From Gurri to Postman: Why Politics Feels Like Reality TV

What counts as charismatic in the Internet age?

Why do modern political campaigns feel more like reality TV than serious debates about policy? In the Internet age, voters are no longer swayed by polished platforms or institutional endorsements. Instead, they crave authenticity.

As I reflected on the recent election results, my initial focus was on coalition dynamics within the Democratic Party. But the more I think about the role of aesthetics and different brands of charisma. I’ve been thinking about how our public discourse has become more about spectacle than substance in a world that resembles the one that Neil Postman prophesied (and warned about) in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Martin Gurri’s insights into the collapse of institutional authority, which I referenced in one of the posts above, have also been kicking around my head.

Consider Donald Trump’s unfiltered speeches or AOC’s informal Instagram Lives. These aren’t just campaign strategies—they’re performances tailored to an electorate increasingly distrustful of polished politicians. In this post, I’ll summarize Gurri and Postman’s works, provide my own reflections, and incorporate some resonant punditry along the way.

Gurri’s crisis of authority

I’ll start with Gurri. For whatever reason, his thesis is big in Silicon Valley circles but hasn’t penetrated the progressive political arena that I work in. Here’s Rob Wiblin’s summary of Gurri’s work from a preface to a 2019 interview at 80,000 Hours:

Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What’s the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?

Martin Gurri spent decades as a CIA analyst and in his 2014 book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, predicted political turbulence for an entirely different reason: new communication technologies were flipping the balance of power between the public and traditional authorities.

In 1959 the President could control the narrative by leaning on his friends at four TV stations, who felt it was proper to present the nation’s leader in a positive light, no matter their flaws. Today, it’s impossible to prevent someone from broadcasting any grievance online, whether it’s a contrarian insight or an insane conspiracy theory.

I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland (which is fantastic and I’m excited to write about at a later date) and I am struck by how much the world used to work this way, especially with respect to Vietnam. There really was an elite cabal suppressing information about Vietnam that involved politicians, journalists, and pundits. As that cabal’s monopoly on information broke down, rage rippled throughout the country, tearing apart the New Deal Democratic coalition and paving the way for President Nixon.

To help illustrate the shift Gurri’s describing, let’s look at the difference between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Here’s Scott Alexander from his review of Gurri’s book:

With the beginning of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century, bloggers and social media influencers short-circuited the established hierarchy. America's crimes and failures in Vietnam had percolated slowly and inconsistently through word of mouth, with most people content to believe whatever sanitized version the nightly news told them. But when America had crimes and failures in Iraq, leaked photos of torture in Abu Ghraib spread instantly across the Internet; there was no opportunity for elites in government and media to come to an agreement on how much of it they were going to share or what the narrative should be.

In Wiblin’s wording, “We are now free to see our leaders as the flawed human beings they always have been, and are not amused. … In this model, politics won’t return to its old equilibrium any time soon. The leaders of tomorrow will need a new message and style if they hope to maintain any legitimacy in this less hierarchical world.”

If this summary intrigues you and you want to hear more, I recommend checking out the full 80,000 Hours interview with Gurri (transcript here). He also had an hour long roundtable after the interview, which I haven’t had the chance to listen to yet, but it looks like it engages well with counter arguments.

Postman’s prophecy fulfilled

I recently read Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and, while I have my quibbles, it feels prophetic. For those unfamiliar, Postman is an educator and cultural commentator who wrote in the 1980s about the shift from a print-based culture to a television-dominated one. He felt that this shift has turned public discourse into entertainment, undermining societal capacity for rational thought and serious debate.

I remember that Ezra Klein wrote about Postman at the NYT and got a lot of grief from media studies academic people who don’t like his work. A friend of mine who got a PhD in Political Communications, also loves Postman but his graduate advisor dismissed Amusing Ourselves out of hand.

To me, it’s an example of how specialists can be too close to an issue and miss the forest for the trees. Postman is ultimately a cultural pundit, rather than someone making falsifiable, testable assumptions, so I get how other scholars can roll their eyes or be jealous of the attention he receives. And sure, he over-valorizes the print culture of the past.

But Postman’s core contention seems so correct that if there’s a critique to be made it’s that it’s a boring observation. Donald Trump is the reality TV President-Antichrist that Postman foretold decades ago.

Mark Oppenheimer doesn’t reference Postman in this piece about how charisma explains the 2024 election, but he perfectly describes how politics works in this entertainment-addicted culture:

The question is often put, “Whom would you rather get a beer with?” I would phrase it differently: “Whom would you rather watch on TV as you drink beers?” I strongly suspect that even many Kamala Harris voters would rather kick back and watch a highlight reel of Trump than one of Harris. What would be on her highlight reel? What witty rejoinder, fine turn of phrase, impassioned peroration, spontaneous interaction, unexpected tomfoolery, or poignant story?

Permanently anti-establishment politics?

Samuel Hammond beat me to the Gurri-2024 Election connection, unfortunately (I promise I started drafting this before his November 19th publication date):

Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.

Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?

Sure, 2024 was an “anti-establishment” election and incumbents are being pummeled all over the world. But the Gurri thesis suggests that we’re moving towards perennially anti-establishment politics.

This worries me – it seems like American politics are moving to mirror Latin American politics (see the Brian Winter tweet below), complete with polarization, personality cults, and huge pendulum swings. As institutional norms decline, the very strong institutions and civil society that have distinguished American politics (including during the first Trump term) seem to be decaying. Even when those institutions remain strong, the trust in them has decayed. All of this is bad.

Do Democrats need to change their positions on anything?

All of this suggests that voters just want an outsider. If so, is that showing that the real issue here is just style? Could Democrats solve their problem by just running more outraged outsider types, or “populists” like Trump? Post-election, progressives have used this kind of point to essentially argue that there’s no need for Democrats to moderate on policy, they just need to have a clearer, less garbled brand of “what they’re about” that foregrounds left-leaning economic policy.

There’s conflicting evidence here. The Bernie Moment was relatively brief – he was in Congress for a long time before his 2016 primary challenge and in 2024 he ran behind Kamala in Vermont. On the other hand, AOC ran ahead of Kamala. As always, Ezra Klein is on the beat and had a long dialogue with Bernie advocate Faiz Shakir exploring all of these points.

To some extent, the aesthetic element is downstream of the cultural extremism and ideological conformity enforced in the national Democratic Party brand. AOC is a pretty rare exception of someone who is able to run ahead of her party while still checking most of the boxes that The Groups want her to. She also has the luxury of running in NYC, I don’t see her winning in swing districts.

Point is, as anyone who has worked directly with working class people can tell you, if you talk like the highly educated elite consensus in the Democratic Party you sound like a weird robot. If you don’t, you get bad press that distracts from the point you’re trying to make. Think of the backlash from The Groups to Biden using the noun “illegal” at the State of the Union. I worked with immigrants with a variety of legal statuses for years (undocumented, asylum seeker, refugee, etc.) and many used that term, including as a noun to describe themselves (e.g., soy ilegal).

It is not impossible to validate voters’ concerns and redirect some of their more retrograde impulses and language without seeming like a scold. But it is hard! And it’s harder if you have 100 groups ready to pounce on the slightest misstep there, which further distracts from voters’ actual concerns (which are not related to questions like whether people should say “unhoused” vs. “homeless” vs. “person experiencing homelessness”).

But Democrats also do need to accept that on some issues, like immigration and crime, they are just out of step with public opinion and no amount of aesthetic shifts will change voters’ accurate perceptions of the party. Josh Barro says “Democrats will not win by changing the subject.”

For example, Kamala Harris refused to endorse Proposition 36 in California (which raised some penalties for drug crimes and shoplifting) even though it ended up passing 70-30. As Barro puts it, “If Democrats want to rehabilitate the party’s image on crime and disorder, they have to be willing to get on the popular side of 70-30 policy issues, even if they’re going to upset some activists on their side. Harris couldn’t even do that.” Yglesias calls out the same dynamic as “the new politics of evasion.” In a recent mailbag post, Yglesias backs some of this up to data, suggesting that the problem isn’t that Democrats message is garbled, it’s that it’s unpopular. He cites this Third Way poll:

What this poll shows is Americans accurately viewing Kamala as a middle-of-the-road Democrat (literally halfway between fully liberal and fully in the middle). Trump is seen as being a bit more conservative than Kamala is liberal, but the voters also describe themselves as being center-right. And note that these are voters in battleground states, so they’re more likely to resemble the kind of swing voters Dems need to pick up.

My takeaways

I’ll admit, I found that poll above surprising. I’ve bought into some of the idea that Democrats struggle with having a coherent and legible brand that captures people’s attention enough so that they know their popular policy positions. This evidence suggests that’s not true.

But I do still think there’s something important here about aesthetics and charisma. Maybe it’s just the simple observation that Trump punches above his weight because he’s charismatic and entertaining. Populist movements globally and historically seem to grow around charismatic individuals and then fizzle out when that person leaves the stage.

Overall, I think the Faiz Shakirs of the world are on to something. They’re picking up on the ways that the national Democratic brand is not compelling and that anti-establishment vibes are. Naturally, they’re selecting charismatic examples (Bernie, AOC) that are from their side of the political spectrum. But I think the post-Postman entertainment/charisma analysis is a bit closer to the mark than the “we just need to all be Bernie Sanders” analysis.

Maybe all of this is just a convoluted way to say that Kamala Harris was a bad and uncharismatic candidate. Which people have known for a while. After all, she was the first to drop out in the 2020 primary. Lots of the pressure for Biden to stay in the 2024 race stemmed from the idea that she was the obvious alternative and would do worse.

But I do think the lesson should be a bit broader than “run someone who’s more charismatic.” Gurri’s work helps us understand what kind of charisma Democrats should be looking for. Obama ran on some outsider “fix government” aesthetics, but was also a traditionally strong orator and charismatic in a classic “politician” mode. Given that Democrats lean more establishment, it makes sense that those who rise through the ranks would have traditionally polished public speaking skills, well-crafted policy positions, and strong institutional endorsements.

But maybe those are all holdovers from a previous era’s definition of what’s entertaining or who’s charismatic. I don’t know that JFK’s political dynasty charm would play as well in a televised debate as it did against Nixon in 1960. In the internet era, I think people are craving something less formal.