Somebody once said that politics is Hollywood for the ugly.
The modern version: Politics is Tiktok for the insane.
The public parts of politics serve ABSOLUTELY NO FUNCTION. Congress and the executive have deliberately surrendered their own legal power to the courts and Deepstate. When they couldn’t surrender it to another branch, they placed non-legal but totally binding fences around their own power, declaring ALL genuine budget decisions permanently off-limits for legislative control. Budgets simply double every year.
Politicians make noise to bring in money for themselves and their sponsors. They are Influencers, nothing more.
In one of the three preserved 1948 essays by Bert Andrews, he marked the start of Government By Publicity. He thought Howard Hughes invented it and Harold Stassen perfected it. Stassen had no policy agenda at all. He used the mechanisms of Congress and elections solely to make noise for his own benefit. Obviously politicians had been making noise before 1948, but Andrews was marking a step function in the process.
The media is publicity ABOUT publicity. But there’s an important difference between the two types of influencers. When media gives us the latest doings of movie stars or Instagrammers, media honestly describes its talk as gossip and doesn’t pretend to be serving a higher purpose. When media passes along the latest doings of politicians, it dishonestly describes the talk as “information” which is “needed for an informed electorate”, and claims to be “serving a constitutional purpose”.
Polistra's Mill 