Beppo Grillo is one of Italy’s most famous comics. He is also one of Italy’s most influential political commentators. His blog attracts 160,000 hits daily, and if he could run for prime minister (he can’t, because of a criminal record), more than half of Italy’s voters, according to a poll last year, would have considered voting for him.
Grillo is yet another reminder of a modern phenomenon: the important role of comedians in contemporary politics. Until a few years ago, the one TV program most Mexicans turned to for political information was called The Morning Quickie, broadcast from 6-10 am. The host, interviewer, and main commentator was Victor Trujillo, better known as Brozo the Clown, adorned with a green wig and a red rubber nose. It was Brozo the Clown who exposed a major corruption scandal in the office of a former Mexico City mayor.
While staid TV pundits ask the usually vapid questions during presidential debates in the United States, candidates know that the really important thing is to get laughs on the comedy shows of David Letterman or Jay Leno. And, for several years, American liberals have looked to Jon Stewart, another comic talent, for critical political commentary.
Of course, comic entertainment in politics is not just a modern phenomenon. Nero was a murderer who understood that he had to amuse the masses to gain popular support. Then there is the long tradition of the court jester with license to criticize the despot by sweetening his barbs with jokes. The annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, where the president is lampooned by the press, is a relic of this custom.
In the US, especially, the borderlines between showbiz and politics (or indeed religion) have always been porous. The similarities between the variety show, the evangelical meeting, and the party convention are striking.
Europeans like to sneer at American political jamborees as being hopelessly vulgar. In fact, democracy demands a degree of showmanship and pizzazz; politicians need to appeal to the mass of voters, and not just to an elite, which can afford to ignore hoi polloi. To be utterly boring, holding forth for hours on end, regardless of entertainment value, is the privilege of autocrats.
Only communist rulers could force millions of people to buy their complete works, filled with wooden ideas written in turgid prose.
The problem with many democratic politicians today is that they have become almost as dull as the old communist autocrats. Most, especially in Europe, are professional politicians with no experience apart from working the levers of party machines. Gone, for the most part, are the colorful rogues and public-spirited idealists who used to liven up parliamentary politics. Like bureaucrats, professional politicians have mastered the art of saying nothing interesting in public. They are managed by equally professional press handlers, masters of spin and the television sound bite.
In these dying days of serious newspaper journalism, slick television shows, packaged by highly-paid anchormen – who never utter an original thought themselves, and would never expect a politician to do so – are the only venues where professional politicians feel secure enough to “face the public. As a result, the public is turned off. Not since the 1930s has popular disgust with politicians in Europe, the US, as well as Japan, run so high. This is dangerous, because such sentiments can end in disgust with liberal democracy itself.
Does the future belong, then, to the clowns, the anarchic blogosphere, the anti-politicians, and the populist showmen who entertain the masses with jokes, slurs, and indiscretions on TV channels, which some of them actually own? If the success of a TV pundit with a red rubber nose is a rebuke to the dull and fawning anchormen, the political success in recent years of entertainers, demagogues, and public figures who make a virtue of their indiscretion is a slap in the face of the professional political class which they profess to despise.
The recent re-election of the great showman Silvio Berlusconi illustrates this perfectly. Although none of the aspiring candidates for the US presidency can match him in terms of zaniness, similar trends are plain to see. John McCain managed to defeat his more conventional Republican rivals by seeming to be totally different from them: a maverick who says what he damned well wants, a tough guy with the knowing wink of the old ladies’ man.
Barack Obama, at least when he began his campaign, had all the charisma of the holy roller, turning on the crowds with the rhetorical spark of a great evangelist. That is why he barged his way past Hillary Clinton, the consummate operator of the party machine.
In some ways, Obama’s candidacy illustrates the problems facing our democracies today. People don’t trust the professionals. But electing a clown is not the answer either. Obama happily combines showmanship and seriousness in a way that could inject new life into the democratic system.
But he has been maneuvered into a peculiar dilemma. Attacked for being shallow, indiscreet, and flashy by the Hillary camp, he has toned down his revivalist rhetoric, and adopted a more sober, more cautious, more professional air. Yet, by doing so, he may have made himself less popular, and is being accused of elitism to boot. Here is one case where a bit more vulgar showbiz may be exactly what democracy requires.
Ian Buruma is Professor of human rights at Bard College. His most recent book is “Murder in Amsterdam: The Killing of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. This article is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate, www.project-syndicate.org.
