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I have a nice example on how people will always choose celebrities over good politicians.
In Belgium, there is this political party NVA, who used to say that politicians shouldn't appear in entertainment programs. This party also lived by it. They only appeared in political debates. Back then that party was small.
At the time, there was this popular politician Steve Stevaert, of an opposing (big) party. He always appeared at TV entertainment shows, and people loved him. They thought he was a very sympathetic. People voted for him because they probably felt close to him.
NVA saw that their (in my eyes politically correct) strategy wasn't working. So one of their major politicians, Bart De Wever, started to appear in entertainment shows. Now this guy had a hidden talent: he could make really funny dry jokes, and people loved him for that. Because of his entertainment value, all kinds of shows invited him.
Guess what, that political party became huge, one of the biggest in Belgium. People voted for him.
So unless there is a law that forbids politicians to appear in entertainment shows, I guess people will vote for the ones who appear in the popular media. Sad but true.
To everybody considering this a good thing (and even to those considering this a bad thing), I suggest reading Neil Postman's excellent cautionary analysis Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 and subsequent revisions): basically he predicted that a 24-hour news cycle and bombastic personalities with debates framed in terms of fifteen-second sound-bites would result in politics becoming nothing more than a form of entertainment, and that citizens would begin to respond to it as such. That was with few-to-many traditional mass-media; with social media the tendency has become (counterintuitively) if anything even more heightened. It's a horrific state of affairs. Anyway, it’s a book I first read in 1998 and though written in the Regan years struck me as being unbelievably pertinent even to the world when I first read it, let alone now.
I remember that right after the Columbine mass-shooting in 1999 my best friend and I were sitting in his bedroom. We were late teenagers (18), expatriates living in Italy, getting our “international” news from the very first online news sources such as cnn.com and the bbc website. George W. Bush was clearly on track to become the Republican candidate and was equally clearly under the thumb of the NRA. I remember muttering that if the Democrats had any sense they'd deploy against him with a candidate with mass-market appeal... “Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Springer, and sod the consequences”. My friend, wise beyond his years, presciently remarked “Jerry Springer I shan't deign with a response, but Oprah Winfrey and the touchy-feely feel-good stuff of folks like Robin Williams is all that is bad about what is good about America... the day a party will nominate one of those to run as their candidate you'll know it's all over, the experiment of the Founding Fathers will have gone down the drain, it'll be the end of everything because the system will have the means but no incentive to recover”. Those words have haunted me ever since. I reminded him of that grim pronouncement of his just the other day (coincidentally the day Oprah gave that speech was also the exact same day he became a father) and he just looked at me with tired eyes that glasses over with sadness.
ridiculously how Americans are agitating for Oprah as the best chance to save us from Trump...just goes to show the sad state of affairs in US. Oprah and Trump are two sides of the same coin.
The much more common sentiment among my liberal friends is that after Trump they want someone who knows what the hell they are doing and Oprah is not that person. Maybe it's just the liberals I know but they have so far all been hostile to her running.
Fingers crossed, but then again, all the conservatives I know detested Trump too, and yet here we are.
If the field is fractured, a surprisingly small group of fans can push a highly disliked candidate to the top of the heap, and once that happens, the inexorable logic of the electoral system can make it difficult to reverse. (I'm thinking here of Trump, of course, but Clinton is almost as good an example.)
Speaking from the center, yes, I'd love to see someone who knows what they're doing. (But worst of all would be someone who knows what all of us our doing. If forced to vote in a Winfrey vs. Zuckerberg primary, I suppose I'd choose her).
Same - could be a bubble but I haven't seen anything supporting her running, just pieces on why it would be terrible if she did - which I agree with.
I think it's more the sad state of America's 2 party system - elections are less about voting for the "best" candidate, and more about voting for the least bad of the only 2 viable choices. A vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against your favorite of the main party candidates.
I think some sort of ranked voting system would be better.
Yes, let's trade one narcissist for another who is on the cover of every issue of her own magazine.
Are there really Americans calling for Oprah though, really?... I mean, who of your friends or family actually said that Oprah should become president? All I'm familiar with is the media that keeps talking about how not Oprah, but 'insiders' keep saying she should run. It's an absolute joke. To me it seems obvious that Oprah wants to run, and that there wasn't anyone calling for that until she started a media campaign of anonymous-insiders talking about her run for presidency.
I hate these self prophesying stories. You can hardly not respond to this nonsense, but responding to it doesn't seem to help either.
The American media in no way represents the American public.
I'm not sure that they are? Nobody asked for it, but the media started talking about it, for some reason.
I think part of why it still has some life, is that it is so outlandish to even think about (like Trump) - its great click bait.
> ridiculously how Americans are agitating for Oprah as the best chance to save us from Trump
It's actually not uncommon even in normal times for a bried “so and so for President” thing to pop up after a particular speech or event that has large viewership in which someone has a performance which resonates with a segment of the population.
While I’m mildly concerned about it, I’d be cautious to give it much weight unless it doesn't fade in a couple of weeks.
Guys, can we just, as a society, agree not to elect any more celebrities to public office.
I just want my next president to be boring. Just some dweeby guy/gal in a suit who isn’t part of some political dynasty, that went to school, studied hard and got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one.
The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal instead of throwing a tantrum because the last guy tried to fix health insurance.
I agree with your post, but:
> The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good
It just isn't. The American political system is one of the core reasons why the country is so divided. Why Trump got elected at all, despite being supported by the minority. Why people are now talking about Oprah running.
The American political system was broken before Trump. The current president is one of the gross symptoms of a much more insidious disease; one of the roots of that disease is in fact, that political system.
Of course, it's not some tv star that'll fix it when it benefits them. In fact, statistically it's unlikely you'll find a president (who got elected, ergo benefited from the system) who will change that.
I don't even think should expect a president to have a law degree. Many east asian countries and germany have engineering phd's as their leader.
> got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician.
I hate the preponderance of lawyers in the U.S. political system. I would much prefer engineers, who have experience building large systems, and executives who have experience managing large organizations.
But I agree with the desire for boring, "dweeby", competent people.
⎡I just want my next president to be boring. Just some dweeby guy/gal in a suit who isn’t part of some political dynasty, that went to school, studied hard and got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one.⎦
If something happens to Trump you might get your wish in Mike Pence.
I think it sort of depends on the person but I mostly agree. There is massive power in someone who truly believes "anything is possible" and takes massive action on extremely high goals they set for themselves and achieve. The Napoleon-Hill-Approved humans who let nothing get in the way of their self-designed "definite life purpose". Better examples of celebs-turned-political are Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who put the effort into learning the material and acknowledging the crowd.
Although Trump and Oprah are undoubtedly the kinds of action-takers who make their extremely high goals a reality, in my opinion they both lack one or two other vital presidential qualities that come with their personality types. Trump lacks the humility to admit what he doesn't know and learn it— instead he lashes out on Twitter, taking every unimportant comment personally; he is always thinking about competition and personal problems rather than considering all-inclusive encouragement. Oprah has the opposite problem; I can't judge her until she's given a chance, but I imagine her relying too much on people-pleasing, and would perhaps struggle to deal with constant decisions millions of people will dislike her for no matter what she chooses (unless she can afford a few hundred million "free cars" to give away to her new audience).
Since Ronald Reagan there's been a precedent set that it isn't a bad thing for conservatives to have previously been in showbiz. Same is definitely true on the "other" side.
I honestly would prefer to see some salt-of-the-earth person not involved in politics elected to office ala Ricky Muir in Australia (where I'm from).
I don't necessarily think lack of political experience is a bad thing for a politician to have. Many of the positions which hold the requisite political knowledge and support elected officials are hired, not elected.
Extremely strong concur. I want someone competent, qualified, and trying to be basically decent to Americans and non-Americans. There are many elected officials in high office in both parties who would roughly fulfill that description.
BoringPol 2020 :)
I hope we will at some point get some diversity in the background of politicians. Seems there are way too many lawyers.
This is a website for tech and for startup culture, hosted by an incubator. A lot of startup culture is about "disrupting" industries, reshaping society, and streamlining the inefficiencies in the ways things are currently done. But politically, I find the discourse here pretty uncritical of the status quo, aside from a bit of libertarian contrarianness, which doesn't have any ideas that fall that far away from business as usual.
> The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal
What do you consider normal in American politics? Here's what I think has been pretty normal historically:
- wealth inequality - war - corruption - union busting - labour exploitation of poor people and immigrants - racism - in recent decades: the decline of government spending on public services and investment in infrastructure and other projects that benefit the average citizen (rather than just subsidies to the already wealthy) - interference in international politics, often for the worse (installing military dictatorships, sometimes only to go back to war with the same regimes, fighting expensive pointless wars against an ideology across the globe, offering unreasonable foreign aid to poor nations which cripple their economies, pressuring privatisation via IMF and other international bodies which cripples economies) - as with the last point, I would have put this higher on the list but I figured it would make this comment even more unpopular than it already will probably be: genocide
I think many of these normalities of US politics in recent times have sort of inevitably led to the state it is currently in. So the election of celebrities at this point is something which, to me, seems to be more or less a continuation of US politics as normal. The absurdity of it all has just been allowed to go this far.
Saying that you want things to go back to "normal" really says something about how you have been affected by all the above points. It seems, for much of middle class America, that the detrimental consequences of past policy have only just now started to encroach on the parts of society that were previously protected from it.
So now that we are finally upset in this space of tech startups that has so much power and a desire to make radical change in the world, why ask for "normal" again? Why not ask for a radical change to a new kind of politics? Why can't we be critical and wonder whether the current system really is all that good as we're told, or whether the faults in the system are actually much worse than we previously thought?
I don't want another celebrity present. I also don't want anyone like the corrupt warmongers of the past either. I don't see why we'd want a president at all really.
> You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one.
Oh you mean the guy or gal who ships your jobs overseas with a smile?
>The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good
It's actually fucking atrocious: 2 parties, and you depend on the money of the elite to become elected. If our system was decent, people wouldn't have looked towards Trump to reject it. We voted for Democrats in 2008 to fix healthcare, and the public option was denied by Lieberman and Ben Nelson (former insurance executive).
As an outsider I have always found it interesting Oprah has a huge gathering from her talk shows. While there are stories outlining her rise, I wanted to see some of her "best" interviews, especially during her early years. But Google or YT have not been very helpful.
She's not a good interviewer. Her success has nothing to do with any kind of interviewing skill, it has to do with choosing hot button issues and topics that her audience find compelling. That's it. That's why there's so much woo-woo on her show over the years, and so many total fluff interviews, and so much panic about child safety. Because it was a daytime show aimed at housewives.
Oprah is less of an interviewer than a cooperative promoter for those selling feel-good narratives, social panic, and (often health-related) woo.
The first is probably mostly harmless, the second and third decidedly not.
Her shows over the years have largely been about reaffirming people's delusional beliefs for headlines. But that's what gets the viewers.
In her early years, her show was more like a salacious talk show, like Jerry Springer.
Dave Rubin has a good take on a potential presidential run by Oprah:
He makes some great points. The issues no longer matters for US politicians. All that matters is their cult of personality building around politicians.
If it's Oprah vs Trump 2020, I feel like we're rapidly approaching Fahrenheit 451 crazyland politics (just specifically the politicians, nothing else about the book).
Oprah v Trump would be straight-up two cable television stars running for “leader of the free world”. (A phrase that already sounds even more ridiculous than it did a few years ago.)
One popularized the racist Birther / “born in Kenya” meme. The other is biggest promoter behind Dr Phil, probably the most prominent modern American quack doctor.
They’d be representing opposite parties, but they have a lot in common. Both have publicly promoted the uniquely damaging lie that vaccines cause autism.
Both are media people first and foremost, hucksters, promoters, peddlers of false hopes and false fears.
Waves of dangerous Mexicans are not, in fact, “pouring across our southern border”. Dr Phil does not actually have a magic solution for weight loss. Trump does not now, and never did have a plan to “Make America Great Again”.
It’s all for show.
—
Just curious, if it comes to Trump v Oprah 2020, how many of you currently in America would consider starting or joining a venture outside the US?
I would say that one very important mitigating factor is that Oprah has clearly demonstrated that she's capable of delegating tasks in order to achieve something larger than what would otherwise be possible with the force of her own personality. This is a material and important skill in a leader. People's view of trump as a success at building businesses by any reasonable measure is absurd but Oprah has been wildly successful by many metrics the right has consistently agitated for in their leaders.
To be clear I'm a pretty staunch socialist so I find little solace in the idea that she could be president, but I also think it's not quite right to say that they are steps down the same path: if I had to make this sort of a metaphor it would be that Trump yields Fahrenheit 451 and Oprah yields a cyberpunk dystopia something akin to Blade Runner.
For those not familiar with Bradbury's work, Seth Macfarlane's comment is a concise summary of the problem:
"Oprah is beyond doubt a magnificent orator. But the idea of a reality show star running against a talk show host is troublingly dystopian. We don’t want to create a world where dedicated public service careers become undesirable and impractical in the face of raw celebrity."
I can see the Dem machine in action now. If Oprah were to run, they would run her out of town. I think they are afraid of her because she'd provide a weak candidate against Trump. I have read a few are actually wishfully hoping H runs again. But who do the Dems even have? I mean Warren is a bit too left for most Americans. Bernie, I don't think he'll go another go after they threw him under the bus like that.
To what degree are Facebook and Twitter responsible for this?
More Idiocracy than F451, IMO.
And not just the politicians.
It’s closer to Idiocracy than Fahrenheit 451.
I'm no fan of Oprah or even know her politics but it's funny that when someone says "I'm considering a run for President" you can expect a queue of negative news articles.
Makes me wonder if they're sponsored by political opponents. I find it hard to believe that Slate had this story in the queue and that her announcement was simply a coincidence.
Or does the news media simply want to ride the Oprah for President wave?
It is possible that it is simply an attack peace but I don't think so. Opera is now a person of greater interest. That means that more people are likely to read an article about her. Therefore news sites want to write things about her.
I had no idea about some of the connections brought up in the article. All I had to say was lol. She is opposite of Trump but still share same attributes: outsider from DC, rich, and media savvy.
It's not really her fault that she took off with her unscientific stories. There definitely was an audience ready for it. People usually hear what they want to hear. Or so I'm told.
Edit
> She is a kid of opposite of Trump in a way. Outsider. Rich. Media savvy.
What? Those are all traits they have in common. Not really opposites. Do you mean she's a liberal counterpart to Trump?
Yeah, I agree, it's not really a fraudster's fault that people fall for their lies. If people are prone to fall for fraud, how could it be the responsibility of others to not abuse that susceptibility?