Democracy and Popular Culture Before Reform

The theatricality of modern politics is an axiom available to every headline writer, every talk show host, and every college professor. National and international politics have become a branch of theater which is a branch of advertising. And most people who bother to note this commonplace complain about it. With the presidency of a movie actor, the headline writers have tended more and more to acknowledge the metaphor that animates their own activity. The press with its words and pictures, the newsreel, and then television have very self-consciously assumed the function of the stage in this century. Politicians step in as its actors while ad agencies produce, and we the people quietly sequestered in our living rooms play an uneasy role as a dispersed and silent audience, the weakest component of a global metaphor that has been with us at least since Shakespeare's time.