How democracies promote tyrants to power

Brazil's corrupt dictator and 

his corrupt offspring units

These are comments that PD left here a couple of days ago. He is commenting on a 2 hour documentary that PBS broadcast about the rise to power of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and his corrupt children. He is another anti-democratic demagogue-criminal-fornicator-liar like our ex-president and his corrupt offspring. The parallels between the two thug political leaders and how they rose to power are striking and depressing. PD's comments speaks for themselves. 

I saw the doc last night (googled it and streamed it). It was good, and it reaffirmed my conviction that people like Trump and Bolsonaro move from the fringes to the halls of power largely because of the convergence and interplay of 3 critical factors: 1) many idiots in society, 2) a powerful, 24/7, dumbed down media which puts idiocy (e.g. birtherism, Bolsonaro's stunts etc.) in the spotlight (began in 90s when entertainment and news merged in various cable TV outlets), and 3) recent forms of social media that allow ambitious politicians who are fringe and get in the dumbed down headlines to inflame the passions of the aforementioned idiots who quickly reciprocate by devoting all their free time to posting stupid, toxic memes, fake news, thus creating an "alternative information ecosystem" in which truth and fiction are nearly interchangeable, and crowd-sourced mass political movements upstage formerly legitimate (but more "boring") politics.

Put simply, politics is being conducted at the level of, say, the Jerry Springer Show, here and in many places (Brazil, much of Europe swept up in its own faux populists bashing minorities etc.).

Walter Lippmann was right (in his 1922 book, Public Opinion) when he said political reality is too complex for the masses to digest thoughtfully, and that confronted with it they descend to levels of idiocy that would make their input dangerous. He was WRONG to imagine that there would or should be an elite group of "experts" who socially engineer a relatively benign public consensus through think-tanks, media and the like. The more advanced media gets, the more we see educated "experts" and "pundits" happily feeding dumbed down sensationalism to the many eager consumers of idiocy.

The answer isn't Lippmann's "manufactured consensus" or the more sinister option of state-controlled media which is where all this is leading anyway. No, the educated journalists and "pundits" must stop putting idiots and their stunts online as well as on the front pages, essays and books where they are recycled and manipulated and distorted on Twitter, Facebook or whatever. When pols started getting Twitter accounts, I argued they should not have such accounts as "official" accounts. It would allow them to use legitimate government status and roles to disseminate bullshit at will. Sure enough, we got a lurid and obsessive Tweeter shortly thereafter in the WH. A president with an "official" Twitter account is like a modern-day equivalent of say Reagan or Clinton having their own TV Channels in the 80s or 90s plus having fan clubs (the equivalent of sympathetic "followers" online). Same idea.

Imagine a Reagan or Clinton skipping most press conferences in favor of controlling the flow of OFFICIAL information on TV shows they would produce themselves, and which would bear the imprimatur of the US Gov't. Unaccountable to even the press (which has become itself a Twitterized group of pundits each with their own fan-clubs and often TV shows or slots). The crass commercialization of the serious business of statecraft is really alarming when you stop and think how far it has sunk and how rapidly.

In the same way, journalists have used their increasingly glamorous status (remember when almost all journos were just schlubs who had their gigs and were mostly unknown and invisible?) to tantalize hordes of entertainment hungry consumers with gossip and lurid bullshit (Palin, birtherism, meaningless scandals etc.) to sell themselves and their product. Had they not covered Bolsonaro's idiot-stunts so much, his candidacy and even his stabbing would not have been such gigantic media feeding frenzies. If CNN and MSNBC had not given Trump SO MUCH airtime to spout out his bullshit Birther claims, he might not have run. If he had run but the media had not used footage and discussions of him and his candidacy as a go-to staple of entertainment, his success in politics would have been, imo, far less likely.

As one Republican operative said, "If you treat politics like a game show, you might end up with an unhinged star from a game show in the White House."

A quote from a 2016 book by two social scientists that I've posted here about 20 or 30 times roughly echoes what Lippman intuitively understood in 1922:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”