In the 1990s, a new term was coined to describe
this phenomenon of populistainment: infotainment, entertainment-based news. When
the term infotainment ceased to be sufficient for political analysts to describe
new relationships between politics and the mass media, politainment surfaced.
The slogan “panem et circenses” or populistainment dates back to Antiquity. The
“entertainization” of politics has its rationality. If serving dopamine is the
only way to catch the attention of a bored brain, it is no surprise that many
politicians practice it. There are many reasons to detest populistainment.
Populists’ political actions are justified only by their success in seizing
power by means of an amusing spectacle, no matter what the actual effect on the
state is.
On the BBC, the Hungarian State Secretary for International Communication, Zoltan Kovacs, ridiculed questions about his leader Victor Orban ruling by decree, calling any kind of criticism of Hungary “political lynching”. This devoted much of the time in the interview to discussing this expression, instead of the actual character of the Hungarian regime. In Poland, the hard time experienced by patients and medical staff during the pandemic has been partly caused by the PiS government’s failure to reform the health care system. But this did not prevent the country’s president Andrzej Duda from taking part in an online challenge, performing rap about how difficult the work of medical staff is. The media discussed the lyrics he used for a good two weeks. He, not the doctors, won our attention. So, unfortunately, the times they are not “a-changin’”.
Where does populistainment come from? People have
demanded material goods and entertainment for centuries. Even the most
tyrannical authorities usually remembered to meet these expectations. In the
seventeenth century, for example, Blaise Pascal stated that it is the only thing
allowing the people of high condition not to think constantly about their
miserable lives. In the twentieth century, totalitarian Germany and Russia tried
to capture the attention of citizens through constant mobilization. In
democratic societies after 1945, various attempts were made to describe the
impact of entertainment on citizens. In 1960s, Guy Debord’s notion of a “society
of the spectacle” became fashionable, and two decades later, Neil Postman warned
that with the current trends we could “amuse ourselves to death”.
Populistainment is a new phase in the chain of these
developments. Some would say that there is no huge difference between Bill
Clinton playing Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on his saxophone on “The
Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992 and Donald Trump bringing the style of communication
of his television show “The Apprentice” directly to the presidential campaign.
Populistainment is a supplement to ideology and
traditionally understood party politics. Populists turned it all upside down,
they made politics a supplement to entertainment and show business. Precisely
this makes populistainment a new political phenomenon. It is as if they take
politics as imagined by the fifteenth-century Italian philosopher Niccolo
Machiavelli one step further. Machiavelli particularly unnerved his
contemporaries by claiming that political action is justified only by its result
and that its aim should be to preserve the wellbeing of the state.