The news that a former reality show contestant—a man whose sole qualification for public office is the ability to manufacture outrage for ratings—is now seriously contemplating a run for mayor of a major American city should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention. And yet, the British political commentariat, with their characteristic blend of condescension and myopia, have dismissed this as an amusing curiosity, a mere transatlantic eccentricity. How quaint. How very Roman of them.
Let us be clear: this is not an isolated oddity. This is the logical endpoint of a political culture that has systematically devalued expertise, rewarded theatricality over competence, and transformed governance into a branch of the entertainment industry. When a man whose greatest achievement is being booed on national television can credibly threaten to capture a mayoralty, we have passed beyond satire into something far more sinister: the commodification of public trust.
The parallels to the late Republic are almost too obvious to draw. As the Roman aristocracy grew decadent, more concerned with lavish banquets and poetic rivalries than with the crumbling infrastructure of the state, they ceded the stage to populists who understood that spectacle could substitute for substance. Clodius, that infamous patrician-turned-plebeian, used gangs and theatrical flair to bypass the traditional mechanisms of power. Today, our Cloduses do not need gangs; they have Twitter.
And what of our intellectual class? The British pundits who laugh off this candidacy are the same ones who, a decade ago, dismissed Brexit as an impossibility. They cannot see that the cultural rot they mock in America is already flourishing in their own green and pleasant land. The same forces that turned a reality show into a launching pad for political ambition are at work here: the collapse of deference, the erosion of shared facts, the fetishisation of the ‘genuine’ over the ‘qualified’.
We dare not laugh. When a nation begins to elect jesters, it is not because the jesters are talented; it is because the court has ceased to believe in itself. The people sense, perhaps correctly, that the entire apparatus is a farce, and they prefer a clown who admits he is a clown to a patrician who pretends he is not. This is the tragedy of our age: we have trained our citizens to despise seriousness, and now we are surprised when they vote for buffoons.
The mayoral race in question is, of course, a local affair. But it is a bellwether. If this man wins, it will no longer be a curiosity; it will be a template. Every city, every county, every constituency will face the same choice: do we want someone who can govern, or someone who can entertain? I fear we already know the answer.
So let the British commentators smile and shake their heads. They will not be smiling when the jester comes for their own thrones. The gate is open; the barbarians are not at the gate. They are inside, and they are filming it for our amusement.
