Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Lights, camera, politics: the triumph of showbiz over argument

In the search for ratings, American democracy is losing the most basic of decencies

At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect in one another’. In the resulting pause and exhalation it felt as though the country had seen itself in a mirror and realised it looked hideous.

Unlike some of our MEPs, the candidates for US president only sparred verbally in St Louis. And nobody watching politics from the continent of Europe (Beppe Grillo anyone?) should be too sanguine that it won’t happen here. Nevertheless there is something especially noxious happening on American prime time.

If there is a central cause, it is the triumph of entertainment over politics. Long an American temptation, this season it has finally won through. In part because every body had been enjoying themselves so much that they failed to notice that the nation was losing.

Consider the state of political discussion further down the food chain from the presidential debates. Most of it makes the Clinton Trump debates look like Lincoln Douglas. Take a recent public exchange between left wing blowhard Cenk Uygur and conservative pundit Dinesh d’Souza (both men with substantial media followings). D’Souza was promoting a new film arguing that Hillary Clinton should be in prison; and before a large audience, live streamed, Uygur gleefully pointed out that D’Souza himself had been to prison and then used D’Souza’s recent divorce papers to suggest he had also beaten his wife.

Such a level of debate has become wholly normal in America. At the end of the hour, the host remarked that a lot of young people were watching. What, in closing, would the two men say to encourage more young people to get involved in politics? Amazingly both men answered, rather than doing what any decent person would have done, which is to have hung their head in shame and left the stage.


Douglas Murray and Xenia Wickett discuss reality TV politics


Why would anyone behave like this? The reason, alas, is straightforward.

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