On Politics as a Spectacle
1 Introductory Remarks
2 Background
3 Entertainment as Democratic Corruption
4 Entertainment as Political Adaptation
1 Introductory Remarks
In recent years, political life in liberal democracies has come to resemble a continuous spectacle. Election campaigns unfold as narrative arcs; political leaders are assessed as personalities rather than officeholders; debates are consumed through clips, edits, and viral moments rather than sustained argument. Outrage, humour, and emotional intensity circulate faster than policy, while political legitimacy appears increasingly bound to visibility, engagement, and attention. This transformation is often described as Politics as Entertainment or Politainment: a mode of political communication in which political actors, events, and conflicts are organised according to the logics of mass media and popular culture. Politics becomes legible not through institutional processes or deliberative reasoning but through performance, narrative, and emotion. In this environment, leaders function as brands, campaigns function as content streams and citizens function as audiences whose primary political action consists in watching, sharing, and reacting. We are but witnesses to the destruction of democracy.
At first glance, this phenomenon appears uniquely modern, driven by social media platforms, algorithmic feeds, and the collapse of traditional journalistic gatekeeping. Yet the relationship between politics and entertainment is far older. From the theatrical assemblies of Ancient Athens to the Roman republican spectacle, to the revolutionary festivals of eighteenth-century France, political authority has long relied on performance, symbolism, and emotional mobilisation. What distinguishes the present moment is not the existence of the spectacle as such, but its centrality: entertainment has become the dominant condition under which politics is encountered, understood, and evaluated.
This major shift in the late twentieth century has transformed the very form of public discourse. Under broadcast media, politics increasingly prioritizes image over argument, emotion over reason and immediacy over continuity. A culture shaped by such entertainment values might remain politically active, yet it loses the capacity for seriousness, judgement, and sustained attention. Now in the early twenty-first century, we can identify an even more dramatic change in public discourse via social media. Digital platforms intensify many of the previous threats to our participation in democratic practices: politics is delivered through emotional, fragmented, and fast visuals. The world’s political affairs now compete with other forms of entertainment for attention in an economy governed by clicks, shares, and watch-time. In such a context, the line between political engagement and political consumption becomes increasingly difficult to draw. This raises a set of urgent and contested questions:
Has the transformation of politics into entertainment strengthened democratic participation by lowering barriers to entry and expanding access to political discourse?
Has it hollowed out democratic power by replacing deliberation with spectacle, and judgement with reaction?
Does politainment function as a new and effective language of mass politics, or does it mark the erosion of politics as meaningful collective activity?
Can liberal democracy survive without seriousness, patience, and sustained attention— or has entertainment become the unavoidable medium of political life in late modern societies?
The purpose of this prompt is not to offer immediate answers, but to frame these questions historically, philosophically, and structurally. By examining the media-theoretical diagnosis of politics as entertainment, the critique of spectacle as democratic corruption, and the counterclaim that entertainment represents political adaption rather than decline, this debate asks whether the rise of politainment reflects the failure of democratic politics— or its transformation.
2 Background
Section 2.1: Neil Postman and the Medium as Politics
Any serious examination of politics as entertainment must begin with Neil Postman and his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s central claim is not simply that political discourse has become shallow, sensationalist or unserious, but that the dominant media of a society fundamentally shapes what politics can be. Media, in this sense, is not a neutral conduit of information; it structures cognition, defines legitimacy, and determines which forms of knowledge appear coherent and persuasive. Postman’s argument emerges from the tradition of media ecology, influenced by thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, who famously claimed that “the medium is the message.” For Postman, each communication technology privileges certain modes of thought while marginalising others. Print culture, which dominated political life from the Enlightenment through to the nineteenth century, encouraged linear reasoning, abstraction, and sustained attention. Parliamentary debate, constitutional argument, and legal reasoning were all well-suited to a print-based public sphere that rewarded coherence, evidence, and logical continuity. However, the advent of technology, and its influence in our cognition, is a Faustian trade. With the written word, the oral tradition was lost; with the printing press, mass dissemination of information became prevalent; and with the television, media became banal. Moreover, television operates according to a radically different epistemology. It privileges image over text. Suddenly, long, continuous and logical content is trumped by immediate, emotional, and novel visuals. In a television dominated culture, information must be visually compelling, quickly digestible, and entertaining to survive. As Postman writes, television “redefines the meaning of public discourse by packaging every form of communication in the format of entertainment.” Politics, education, religion, and journalism are not abolished, but transformed: they must conform to the logic of the medium to remain visible at all.
This analysis, admittedly, is decades old. However, Postman’s insight and analysis are arguably more important today than they were at the time of the book’s publication. To extend his analysis to our modern media landscape, we engage in a Faustian sacrifice of our attention-span for trivial contentment; our epistemology is threatened to move beyond image, that is beyond reality, as artificial intelligence enters our media landscape. With our epistemological processes now imprisoned into a shortened time space and our public discourse and societal reasonings now perpetually polarized to the detriment of democracy and meaning. We have sacrificed truth and consensus on reality, and from their grave we draw the fruit of constant entertainment and pleasure.
Section 2.2: From Broadcast Media to Algorithmic Spectacle
Although Postman’s critique was rooted in the age of broadcast television, the logic he identified has intensified under the algorithms of digital media. Contemporary platforms do not merely transmit entertainment; they optimise for it. Political content now competes directly with all other forms of leisure within a single, continuous attention economy. Visibility is governed not by editorial judgment or institutional norms, but by engagement metrics: clicks, shares and watch time.
Empirical evidence illustrates the scale of this shift. Most adults now encounter political news through social media platforms where algorithms prioritise emotionally resonant and visually engaging content. Among younger demographics, short-form video platforms are now the primary sources of political information, collapsing the distinction between political communication and entertainment consumption. In such an environment, political content must be instantly legible, emotionally charged, and narratively simple to circulate. This marks a transition from editorial gatekeeping to algorithmic gatekeeping. Under the former, journalistic institutions filtered political information according to professional norms of relevance, verification, and public interest. Under the latter, content is filtered according to behavioural data. The result is not necessarily misinformation, but misprioritisation. Political issues are valued less by their structural importance than by their entertainment value. Postman’s warnings thus appear prophetic: When politics is organised according to entertainment logic, it becomes fragmented into moments rather than processes. Policy disappears behind personality; governance recedes behind campaign theatre. Political judgment becomes reactive rather than reflective, oriented towards spectacle rather than consequence. As Postman observed, “we do not argue with propositions; we laugh, we feel, we applaud.” Politics becomes something one experiences rather than something one does. It becomes entertainment.
The concept of politainment captures this convergence of politics, popular culture, and media economics. It does not describe a specific genre or style, but a systemic logic: the reorganisation of political communication around entertainment values. In this sense, politainment is not merely a cultural trend, but a structural condition. Politics is engaged with only when it entertains. If democracy presupposes citizens capable of sustained attention, collective judgment, and reasoned disagreement, then a media environment organised around entertainment appears deeply corrosive. Yet if politics has always relied on spectacle and emotion to mobilise mass publics, then the rise of politainment may represent not democratic decline, but democratic adaptation. This tension sets the stage for the following sections.
Is entertainment an enemy of democratic seriousness, or its contemporary vehicle?
3 Entertainment as Democratic Corruption
Section 3.1: Postman vs Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy describes a form of democratic government rooted in equal status and mutual respect to discuss political issues, and that government policy results from that deliberation (Bächtiger, et al. 2018, 2). Based on these ideals, a crucial component of deliberative democracy is communication, hence the exercise of communicative freedom; the ability to express one’s opinions and views on equal, respectful grounds which ensures the functioning of a society modelled around these ideals. To examine what deliberative democracy is, it is illuminating to describe what justifies democracy in the first place. That is, the basis of what justifies democracy, and how we can describe what its virtues and its functions are. C. Edwin Baker notes that the justification of democracy stems from the fact that it is the only form of government that is built on the principle of equal respect for ‘individual autonomy’ (Baker 2012, 67). That is, democracy is justified by and grows out of the liberal principles of individual autonomy, their exercise and the legal, equal protections of these freedoms. Hence, deliberative democracy can be identified as having two crucial components 1) the principle of liberal autonomy and choice, and 2) the building of policy based on the deliberation of individuals as equal participants of politics. Hence, Williams’ remark is doubly insightful here that each speaker “is owed an effort at identification; that he should not be regarded as the surface to which a certain label can be applied, but one should try to see the world from his point of view”. (Williams 1962, 41).
Yet the growth of the entertainment sphere into the political sphere threatens these principals. First, as Postman notes, the epistemology of media has shifted from propositional content to image content. This shift, from newspaper articles to TV commercials, restricts the capacity for rational criticism in politics, as images can only imply contents. Further, images allow a larger variety of routes of communication, besides propositions, which can be, and has been, exploited to influence the voter. As Postman identifies through the medium of commercials, the main aim of political advertisement is no longer grounded in policy, conveyed by propositions, but rather grounded in drama and mythology, conveyed by images. Political messaging no longer needs to emphasize policies for deliberation, but can rather emphasize the characters, the dramas, and the mythology of a political ideology. We can further suggest that political messaging has now abandoned the communication of policy, and rather solely engages in drama. That is, the written word and the clarity of propositional content have been abandoned for the emotive excitement conveyed by the coarse messaging of images. We move closer to reaction rather than deliberation.
Finally, the modern evolution of the entertainment sphere into short-form content is an assault on deliberation itself. With our growing inability to hold attention, deliberation is threatened as we are alienated from communication itself. The ability to communicate and deliberate a myriad of policy positions necessary for deliberative democracy requires great cognitive effort, and long, uninterrupted attention. The erosion of which leaves us in a political structure which is simultaneously reliant on deliberation yet is peopled by those unable to effectively deliberate. Hence, the communication of politics no longer represents explicit and precise propositions that can be explicitly challenged. Further, the media landscape actively discourages the dispositional tools necessary for effective deliberation and communication. Having examined the epistemic and media structures which we inhabit, we take our attention to former U.S President Ronald Reagan’s insight that “politics is just like show business.”
Section 3.2: Polarisation and the Citizens as Spectators
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting. - George Orwell, 1945.
Postman investigates Reagan’s claim by contrasting it with the claim that politics has regressed to sports, with his conclusion affirming Reagan’s insight rather than the latter. The reason for this is that sport prioritizes excellence. The most viewed sporting events consists of athletes who’ve dedicated their lives to perfect their craft. That is, the pinnacle of sports has clean standards. Whereas in politics, especially with the encroachment of the entertainment sphere into the political, the standards of sporting excellence are absent. All that is required is the appearance of political excellence. But Postman’s abandonment of the sports analogy is a bit too haste. There is one factor in contemporary politics which overlaps heavily with sports, and though Postman may be right in suggesting that our political representatives may not be at the height of ‘performance’, the audience of politics reflects heavily the audience of sports.
Orwell’s suggestion that the “sporting spirit” mimics the partisan excitement of war can be expanded to the current state of politics today. Division within American politics has increased by 64% since 1998, with most of the polarisation occurring after 2008. Though there are several explanations as to the cause of this, one examines the cyclical phenomena which arise from this polarisation, and which perpetuate it. The rise of politainment could be identified as one of these perpetual causes. Through the injection of drama and myth imagery into our political consumption, politics has degenerated further away from effective deliberation, from the eyes of the voting audience, and towards something more akin to sports. That is, we are interested in wanting our side to win, over theirs. This is the most emblematic in the incoherent ideology of the Trump administration. Besides a vague allegiance to protectionism and protecting the interest of capital, it is extremely difficult to construct a coherent ideology, or idea, that connects each of Trump’s policies with one another. His supposed more libertarian position, of cutting taxes in favour of the market, contrasts heavily with his sweeping tariff policies which halt free-trade; his consistent rhetoric against China is contradicted by his harsh treatment of regional allies in the Indo-Pacific, pushing them further into the Chinese sphere of influence. But one thread, if I can posit, that finds itself coherent within the Trump administration is the emphasis on ‘owning the libs.’
It is worthwhile breaking down what the phrase ‘owning the libs’ means. It sections a segment of the population, the ‘libs’, presumably the left-wing of the American political environment, and finds political prowess and success in ‘owning’ or humiliating this sect of the population. It is not hard to see how this directly contradicts the principles of deliberative democracy, but it further vindicates the analogy with sports fans. Just as a Spurs fan finds joy in Arsenal not winning a game, a Republican finds analogous pleasure from legislative or political failure from the Democrats, or the ‘libs’ (and vice versa). To return to Postman’s politainment analysis, this process is greatly aided by the dramatization of politics as myth building, which has flourished with social media. The expansion of the entertainment arena into the political realm erodes away at and replaces democratic deliberation with politic-sportesque drama. Jeering us on to pick a side, and cheer for their victory.
4 Entertainment as Political Adaptation
Section 4.1: Attention is Power
The critique of politics and entertainment thus advanced, privileging appearance over action and reducing citizens to spectators, rests on a particular image of democratic politics as a rational deliberative public sphere in which argument proceeds through sustained propositional discourse. Yet this image, powerful as it is, is more normative than descriptive. A substantial body of political and media theory challenges the assumption that seriousness and rationality have ever been the primary drivers of democratic participation. From this perspective, the rise of politainment represents not a degradation of politics, but an adaptation to the conditions of mass democracy. At the centre of this counter-position is the idea that politics requires attention before it can require deliberation. In large, heterogeneous societies, the problem is not merely how citizens reason about policy, but how they come to care about politics at all. Spectacle, narrative, and emotion have historically functioned as mechanisms of political mobilisation, creating shared points of reference that enable collective action.
A historical example is Ancient Athens: not because it is identical to modern democracy, but because its political communication was explicitly public, embodied, competitive, and rhetorical. Athenian democracy depended on the Ekklesia, where eligible citizens gathered to debate and decide matters of war, finance, and law. Politics was not primarily mediated through text, it was mediated through live speech: persuasion depended on voice, timing, presence, reputation and the ability to move a crowd. The format of politics was not a policy document but a performance of argument in front of fellow citizens. Even when Athens valued reason, reason arrived socially. The city’s civic life was also saturated with institutions that merged persuasion, culture, and mass attention: The Agora functioned as a space of exchange not only for goods, but for news, reputation, and political talk. The law courts consisted of large citizen juries, that made legal judgment itself a mass civic event, structured again by persuasive performance. Festivals and theatre were not separate from politics, but rather they were considered civic rituals, bound up with communal identity, moral evaluation, and the education of public sensibility.
The point is not that Athens embodied politainment exactly as it is today but rather that this example reveals something deeper. Politics has never been purely informational; it has always required forma to hold attention: speech, narrative, symbolism, and public competition. In the Athenian case, persuasion was inseparable from the aesthetic dimensions of public life: the way political claims were staged, heard, felt and judged. This is why the nostalgia for purely rational, content-driven politics can be misleading. The idea that politics should be clean of performance is less a historical description than a nostalgic narrative.
In Entertaining the Citizen by Liesbet van Zoonen, this aesthetic theory is critically discussed. Zoonen resists the familiar ‘television malaise’ story in which entertainment is blamed for democratic decline. She studies how this narrative often turns into a kind of cultural hierarchy: where ‘good citizenship’ is defined by a resistance to popular media. She describes how cultural critics frame proper citizenship around rising above lesser media forms, claiming that “the true citizen… must rise above the troubles of television to be counted as a ‘good citizen’. ” She argues that this kind of diagnosis can be used for cultural stratification producing “an authoritarian distinction between elites and masses,” implying democracy would be healthier if “the masses think and act like elites.”
Her alternative is not to celebrate all spectacle uncritically, but to insist that we start from the political world we inhabit. She cites Michale Schudson approvingly: “change happens,” and therefore what we need is “not rejection but an attempt to incorporate the face of actual political life into a theory of desirable political forms.”The task is not to fantasise about eradicating entertainment from politics, but to ask how democratic virtues can be sustained under contemporary cultural conditions. Politainment isn’t an accidental degradation, it is the form politics takes in attention-scarce democracies. If citizens’ time, focus, and emotional capacity are limited, politics will either learn to compete, or it will be socially peripheral.
This adaptive argument is developed further in the work of John Street, who has long insisted political communication cannot be understood if we treat popular culture as mere distraction. Street seeks to treat popular culture as a resource through which political identities are constructed and political claims become meaningful. Politics is not only a matter of “what is true,” but what is resonant: what people can recognise, feel, repeat, and carry into collective life. In this view, political judgment does not float above culture; it is formed through it. Street’s approach is especially useful as it reframes the spectacle: the question is not “why has politics become theatrical”, but how theatrical forms shape power, legitimacy, and belonging.
Now Postman’s critique appears one-sided: If politics has always required persuasive form, then the shift from parliamentary speech to television to TikTok is not a fall from purity, but an evolution in the dominant technology of attention. The political stakes lie not in whether politics ‘should’ entertain, but who can command attention, and to what ends. In the contemporary media environment, this adaptive logic intensifies. Thomas Meyer makes the argument that television has “colonised politics” to such a degree that we now live “no longer in a democracy but a mediacracy,” where politics has “surrendered” to the logic of media systems and politics “now follows the media.” You can read that as decline, but you can also read it as realism: In a media-saturated society, visibility is power. If political actors refuse to engage the dominant communicative forms, they do not preserve democratic purity: They lose the capacity to mobilise, frame, and lead. This is why “attention is power” is not a cynical slogan but a structural observation. In our contemporary democracies, power increasingly operates through agenda-setting, narrative dominance, and emotional salience. If you cannot compel attention, you struggle to create political reality.
Section 4.2: Mobilisation, not Deliberation
A second major adaptive argument follows from the first: Even if deliberation is desirable, deliberation without mobilisation is politically inert. Politics does not begin with policy detail; It begins with people caring enough to act. Historically, what mobilises people is rarely neutral information: It is moral narrative, symbolic identification, anger, hope, fear, solidarity, and urgency. Deliberative democracy assumes a public willing and able to sustain attention for complex reasoning, but mass publics have always engaged with politics unevenly, often though shortcuts: trusted figures, moral signals, shared stories, symbolic events. This is not necessarily irrational; it’s a feature of political life under conditions of time scarcity and cognitive overload.
Van Zoonen refuses the comforting illusion that “if only citizens were educated enough, politics would become rational again.” She critiques the familiar reformist reflex—more media literacy, better civics, higher standards— when it becomes a moralistic condemnation of the very people democracy depends on. She argues that denunciations of entertainment politics and calls to ‘educate’ citizens to higher standards often end up “profoundly out of touch with everyday experience in the entertainment society.” In other words: mobilisation requires meeting citizens where they are, not where theorists wish they were.
Furthermore, entertainment formats can sometimes feel more representative than formal politics: not because they are better institutions, but because they produce a sense of recognition and resemblance. Stephen Coleman’s comparison between the House of Commons and the reality-TV format Big Brother focuses on the provocative finding that some viewers perceived Big Brother contestants as “more representative” than professional politicians. Coleman highlights how the contestants felt more socially familiar and directly observable rather than these distant leaders, locked away in the House of Commons. The argument isn’t that reality TV is democracy, but that modern politics suffers from a crisis of representational connection: Politicians are experienced as distant and alien. They talk at their citizens rather than to them. They preach and wave but fail to represent.
This is where politainment can function adaptively. If citizens experience formal politics as opaque, technocratic, and culturally remote, then narrative formats can restore the connection between politics and everyday life. That connection may be shallow, but it can also be the condition for mobilisation.