Trump. From his four decades in celebrity culture from the brashness of the New York real estate scene to the abrasiveness (but morbidly fascinating for those who became captivated by it), he understood the power of spectacle. Those who believed in the separation of entertainment from politics as a basic guardrail in US democracy could not countenance the possibility, never mind reality of his arrival in the White House. Yet news editors operating as they were in an increasingly competitive media environment could not be help but be captivated by his every outrageous policy announcement such as a total shutdown of Muslim immigration into the US; racist jibe at Mexicans and other migrants from “s___thole countries;” by his every sexist and disablist put-down and his outlandish personal wealth. They understood he never bored an audience. They grasped the commercial benefits of affording him wall-to-wall coverage.[4]

What tragically the elites and guardians of civility did not appreciate until it was too late was that sneering responses to him such as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables who could not be redeemed” comment proved to be possibly his major electoral asset. Trump was able to tap into the public's feelings of being ignored, of being trapped, of being under siege, and he tapped into their overall weariness about politics. Elite scorn for Trump somehow translated into elite scorn for them.[5]

Yet the triumph of the values of entertainment over those of traditional politics in 2016 which so (rightfully) horrified the American commentariat might not have come as much as a shock had they examined more closely events in Italy in the mid-1990s. There they would have observed Trump before Trump in the persona of Silvio Berlusconi and how this media magnate remade Italian politics using the [6] model of the Entertainment Political Complex.

Silvio Berlusconi: A Chronicle of Trump Foretold

The long march from the disintegration of the Italian First Republic and the webs of corruption and kickbacks that sustained all its major political parties (apart from the Italian Communist Party) exposed in the Tangentopoli judicial investigations in 1992 to the very real possibility of Western Europe’s first far right led government headed by the Brothers of Italy Party after the general election to be held on 5th September can in no small way be attributed to the media revolution that occurred there in that decade.

Italy in the 1990s was almost unique in the virtual hold that RAI, its state-owned and publicly subsidized broadcaster, RAI had over the media. Known for its intellectually high-brow output; it was also a notoriously boring network that well into the 1980s had no system for tracking its own ratings. The boring nature of RAI was a heaven-sent opportunity for Silvio Berlusconi, one-time real estate speculator and owner of AC Milan football club who went onto acquire billionaire status through Mediaset, his hugely profitable and sprawling TV holding company which lay at the centre of multiple enterprises from insurance to publishing and financial services. Mediaset’s sales and marketing team were legendary with its USP of pitching ads to midsized Italian businesses and Berlusconi later perfected the art of delivering mass audiences to companies that had no other way through selling ads on regional affiliates to the sort of companies that had never appeared on Italian TV before.[7]

Barred by existing legislation from establishing a nationwide operation all at once; Berlusconi, started to buy up small regional broadcasters in different parts of Italy and weld them into a de facto network with unabashedly lowbrow, mass-appeal programming familiar elsewhere but revolutionary in Italy. Mediaset may have given the Italian public but had detrimental effects on the public sphere and on cognitive abilities. For decades later studies by the Italian economists of the differences in voting patterns between regions which had received early exposure to Berlusconi’s behemoth and those who could only access it later. Working from a vast and detailed dataset about where Mediaset expanded, as well as granular psychometric tests measuring Italians’ cognitive abilities, these researchers found that early exposure to the junk TV served by Berlusconi’s media empire accounted for a substantial component of his electoral success. In particular, according to the OECD administered, Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), very young and very old viewers exposed to Mediaset early turned out to be significantly less sophisticated than Italians who could only access the network later. Italians with early exposure to junk tv became more susceptible to populist rhetoric not just from Mediaset’s owner but later on from populist movements such as Five Star.[8]

Faced with bribery allegations and multiple investigations into tax evasion, Berlusconi sought to avoid imprisonment by becoming Prime Minister through the transformation of his media empire into a political party, Forza Italy whose parliamentary candidates were, more often than not, network employees. Reveling in stories of Berlusconi’s billionaire playboy lifestyle and all its pizzazz of glitz and glamour gleefully promoted by the magazines and newspapers he owned, Forza Italia’s strategy was unashamedly based on Mediaset’s commercial success. At its heart was the doctrine of the simple message “Remember your job is to appeal to the regular people of Italy – not to the smartest student in the class.”[9]

Such crude but effective anti-intellectualism provided the ideal “common touch” smokescreen to obscure his shady deals, ethical defects and personal decadence symbolised so starkly by his “Bunga Bunga” parties. He fiddled with electoral rules, denounced judges engaged in a vast left-wing conspiracy against him (shades of the Daily Mail “enemies of the people” condemnation of the judges who in late 2016 stymied the UK government’s attempt to steamroll Brexit through without parliamentary consultation) and mocked his opponents through the airwaves and print outlets that he owned. Despite or, more likely, because of these multiple malpractices, Silvio Berlusconi served, albeit in three separate periods between 1994 and 2011, as prime minister longer than any other Italian leader since World War II. His legacy is the reproduction of a new generation of Italian populists such as the ideologically eclectic Five Star movement led by the comedian Bepe Grillo and the far right, anti-immigrant Legia Nord party led by Matteo Salvini plus the latest kid on the block, the Brothers of Italy led by Georgia Meroni which is poised to form Western Europe’s first far right government since 1945.

The Politics of Outrage

The current crop of populist leaders feeds into a self-reinforcing celebrity culture as the familiarity of a name and the outrageousness of a celebrity’s exploits attracts people’s curiosity, fascination and, ultimately, political loyalty. Globally, outrageous public personas have become the new normal. In Guatemala, the bawdy TV comedian Jimmy Morales who ran on the vaguest of platforms won the presidency with a 67% landslide in 2015. The former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent swearing in public proved to be almost as incendiary and popular as his pledges to institute death squads against drug dealers. His successor “Bong Bong” Marcos did not find his defence of the tyrannical regime of his notorious parents to be an obstacle to electoral success. In Britain, the bombast of Nigel Farage (assisted, many Remainers have argued, by his numerous appearances on mainstream broadcasting shows) proved to be an asset in the successful campaign to force the country’s exit from the European Union.[10]

It wasn’t just Donald Trump and other populist right-wing ethno-nationalist leaders who borrowed from Berlusconi’s playbook. One of the most successful practitioners of politics as entertainment came from the supposedly opposite end of the ideological spectrum – the late Hugo Chavez President of Venezuela. Rather than viewing Chavez and the movement he headed as an ideological and rhetorical throwback to the Cuba of the 1960s which inspired it, it is more instructive to see him a version of Berlusconi. For like the Italian tycoon-cum-politician, Chavez understood that ideology matters less than celebrity status, and that through the medium of television it is possible to create a world where style equivocates to substance.[11].

Through his TV show, Alo President and his theatrical speeches, Chavez fused charismatic leadership, celebrity antics, and autocratic ambition. On his TCV show between storytelling, political diatribe, and fulmination against real and imagined enemies, he was able to establish a direct, personalised rapport with his audience. He portrayed empathy in spades; hugging weeping mothers who struggled to find money for her children’s school supplies; learning the names of viewers who regaled him with their daily issues. But this feeling the pain of his people was interspersed by Trumpian style denunciation of the media and major TV networks as the “four horsemen of the apocalypse" or grandiose promises to build a gas pipeline through the Andes to Buenos Aires. In his hours-long speeches that all broadcasters were forced to show, he wove together these intimate bonding with individuals with party revolutionary harangues, part revival meetings and part history lecture into a coherent narrative of Bolivarian Socialism (or more accurately Nationalism).

The fandom and devotional following which Chavez the celebrity leader inspired became the raw material that he fashioned into power: power which he used to take apart the checks and balances at the heart of Venezuela’s constitution. Political divisions rapidly polarized around the single, binary question “Are you pro-Chavez or anti-Chavez.” Opponents and supporters ceased seeing themselves as belonging to a shared nation but as opposite tribes and existential enemies. His personality cult survived his death from cancer in 2013 with the assimilation of his figure into the pantheon of Santeria, the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion to which millions of outwardly Catholic Venezuelans are secretly devoted to. Chavez statuettes began to appear in santero rites alongside ancestral Indigenous deities such Maria Primero and the legendary slave-born lancer who rose to become the only Black officer in Simon Bolivar’s republican army. [12] The elevation of charismatic leaders such as Higo Chavez into a space between ordinary humanity and divinity and the devotional cult of their followers and their turbocharging by modern media technology thus reduces to rubble the cordon sanitaire between politics and entertainment and upends all the rules and norms of established democracy.

The Media as Guardians of Democracy

The political entertainment complex as it has functioned in Trump’s USA, Putin’s Russia, Berlusconi’s Italy, and Chavez’s Venezuela is proving to be a major portend of a post-democratic world. The elevation of the trivial over matters of substance in media output and the worship of the charismatic celebrity masks the slow emasculation of independent media and of other guardrails which constitute the critical infrastructure of democracy.

Independent and trusted media, be it print, broadcast or digital are one of the essential intermediary institutions between rulers and ruled in democratic states. Donald Trump used Twitter as a “megaphone” (until it was taken away in January 2021) and as “the way I speak directly to the people without any filter”. Beppe Grillo, one of the founders of the Five Star Movement in promised to be an “amplifier” for ordinary people. He told his followers to connect with him directly via his blog, bypassing pollical parties – la casta of corrupt politicians, in his words – and professional journalists, who were all said to be in bed with the politicians.[13] Just two examples of the common populist refrains that the “mainstream media represent “corporate interest” or that they will not publish the stories that the Establishment or elites (be they liberal or corporate) do want you to hear or read; be they those of vaccine damage or the covering up of crimes committed by “illegal” immigrants. How then can the integrity and professional independence of the Fourth Estate deal be strengthened?

Democracy has a dual nature or two crucial sites. First, it requires a designated locus (and specific times) for collectively binding decisions. Second, it requires a forum for the dynamic formation of opinions and political judgments in society at large: anyone can have their say, at whatever time.[14]

This dualistic nature of democracy has always been a given. John Stuart Mill observed that “The [British Parliament] has an office …. To be at once the nations’ Committee of Grievances, and its Congress of Opinions …. Where every person in the country may count upon finding somebody who speaks his mind, as well or better than he could speak it himself – not to friends and partisans exclusively, but in the face of opponents, to be tested by adverse controversy …”[15].

The opinion publique of Montaigne’s creation was supposed to supervise governments. Jeremy Bentham praised the “superintendence of the public which had adopted a “habit of reasoning and discussion.”[16]

However, Christopher Lasch wisely qualifies the superintendent role of the public by stipulating that “What democracy requires is public debate, not information” or “the kind of information…. Generated only by vigorous popular debate". For “We do not know what he needs to know until we ask the right question, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas to the test of public controversy”.[17]

It is fair to say that the superintendent role of the public in countries like Italy where cognitive competencies have been so weakened over the last generation by exposure to the diet of junk tv served up by Berlusconi’s media empire. It is a role that the public, in the US at any rate, is increasingly unwilling to fulfill due to declining trust in the print media. In 2020, for the first time, fewer than half of Americans said they trust traditional media according to Edelman’s annual trust barometer. In polling after the 2020 US presidential election, trust had worsened with 57 percent of Democrats trusting the media and only 18 percent of Republicans. It has also been compromised in the social media world by the strong propensity of online algorithms to favour the flashy but false over the humdrum but true.[18].

The biggest threat, both in epistemic and in moral terms, to democracy is the Big Lie peddled by all authoritarian populists from Trump to Bolinasario; from Putin to Orban. So, the overriding duty of today’s ruth-tellers in the Fourth Estate is to restore the ability of citizens to differentiate truth from lies and so become authoritative superintendents of powerholders again. The ingrained journalistic instinct to ensure “impartiality” by reporting or giving platforms to “both sides” if one of those sides is attacking democracy or promoting misinformation; climate change denial and opposition to vaccines being two pressing contemporary examples. This does not mean, as Lionel Barber former editor of the Financial Times argues, that journalism has to be openly partisan, or advocacy orientated. So long as arguments are made in good faith and are evidence based, the public does need to hear both sides. However, there can be no journalistic requirement to be equidistant between people who peddle Big Lies about immigration, the EU, or the result of the 2020 US Presidential election since that has always formed part of the playbook of the aspiring autocrat.[19]

We live in the era of the “Polidol;” the age of the celebritised and falsely charismatic leader. The Triple P autocrat is a performative phenomenon; made by a “reality” televisual culture which has had actual effects on real politics. Recovery of civic competence through taming the powers of the modern media and digital conglomerates; the redefinition and refining of traditional journalistic standards and the inculcation of civic education and critical thinking skills are just a few of the measures needed to roll back the onward march of 21st populist autocracy.

[1] Moses Naim, The Revenge of Power. How Autocrats are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. New York: St Martin’s Press

[2] Naim, pp.30-59

[3] Dylan Byers, Frum: Republicans Lied to by Conservative Entertainment Complex” Politico 11 September 2012,

[4] Naim, pp.34-35

[5] Naim, p.34

[6] Nam, pp.37-38

[7] Naim, p.36

[8] Naim, pp.37-38

[9] Naim, pp38-40

[10] Naim, p.44

[11] Naim, p.51

[12] Naim, p.52

[13] Jan-Werner Muller (2021) Democracy Rules. London: Allen Lane

[14] Muller p.94

[15] Muller, p.95

[16] Muller, p.96

[17] Muller, p.101

[18] Naim, p.247.

[19] Naim, p.249

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. Barry Gilheany

Threats To Democracy ✑ The Triple P Virus And Its Superspreaders, Media And Celebrity

Barry Gilheany ✒ The global threat posed to democracy in what Moses Naim describes as the Triple P era, the era of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth,[1] has almost paradoxically been heightened by apparent democratizing trends in the media and information worlds. 

The internet has enabled an explosion of new and supposedly media; the boundaries between traditional and citizen journalism has been steadily eroded; the proliferation of new media outlets has challenged the hegemony and legitimacy of what their critics deride as “the mainstream media”; the growth of open source reportage and the activities of whistle-blowing bodies such as WikiLeaks is reckoned to have shown a bright light on the murky goings on in the global corridors of power and the postmodernist dream of the deconstruction of metanarratives has seemingly been realised by the ability of the blogger to by-pass traditional publishing regimes by self-publishing on the Web. 

However, this apparent “levelling-up” of the established media world and culture has proved to be a massive boon for today’s autocrats particularly those with a media background, most famously Donald Trump. Rather than enabling more noble citizenship traits such as healthy scepticism and informed deliberation; the 21st century media landscape has sedimented modern tribes into their silos of media echo chambers in which tribe adherents seek out and republicise the information they wish to hear in the same way that football fans flock to the message boards of their teams. It has facilitated the “politics of fandom” [2] in which the charismatic leader speaks directly to their followers cementing their loyalty in this “in your face” way while by stealth removing the layers of accountability which are the pillars of democracy.

The Political Entertainment Complex

Modern day autocrats are, unlike those in previous eras, visible, inescapable, and familiar. They are, in contemporary literary jargon, accessible. Their ubiquity has been in no small measure by the changing media landscape and the nexus it has facilitated: a nexus between entertainment, celebrity, and politics. Writing about the right-wing ecosystem in the USA, the author and former speech writer for President George W. Bush David Frum coined the phrase “conservative entertainment complex.”[3]. I describe The Political Entertainment Complex or PEC as a sui generis environment for that nexus of showbiz, fame, and politics which putative autocrats of all ideological hues fully exploit. The PEC encapsulates the culture of fandom. It facilitates the transfer to or projection onto of the tribal devoted following of sports teams, pop idols and the celebrity with millions of ‘likes’ and followers on social world onto the modern charismatic political “stars” of today. In such an atmosphere, political opponents can become delegitimised as central to the identities of many sports and not too few music fans are rivalries with other teams and groups that become bitter enmities. The patterning of today’s political cults on the entertainment values of our age thus sharpens polarisation which within the Triple P framework is accentuated and globalized by digital media and by the intense activism of social groups such as “left behind “white working classes who feel alienated from the old order and who relish the chance to take the fight to those who live on the opposite pole; be they liberal or banking elites or multicultural advocates. The consequences of these culture wars are writ over post-Trump America and Brexit Britain.

The exemplar of the triumph of the entertainer over politics is, justifiably in the opinion of many, is ex-President Donald J. Trump. The route from the world of entertainment to a Presidency or State Governorship had been negotiated before, in the cases of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger from the cinematic arena. But in their cases, reinvention was a lengthy and laboured process. Not so in the case of Donald Trump. From his four decades in celebrity culture from the brashness of the New York real estate scene to the abrasiveness (but morbidly fascinating for those who became captivated by it), he understood the power of spectacle. Those who believed in the separation of entertainment from politics as a basic guardrail in US democracy could not countenance the possibility, never mind reality of his arrival in the White House. Yet news editors operating as they were in an increasingly competitive media environment could not be help but be captivated by his every outrageous policy announcement such as a total shutdown of Muslim immigration into the US; racist jibe at Mexicans and other migrants from “s___thole countries;” by his every sexist and disablist put-down and his outlandish personal wealth. They understood he never bored an audience. They grasped the commercial benefits of affording him wall-to-wall coverage.[4]

What tragically the elites and guardians of civility did not appreciate until it was too late was that sneering responses to him such as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables who could not be redeemed” comment proved to be possibly his major electoral asset. Trump was able to tap into the public's feelings of being ignored, of being trapped, of being under siege, and he tapped into their overall weariness about politics. Elite scorn for Trump somehow translated into elite scorn for them.[5]

Yet the triumph of the values of entertainment over those of traditional politics in 2016 which so (rightfully) horrified the American commentariat might not have come as much as a shock had they examined more closely events in Italy in the mid-1990s. There they would have observed Trump before Trump in the persona of Silvio Berlusconi and how this media magnate remade Italian politics using the [6] model of the Entertainment Political Complex.

Silvio Berlusconi: A Chronicle of Trump Foretold

The long march from the disintegration of the Italian First Republic and the webs of corruption and kickbacks that sustained all its major political parties (apart from the Italian Communist Party) exposed in the Tangentopoli judicial investigations in 1992 to the very real possibility of Western Europe’s first far right led government headed by the Brothers of Italy Party after the general election to be held on 5th September can in no small way be attributed to the media revolution that occurred there in that decade.

Italy in the 1990s was almost unique in the virtual hold that RAI, its state-owned and publicly subsidized broadcaster, RAI had over the media. Known for its intellectually high-brow output; it was also a notoriously boring network that well into the 1980s had no system for tracking its own ratings. The boring nature of RAI was a heaven-sent opportunity for Silvio Berlusconi, one-time real estate speculator and owner of AC Milan football club who went onto acquire billionaire status through Mediaset, his hugely profitable and sprawling TV holding company which lay at the centre of multiple enterprises from insurance to publishing and financial services. Mediaset’s sales and marketing team were legendary with its USP of pitching ads to midsized Italian businesses and Berlusconi later perfected the art of delivering mass audiences to companies that had no other way through selling ads on regional affiliates to the sort of companies that had never appeared on Italian TV before.[7]

Barred by existing legislation from establishing a nationwide operation all at once; Berlusconi, started to buy up small regional broadcasters in different parts of Italy and weld them into a de facto network with unabashedly lowbrow, mass-appeal programming familiar elsewhere but revolutionary in Italy. Mediaset may have given the Italian public but had detrimental effects on the public sphere and on cognitive abilities. For decades later studies by the Italian economists of the differences in voting patterns between regions which had received early exposure to Berlusconi’s behemoth and those who could only access it later. Working from a vast and detailed dataset about where Mediaset expanded, as well as granular psychometric tests measuring Italians’ cognitive abilities, these researchers found that early exposure to the junk TV served by Berlusconi’s media empire accounted for a substantial component of his electoral success. In particular, according to the OECD administered, Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), very young and very old viewers exposed to Mediaset early turned out to be significantly less sophisticated than Italians who could only access the network later. Italians with early exposure to junk tv became more susceptible to populist rhetoric not just from Mediaset’s owner but later on from populist movements such as Five Star.[8]

Faced with bribery allegations and multiple investigations into tax evasion, Berlusconi sought to avoid imprisonment by becoming Prime Minister through the transformation of his media empire into a political party, Forza Italy whose parliamentary candidates were, more often than not, network employees. Reveling in stories of Berlusconi’s billionaire playboy lifestyle and all its pizzazz of glitz and glamour gleefully promoted by the magazines and newspapers he owned, Forza Italia’s strategy was unashamedly based on Mediaset’s commercial success. At its heart was the doctrine of the simple message “Remember your job is to appeal to the regular people of Italy – not to the smartest student in the class.”[9]

Such crude but effective anti-intellectualism provided the ideal “common touch” smokescreen to obscure his shady deals, ethical defects and personal decadence symbolised so starkly by his “Bunga Bunga” parties. He fiddled with electoral rules, denounced judges engaged in a vast left-wing conspiracy against him (shades of the Daily Mail “enemies of the people” condemnation of the judges who in late 2016 stymied the UK government’s attempt to steamroll Brexit through without parliamentary consultation) and mocked his opponents through the airwaves and print outlets that he owned. Despite or, more likely, because of these multiple malpractices, Silvio Berlusconi served, albeit in three separate periods between 1994 and 2011, as prime minister longer than any other Italian leader since World War II. His legacy is the reproduction of a new generation of Italian populists such as the ideologically eclectic Five Star movement led by the comedian Bepe Grillo and the far right, anti-immigrant Legia Nord party led by Matteo Salvini plus the latest kid on the block, the Brothers of Italy led by Georgia Meroni which is poised to form Western Europe’s first far right government since 1945.

The Politics of Outrage

The current crop of populist leaders feeds into a self-reinforcing celebrity culture as the familiarity of a name and the outrageousness of a celebrity’s exploits attracts people’s curiosity, fascination and, ultimately, political loyalty. Globally, outrageous public personas have become the new normal. In Guatemala, the bawdy TV comedian Jimmy Morales who ran on the vaguest of platforms won the presidency with a 67% landslide in 2015. The former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent swearing in public proved to be almost as incendiary and popular as his pledges to institute death squads against drug dealers. His successor “Bong Bong” Marcos did not find his defence of the tyrannical regime of his notorious parents to be an obstacle to electoral success. In Britain, the bombast of Nigel Farage (assisted, many Remainers have argued, by his numerous appearances on mainstream broadcasting shows) proved to be an asset in the successful campaign to force the country’s exit from the European Union.[10]

It wasn’t just Donald Trump and other populist right-wing ethno-nationalist leaders who borrowed from Berlusconi’s playbook. One of the most successful practitioners of politics as entertainment came from the supposedly opposite end of the ideological spectrum – the late Hugo Chavez President of Venezuela. Rather than viewing Chavez and the movement he headed as an ideological and rhetorical throwback to the Cuba of the 1960s which inspired it, it is more instructive to see him a version of Berlusconi. For like the Italian tycoon-cum-politician, Chavez understood that ideology matters less than celebrity status, and that through the medium of television it is possible to create a world where style equivocates to substance.[11].

Through his TV show, Alo President and his theatrical speeches, Chavez fused charismatic leadership, celebrity antics, and autocratic ambition. On his TCV show between storytelling, political diatribe, and fulmination against real and imagined enemies, he was able to establish a direct, personalised rapport with his audience. He portrayed empathy in spades; hugging weeping mothers who struggled to find money for her children’s school supplies; learning the names of viewers who regaled him with their daily issues. But this feeling the pain of his people was interspersed by Trumpian style denunciation of the media and major TV networks as the “four horsemen of the apocalypse" or grandiose promises to build a gas pipeline through the Andes to Buenos Aires. In his hours-long speeches that all broadcasters were forced to show, he wove together these intimate bonding with individuals with party revolutionary harangues, part revival meetings and part history lecture into a coherent narrative of Bolivarian Socialism (or more accurately Nationalism).

The fandom and devotional following which Chavez the celebrity leader inspired became the raw material that he fashioned into power: power which he used to take apart the checks and balances at the heart of Venezuela’s constitution. Political divisions rapidly polarized around the single, binary question “Are you pro-Chavez or anti-Chavez.” Opponents and supporters ceased seeing themselves as belonging to a shared nation but as opposite tribes and existential enemies. His personality cult survived his death from cancer in 2013 with the assimilation of his figure into the pantheon of Santeria, the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion to which millions of outwardly Catholic Venezuelans are secretly devoted to. Chavez statuettes began to appear in santero rites alongside ancestral Indigenous deities such Maria Primero and the legendary slave-born lancer who rose to become the only Black officer in Simon Bolivar’s republican army. [12] The elevation of charismatic leaders such as Higo Chavez into a space between ordinary humanity and divinity and the devotional cult of their followers and their turbocharging by modern media technology thus reduces to rubble the cordon sanitaire between politics and entertainment and upends all the rules and norms of established democracy.

The Media as Guardians of Democracy

The political entertainment complex as it has functioned in Trump’s USA, Putin’s Russia, Berlusconi’s Italy, and Chavez’s Venezuela is proving to be a major portend of a post-democratic world. The elevation of the trivial over matters of substance in media output and the worship of the charismatic celebrity masks the slow emasculation of independent media and of other guardrails which constitute the critical infrastructure of democracy.

Independent and trusted media, be it print, broadcast or digital are one of the essential intermediary institutions between rulers and ruled in democratic states. Donald Trump used Twitter as a “megaphone” (until it was taken away in January 2021) and as “the way I speak directly to the people without any filter”. Beppe Grillo, one of the founders of the Five Star Movement in promised to be an “amplifier” for ordinary people. He told his followers to connect with him directly via his blog, bypassing pollical parties – la casta of corrupt politicians, in his words – and professional journalists, who were all said to be in bed with the politicians.[13] Just two examples of the common populist refrains that the “mainstream media represent “corporate interest” or that they will not publish the stories that the Establishment or elites (be they liberal or corporate) do want you to hear or read; be they those of vaccine damage or the covering up of crimes committed by “illegal” immigrants. How then can the integrity and professional independence of the Fourth Estate deal be strengthened?

Democracy has a dual nature or two crucial sites. First, it requires a designated locus (and specific times) for collectively binding decisions. Second, it requires a forum for the dynamic formation of opinions and political judgments in society at large: anyone can have their say, at whatever time.[14]

This dualistic nature of democracy has always been a given. John Stuart Mill observed that “The [British Parliament] has an office …. To be at once the nations’ Committee of Grievances, and its Congress of Opinions …. Where every person in the country may count upon finding somebody who speaks his mind, as well or better than he could speak it himself – not to friends and partisans exclusively, but in the face of opponents, to be tested by adverse controversy …”[15].

The opinion publique of Montaigne’s creation was supposed to supervise governments. Jeremy Bentham praised the “superintendence of the public which had adopted a “habit of reasoning and discussion.”[16]

However, Christopher Lasch wisely qualifies the superintendent role of the public by stipulating that “What democracy requires is public debate, not information” or “the kind of information…. Generated only by vigorous popular debate". For “We do not know what he needs to know until we ask the right question, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas to the test of public controversy”.[17]

It is fair to say that the superintendent role of the public in countries like Italy where cognitive competencies have been so weakened over the last generation by exposure to the diet of junk tv served up by Berlusconi’s media empire. It is a role that the public, in the US at any rate, is increasingly unwilling to fulfill due to declining trust in the print media. In 2020, for the first time, fewer than half of Americans said they trust traditional media according to Edelman’s annual trust barometer. In polling after the 2020 US presidential election, trust had worsened with 57 percent of Democrats trusting the media and only 18 percent of Republicans. It has also been compromised in the social media world by the strong propensity of online algorithms to favour the flashy but false over the humdrum but true.[18].

The biggest threat, both in epistemic and in moral terms, to democracy is the Big Lie peddled by all authoritarian populists from Trump to Bolinasario; from Putin to Orban. So, the overriding duty of today’s ruth-tellers in the Fourth Estate is to restore the ability of citizens to differentiate truth from lies and so become authoritative superintendents of powerholders again. The ingrained journalistic instinct to ensure “impartiality” by reporting or giving platforms to “both sides” if one of those sides is attacking democracy or promoting misinformation; climate change denial and opposition to vaccines being two pressing contemporary examples. This does not mean, as Lionel Barber former editor of the Financial Times argues, that journalism has to be openly partisan, or advocacy orientated. So long as arguments are made in good faith and are evidence based, the public does need to hear both sides. However, there can be no journalistic requirement to be equidistant between people who peddle Big Lies about immigration, the EU, or the result of the 2020 US Presidential election since that has always formed part of the playbook of the aspiring autocrat.[19]

We live in the era of the “Polidol;” the age of the celebritised and falsely charismatic leader. The Triple P autocrat is a performative phenomenon; made by a “reality” televisual culture which has had actual effects on real politics. Recovery of civic competence through taming the powers of the modern media and digital conglomerates; the redefinition and refining of traditional journalistic standards and the inculcation of civic education and critical thinking skills are just a few of the measures needed to roll back the onward march of 21st populist autocracy.

[1] Moses Naim, The Revenge of Power. How Autocrats are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. New York: St Martin’s Press

[2] Naim, pp.30-59

[3] Dylan Byers, Frum: Republicans Lied to by Conservative Entertainment Complex” Politico 11 September 2012,

[4] Naim, pp.34-35

[5] Naim, p.34

[6] Nam, pp.37-38

[7] Naim, p.36

[8] Naim, pp.37-38

[9] Naim, pp38-40

[10] Naim, p.44

[11] Naim, p.51

[12] Naim, p.52

[13] Jan-Werner Muller (2021) Democracy Rules. London: Allen Lane

[14] Muller p.94

[15] Muller, p.95

[16] Muller, p.96

[17] Muller, p.101

[18] Naim, p.247.

[19] Naim, p.249

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. Barry Gilheany

3 comments:

  1. Thanks Barry, you put a massive amount of effort into your pieces.
    On an aside, but somewhat tangential, I use another 3P model which helps recognise negative cognitive disorders,

    (i) Personal (everything is narcissistically about oneself)
    (ii) Pervasive (it's all shite & fucked up. No possibility for silver linings here.)
    (iii) Permanent (no possibility for positive turns in events are to be included. It's all crap, always was, always will be, forever & ever Amen).

    These 3P's taken together lead to a 'woe to me' outlook, depression and nihilism.
    The 'Polidols' alas in their messaging nudge the vulnerable closer to these positions, into these painful mindsets and to their own exploitive advantage.

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  2. Thanks for that feedback, Henry Joy. We can only work at effective antidotes to all the Triple P variants!

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    1. At the level of the individual effective antidotes are relatively easy, once one has developed an ear for these patterns, to then linguistically and playfully tackle them.
      At the level of the group or collective it presents a far greater challenge. The group will tend to attempt to silence and bully the individual who dissents from their cherished positions. Ultimately this is a far greater challenge and one that's alas way beyond my competencies and also way beyond my pay grade!

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