The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

by Moisés Naím

Working from a trove of detailed data about where Mediaset expanded when, as well as granular psychometric tests measuring Italians’ cognitive abilities and political preferences, the researchers found that early exposure to junk TV accounted for a substantial fraction of Berlusconi’s electoral success.

In particular, very young and very old viewers exposed to Mediaset early on turned out to be substantially less cognitively sophisticated than Italians who gained access to junk TV only later. Italians with early access to junk TV became more open to populist rhetoric, not only that coming from Mediaset’s owner but also that coming from his later competitors in the Five Star Movement

This blurring of the boundaries places a whole new set of demands on leaders. Competing for the audience’s mind share against a limitless expanse of distractions, politicians who can’t entertain find themselves quickly tuned out. Those not gifted with good looks (as Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau are) find they can make up for it with traditional entertainment chops: unpredictability, bravado, pizzazz, humor, or brawn.

None of this is entirely new: John F. Kennedy had his fans, as did Harold Wilson, François Mitterrand, Pierre Trudeau, and Margaret Thatcher. What’s new is the extent to which people look at politics first and foremost as spectacle, as a battle where celebrities face off with each other in an antagonistic contest for supremacy. Where the line between power and spectacle vanishes completely, freedom cannot hold out for long.

Polarization, in this sense, is less about issues and policies and much more about raw, visceral identity. Once, long ago, people pegged those identities to their social class, their religion, their community, or their ethnicity. Today, more and more, you go to the polling place for it. People no longer vote their values, much less their interests. Today, people vote their identities.

The new era devalues mastery of policy details, expertise, the ability to strike bargains and to move toward messy pragmatic compromises. Those are the skills it takes to actually govern within the strictures of a constitutional republic. But such skills have little relevance to the new task at hand: in a political system in which the three Ps of populism, polarization, and post-truth are rampant, what counts is building and sustaining a fan base devoted enough to have your back no matter what. Fealty rules.

When traditional politicians break an important norm, their supporters turn on them, and their political standing suffers. But when celebrity leaders break an important norm, their fans don’t turn on the leaders; they turn on the norm. In fact, they rally to the leaders, whose standing often improves, at least in the fans’ eyes.

An increasingly well-established thread of social scientific research suggests that large numbers of people are predisposed to authoritarian politics. This is not at all the same thing as saying that people are born authoritarian. A predisposition can very well remain dormant unless and until it is coupled with an environment liable to activate it.

Amazon’s effects on competition are based on its ability to channel users’ attention to the places where it can monetize them. All the disparate elements of its strategy converge on this alchemy of turning what its computers understand about your preferences into money in its bottom line. Because beyond all its other identities, Amazon is also a huge de facto advertising firm, its algorithms working overtime to turn the data you knowingly or unknowingly disclose into targeted recommendations for your consumption.

Together with political sclerosis, this tax-evasion-fueled debt broke the historic bargain between the Italian state and Italian citizens. With so much money allocated to just paying off bondholders, not enough was left over for public investment. Capital flight, tax avoidance, tax evasion, and paltry economic growth fed chronic government deficits.

A retirement system designed to curry favor with voters at the expense of common sense allowed millions of public employees to retire on full pensions while still in their forties or early fifties. Expansively drafted pension plans designed to protect widowed people from destitution in old age gave rise to what Brazilians smirkingly call the “Viagra effect”—male pensioners in their seventies marrying women many decades younger, who become entitled to continue receiving their husbands’ full benefits even after they died.