By EUGENIO BUCCI*
The prism of entertainment, which redefined the social form of democracy, is our childhood disease, as laughable as it is deadly
Why did free elections begin to vote for candidates opposed to free elections? What led rights-based regimes to establish leaders who sabotage rights?
For a few years now, these questions have not left the agenda. In 2018, two Harvard professors, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, released a book that challenged the reader: How do democracies die? (Companhia das Letras). Analyzing a strange period, with Donald Trump at the head of fake news and authoritarian outbursts, the duo of authors caught the democratic State of law eaten from within. The danger would not come from outside, but from within.
That same year, 2018, Brazil elected a guy to the Palácio do Alvorada who praised torturers, insulted journalists and discredited science. In 2019, a collection also appeared in the form of a question: Democracy at risk? (Companhia das Letras), signed by more than two dozen names. Also in 2019, I asked another question myself: Is there democracy without factual truth? (Letters and Colors Station). Four years later, in December 2023, the magazine The Economist, resumed the concern in an extensive article: “Is a healthy democracy that is not based on facts possible?” (“Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts?”). Now, another question has just come out of print: Why didn't Brazilian democracy die?, by Marcus André Melo and Carolos Pereira (Companhia das Letras).
Have we found the answers? Maybe not, but we keep trying. In a recent work, fake democracy (Trace), Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman show that the new autocratic regimes have learned to pretend that they are democratic. In Biography of the Abyss (Harper Collins), 2023, Thomas Traumann and Felipe Nunes show that extremism has grown, desertified the center, ended reasonableness and generated polarization – which, for many people, leads to political violence.
All of these studies are worth reading. They have part, at least part, of the reason. None of them, however, delve into the less apparent – and perhaps the deeper – cause of democracy's malaise. This cause lies in social communication.
I could summarize it as follows: the public debate of our days is not resolved in journalistic discourse, in the factual record or in the rhetoric of critical argument, but in the language of entertainment, which has become the hegemonic standard in the so-called market of ideas.
Régis Debray once stated that we are the civilization of the image. He was also right, or part of the reason: yes, we are the civilization of the image, but not of any image; We are the civilization of manufactured images to entertain us, until they kill us with pleasure. We are the civilization that looks at politics through the lens of entertainment. We look at – and consume – everything through the lens of entertainment. In other words, we are an infantilized civilization.
Audiences savor politics in the same way they savor a horror film or a game of war, just as they spend the night in raves and become addicted to social networks. Electoral campaigns are efficient when they excite the people's senses - and the people respond positively when they crowd marches-Happening and distributes memes in the family group. It is like public entertainment that power requests support – and gets it.
The language of entertainment blurs the distinctions between fact and fiction (hence the increasing discredit of factual truth). To the same extent, by focusing on intermediation between State and society, it dilutes the border that separates politics from fanaticism. Seen from this angle, even the phenomenon of polarization gains more clarity: its fuel has nothing to do with any ballast of objectivity, but with passionate oratories, which entertain, seduce and ignite hearts.
That said, let's ask again: why do democratic decisions elect the opposite of democracy? Very simple: because your preferred mediator is entertainment. The desire to have enough as if there was no tomorrow, in the style of a night out in Las Vegas, is worth more than the boring abstraction that was called the common good. Performance scenes convince more than hundreds of government programs; the bloody narratives are worth more than a thousand images, the same ones that were already worth more than a million words.
The public, relegated to the status of spoiled children, watches as spectators the farce of which they are the protagonist. Politics is losing its essence of collective construction (which has to do with work) and is taking on the contours of a circus attraction (which has to do with the consumption of emotions). There are no more activists, just social media propagandists.
In 1920, Vladimir Lenin diagnosed leftism with the infantile disease of communism. It no longer matters whether he was right or wrong; leftism and communism became extinct. Now, the prism of entertainment, which has redefined the social form of democracy, is our childhood disease, as laughable as it is deadly.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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