Moisés Naím tells it in his most recent book,
The Revenge of the Powerful
.
In 1994, when he launched his candidacy for Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was a billionaire owner of a media empire: Mediaset.
The enormous success of Mediaset, as Naím explains, was due to a precise diagnosis: Berlusconi had realized at some point that the public television channel, the honorable RAI, had become a prodigy of boredom over the years.
For the vast majority of Italians, this programming devised by intellectuals and educators was indigestible;
Berlusconi understood this better than anyone, and he filled the airwaves with crude variety shows, Latin American soap operas and stupid series (or perhaps we could say serial stupidity).
“
Baywatch
”, writes Naím.
“Lots
of Baywatch
.”
Years later, faced with the ineffable reality of Berlusconi's reign, a group of Italian economists undertook the task of finding out the secret links that could exist between the citizens' votes and the presence of the prime minister's media empire.
In the territories where Mediaset had been established very early, they discovered, the vote for Berlusconi had predominated.
And then, by examining voting patterns, analyzing reading comprehension tests, and comparing numeracy skills, they came to a shocking conclusion: viewers who had been watching Mediaset programs for many years had less cognitive complexity than those who came to the news later. trash TV.
“Exposure to television entertainment,” the researchers concluded, “particularly at a very young age,
All populism, including the most dangerous ones, dreams of an uneducated or ignorant and, above all, gullible citizenry.
“I love poorly educated people,” Donald Trump once said to an ecstatic audience, and neither he nor the audience realized that the phrase was an insult.
Of course, now it is not necessary to invade people's homes with garbage television, since populisms produce garbage without the need for help: if there is any difference between our time and that of Berlusconi, it is that in those times the aspirants to lead us do not they had all become
performers
full-time, always appeasing the voracious monster of public opinion through entertainment and deliberate emptiness.
Berlusconi began to do so, perhaps because he had understood something before the others, but buffoons like him had not taken over our political map.
On the other hand, it is fair that we consider him a pioneer: he presaged Trump, who made the show a way of relating to the voter.
But Trump has since taken it upon himself to give the show a special twist, or to add an ingredient that gives his idea of the show a certain idiosyncratic shape: cruelty.
That's right: the entertainment that Trump invented for a good part of his electorate consisted of harming his opponents or enemies, real or perceived, always with an audience in mind.
Most of the time he did it through words, filling his speeches with racist or misogynistic comments that provoked the happy applause of the attendees, but sometimes he didn't even have to speak: in 2016 we saw him mocking with faces, like a little playground bully college, the disabilities of a
New York Times journalist
.
Later, when his administration locked immigrant children in cages at the border, when he tore families apart knowing full well that he was causing them irreparable suffering, it was impossible not to think that Trump was addressing his most loyal political base: the one who vociferated when called Mexicans rapists, the one that marked him when he referred to African countries as “shithole countries” (which we can imprecisely translate as “shithole countries”) or the one that applauded when Trump complained that Nigerian immigrants, after see life in the United States, they would never want to "go back to their shacks."
I don't know if Trump has actualized the power of hate speech for today, but I do know that he used it with impunity, or rather discovered that the most pernicious verbal attacks could be used without suffering (at least, apparently) political consequences.
Since then, the deterioration or degradation of the political world in the United States has been unstoppable, and we already know that this always has consequences in other latitudes.
A few months ago, when one of his supporters nearly beat Nancy Pelosi's husband to death with a hammer, the most despicable of Trump children endorsed a nefarious conspiracy theory that was not only homophobic and slanderous, but openly mocked pain. and the anguish of a family;
and those of us unlucky enough to remember remember the equally infamous conspiracy theory that Trump launched in 2020,
when he openly accused Joe Scarborough, one of his harshest critics, of having killed a woman twenty years ago: Lori Klausutis, Scarborough's assistant at the time.
Of course he had no proof, but that doesn't matter: the show (the performance) of unscrupulously harming one of his critics mattered.
Now, the two slanders, the first from the father and the recent from the son, have something in common.
Lori Klausutis's husband had to write to Jack Dorsey, then head of Twitter, asking him to remove Trump's tweets, which perverted a dead person's memory and hurt their surviving family.
Dorsey did not.
The current owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, went much further: he himself retweeted the conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, and to get an idea of the character, it is enough to say that this has not been his lowest moment in recent weeks. .
The distance between the two moments can also be a way to measure the deterioration of Twitter.
When he came to power in 2016, Trump gave new meaning to the relationship between entertainment and politics;
six years later,
I have thought about all this because a few days ago, just like last May, the ineffable Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, brought a hundred immigrants to Washington -Colombians among them- and left them in front of the residence of the Vice President Kamala Harris.
It's his way of teaching these Biden liberals who champion the idea of sanctuary cities a lesson.
But this time Abbott has done it at Christmas and in the midst of the harshest winter wave to hit the East Coast of the United States in many years: the next time we are told about the Christian values of the Republican Party, we will be entitled to a some skepticism.
Meanwhile, the truth is that Abbott has put on a show, and it's a show of cruelty.
The question is: who does it do it for?
Who's clapping?
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
is a writer.
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