In a development that would have made Juvenal weep into his satires, a man best known for feigning romantic interest on a reality television programme has announced his candidacy for mayor of a medium-sized American city. The news lands with all the surprise of a hangover after a frat party. We have seen this script before. The playbook is worn from use: a figure of negligible intellectual heft, armed with nothing but a talent for manufactured outrage and a gift for saying the quiet part loud, rides a wave of public disillusionment into political office. It is the American way, or so it seems.
Yet as the mists of this latest political spectacle roll in, I find myself struck not by the audacity of the candidate but by the stale familiarity of the entire affair. The United States, that great experimental republic, has long harboured a soft spot for the charismatic ignoramus. From the village idiot to the carnival barker, the American electorate has occasionally shown a peculiar fondness for the man who tells them what they want to hear, no matter how divorced from reality. The current crop of political performers is merely the latest iteration of a very old tradition. Andrew Jackson was a duellist and a slaveholder, not a scholar. The comparison is not exact, but the impulse is the same: a yearning for the authentic, the rough-hewn, the anti-intellectual.
But let us not comfort ourselves with the notion that this is a uniquely American disease. Britain, that scepter’d isle of parliamentary decorum and stiff-upper-lipped governance, has its own history of flirting with the vulgar. Was not the rise of the popular press in the late Victorian era a similar phenomenon? The Daily Mail, founded in 1896, was designed for the newly literate lower middle classes, a diet of sensation and scandal dressed up as news. It worked. It always works. The British public, like any public, enjoys a bit of theatre with its politics. But here is the crucial difference: our political system, for all its flaws, has retained a certain institutional resistance to the outright charlatan. Yes, we have had our share of rogues and eccentrics, from Horatio Bottomley to George Galloway. But the office of mayor in a major British city remains, by and large, the preserve of individuals who have at least passed through the crucible of local government or party machinery. Our media may froth at the mouth, but the levers of power are still greased with the old oil of establishment protocol.
The American system, by contrast, is uniquely vulnerable to the Celebrity Candidate. Its primaries are chaotic, its campaign finance laws a sieve, and its electorate increasingly fragmented into media silos. A reality show villain can buy airtime, hire a social media team, and tap into a reservoir of resentment that is wide and deep. He can promise to “drain the swamp” while standing up to his knees in it. The irony is lost on his supporters, who crave authenticity above all else, even if that authenticity is a carefully constructed fiction.
What does this portend? A further descent into the politics of personality, of course. The issues will be drowned out by the spectacle. The complexities of municipal governance: zoning laws, public transport funding, waste management. These are not made for prime time. A candidate who rants about “woke” indoctrination in schools will always draw a larger crowd than one who patiently explains the intricacies of the city bond rating. This is the death of civic discourse, and it is happening before our very eyes.
I am reminded of the late Roman Republic, when politicians like Clodius Pulcher used mobs and street theatre to advance their ambitions. The result was chaos, then civil war, then the Empire. I am not predicting the fall of the American republic, but I am pointing out the pattern. When the citizenry prefers entertainment to governance, the barbarians are not at the gates. They are on the ballot.
For now, we British can watch from across the pond with a mixture of horror and smugness. Our political ethics remain, for the moment, unimpeachable in comparison. But let us not become complacent. The infection of vulgar celebrity politics is a contagion that respects no borders. It is only a matter of time before a reality star with a talent for controversy and a gift for the glib sets his sights on a British council chamber. When he does, do not say I did not warn you.
